Lacking any information to the contrary, many businesses still think that all they need to do to get new clients is to put their name and face in the Yellow Pages or online social directories – Facebook, Twitter to name a few, get some professional looking business cards, a website and hey presto! It’s the old adage “build it and they will come”.

Trouble is, that’s what their competitors are doing and in this day and age, it’s just not enough.

Does Your Business Stand Out Online?

Most advertising on the Web follows a time-honored format, although some might call it a time-worn format as it does little to differentiate itself. You can bet that a high percentage of this advertising will be ignored and the money spent on it will be wasted.
So how does a small business stand out from the crowd online?

Thanks to an oversupply of similar text, claims, and presentation constantly be streamed at your target audience – coupled with a short 21st century attention span – your website has less than ten seconds to move your visitors to action. If it doesn’t, that visitor will click away… end of story. Therefore, it’s critical that you find a way to break through the noise your competitors and even other online advertising media is making. But even that’s not enough.

Statistics show that even the best-looking websites generate conversion rates of under one percent, so for every 100 visitors you do manage to get, less than one will call or email you.
Sound pretty bleak doesn’t it? Thinking of redirecting more of your advertising budget back to the Yellow Pages? Don’t. You’re on the right track – you just haven’t leveraged all the power available to you online.

One-to-Many Communication. One-on-One Feel.

Most websites are little more than electronic versions of Yellow Page advertising. For the most part, they don’t encourage interaction beyond the obligatory “Contact me for more information” plea. These sites don’t encourage trust any more than their print counterparts. They don’t give visitors the warm-and-fuzzy feeling that a face-to-face meeting would.
But they can.

Searching for a local service provider online can be a daunting prospect, but even more daunting than the search is deciding which provider to use once you get to the page, especially since most websites promise the standard good service, competitive pricing and high quality.

So how does a business differentiate itself from the sea of competition? Web video makes this possible and the awesome thing is, that it is easier than you think to implement.
Thanks to rapidly improving technology, it’s easier than ever to add that warm-and-fuzzy, face-to-face element to your site, replicate an in-person interview, and offer your visitors an opportunity to check you out before picking up the phone. With Web video, you can present an interview that addresses all the questions and concerns of potential clients. You can keep them on your site longer and give them insight into the “business behind the business.” In a way that wasn’t possible even a few years ago, business owners can now speak directly to their audiences and showcase their personalities and areas of expertise. This is especially helpful if you are a professional service provider.

Any business that relies on conveying trust-ability will benefit from this type of web marketing. Really, it’s one-to-many communication with a one-on-one feel. It’s the perfect ice breaker and an efficient means of generating the interest and trust needed to compel potential clients to make an call and do business with your company.

A high-quality Web interview placed strategically on your site is a huge timesaver for you and prospective clients because you reach a wide audience in minimal time. Potential clients get the information they need to pre-qualify – and pre-sell – themselves before they call.

Online video delivers some of the best returns on investment of any advertising medium today and if set up properly, is actually ranks higher than text now by the major search engines like Google. Short of spending valuable face time with a potential client (often times a poorly qualified potential client) there is simply no better way to forge a personal connection with them. With that in mind, here are 10 tips to help you get the most of your online video marketing efforts.

7 Tips for making the most of Online Video

1. Make sure your video is professionally done.
This is an absolute must. The whole point here is to establish credibility and trust, but you’ll do the opposite with a poorly executed and produced video. Yes, many of the videos you find on sharing sites are mediocre at best, but that is changing rapidly as companies begin to see the value of promoting themselves in this manner.  Find a personable, engaging interviewer and a top notch production crew to really stand out.

2. Submit your video to as many outlets as possible.
While YouTube is the clear leader here as far as syndicating your video, there are many other video sharing sites worthy of consideration. Here are some others you might want to consider:

• Google Video, http://video.google.com
• Daily Motion, http://www.dailymotion.com
• MetaCafe, http://www.metacafe.com
• Revver, http://www.revver.com
• Veoh, http://www.veoh.com

But then again, you could just distribute your video to all of these and more using TubeMogul.

3. Insert your video on the front page of your website.
Don’t hide what’s going to become one of your most effective selling tools on a dusty inside page of your website. Get it out front. Customers and search engines will love you for it.

4. Find out what search terms your potential clients are using and put them in your video’s title.
If you don’t know what words clients in need of your services are typing into Google and other search engines, get professional help or use some of the resources featured on this page. Once you’ve identified these terms, use the most popular in your video’s title.

Use these free resources to get a handle on the terms that potential clients are using to search for you right now.
Wordtracker
Google AdWords

5. Make your tags and descriptions search engine friendly.
Most video sharing sites let you tag videos with keywords and post a short description, so get the most out of these by sprinkling in the search terms you’ve identified.  Search engines love content from video sites, so you will be surprised at how well a carefully search engine optimised video can rank.

6. Don’t forget your thumbnail.
A thumbnail is a still shot from your video that appears along with search results. Don’t waste this opportunity to present yourself in the best light possible – choose a key moment from your video, preferably one where you’re smiling as you speak with your interviewer.

7. Link back to your site.
Put your URL near the top of your video’s description. You’ll get a higher search ranking and potential clients will quickly learn where to go for more information.  Also use it as a call to action at the end of the video , or even have it display on the bottom of the video.

An awesome system for getting you huge amounts of video traffic is the system called Traffic Geyser.  Check it out right here.

Every website and business owner is looking for simple and effective ways to get traffic. Now, if you are internet marketer, then I don’t need to tell you all the ways to get traffic fast, but if you are a business owner or new to internet marketing, have you considering using online video marketing to drive traffic to your website?

Some of the biggest and most content rich websites on the internet, are online video hosting sites, including Youtube.com, Yahoo Video, Myspace Video and Google Video. By putting a video up on one of these sites, you could literally have viewers from across the global watching your video. And, if you have your website address plastered across the bottom of the video, you have the perfect opportunity to send traffic to your website.

Here is how a video can rank on Google for a given keyword search:

Now, what this also means, is that because there is so much video content on these sites, these sites will very often appear in search engine results, displaying a video that is related to the keywords you have just searched for. The reason for this, is that these sites have so much video content, that very often they are seen by search engines like Google as being a valid source of information on the topic relating to the keywords you as the user have just typed into Google.

Now, I am not going to go into too much detail here on how natural search engine ranking happens, but there is a simple approach which means that you can have videos that you create and post to these video hosting sites, achieve front page ranking on major search engines, for the keywords that you select. And, if the video has your website address all over it, you will start to get increased traffic from people watching the video.

So how do we do this?

1. Create a video for an aspect of your website or business that you want to promote. This video could be an advertorial, where you feature a particular product or service. Another option is doing a “How to video” for the market you are targeting. If you are recommending someone’s product or website as an affiliate, you could do a “I recommend” video, with your affiliate link website address in the video. You can use various video software to create this, one being Sony Vegas Studio. Remember, that when you are starting out with this, the video does not need to be perfect.

As an example, you could create a video using a recording of a PowerPoint presentation, recorded off your screen by screen capture software like camstudio.org and using a mic to record the sound of the recording. The most important thing to remember, is to make sure you put your website address across the bottom of the video.

2. Do your keyword research: To get the maximum results from the video you have created, you must make sure that the keywords that you use in the title for the video are the keywords you are going to want to have your video found on in the search engine results. You can do keyword search using several tools, including Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker.com or Keyworddiscovery.com.

Remember, you want to focus on not just the most trafficked terms, but those keywords that will deliver you with the highest quality viewers in relation to the product, service or website you are promoting from the video. Using what is called “long tail keywords”, could deliver you the best results. For example, if you had website about massage and massage therapy, and you had a video on how to treat back and neck pain, instead of just using massage therapy or massage as the keyword in the video title, you could focus on the long tail within “massage”, like “massage for back and neck pain” or “Healing Back and Neck Pain with massage”.

When you submit your videos, you are going to build your title using the keywords you have found from this research. Use these keywords in the title, the tags for the video as well as in the description of what the video is about. A hot tip, is to start the description section of the video with your website address, that way if your video does rank on the search engines, and the person doesn’t watch it, they may just visit your website directly.

3. Submit your videos to get them distributed: Submit your videos to multiple video hosting websites, including Youtube.com, Google Video, Yahoo Video and Revver.com.

Now, obviously submitting your video to all these sites is going to be very time consuming and tedious. To speed up this process for you, I would recommend using a system called Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser will allow you to post your video to many of the big online video sites, including Youtube.com, Google Video, Revver and many more. It will also allow you to post your video to podcast directories and video blog websites. This will give your video massive distribution.

So if you have done the correct keyword targeting in the title based on step 2, and used these in the title, you should see you videos start to rank for the keywords you selected in 3-4 days. The more views you get of your video, the more traffic you are likely to generate.

Here is one of my videos that took 3-4 days to rank on the first page of Google.  This video was actually placed onto a blog.

More traffic = more leads = more sales = increased profits to you and your website or business.

You can use other video distribution software to do the same thing, but my personal recommendation is Traffic Geyser. And remember, always include your website address at the bottom of the entire video, so no matter where a viewer is at in the video, they know how to get more information. The biggest key to the success of this process will also be the correct selection of keywords, so make sure you do this properly and do not skip this step.