Online Videos can truly differentiate your products and services from the competition because Google, Yahoo! and MSN give videos top ranking. In addition, visitors stay on a web page with video content over 50% longer than pages without video. With today’s video recording and screen capture technology, it’s easier than even to make and syndicate videos. Here are some tips for creating and distributing professional quality videos.
1. Determine whether you are going to shoot live video with a camcorder/camera or simply voice-over screenshots of a presentation. For software demos or voice-over presentations on a PC, we use Adobe Captivate and Microsoft Powerpoint. For the MAC, we recommend Keynote and Screenflow.
2. Create a script and rough storyboard. This will allow you to determine timing and will make it easy for the participants to quickly record the sessions.
3. Use a high-quality microphone. For voice-over of screen capture or software demos, we use a Snowball microphone by Blue. It’s only $99 and delivers great sound quality. Another popular model is the Audio Technica 2020 USB microphone. For videos, you will probably want the participants to use lavaliere microphones or at least attach an external microphone to your camcorder.
4. Eliminate noise in the recording environment. No room is 100% silent so record your voice as loud as possible, keeping your voice signal many decibels louder than the ambient noise of your room.
5. Keep the digital compression as high as possible for the best video and audio. For audio on the web, use a 22.5 Hz sample rate, 16 bit mono or stereo at 56Kbps. For video, save as AVI uncompressed for editing purposes, and then upload to the web in FLV or WMV format.
6. Optimize your video for search engines. Use keyword phrases in your video titles and descriptions considering as this is how the search engines will index your video. Most videos show up in Google’s result pages within 1-2 hours of submission.
7. Distribute your video efficiently. Rather than submitting your video to every online content site, use Traffic Geyser (www.trafficgeyser.com) . For $99 per month, you only upload once to the service and it automatically distributes your video to the most popular social networking sites in minutes – saving you hours of manual submission.
