If you have a blog where you want to reach more people and share your ideas, or an online business where you want more customers; (and who doesn’t want that?) you really need to be creating videos and uploading them for people to view!

If you aren’t doing this and your competitors are, then they are taking customers from you that don’t even know you exist. If they aren’t producing video for YouTube or their own sites then you need to make sure you get those customers they are missing.

Compete.com lists YouTube with 85 million unique visits in July of 2009! Imagine for a moment what sort of traffic you would get from a viral video with 100,000 views… 200,000 views…. 1 million views! A certain percentage of those people would visit your site and a percentage of those would sign up for your newsletter or buy something from you.

Now if my math is right, and you get 1 million views for a video and only 3% of those viewers visit your site that is 30 thousand visitors! If 3% of those signed up or bought something, that is 900 signups or sales! Sound good to you?

I know it’s very difficult to get a video with 1 million views, but take a look at YouTube and see what videos are that popular. Why do they become popular? What is great about them? It’s not the production value, it’s not because they have celebrities or cost a large amount of money to create.

These videos are crazy popular because they are extremely funny, or cool, or amazing for some reason. The videos can be planned out, but wildly popular vidoes are not outwardly selling anything, there is no pitch. If you want a video to have a chance at going viral, you can’t be selling in the video; you must let the video sell for you!

In door-to-door sales years ago we had a saying that you should “sell the sizzle, not the steak”. Well what does this mean to you? If I want to sell plant food, do I talk about the chemical composition and the different nutrients that are in it? NO! I am not selling them fertilizer, I am selling them BIG TOMATOES, that’s the sizzle!

Give the viewer something in your videos for free. We are a digital camera repair shop and can’t make videos about how to repair every camera, but your customers are looking for something regarding your business, so find out what it is and give it to them!

Teach them something, give them information they are looking for, entertain them. [If you become an authority on your subject your customers will happily tell others about you].

You don’t need professional quality videos, but you do need to make them viewable and understandable.

  • Make sure your camcorder or digital camera records good quality video, and no it doesn’t have to be HD quality for YouTube!
  • Use a quality microphone. If your audio is awful then nobody is going to stick around and watch.
  • Use a solid backdrop, don’t show your cluttered basement or office or bedroom unless this is part of your presentation
  • Write a script or at least notes regarding what you want to say
  • Practice and view your results before publishing it. Ask others for opinions and feedback!
  • Everyone hates the sound of their own voice; but that is how we hear you so don’t worry, you sound fine.

Keep going, things will keep getting better along the way!

Now I’m off to try and figure out what my customers are looking for regarding digital camera repair for their Sony, Canon and Nikon cameras and then just give it to them.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,