Video Redux

So have you created the next great viral effort for the web?

No…?

Well, what about testing a viral effort with video?

Video is a great content driver. It's viral by nature, and can be one of the most effective tools to spread your brand, product, or campaign far and wide in an instant.

Of course just posting a video on your site isn’t enough… and if you’re doing it regularly it’s probably costing you a fortune, eh?

So what to do?

Easy…

If you want to make video work for you, and want it to catch the “viral buzz”, you need to apply organic search principles.

AND… if you do, just as with organic “content” optimization, the engines will help bring eyes to your video. That’s step one – SEM.

Step two – Create Value. No surprise, right?

It’s up to the content of the video, as well as the current events of the day, and what's hot in the media/pop culture that will determine it’s viral success.

Smart marketers understand this and are the ones currently using the engines to market their videos to drive brand recognition, traffic and revenues.

Keep in mind that this video web thing is still very new… and unfortunately, or rather fortunately for you, most marketers are still doing little to no optimization.

So if you can just applying the basics search techniques to your video then the time spent will produce results far ahead of the field.

Wait… here it comes…

“But I’m too busy already…”

Ugh… too busy to do it, or too busy to do it correctly?

If you are already invested in video, and not getting the most out of it... I'm not suggesting you stop...not yet. But I would ask you to just implement one step for me, please.

Publish ASAP a video site map.

Excluding the home page, we can all agree that the most important page your site can have for the engines is a site map. The strength of the site map is to raise your contextual rankings; the same applies to a video site map. It will put your video efforts at the top of the class.

Conceptually, you’re not just optimizing a single video for the engines but showing the engines, in this case both the video and content engines, that you have a wealth of video material for indexing. AND most importantly, the video site map encourages and makes it easy for the engines to come back and index more.

“Yeah… video sounds great but the costs scare me.”

Me too.

Listen… no one wants to invest thousands into video from day one without evidence that it will work for your business, right?

So don’t.

Don’t spend money on a production team... use someone else’s. In other words, develop a partnership with another web site that has already invested in the infrastructure. Look for a site in your niche and make sure they understand how to market video via search.

Odds are they would love to publish your companies content as video on their site… and you can get your feet wet. You’ll learn the ins and outs and hopefully start a buzz.

I think this is definitely worth making time for.