Link Building Strategies: Video
One of the exciting trends in link building right now is leveraging video to increase interest in websites, as well as creating another reason for someone to link to your site. Pretty much any site can take advantage of online video production to create content that is useful to visitors, and the great thing about it is that you don't even need high end video production facilities to make it work.
Marketing via YouTube and Google Video
This is the most straightforward aspect of the trend. Someone asked me how valuable the traffic of video sharing sites are in terms of CPM traffic and my response was that smart marketers are actually using YouTube and Google Video to distribute their content. Hollywood and Madison Avenue are releasing trailers and commercials via these channels but you don't have to be big bucks to do it yourself. Smaller niche players are leveraging the traffic to create instructional videos, videos that display the strength of their products, and videos that are essentially articles re-produced to suit the medium in order to plug into the traffic.
Case study of raising brand awareness & conversions
A small martial arts studio produced a series of videos of their students performing lion dances, and added links to their site. Anyone in their local area interested in learning martial arts may take an interest, based on the performances of their students, to join that studio. A company that specializes in knowledge produced around two thousand videos ranging from how to play the guitar to how to brine a turkey. Each video has been watched thousands of times. That's a lot of exposure and aside from the time spent creating the videos, it's virtually free exposure.
What if you're a retailer?
Suppose you're selling goods over the internet. One approach is to show your products in action and demonstrating how your surfboard, skis, cooking products work well and produce a positive outcome. Another approach would be to create instructional videos that demonstrate how well your products work, for instance, how well a garden fountain integrates into a garden and makes it look twice as good.
The best part about this is you don't have to limit your endeavor to YouTube or Google Video, you can host it yourself. You ever visit a mall or county fair where they have the guy in a booth cooking tasty snacks on their wok/non-stick pans, indoor bbq? Have you seen the Jack Lalanne Power Juicer informercials? There is nothing like showing your product in action for motivating people to purchase it. It seems to me that many products, brands, and services can benefit from a mix of informercial style promotion on and off their websites.
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even New York Times does it
Even if you are a site that produces product reviews, you too can make videos people will be interested in watching, and anytime you become useful you are giving someone else a reason to link to you. NYTimes features Movie Minutes, movie reviews on video. That's a great example of leveraging video to create more content- and they're not even selling anything beyond becoming a destination.
TurnHere.com is a beautiful example of a travel site full of user generated content that is useful and gaining notice for the great videos of sites to visit on vacation. Contributing content to promote your destination or travel site is a great idea, but you can also host it from your own site to demonstrate why your restaurant, hotel, boutique, or travel site is the best choice. Sell yourself. Make it useful. From there on you can leverage press releases, blogs, PPC, YouTube, and Google Video and other marketing strategies to light the fire under the campaign so that it grows legs.
If a picture is worth a thousand words...
The main point I'm trying to get across is that while text is content and quality content is easier to get links to, video is also content. My question to you is, is it time you strategized how video content can become another reason why users should visit and link to your website?
Marketing via YouTube and Google Video
This is the most straightforward aspect of the trend. Someone asked me how valuable the traffic of video sharing sites are in terms of CPM traffic and my response was that smart marketers are actually using YouTube and Google Video to distribute their content. Hollywood and Madison Avenue are releasing trailers and commercials via these channels but you don't have to be big bucks to do it yourself. Smaller niche players are leveraging the traffic to create instructional videos, videos that display the strength of their products, and videos that are essentially articles re-produced to suit the medium in order to plug into the traffic.
Case study of raising brand awareness & conversions
A small martial arts studio produced a series of videos of their students performing lion dances, and added links to their site. Anyone in their local area interested in learning martial arts may take an interest, based on the performances of their students, to join that studio. A company that specializes in knowledge produced around two thousand videos ranging from how to play the guitar to how to brine a turkey. Each video has been watched thousands of times. That's a lot of exposure and aside from the time spent creating the videos, it's virtually free exposure.
What if you're a retailer?
Suppose you're selling goods over the internet. One approach is to show your products in action and demonstrating how your surfboard, skis, cooking products work well and produce a positive outcome. Another approach would be to create instructional videos that demonstrate how well your products work, for instance, how well a garden fountain integrates into a garden and makes it look twice as good.
The best part about this is you don't have to limit your endeavor to YouTube or Google Video, you can host it yourself. You ever visit a mall or county fair where they have the guy in a booth cooking tasty snacks on their wok/non-stick pans, indoor bbq? Have you seen the Jack Lalanne Power Juicer informercials? There is nothing like showing your product in action for motivating people to purchase it. It seems to me that many products, brands, and services can benefit from a mix of informercial style promotion on and off their websites.
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even New York Times does it
Even if you are a site that produces product reviews, you too can make videos people will be interested in watching, and anytime you become useful you are giving someone else a reason to link to you. NYTimes features Movie Minutes, movie reviews on video. That's a great example of leveraging video to create more content- and they're not even selling anything beyond becoming a destination.
TurnHere.com is a beautiful example of a travel site full of user generated content that is useful and gaining notice for the great videos of sites to visit on vacation. Contributing content to promote your destination or travel site is a great idea, but you can also host it from your own site to demonstrate why your restaurant, hotel, boutique, or travel site is the best choice. Sell yourself. Make it useful. From there on you can leverage press releases, blogs, PPC, YouTube, and Google Video and other marketing strategies to light the fire under the campaign so that it grows legs.
If a picture is worth a thousand words...
The main point I'm trying to get across is that while text is content and quality content is easier to get links to, video is also content. My question to you is, is it time you strategized how video content can become another reason why users should visit and link to your website?
Search Engine Commentary by martinibuster || Link Building Strategies: Video
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