Five Easy Steps for Easy Video Marketing Online

Video marketing online is exploding. The average US viewer now watches more than 187 videos online per month, and that number is only increasing.

To help your business attract customers through this exploding new medium, I recommend video blogging. While many people are intimidated by the technical complexities of producing online video (or are just shy about appearing on camera), video posts to your blog are easier than you think.

Five Easy Steps for Easy Video Marketing Online

To get started in online video there are a lot of complicated strategies and equipment that you can use. Instead here’s the plain and simple way I recommend that can get you started in online video quickly and inexpensively:

1. Camera: Almost any video camera today can plug into your PC to upload video to the web. Use your point and shoot digital camera, a hand held camcorder like the Flip, or my personal preference, a web cam.
     
2. Setup: Prep some notes about what you want to say, and find a pleasant, quiet and well lit spot to use as a background for your video shoot.
     
3. Shoot: Turn on the camera and start talking. Save it when finished.
     
4. Upload your video to YouTube: This is the part where non-technical people get intimidated but it's really quite easy. An account at YouTube is free. After you have one simply go in and click the button that says "upload". “Browse” to find the new video file on your hard drive and click to upload it. You can even use a webcam to record directly onto YouTube, if you would like.
     
5. Distribute Your Video: Here’s where the marketing part kicks in! Once your video is live on YouTube, you can syndicate it around the web. Grab the URL of the video's page on YouTube and promote it on your blog, Facebook, Tweet about it, and share it with your friends and business associates.
    
   Even better than sharing the URL is to copy the "embed code". If you have access to the HTML of your website or blog's pages, you can paste this embed code in to make a YouTube video player appear on your site. That way visitors can watch your video without leaving your site.

The cost of all this? FREE!

BONUS TIP: Automatic Video Syndication by Email

My favorite online video syndication technique it is to share my videos by e-mail, too. This may sound complex but FeedBlitz makes it easy!

If you use FeedBlitz to turn your blog’s RSS feed into newsletters, you’ll also discover that FeedBlitz offers a great feature that automatically captures a still image from your video and places it in the e-mail newsletter.

Your e-mail newsletter subscribers will see a nice big JPEG taken from your video. They can click on that picture to visit your site and play the video right away. This is a super handy FeedBlitz feature that can help you get double duty from your online videos. It also attracts much higher clickthrough rates than simply including a URL.

Example: Each week I send an email newsletter to the readers of my books, Internet Riches and e-Riches 2.0: Next Generation Online Marketing Strategies.

So to share a new video I follow the steps above: I shoot and upload the video to YouTube, followed by posting the new video on my blog at ScottFox.com by pasting the YouTube embed code into a post. Then, when my e-mail newsletter goes out each week via FeedBlitz, attractive, clickable JPGs from the videos I post are automatically included!

To see this technique in action please visit ScottFox.com to subscribe to my free e-mail newsletters. Each week I'll share with you more practical online marketing and e-commerce money-making strategies just like those detailed here.

I'm looking forward to seeing your smiling face soon in an online video, too!

• What are your online video marketing tips?
• Are you posting your videos in your Feedblitz emails yet?

About the Author

Scott Fox is the host of the online marketing success coaching community ClickMillionaires.com. He is a serial startup executive, podcaster, and author whose e-business strategy coaching helps solopreneurs, small business owners, and corporations make more money online. He is the best-selling author of two books: Internet Riches and e-Riches 2.0: Next Generation Online Marketing Strategies. Visit http://www.scottfox.com/ for free email newsletters and http://www.clickmillionaires.com/ for a free trial of his personalized coaching community.