Why online video? – VidBiz – EP1

VidBiz is an article series and online video show dedicated to educating business owners about the benefit of using online video and how they might take advantage of the amazing opportunities now available through sites like YouTube, MetaCafe, Viddler, Vimeo and the like. This article series will also try to take some of the technical jargon out of recent announcements from the online video world. Explaining how changes to YouTube, new technologies and the like can be used in a business setting and what they actually mean.

I guess the first question is why online video. For me it boils to three simple things, sight, sound and motion. It’s easier to click play on a website and watch a video thats a couple of minutes long than trying to read a thousand words and thats the simple answer to it, it’s a little more engaging that pages and pages of text, don’t get me wrong, pages of text are still really important for Google and the other search engines, but video can help engage those people to entice them to read a little bit more.

The second thing that I want to put out in this quick article is also recent research from Forrester research suggests that your 50 times more likely to get a first page ranking on Google with an engagement object like online video on your page. This does not mean that you should go out and fill your website with video just for the sake of it but it does mean that, as a business owner, you should be looking to utilise the benefits of online video to help in raising the profile of your online brand.

I really want to leave you with the notion that online video is not hard, that its possible. For the cost of a few hundred dollars its possible to have a small filming studio producing HD quality content and that using the free online tools, that we will cover more in this article series, it’s possible to build an audience that was unheard of only 5 years ago.