Chapter 1: Setting up your Website
Section 9: Making Videos and Using Them on Your Site
There are many good reasons to use videos on your site. First off, I think it establishes a certain level of trust and credibility instantly. You just can’t help but feel more connected with the person behind the website when you see them talking directly to you.
Secondly, if you are conveying sometimes tricky information, especially involving things online, there is nothing better than watching "over the shoulder" as someone does exactly what you need to do. If pictures are worth a thousand words, then video must be worth a million!
Lastly, search engines are also starting to love video! I’m now learning that some people are able to get on the first page of google results very quickly by correctly using video. Even without considering search engine traffic, just posting your video up to youtube can generate substantial traffic. There are certain principles that must be followed to do this correctly. The more advanced methods, involving generating traffic, will be saved for Section 2.
(As a quick funny story though, when I was first putting up video on my site, I was testing posting a youtube video connection. I didn’t have any video to use at the time, other than a short 10 second clip from my honeymoon. The clip was from one of the ports of call on our cruise, where for some reason we had gone on a tour of an ostrich farm. The video was of a woman feeding the ostrichs. I posted that clip, with a couple keywords relating to this site, and it worked fine. When I got up after sleeping for 5 hours, 10 people had already viewed the clip! This stuff is POWERFUL when used correctly!)
Other than having a video camera, there are a couple other things I would recommend to purchase, but of course you should do whatever fits your budget and purposes. If you don’t have a video camera, you can get a simple "flip" camera at Best Buy for just $150. It is really simple, with just two buttons, but is perfect for our purposes. You can get a standard tripod for that at Radio Shack for $10 to $15. I have a five foot standard tipod, and it is very easy to put together and take down.
(A quick note here: if you happen to have a JVC camera like I do, you’ll run into the same problem I did. For some reason, they use a proprietary video format which few other programs recognize. You’ll need to convert your .MOD files into something more common like .AVI or .MPEG. I read on some discussion boards that you can just rename the files with a .MPEG extension, but that didn’t work for me. I just bought Movavi for $30, and that works fine.)
In terms of software, I have two recommendations. First off is FLVProducer . (Cost for that is $97.) This will convert your video files to flash files, and will give you a player to use on your site. This is what I use on this website. (Note that you can use youtube for free for this as well, but it doesn’t look quite as nice, has some length limitations, and the youtube player on your site will show other videos once your video stops playing. I would ABSOLUTELY still recommend posting your videos to youtube though, for the traffic. Again, that is covered in Section 2.)
Second, if you want to capture screen images together with audio, you should get camtasia. The cost here is a little more expensive (I got my copy for about $250 from amazon.com), but it is well worth it if you want to produce online tutorials. This is exactly what I use to produce all of my tutorials.
To see exactly how to get your video files onto your webpage, watch the video tutorial I have on this page. Once you actually produce your video and are happy with it, getting it onto your webpage is a pretty quick process, once you know a few tricks. Again, this took me an hour or two to get right, but watching my video and you should be able to get your own videos up in 5 minutes or less easily.
As a final topic for Section 1: Setting up Your Website, I want to unveil a great way to use video content on your site …
