In the race to get more traffic and convert it to customers, one method stands head and shoulders above the rest: video. The good news is it’s never been easier or cheaper to do, so here’s why you need it now.
1. An ever increasing audience: according to Nielson-Netratings, 78% of all USA homes had a high speed broadband connection
2. Increased sales: it’s a well established psychological principle that people buy with emotion and justify it later with logic. Now the emotional part of the brain works with pictures not words. So by adding video to your web site, you tap directly into your prospect’s emotional soft spot and so greatly enhance the effectiveness of your squeeze pages, newsletter sign ups, and sales pages, which are far more compelling than if they merely contain the written word.
3. Easy showings : one of the established principles of marketing is “let the prospect see the house and they’ve bought it“. It’s the very effective principle behind the Home Shopping Network. So, by providing a demonstration you’ll greatly increase your sales too.
4. Branding and bonding: ever met a celebrity? Don’t you just feel you know them and could walk right up to them and say “Hi”, like they were an old friend? That’s the bonding effect of video. And who would you rather do business with — a business headed by someone you know and identify with or some faceless corporation? That’s the principle Donald Trump uses to such great effect with his TV appearances. Now you too can bond and build trust with both your prospective customers, customers and affiliates — just like a movie star or a well known business owner, simply by being the person they see on your web site videos.
5. Ease of production: cheap video creation software that a child can work, yet would not disgrace Steven Spielberg, makes it so simple for non-techies to produce stunning videos a snap.8. High perceived value: video products are not only easier and faster to produce than books, the irony is they have a higher perceived value, at present. So now is the time to get making videos. Their high perceived value may change later, when they may become as commonplace as e-books. But, by then, the smart people will have moved on from just videos to making holograms!
6. Better search engine rankings: the introduction of Googles’s Latent Semantic Indexing, and similar systems, means the length of time the visitor spends on your web site is now an important factor in your page rank. You can greatly increase visitor duration with a range of interesting videos and thus increase Google’s perceived value of your site.
7. New free traffic sources: with some video sites getting over a million page views daily, diverting some of that torrent of free traffic to your sites takes on a new urgency. The traffic you’ll get from these new sources is totally free.