Special Report The State of Online Video by Warner Carter

Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Video Master Course

Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Special Report: The State Of Online Video Published by:

of this special report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. Note: This report is optimized for viewing on a computer screen, but it is organized so you can also print it out and assemble it as a book. Since the text is optimized for screen viewing, the type is larger than that in usual printed books.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Disclaimer This special report has been written to provide information to help you fully understand the current and future state of online video and what opportunities it offers. Every effort has been made to make this special report as complete and accurate as possible. However, there may be mistakes in typography or content. Also, this special report contains information on online video and its use only up to the publishing date. Therefore, this special report should be used as a guide – not as the ultimate source of online video information. The purpose of this special report is to educate. The author and publisher does not warrant that the information contained in this special report is fully complete and shall not be responsible for any errors or omissions. The author and publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this special report. If you do not wish to be bound by the above, please return this special report for a full refund. MATERIAL CONNECTION DISCLOSURE: You should assume that the author and publisher have an affiliate relationship and/or another material connection to any providers of goods and services mentioned in this special report and may be compensated when you purchase from a provider. You should always perform due diligence before buying goods or services from anyone via the Internet or offline.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Message From The Author I've been building businesses and creating products for over 30 years. Once I discovered the advantages of marketing online, I took all my experience and skills from the offline business world and moved them to the Internet, where I now create and market information products – from small how-to guides in e-book format to larger home study courses with video lessons. My expertise with info products and my effective teaching skills even prompted Internet marketing's largest forum (the Warrior Forum) to invite me to hold special Private Workshop – including the very popular Video Production Lab Workshop – on their forum. I've has been hailed as a creator of highquality info products, a superior step-by-step teacher, and an innovative marketer who definitely thinks outside the box. Since 2006, I've been finding creative ways to use online video for products, sales pages, and in my marketing activities. I've also developed methods for creating impressive videos with nothing more than a low-budget camcorder and Camtasia – avoiding the need for expensive and complex editing software. Rather than create award-winning videos, I create videos that make money ... and that's what I show others how to do.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Contents How To Make Some Money Today

The Special Report

A Brief History In Time

Video Starting To Boom On Retail Sites

Other Ways To Use Video To Make Money

The Myth Of The Viral Video

Creating Videos For Main Street

Video: It's Easier Than Most Think

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

How To Make Some Money Today Of course, if you act upon the information in this special report, you can build yourself a great business with online video. And, with the potential that online video offers, you'll be able to generate a fantastic income. However, if you want to make some extra money today, you can do so right now. I want to get this helpful report into the hands of those it can help – Internet marketers, online retailers, local businesses, entrepreneurs who can see the opportunity offered by online video. The information that has been collected, analyzed, and summarized here can help many people to heavily profit from online video. If you help me, by recommending this special report to others, I'll gladly share 50% of the sales with you. In fact, you'll instantly get every second sale's full proceeds directly and instantly deposited into your PayPal account.

Here's all you need to do to make some quick cash: Step 1 – Replace "YourPayPal@EmailAddress.com" in the following URL with your own PayPal e-mail address: http://TheStateOfOnlineVideo.com/?e= YourPayPal@EmailAddress.com Step 2 – Send the link to your friends, family, colleagues. Step 3 – Place the link on your blog or website, and give a quick review of this guide. Extra – Tweet it on Twitter.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

The Special Report In this special report, I'm going to share with you the results of a number of studies and ongoing research, to show you a very clear picture of the state of online video. This special report will decipher all the massive reams of statistics and industry jargon, as I present you with an in-depth analysis of the research work of such market research and networking leaders as Comscore, Forrester, BIA/Kelsey, Cisco Systems – and others. You're going to see exactly what's happening with video, what is forecast for it, and discover a few critical reasons to embrace video this year. That last statement may sound dramatic, but in this report you'll see exactly why businesses and websites that don't make use of video may lose ground over the next year. In fact, you'll get the facts from one of the top SEO firms in the world, showing you why websites without video may suffer the penalty of not having “engagement objects”. In this special report, you'll see how Internet users all over the world are watching more and more videos online every month, how the use of videos by online retailers has skyrocketed, and how the online video market is predicted to grow in the next few years. Then, you'll see exactly what this means in profit potential for you. I'll go over some important case studies with you – showing you the results of such diverse websites as a ski resort and a merchandiser selling epilators. You'll discover the strategies being implemented by big retailers like Zappos, and see how the same strategies can be applied with small businesses. In this special report, you'll find out how video can be used in a number of ways to make money online. We'll look at videos as products, videos for selling products, videos for driving traffic to your website, and take a close look at all the fantastic opportunities opening right now in the lucrative business of providing video services to the hungry small and medium business market. You'll then go on to benefit from the pioneer work of others, as this report shows you how to make the kind of videos that will make you money. You'll discover a number of small tweaks and techniques that make a big difference in your profits. You'll also take a look at the myth of the “viral” video, and discover just what will and won't make you money. You'll learn how to avoid pitfalls that waste your time and money, discover how you can create highly-profitable videos on a shoestring budget, and how you can use one of the featured business models to create a fantastic income for yourself. But first, a look at the current state of online video.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

A Brief History In Time Just 15 years ago, those who accessed the Internet from anything other than a fast connection in an office building, often made use of Netscape Navigator's option to uncheck “Autoload Images”. Page load times were crucial – users often paid per minute to phone service and/or Internet service providers – and loading pages without pictures saved time and money. In the early 2000s, users were signing up for broadband, but were still rarely watching videos online. Video files were too heavy, load times were long, and playback was jerky. For marketers who wanted to upload videos, the choices were unsatisfactory and expensive. Then, at 8:27pm on April 23, 2005, Jawed Karim uploaded a 19-second video, called “Me At The Zoo”, to YouTube. By the time YouTube officially launched in November, beta testers had already been uploading many videos, and by June 2006, the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

What YouTube did was to provide an easy way for anyone with an Internet connection to post a video, which a worldwide audience could then watch within minutes. In effect, YouTube made it possible for everyone to become a video publisher. And, with the pushbutton ability to embed a YouTube video in a blog, web page, or social networking page, your video can get lots and lots of exposure.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Five Years Later There are now very few people left on the planet who do not know YouTube, and most have at least watched one dancing hamster or cute kitten video. Others watch a lot more. In fact, YouTube has made watching video online a serious pastime. The April 2010 US Online Video Rankings data from Comscore, an Internet marketing research company that tracks and studies online behaviour for many of the Internet's largest businesses, shows that in the US alone, 178 million Internet users watched 30.3 billion videos in April. 13.1 billion of those videos were watched on Google sites – of which over 99% are visits to YouTube.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

And, those 178 million users are watching a lot of video. In April, the average user watched 171 videos. With an average duration of 4.4 minutes for each online video, that adds up to the average Internet user spending 12 1/2 hours a month watching videos online.

This surge in online video viewing is not just in the US. According to Will Hodgman, Comscore's executive vice-president for the Asia-Pacific region, “Online viewing has become an essential part of the digital consumer experience in the Asia-Pacific region, with nearly 4 out of 5 Web users viewing online video each month.” Although they have smaller Internet populations, Hong Kong and Singapore have the highest penetration of video viewers – with 87% of Singaporeans watching an average of 10.5 hours of online video in April 2010, and over 88% of Hong Kong's Internet population watching videos online. As Victor Cheng of Comscore's Hong Kong Office stated, “Online video viewing has become nearly synonymous with Internet usage in Hong Kong.” According to Mr. Cheng, this high penetration of viewing demonstrates, “The importance of this platform as a vehicle to reach and engage consumers in this highly advanced digital media market.” Later in this special report, you'll see just how important video's ability to engage consumers is, if you want to sell or pre-sell anything on the Internet. But first, a look at what the future holds in store for online video.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Much More To Come Yet Cisco Systems, the worldwide leader in networking, released its Visual Networking Index Global IP Traffic Forecast on June 2, 2010 (just 5 days before this special report was to be published). In this forecast, Arielle Sumits of Cisco Systems revealed that online video users worldwide are expected to reach 1 billion by the end of 2010. For the first time, video traffic will surpass peer-to-peer file sharing traffic and become the number one Internet traffic type.

The predictions through to 2014 show that for anyone wanting to get into the online video market, there is plenty of room to carve out your spot in this profitable market. Cisco is expecting a growth of 300% between now and 2014.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Video Starting To Boom On Retail Sites Already, retailers are responding to the growing appetite of consumers for online video. The Forrester Research study, “Online Retailers' Adoption Of Online Video Content Is Ahead Of Consumers' Preferences”, published in November 2009, shows that the top 50 US online retailers offering videos jumped by 378% in 2009. Over 2/3 of the biggest online retailers used video on their sites, and this number will rise a lot more yet.

According to Russ Somers, the Director of Product Marketing at Invodo, this is a leading indicator of exponential growth to come. Now, retailers are implementing video on a few key pages, but they'll soon be going to video on all product pages (as you'll shortly see with an example from Zappos) and that will create a massive increase in demand for video content. Although there was massive growth in 2009, the true online video boom for e-commerce is just ahead of us. Later in this report, you'll discover how that offers one of the best opportunities for you to make money with online video.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

And, it's not just those top 50 retailers that are adding video. According to surveys done for Multichannel Merchant's “Outlook 2010: E-Commerce” report, 66.4% of respondent businesses planned to redesign their website in the next 12 months. And, of those merchants, 42.3% planned to add video to their websites.

And, it's not just the big retailers who are adding video to their online marketing and placing video on their websites. The recently released “State Of Small Business Advertising”, which examines trends among nearly 12,000 SMBs (small and medium businesses) shows that the number of SMB websites with video nearly quadrupled in the last year, and the number is expected to rise significantly this year, as small businesses race to get their websites video capable.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Why Are Businesses Flocking To Video? As shown by the November 2009 Forrester report “Online Retailers' Adoption Of Online Video Content Is Ahead Of Consumers' Preferences”, 64% of consumers who watch videos on retailers' sites find them very useful in making a purchasing decision. Video allows them to become more informed, and thus confident, when making a purchasing decision. As early as 2007, BIA/Kelsey, a leading provider of research and analysis for SMB advertising, showed that already then 59% of those surveyed watched online video and more than half engaged in some sort of response – visiting a website, going to a physical location, or making a purchase. The report, “Online Video: A New Local Advertising Paradigm”, reflected that the use of online video combined the strengths of the Internet's targeting capabilities with the emotional and dramatic power of television. Now, three years later, BIA/Kelsey's User View Wave VII online consumer survey for the first quarter of 2010 found that now 97% of all consumers use online media when researching products to buy in their local area. BIA/Kelsey's director of research, Steve Marshall, said of the results, “The data suggests we're at an inflection point, where the balance of power in local shopping is shifting to online.”

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Online video is proving its worth on websites and in ads. When the UK-based Brownbook directory bundled video into its suite of services in 2009, they found that the presence of video in ads or business profiles increased response rates 5-9 times. And, the videos doubled conversion rates.

Justin Foster, the founder and president of the Video Commerce Consortium, reported in May 2010 that retailers who were properly placing video on their product pages – as opposed to those retailers who feature video so poorly consumers barely notice them – were having 45% of the visitors to the product page watching the video.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Just Having Video Increases Conversion Interestingly, just having the video on the page is getting retailers higher conversion rates – even without the website visitors watching the video. One of the leading video platform providers for online retailers, Treepodia, found in case studies that merely having the video capability on the site – in this case, just a button that causes a video to pop up – significantly increased conversions.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

In one test done in January 2010, the e-commerce retailer had a conversion rate of 3.27% without video. With video, the rate jumped to 4.82% when visitors watched the video. But, the surprising news is, even when they didn't watch, just having the video capability on the page increased the conversion rate to 4.06%.

Why are they seeing these results? It increases the trust factor. Visitors to a product page feel more secure if you display video on your website. Having a video shows that you have enough faith in the product to show it in all dimensions – you are willing to let the prospect fully inspect your merchandise. Also, it shows a visitor that the retailer is investing in their site and providing the best user experience, which adds to an image of reliability and increases consumer confidence.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Video Pushing Up Conversion At Zappos At the Streaming Media West 2009 show in November, Rico Nasol explained what Zappos is doing with video and their plans for 2010. With 8000 videos on their site already, they were getting anywhere from a 6% to 30% increase in sales for products with a demo video on the page. This has prompted Zappos to aim for 50,000 videos in 2010.

What exactly is Zappos doing? Most of their videos are simple product description videos, with a Zappos employee demonstrating the product and going over the features. Here, a one-minute video with Andrew describing the features of the Nike Keystone 3/4. Nothing fancy. No special effects required. Just a simple video showing and describing the product.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

According to Justin Foster, of the Video Commerce Consortium, production quality is not nearly as important as content when it comes to driving conversion. To follow the Zappos model, you don't need high-tech equipment, a fancy studio, or actors. In fact, Zappos maintains that their success comes from using real people to shoot their videos. You'll see the guy who works in shipping describing one product and the girl in human resources describing another. The personality and the person suit the product.

Videos To Get Customers In The Door While online retailers are rapidly adding video to their product pages, traditional “brick and mortar” businesses are also profiting from video. We already saw the results Brownbook's SMBs are getting from video in their ads or profile pages. Now, DexOne – who publishes Yellow Pages and the online Dex Pages – has made video a standard element of its Enhanced Pack online advertising bundle for its local directories. As Sean Greene of DexOne announced, “Online video advertising has become an increasingly important tool for businesses to convey their services, location, and personality.” After all, if you're looking for a band or DJ to play for a wedding reception in Denver, Colorado, isn't the band that shows you what they do – in a video – the easier choice?

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

The important detail for any local business to take note of – no matter how big or small you are – is that nearly all consumers now use online to shop locally. Remember, the latest BIA/Kelsey User View Wave survey found that 97% of all consumers use online media when researching before purchasing offline – or local. By getting in front of them with video, using video to demonstrate your product or service, using video to show prospects what you can do for them, and letting them see your business' personality, you can get a lot more of that 97% to come in your shop door. Fortunately for small local businesses, the large national retailers are still finding it a challenge to compete with locally-owned stores on local websites, directories, and social sites. At a panel hosted by Red Door Interactive in May, however, members looked at solutions for the national retailers to get on the local Web. Placecast's Jeff Montgomery suggested that the big retailers needed to go beyond their stock store locators and product info, and get serious about video, mobile, and SMS. Small local businesses will have to stay one jump ahead of the big retailers, and keep their position on the local Web scene by implementing media like video. Put your personality out on the Internet with video, and you'll maintain that edge over the large, faceless national retailers.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Video May Soon Become Critical For Search Engine Rankings Another very important reason for any website – local business, online retailer, or other type of marketer using the Internet – to have videos, is the introduction of universal search and the variables that are important to Google's search algorithm. Bruce Clay, the founder of one of the top SEO and SEM firms in the world, was interviewed at the Search Engines Strategies conference in August 2009.

He discussed “engagement objects” and the importance Google is placing on these multimedia components that keep visitors to your website engaged and interacting with your website. Bruce Clay and his team believe that video is one of the most important engagement objects, and that Google has been building this into its algorithm. What this means is that if you have video on your website, it is going to be received better by the algorithm and give your site the opportunity to rank better on Google. At the time of this important interview (August 2009), Bruce Clay remarked that they didn't think they had “yet seen even the tip of the iceberg”. He went on to proclaim this dire warning for those not yet using video on their websites: “I think, that a year from now, we are going to be sitting here saying, 'If you don't have video, if you don't have engagement objects on your website, you are just not going to rank.' It will make you last among equals if you don't have it.”

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Other Ways To Use Video To Make Money We've already looked quite a bit at the use of video by online retailers and local small businesses, but there's a number of other ways you can earn a great living online with video. You can create and sell video lessons, tutorials, or home study courses. You can use video for effectively driving traffic to all kinds of websites. You can use video for selling all kinds of products – not just physical merchandise on large retailer websites. You can create videos for all those local businesses who, as you'll see shortly, offer a fantastic and wide-open opportunity. With the technology available online today, the simplified and inexpensive equipment and software now available, and the wide acceptance of online video, you can use video to generate a great income in any business imaginable.

Become An Info Product Creator You can use video to teach all kinds of subjects – from hobbies to exercise, business building to improving sales, basically any subject that can be taught in a how-to product. And, you can create these video lessons at home, on a basic computer, with some pretty basic software. With more and more people preferring to learn from video – like this buyer of a video course who prefers video because she can more easily understand the strategies – every video course you create can have quite a profitable, ready market.

The important thing to remember is to first research your market and find out what it is that prospects in your market want. Use online resources like your niche's forums to find out exactly what your target prospects want. Create what they want and you'll make a lot more money with your video info products. Then, plan out a set of lessons. Break everything up into easily-digested chunks of learning. Create short videos that teach one point, and let your customer apply what they learned before they go on to the next video lesson.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

For easy-to-follow video lessons, provide lots of bullet point notes to highlight main points of what you are teaching. In software like Camtasia, this is a very easy task, and you can have the individual notes appearing as you narrate. Use photos, illustrations, screenshots, or live video clips to demonstrate whenever possible and make it as easy as possible for your customer to understand exactly what to do. Use your video lesson to walk your customer step by step through each lesson.

You can elect to appear on the screen as you narrate your lessons, or just as effectively narrate from off-screen and just have notes and images on the screen. In the Video Production Lab Workshop portion of the Video Master Course, we create lessons with a number of options. Then, we combine video lessons with transcripts and worksheets for a truly valuable product that you can sell at a very profitable price. You can either sell your video lessons as digital downloads, sell access to a membership site where your customers can view the lessons, or place them on CD or DVD and have a fulfillment house ship them to your customers.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Selling With Videos We've already seen how video can positively effect conversions on the product pages of online retailers. Videos are engaging, they let you control the sales process better than a long sales letter, and when properly scripted can build the kind of emotion that drives sales. Whether you're creating short demo or description videos for retailer product pages – like the videos being created by Zappos – or you create a longer video to replace a long-form salesletter, always remember that the main purpose of your video is to sell. It needs to meet that tried and true AIDA formula – get attention, create interest, build desire, and call for action. In the sales video, words do matter. It's the words in your video that communicate the benefits of your product in such a way that your prospect gets excited at the possibilities and is moved towards a buying decision. It's the words in your call to action that will get your prospect to take that final step and order your product.

This is why, in the Video Master Course, 14 lessons are dedicated to planning and scripting the sales page video – and only one lesson to shooting it. Getting the script just right, getting the words flowing, building up excitement by properly presenting the benefits, bringing in supporting data at the right time, weaving in social proof, and then giving a good, strong call to action – that's what can make you a lot more sales and money.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Driving Traffic With Videos On YouTube As you saw earlier, in the User View Wave VII Survey results of first quarter 2010, 90% of all consumers used search engines when researching prior to purchasing local. And, there's still a heavily-weighted preference for using Google to search online.

Now, Google has a feature that makes it vitally important to have videos on YouTube. Thanks to Google's “blended search results”, videos appear in the Google search results. In fact, YouTube videos appear a lot.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

According to research done by Forrester Research, for the keyword phrases which Google offered video results for, at the beginning of 2009 they were already showing an average of 1.5 videos on page one. And, with far less videos competing for the same keyword phrase, your chances of getting on page one of Google are much greater than with text content. Add to that the fact that Google displays an eye-catching thumbnail of your video, and your clickthroughs from searches go up even if you're further down the page. Since so many marketers don't optimize their videos for search, you can quite easily get one of these first page video spots on Google – simply by taking the time to do some optimization. At the very least, put your target keyword phrase in the title, in the description, and in the tags. This blackjack example doesn't even have the phrase in the description, and someone with a more optimized video should be able to take over their spot on Google.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Other than just optimizing your video for search engines, optimize it for your human prospects too. Give them some great content. Forget about uploading some shaky walkthrough of your business or an existing cable TV ad. Instead, meet the information need of your prospects with a good how-to video – how to spruce up a kitchen, how to use your company's car wax, how to choose a yoyo.

With a tripod, an inexpensive and easy-to-use Flip camera, and some hardware-store halogen lights, you too can shoot a good-quality how-to video. Your videos don't need any fancy special effects or cinema-quality picture – they just need to be easy to watch. As Lars of YoYoPlay.com says, “My videos will never be as good as television, but they're good enough to sell a ton of yoyos!”

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

The Myth Of The Viral Video One of the most dangerous thoughts you can have is to create a “viral video”. It's easy to get caught up in the idea and throw a lot of money at a cool video that you hope will then go viral – getting passed around by one YouTuber after another and getting you millions of views. The problem is, you most likely will just flush a lot of money down the “viral” toilet. The problem is that viral videos are random, and you never know what is going to take off. Most of us can understand the appeal of cute, fluffy kittens and understand why a video, with a litter of them chasing balls of yarn and knocking over flower vases, would get passed around. But, a video of a turtle, slowly following a tomato and then slowly eating it? Who would have guessed it would get over 700,000 views?

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

All kinds of things can trigger sudden viral action. When weatherman Jim Kosek freaked out about an oncoming snow storm, his strange behaviour pushed this video over a million views. And, a CBS news story on an elderly lady doing something incongruous with what we expect of elderly ladies – in this case, being a DJ at a Paris nightclub – gets this other video passed around. Passed around close to ¾ million times in the last three months.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

While the last two examples came from network TV, there are far more home-cooked viral videos. Christiann Van Vuuren, aka The Fully Sick Rapper, is a 27-year old in a hospital in Sidney, Australia. Stuck in quarantine with tuberculosis and bored, he recorded a funny rap song, “just to make mates laugh”. Well, it is quite funny and it's already received over half a million views in less than four months. The other video is a display of multi-tasking skills, as a young girl recites pi to the 100th digit and solves a Rubik's cube, while balancing 15 books on her head. No slick production, poor lighting, basically uninteresting content, and yet it's been passed around half a million times in half a year.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Don't Wait For Viral To Happen By Itself So, you cannot predict what will or will not go viral. Instead of wasting your resources on trying to create a video that “might maybe go viral”, you can take steps to ensure it takes off and gets lots of views. According to YouTube's latest stats, people are uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily, so you can't just hope someone will find yours and pass it around. Make it happen! To increase the chances of your video being passed around when you do get people “discovering” your video – after you've helped that process along – create short, bite-sized videos. If possible, make your video shocking in a way that the viewer has no choice but to find out more, thus engaging them. Create intriguing headlines that make the visitor have to watch to see if it's true. And, avoid sounding like an ad – ads only get passed around if they're very funny or controversial.

In the Video Master Course and Main Street Video Master, we'll design winning concepts for videos in all kinds of niches, to promote all kinds of businesses, and to sell all kinds of products and services. Creating great videos requires staying in tune with what's happening.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

With a good candidate video in hand, you have to have a strategy in place. You want to get your video maximum views as quickly as possible. The more views you can get right away, the more chance you have of landing on the Most Viewed list. If you can get your video on that list, it will only be for a short time, but during that time on the list your video will get a ton of exposure. However, it's going to take a concerted effort to get the views you need, to get on the list, so you can get more views. Fortunately, you can embed your YouTube video in blogs, forums, and other websites, and each view of an embedded video counts as a view at YouTube. Obviously, to get the kind of views to force your video to go viral, you're going to need a systematic approach to this, and recruit as many bloggers and forum members as you can to really push this. Then, you can use e-mail lists to get the YouTube URL out to many, get friends promoting it, and share it on Facebook. But, for a very effective campaign, be sure to include Twitter. According to the latest stats from Tube Mogul, a video distribution and tracking company, Twitter is rapidly emerging as the top referrer for web video traffic. With many on Twitter now using it as an information network and connecting to specific interests, they are finding content that is related to those interests – and finding videos that are more relevant to their interests.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

By building a large, targeted following on Twitter, you can easily use Twitter to refer your YouTube video. Create compelling tweets with a good call to go to the YouTube URL. Make each tweet intriguing or a promise of benefit to your target followers. Then, with the re-tweet function of Twitter, you can get followers re-tweeting your YouTube link and getting you more exposure. Of course, a good campaign to get your video on the Most Viewed page will have compromised results if you don't have a good thumbnail to get random visitor's attention when they surf this page. A thumbnail that grabs attention and compels the YouTube visitor to click on your video. A clear picture with a person or face in it, or something interesting happening – like the lady falling out of the golf cart.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Go Viral With A Goal Getting on YouTube's Most Viewed list is only going to happen with a very well-planned campaign that is implemented with full effort. It can take a whole team to make it happen. And then, you might not even get the results you hope for. The most important thing to remember if you're going to push a video to viral views is why you are doing it. It's not just to get a lot of views. What is your goal? To drive traffic to your blog? To get prospects to an opt-in page for your mailing list? If your video doesn't achieve this, it doesn't matter how many views you get. More important than getting viral views and bringing in a massive number of untargeted viewers, is to get well-targeted prospects to watch your videos. A few hundred good prospects can make you much more money than thousands of random viewers. Create a good how-to video – like this clicker training explanation by the author of a dog training guide – and you'll get targeted prospects, and also have them passing the video on to other targeted prospects. People who come to watch a video like this do so to learn something, and they tend to pass a video like this on to those friends of theirs that they know could also benefit from the information.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Creating Videos For Main Street Main Street, or local businesses, is a huge market opportunity. At the Marketplaces 2010 conference in March, AOL Venture's Executive VP Jon Brod confirmed that local still offers a vast opportunity, stating, “Local is the largest opportunity yet to be won online.” There is money to be made serving small businesses. BIA/Kelsey predicted that small businesses in the US will spend $17.5 billion on Internet ads in 2010, and that figure is expected to increase to $36.7 billion by 2014. As Court Cunningham, the CEO of the online ad agency Yodle, said earlier this year, “There's an increasing sense of urgency around having an effective online marketing strategy”. The small businesses want to be online – they need to be online – but they're not sure where and how. And (very important to remember if you deal with small businesses) they are not concerned with getting more traffic to their site, or any of the other driving desires of those who market online. All they care about is what makes their cash register ring. And, we've already seen how video can do that. So, another great opportunity – maybe the best opportunity with videos – is helping small businesses get good video on their websites and on YouTube. And, looking at the spending growth forecast by eMarketer, it's an opportunity with fantastic potential for profit.

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Special Report: The State Of Online Video

There are three main types of videos you can create for your Main Street clients.

Conversion Video There's the conversion (sales or other goal) video, which sits on a main page or product page and converts prospects to customers – or converts them in some other manner, like getting them to join the business' mailing list for a newsletter. This video engages your visitor, helps them make a buying decision, and then gives a call to action. For a good, selling video on most local business or online retailer websites, you want a short video – mainly under a minute. Keep videos short and to the point and you'll retain viewers and make more sales. To really engage your viewers and boost sales, add captions to your video. Simply having a few captions that highlight benefits of the product, can make a big difference in conversions. In a test conducted by Treepodia – where the only difference is that one video has captions – while the video without captions had a 0.8% conversion rate, the one with captions had a 9.1% conversion rate. That's a whopping 1037% increase in sales due to a few captions.

Video Master Course

Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Another quick addition to these sales videos that has proven to boost conversions is a product review. Simply add any existing customer review that your client has for each product or service.

Of course, to get the most out of your sales videos you have to get prospects to watch them. Use a compelling start image or first frame. Video ads in tourism have attracted active view rates as high as 4.3%, compared to the benchmark of 1.4% for other tourism video ads. When self-hosting your videos (using services like Amazon S3, which we use in the Video Master Course), you can create and upload a custom first frame – or starting image. On top of the starting image, add text that asks a question your prospect can't resist answering, or provides an offer they can't refuse. The offer to “Ski For Free” caused the second of these ski resort videos to attain a 76% higher engagement rate than the extra night's stay.

Video Master Course

Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Traffic Video The second type of video to create for your Main Street clients is the traffic-generating ad or pre-selling how-to video – the one that brings extra prospects to their website and helps make that cash register ring more. As with the traffic-generating videos we discussed earlier, these will take advantage of the search-friendly nature of YouTube. What kind of videos you upload to YouTube will depend on the business you are creating them for, the kind of keyword phrases you want to target, and what kind of pre-selling you want to do.

Educating Video The third type of video you can create for your Main Street clients is the one that educates their customers. You can create a number of these to put on inside pages of the website, and answer all sorts of questions. Educational videos on a local business or online retail site can reduce calls to customer support and leave you with happy customers. Also, by educating your customers, you build trust and when they're ready to buy again, they'll come back.

Fantastic Opportunity Awaits Right now, the opportunities for working with small businesses – helping them get effective video on their websites and on hosting sites like YouTube – are abundant. Small businesses have stated their plans to add videos, they know that they need the engaging factor of videos, they are desperately trying to keep up. The problem they face is that they have no time to learn how to create videos or manage their implementation. As user experience expert Katie Geminder remarked at the May 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt conference, “When you talk to restaurants right now, they're completely overwhelmed by social media tools that are supposed to help them better market themselves.” What you have to remember about small business owners is that most of them spend their whole day working on – or more often, in – their business, and they have no time to learn and keep up with all the developments on the Internet. This is where you come in. You can be the one who provides their solution. You can be the one who helps them secure their online presence with video. You can take away their pain and gain great clients – clients who will pay you monthly to take care of their online video needs.

Video Master Course

Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Video: It's Easier Than Most Think If you've been letting lack of knowledge or a perceived lack of skills hold you back, there is no need to be held back anymore. In reality, with the simplification of camcorders and easyto-use video editing software, all kinds of people are now finding that it is not as difficult as they had imagined. Here, a message from one of the participants in the original Video Production Lab Workshop – Ed Durham of Bordentown, NJ: “Frankly, I avoided tackling video creation because I thought it required too much time and was too complex for me while also doing the other aspects of running my small web-based business. I knew video was critically important because that's where more and more of the action is, but I thought I just didn't have the time to learn how to do it well. So, I just put it on the back burner. “Video Production Lab Workshop changed all that. “A special breakthrough for me was learning how to use Camtasia. I had struggled with the software despite the videos from the software maker. Your approach gave me my "Wow" moment in about 60 seconds. After that, learning each of the new functions covered in the course was almost like putting another word into my vocabulary.”

The Video Production Lab Workshop has been receiving nothing but praise, and many more have voiced how the bite-sized, step-by-step, “here's how you do this” video lessons got them over the fear of video creation and actually made it fun and easy. In the Workshop, we covered basic video creation in step-by-step video lessons, went on to plan and create video lessons for your own profitable home study course, copywrote and created both a compelling squeeze page video and sales page video, and created optimized videos for generating targeted traffic to your website. Although the original Workshop is a closed one-time course, you now have the opportunity to benefit from this course as others have. It is being included as the core basic training in the Video Master Course. This comprehensive video training course – which was carefully designed to turn you into a Video Master – walks you through five (5) projects.

Not Just “Watch & Learn” In the Video Master Course, you don't just “watch and learn”. You actually “watch, learn, and do” to ensure your progress and success. After the core basic training, you'll have your own saleable video product, a compelling sales video to sell your product with, and a trafficgeneration video and campaign to drive targeted prospects to your sales page.

Video Master Course

Special Report: The State Of Online Video

Andrea Tessi of Irun, Spain called it “a complete business in a box: This product is a masterpiece. You won’t learn just how to create effective videos, you will actually learn the secrets of an effective video communication and also the way you can implement this effective video communication with cheap and easy to use resources, how to obtain effective, high quality professional videos while you are still in a string budget. But, a part of learning how to produce effective, internet marketing oriented videos, you will actually learn how to create a complete video-business: how to create a video-course, a video-sales letter, and how to videopromote it. This is a complete video business in a box.

Starting On A Shoestring Budget In the Video Master Course, we don't use expensive or complex equipment or software. We keep it simple and low cost. Although you don't even need a camcorder for many types of videos, if you do use one, you'll be shown how to create very effective videos with a $100 Flip camera and some hardware store lights. Click here to watch a special video I created for you and discover how you too can become a Video Master for next to nothing ... and start profiting from the growing online video boom.

Video Master Course