Tag Archives: relevant

6 Reasons Why You Need To Use Flash For Web Video, and 1 Reason Why You Don’t.

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If you’re putting video on your website, you want as many folks as possible to watch it, right?  No matter if your viewer is using Windows, or Apple, they should be able to watch it quickly and without hassle.

There are more than a handful of multimedia formats, and some players don’t play them all.

I’m a PC – always have been; always will be.  Here’s something I didn’t know – not all Windows systems have Windows Media Player pre-installed. On the other hand, not all Apple machines have Quicktime pre-installed.  Windows Media won’t play Quicktime files. Quicktime doesn’t like Windows. But there’s one format, and one player that works with both operating systems.

When it comes to putting videos on your website, Adobe Flash has a lot going for it.

  1. The small file size means it loads quickly
  2. You can pre-set the buffer size, so it starts playing immediately
  3. It embeds easily into webcode
  4. You can determine how you want the player to look.
  5. You can view it full screen if you want
  6. Mobile devices are using it.  (It’s true, Flash doesn’t play well with the Iphone.  That’s why you also need an MP4 version of all your videos.)

Your website visitors don’t want to have to wait while a video downloads. Give them the experience they want, and the information they need, and they will actually spend a longer time on your site.  My average viewer spends almost four minutes on each page.  And there are effective and affordable video players which will even generate the code for you.  All you do is plug and play!

Do it now.  The longer you wait the further behind the curve you will be.  Video is not a craze.  It will become as ubiquitous as text and images are on websites.

–That’s A Wrap.

How Video Helps Your Website SEO

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Everytime I talk with someone about using Videos On Your Website, the conversation invariably turns to Search Engine Optimization.  A lot of folks hear the term SEO, and they know it has something to do with keywords, but after that, they’re lost.

SEO is kind of like trying to put a bowtie on a fish.

The guys who do this for a living twist and pull and tweak their websites so they can in some measure figure out what the search engines are looking for.  Nobody’s supposed to know for sure.  But we do know that titles, headlines, and what you write on the page all get the attention of the search engine robots. We also know that a few of the right tweaks will get your ranking up, but with time, that ranking begins to fade as something newer takes its place.

There’s another fish analogy – if you turn your back and forget about it, it will start to smell.

That’s why constantly updating your website makes those search engine robots very happy.  Because a changing site is a fresh site.  And a fresh site must be more relevant. That means content.

If content is King, then having videos on your website should at least be Prime Minister. Videos can, and should be optimized with keywords.  They should not only be on your website, but distributed to as many of the video sharing sites as you can with a URL pointing back to your main page.  Everytime you do this, even if it’s the same video, it is fresh content in the hearts and minds of the search engines.

Ultimately, a visitor might share your video with a link, or a recommendation to a friend. That builds credibility, and that’s the other thing that feeds the search engine’s ranking machine.

To put it another way: having videos on your website can make you up to eight times more likely to land on the first page of Google results than if you just have text.

How are folks finding YOU?  What are they doing when they get to your site?  How long would you like to keep them there?

I’d be more than happy to talk to you about it.

–That’s A Wrap

And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor

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Say you’re watching your favorite show, and it’s time for a commercial. But before the commercial is played, you see, “We Will Return To Our Show In 30 Seconds.” What would you do?
Would you sit thru the commercial? Would you fast forward if the show had been recorded? Would you see if you could find a snack in half a minute?

TV execs are hoping you’ll just sit and watch.

This season, there will be some new techniques for commercial breaks, all of them designed to get you to watch, or engage you. Some shows will only show one 30 second spot at a time. Some shows will be using the actors in character, so that maybe you won’t notice they’ve gone to a commercial.

Well, of course, none of this is new.

Forty years ago and more, actors from TV shows were making pitches in character for hundreds of products…everyone from Dick Van Dyke to the Flintstones.

Actually, network execs have been saying for sometime that they’re worried about folks flashing forward on their DVRs. Hmmm. Let’s think about that for a minute. Which TV spots would you NOT want to fast forward thru? Isn’t there one particular time of year when TV commercials actually make headlines?

That January Football Game.

Why?

Why are THOSE spots watched, and talked about, and remembered, and discussed, and replayed?
Could be that they’re just a tad bit more creative than the norm? Could it be that here are a group of advertisers who understand that the way to engage the audience is to also entertain them?
Why does that happen just in January?

Ok, there are actually some pretty good spots the rest of the year.. I like PC vs Mac, the E*Trade baby, and IKEA. But just like radio, TV spots don’t have to be funny. They just have to be memorable. They just have to show their benefit to the consumer.

Make it relevant, and they will watch.

Folks will watch “TV’s Funniest Commercials Part 8?, but they will remember Mean Joe Green and the kid with the Coke bottle because it touched them. And that’s going to sell a whole lot more product than Smiling Bob could ever dream of.

–That’s a wrap.