First off, I want to make it clear that video does not rank particularly well. I know of at least two products that use this as one of their big selling points: "Your videos will get to page 1 in no time!"

Well, they won't. I have hundreds of videos online in dozens of different niches. The amount of views they get from serach engines is generally somewhere between 4% and 6%. I don't know that any of my videos are on page 1 for a reasonably-searched keyword.

Don't get me wrong: If you do keyword research and find a good keyword with a reasonable serach volume and low competition, make a video with title, description and tags optimized for that keyword and build some backlinks to the video, it's very likely that you'll get it ranked. However, the same can be said for a Hubpage, blog post or article. Keyword research plus backlinks will get anything ranked and in my experience it's no easier with video than with anything else.

In terms of views, video won't necessarly get more views than other forms of media. The exception (as always with video) is "kittens". A video featuring cute kittens will get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views. Guaranteed.
Any other video is just another online property. It's not impossible to upload a video to Youtube and only get 5 views in the course of one month. It's also not impossible to get hundreds and thounsands of views in the same time. Much like articles on article directories, actually.

Syndication: For free video distribution, I recommend TubeMogul. However, be aware that A) nothing will beat YouTube and B) many video-sharing sites do not allow any kind of promotional videos.
92% of all my video views occur on Youtube (this includes embedded views and does not include self-hosted videos). TubeMogul is nice to have and getting some extra backlinks and those other 8% of views doesn't hurt, but video syndication is nothing magical.

In terms of conversion rates, once again, there's no magic to video. If you make a video focused on conversion, with strong calls to action and a nice juicy carrot dangled in front of the viewer, you'll get good conversion rates.
If you just make a video without conversions in mind and add your link to the description, you'll still get the occasional click.
Hey, you know what that reminds me of? Articles. And landing pages. And podcasts. And any other online property you can think of.

You can probably guess the core message, here: There's nothing magical about video.

After that dose of reality, let me end on one optimistic note:
Video has one thing going for it and that is the fact that many people are more willing to watch a video than to read a text. Chalk it up to lazyness. Or ADD (video can have more going on more quickly than text). You also need to be aware of the fact that many viewers click away after just a few seconds of watching a video. However, if used wisely, you can get a better response from using video than with text.

video marketing, conversion, ranking, hype

Last updated 826 days ago by ShaneRQR