Use Online Video to get Traffic
December 3, 2007 
2 Comments
For website owners searching for new ways to drive traffic to their sites, online video is the next big thing. The drop in price of hardware and software needed for creating video has made it possible for anyone to make their own short films or commercials.
Faster internet connections and the popularity of sites such as YouTube allow you to share your video creations with the entire world.
Even better, you can use them to drive lots of free traffic to your site. Let’s think of a few different ways we can use video to get more people to your site.
Say you run a merchant site that sells bicycles. You can make your own commercial for the bikes and post it on YouTube. Of course, you’ll need to be creative to make your videos stand out from the masses.
Post a video that’s really funny or different and it may start spreading virally. Once a few people find it they’ll send it to their friends, family, and co-workers to enjoy.
Or perhaps you sell an innovative product that is new to the market, something unlike anything ever seen before. Video is the perfect way to get your message out because you can actually show people how your product works rather then explaining it to them. A picture (or video) really is worth a thousand words.
Let’s pretend your site offers accounting software for small business owners. You can create a video tutorial that demonstrates the software in action. Walking prospects through a few transactions so they can see how easy it is to use will be more effective than just saying, “My accounting software is easy to use.”
Plus, you can create a whole series of video tutorials to serve as customer support. You’ll spend less time and resources helping confused customers if you have videos that teach them step by step.
In order to create these types of tutorials, you’ll need some special software that lets you record screenshots and add your own audio commentary.
You have two basic options:
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But Justin, don’t you think South Africa’s bandwidth is to unreliable to ensure smooth streaming of video, or are you assuming that everyone is using ADSL? I can envisage a scenario where most South African/African users would have to download the video instead of streaming it, and if it was superfluous it would discourage them from engaging in that practice once again. Don’t you think for South Africa and Africa as a whole , the cost of data is too high and this could discourage people from viewing or downloading a video?
Indeed the high cost of bandwidth and low broadband penetration rates will always be an issue, however by making video files smaller, and sacrificing on the quality a little, one is able to make video available for a select group of people who are fortunate enough to have some broadband access.
That said, I am by no means encouraging that video is the only medium, like all aspects of online marketing, this is but one more vehicle to engage a target audience, in this case your target audience is those with broadband connections.