A video is worth a million hits

A Video Is Worth A Million Hits

Whether you are selling stocks, building homes or offering law services, your website can benefit by including video. As a marketing tool, adding video directly to your site, by uploading from youtube or streaming directly from your own server, opens new avenues for traffic and gives another dimension to a website.

How To Add Video To Your Website

There are several methods available to add video to your site and which one you should choose depends on your budget, the product or services you are selling and the goals you have in mind for your marketing campaign. Putting a video directly on your site and utilizing your own server gives you complete control of how the video is played. The many options include Progressive Download, RTSP/RTMP Streaming and Adaptive HTTP Streaming.

Progressive Download Or Streaming?

There is no easier method to deploy a video from a server than Progressive Download. YouTube and HTML5, Ipad, iPhones and Androids support Progressive download, adds to it’s popularity. According to comScore Video Matrix YouTube distributes close to 34% of all video in the US. Over 65%of video traffic comes from Progressive download and more than half of all websites use it to deliver video. The downside to progressive video used to be that users would first have to download the entire video in order to use the fast forward or rewind buttons. However with flowplayer and pseudo streaming, which YouTube now offers, many of these issues have been overcome.
With Progressive download, the video is saved on the clients’ computer, so he/she can see it again without going through the ordeal of downloading it all over again.
With true video streaming, the video must be replayed every time on your website and cannot be saved on the viewers computer. If security or privacy is an issue, video streaming is the way to go. Video streaming easily allows you to play back, forward and rewind without a wait and uses just the amount of bandwidth from the portion used. True video streaming can be as much as 20 times more costly, due to hosting and capabilities, than Progressive Download and should be used when security or copyright is an issue or if you need cutting edge technology to customize your video. Consideration for cost, security and accessibility should be considered before making a decision.

Sell, Sell, Sell

As with any other form of marketing, you need to know the audience that will bring you business. Tone, style, function and accessibility should reflect your vision and appeal to a targeted audience. Think about the music or background music, subliminal images, text, creative photos or an animated tutorial. If you use a spokesperson, your viewers should relate to her or she should be appealing in some way to keep the attention of the user. Be creative, and if possible, get it out there on the web. Another marketing strategy is to embed the video into the body of an HTML5 email campaign. However you choose to add video to your website, the addition can make your site more dynamic and attractive to visitors.