Video Marketing for More Web Traffic
Many internet marketers make a simple mistake when doing video marketing. They forget that views on a video sharing site are not the only reason to engage in video marketing. There are three reasons to post videos and video views are only one of those reasons.
Here’s quick explanation of how video marketing works. You make a video, upload it to the video sharing site such as YouTube, write a good, keyword rich description and wait until it’s posted. Video sharing site visitors watch your video and are counted as “views“.
It’s possible that viewers will visit your site. Some sharing sites allow you to post your site url and you can always include it in the video itself. But unless you are fortunate enough to have produced a really cool video that viewers bookmark, add to their own pages and share with friends, you probably won’t get that many views. If your video does start to make the rounds of the net through “sharing” it’s called “going viral“. You really have no control over this, it’s done by your viewers. If they think someone they know would enjoy it, they’ll share it. If they think it will be something THEIR site visitors will enjoy, they’ll embed it on their pages. Viral videos can get millions of views, especially if they are picked up by major news sites such as CNN and USA Today.
So you see, views are not a great source of web traffic. They can help, but you won’t see 500 web visitors because you post a vid to YouTube.
The other two parts of video marketing are what really count. On any given day it’s probable that 3 of the top 10 most visited sites on the entire web will be video sharing sites. How much is a backlink from those sites using one or more of your targeted keywords worth? Pure gold! You can’t buy that sort of link love!
How much is getting ranked in hours not weeks worth? Google hits the vid sites often. I think they actually have an army of search bots sitting on the major video sharing sites. They sit there sipping coffee and munching donuts until someone posts a vid, which is when they grab the keyword tags and put you into the rankings. Google seems to give emphasis to videos. When you look at a typical search results page on Google, you’ll often find normal site rankings, along with videos in their own section, and sometimes images.
The videos are always highly placed on the search results page. I’ve had videos ranked on page one for my keyterm within two hours. This doesn’t always happen, of course, but it happens often enough that I know from my traffic increase when it does.
In my own humble opinion, I don’t really care if not one single person views my video on YouTube. What matters to my web traffic and sales is the website ranking and the web traffic I get from it. And that lovely backlink on my keyterm from the number 1, 3 or 5 site on the entire net.
As internet marketers we must always remember that what counts is the bottom line - how much money we put in our pocket at the end of the day. Getting even 100 video views on on file sharing site is not going to put that money in my pocket nearly as fast as a first page ranking for my keywords.
