The Power of Non-Fiction Videos in the Classroom

by Kim Miller

For those of you who are over a certain age, the sound of a projector most likely brings back memories of school days when the shades were drawn and a collective groan was heard among your classmates who were dreading watching another educational film. moreOr you are a bit younger and remember the substitute teacher pulling out the VCR and popping in a video.

For all of the boring films and videos you sat through, there were those gems that may have changed your life and most certainly enhanced your awareness of the world around you. I remember excitedly watching that fabulous series Walter Cronkite narrated called The 21st Century in school. Although it also aired on television, watching it in the classroom on the “big screen” made a lasting impression on me.

Videos have long been known to be a powerful tool in the classroom because they enhance lessons and learning so well. Teachers can’t possibly know everything about a subject and always appreciate the help of a well made video to show to their students. Also humans learn in a myriad of ways. With video, you offer a more extended visual and auditory learning experience beyond a lone teacher in front of a blackboard. With how-to videos, you can actually show steps from many different angles. With the use of programs such as Camtasia or Screenflow, teachers can easily demonstrate complex computer programs to students.

In the last twenty years television has been embracing what teachers have long known as a potent tool. It comes as no surprise that educational programming and even dedicated educational channels have become popular in our homes. Some of these channels are staples in my household so, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to draw the shades now because my favorite Discovery Channel show is on.

What are “Special Interest Videos?”

I’ve wrestled with finding a better phrase to define what I call “Special Interest Videos” (SIVs, for short) for years.  Click here to continue reading

Broaden Your Product Line To Grow Your Video Business

If you have or are thinking of making a non-fiction, i.e., special interest video to sell, you may have heard stories where one single video title made its producer millions of dollars and then he retired on a beach somewhere and spends his days sipping mai tais. Click here to continue reading

Lights, Camera, Action!

For those readers who aren’t video savvy, the following is a popular article on getting started with making your own videos we posted at one of our other sites, VideoMarketingResourceCenter.com.

BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING

So let’s say you want to tape someone or something to put on your website. Where to start? Oddly, even the word “tape” is becoming outdated, as many of the least expensive video cameras today don’t use tape anymore. They record to solid state chips or hard drives inside the camera body.

CHEAP, SIMPLE & GOOD

Flip Video produces the hottest items in the camcorder market, the Flip Ultra and Flip UltraHD. These sleek camcorders look no different than digital cameras and are small enough to easily fit in a pocket, purse or backpack. These nifty devices save the video to an internal chip so there are no moving parts, nothing to change, and unlike camcorders that use compact flash cards, nothing to lose. Both models offer a full two hours of recording capacity, a bright two-inch transflective screen for no-glare viewing even in direct sunlight, and an innovative AA rechargeable battery pack that can be conveniently recharged through the camera’s built-in USB arm. The Flip Ultra is priced at just $149.99, while the Flip UltraHD sells for $199.99.

These cameras could not be easier to use. Just point and shoot. Flip Video camcorders are the world’s first with on-board software to enable editing, organizing, and seamless video uploading to websites. Even the built in microphone does an impressive job for for what it is. When you’re ready to upload to your computer, simply flip (hence, the name) out the USB connector and using the provided software, transfer the video clips as simply as transferring a file. Then upload to a website or import into your favorite editing program and away you go. Folks, it just doesn’t get any easier than this.

MOVING ON UP

OK, the Flip Video cameras are not for everyone. For those wanting higher quality and more options, you will want to move up to either a consumer or prosumer camcorder. The camcorders today offer amazing value. For around $300 and up you can get a quality camera that will either record to DV tape, a memory chip or internal hard drive, will have options for adding a more professional microphone, and some even have a built-in light for working in dark spaces.

There are scores of cameras available in this range. If you stick to Sony, Canon, Panasonic, JVC, Sanyo and other well-known names, you can’t go wrong. B&H is one of our favorite sources for equipment. World renowned, B&H, is the place to be for all your video and pro audio needs. Their commitment to sales quality and customer satisfaction is second to none.

SOUND IS HALF THE PICTURE

You’ve probably noticed that “tinny” sound most home movies have, and the way the background sounds overwhelm the main subject. That happens when you rely solely on the built-in microphone. It isn’t picky about what it hears, and the louder the source, whatever that is, the more it will be the main thing you hear. Plus your hands handling the camera, or if you are outside, the wind can create a lot of noise.

For professional sound you will want to add external microphones. Lavalier mics (wired or wireless) are placed on the “talent” and give a sense of presence. They will make a 200% improvement in the sound of the person speaking over a built-in mic. You can buy a simple lavalier mic at Radio Shack for $26.49 online. I use a lot of $300 lavaliers and this mic isn’t bad at all compared to them. It isn’t as good, but at that price it is a great value. If you do want a more professional lavalier, the Sony ECM 44-B is an industry standard and can be had for $220 at B&H Photo Video and other places. These mics sound great and will last a lifetime if treated with respect.

Shotgun mics can be used on the camera, on a boom pole or a mic stand. Contrary to what many people think, a shotgun mic does not amplify or reach out to get the sound in front of it. It works by ignoring the sounds to the side and behind it, to varying degrees depending on the design. These work great when you need to isolate a speaker or actor but cannot practically use a lavalier mic. You can spend thousands of dollars on a top end pro model, but good quality can be had in the $200 – $500 range. B&H Photo Video sells our favorite shotgun mics from Sennheiser and Audio Technica for under $300.

LIGHT IT

All video cameras love light. Most cameras today will operate fine in darker situations, such as an indoor room without a lot of windows, but you will improve the shot immensely if you add light to fill in shadows, add a sparkle to a person’s eyes, and bring out the colors of a scene.

Like microphones, lights can be cheap or very expensive, and unless you plan to shoot professionally there is no reason to spend a lot on lights. Simple worklights from Home Depot will work in many situations. A person at a desk could be lit with a desk lamp pointed at them. You can get ornate with lighting diagrams (that’s the cool patterns the light throws on the wall behind the subject), but the point is to light the subject so as to fill in shadows (or create them, for mood effects) and to give the camera enough light that it doesn’t push the gain up and cause graininess in the image.

One of the challenges of lighting is that what your eye sees is not at all what the camera sees. Your brain evens the “color temperature” of light out, but the camera cannot do that. When you adjust it for tungsten light, the kind that you get from stage lights or a traditional light bulb, it will see daylight as blue. If adjusted for daylight, it would see tungsten as deep orange. So you may have to add colored gels to the lights to balance everything out.

To keep things simple, when shooting indoors with tungsten as the main light source, try to eliminate daylight unless you want the blue effect (this can be quite nice, when done artistically).

I have given a very quick overview of what you will want to consider at all levels of shooting. If all of this seems overwhelming and high production values are your goal, you may want to call a professional.

Split Testing To Improve Ranking When Using Google AdWords

This is a continuation on the topic of getting top rankings on Google. In articles posted last week, I touched on the importance of regularly updating the content on your website and how using long tail keywords might be better when it comes to search engine results pages. Today I talk a bit about Google AdWords for those of you who are considering this method of promotion.

If you have already worked with Google AdWords, you know that this can be an expensive proposition, especially if you aren’t getting the results you expect and you just keep throwing money at it. Adwords and other pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can be a tough nut to crack but there are a few simple and inexpensive ways you can improve your success with your ad campaign.

Split Testing

When determining the success of your campaign, can you answer these questions? How is your advertising working in terms of page ranking? Is your PPC campaign really driving qualified traffic and upping your position? For starters, you need to analyze the results of your efforts. But how?

Perhaps the best way to determine what ads are most effective is to set up split testing. This refers to dueling ads being run simultaneously, each one with slightly different content. After a month of running these two ads, take a look and see which one resulted in more clicks. Then run a report that shows cost per click for each. A higher number of clicks at a lower cost will better help your ad rank higher in the paid search. Lose the other ad or rework it to be more effective.

You also need to consider your conversion rate. Simply getting clicks is meaningless unless someone buys something or does whatever action you are seeking. You will also want to factor in your conversion rate. In future articles I will share some different ways you can measure your conversion rate.

Future of Video

August 9, 2009 by Chris Yates at Huddle Productions

Are you using Video? If so how? How do you see Video being used in the future?

Watch this Video interview with J.R. Atkins who has an interesting idea on where we will see Video next.

Online Video used to be an added bonus now it’s a necessity. We don’t just want to see video we expect it.

1) YouTube is currently the #2 most visited site in the world (Google is #1).

2) 54% of U.S. Internet users consume video online

3) 32% of respondents say they watch more video online than they did a year ago

4) People that watched a video advertisement online, 45% had some sort of measurable response from the ad, and 31% followed through on the advertisement enough to go to the company website and 16% ended up making a purchase (fact provided from mashable.com).

Imagine those kind of numbers on sales calls. It’s obvious that video is a powerful tool but it’s only the beginning.

Podcasts

Starting on July 4, 2009, we became sponsors for a local radio show, Keeping Company With Starr Hall at KVEC 920am. The radio show is all about keeping “your company informed about new ways to market and grow your business in this wired world, the dos and don’ts of marketing, social networking, customer service, best selling authors and special guests, top tips, resources, and whatever else I can fit on my one hour show”. Starr Hall is a forward-thinking, energetic, and imaginative publicist with a tireless dedication to her clients. She has been a client of ours for over six years and we’ve experienced first hand her passion, drive and determination in branding and promoting herself. There is much to learn from Starr.

Starr understands the importance and power of using video in your business and we are honored that she invited us to get this message out to her audience which is 10,000 and growing. She plans on syndicating this show and taking it international.

The show airs every Saturday from Noon to 1pm and can be listened to via the website KVEC 920am“.

Here are the podcasts of past shows.

Introductions & Why Video In Your Business So Important Today 7-4-09 (Rick & Kim Only Excerpt)

Introductions & Why Video In Your Business So Important Today 7-4-09 (Entire Radio Program)

The Myriad Of Video Sites To Use & Why Use Them 7-11-09 (Rick And Kim Excerpt)

The Myriad Of Video Sites To Use & Why Use Them 7-11-09 (Entire Radio Program)

Using YouTube And Other Sites To Drive Traffic To Your Site Continued 7-18-09 (Rick And Kim Excerpts)

Using YouTube And Other Sites To Drive Traffic To Your Site Continued 7-18-09 (Entire Radio Program)

Use A Long Tail To Get Your Website A Good Ranking On Search Engines

by Rick Smith
August 6, 2009

In yesterday’s post, I covered one of the key ways to get and keep your website at a page one ranking – consistently changing the content on your website. That is one of the reasons blogs are so great for this. Really sophisticated wordpress templates are available that make your blog look and function like a regular website. We have set up a few of our sites using StudioPress templates and they look very professional. They also make adding and updating content really fast and easy. But just changing content isn’t all you should be doing to enhance your rankings; it matters what type of content you are adding and that is where keywords come in.

Including Long Tail Keywords

Another key component to getting a good ranking is to include long tail keywords. Think about the keywords you are using within your site or AdWords campaign that you are trying to gain high rankings for. The most used are also the ones with the most competition. For instance, if your videos are on the history of women in baseball, a search for this very broad term will return over 41,200,000 results. Getting to the top of that pile is going to be very difficult.

The long tail keywords, or those located along the right-most side of the bell-shaped curve for keyword popularity, might present a more achievable goal when it comes to search engine results pages. A search engine results page, or SERP, is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. Now take a look at the number of results you get from inputting “left handed pitchers who played in American Girls Professional Baseball League” – far less. Incorporating this narrower term may be a better option for your website.

I’ll go into more ways you can use these long tail keywords on your website and also in paid advertising in upcoming blog posts. Be sure subscribe to my feed for this and other topics. I also cover this in my video, Making Money Selling Your Own Videos available at HowToSellYourVideos.com.

Get Your Website A Page One Ranking On Search Engines

By Rick Smith

If you maintain an e-commerce website to sell your videos and other products, you want your site to reach the first page of search engine rankings. Better than that is to be in the top three of the organic search rankings. Why? Those not only greatly increase your chances of getting seen and clicked on, they are free.

I would like to say, and many out there will lead you to believe, that there is some magic fairy dust you can sprinkle on your computer monitor and get this within minutes of launching your site. The bitter truth is that it takes some work to get there and work to stay there, too.

Page rank is based on many things like the architecture of your landing page, time it takes to load, design elements, keyword use, link structure, and other factors (some of which are confusing and seem to constantly change) that determine ranking for particular keywords.

Getting your site on page one and staying there is almost a constant battle due to the vast number of websites that are being created daily. There are a few things you can do, however, to help you get there and maintain your status.

Change Is Key To Page One Rankings

The first and foremost important thing to remember is that where websites and their page rankings are concerned, change is good. Static content will not increase your rankings over the long run.

So the bottom line is to make sure that you add new content often. Every time you make a change and update your content, your site gains the attention of search engine bots. If you run a WordPress blog such as this, your blog posts are automatically pinged, making it easier to get to the top and stay there.

I’ll go into more strategies in upcoming blog posts, so make sure you subscribe to our feed.

Designing Emails for Mobile Devices – A How-To Guide

By Melinda Baxter (emarketingandcommerce.com)
July 31, 2009

Designing email messages for optimal performance on your subscribers’ computers and mobile devices can be challenging. Is it worth the effort? That depends on your subscribers’ viewing preferences and behaviors.

First, let’s take a look at the current state of the mobile design environment.

Mobile devices are still a complement, not a replacement, for computer screens for most email subscribers. Research my firm conducted on this topic for our Email Marketing for the Third Screen report confirmed this. The majority of subscribers in the report indicated they use smartphones as a convenient way to stay informed, but still use their home or office computers to access email most often. The mobile landscape has evolved since this research. Just consider iPhone’s rapidly increasing share of growth, for example. But the core design situation remains.

There are five important factors that influence how emails will display, and a combination of these factors adds complexity to how emails will display in subscribers’ inboxes. The factors include the following:

1. device manufacturer (screen size, resolutions, features, variances, etc.);
2. mobile data provider (size limitations that dictate lead message size);
3. operating system (each manages email uniquely, with different defaults);
4. email software program (lack of standards results in different contortions of intended design); and
5. HTML versions are stripped of images, displaying emails in a “text-like” view, but certainly not as a designer intended.

The inconvenient truth
While the truth is there’s no bulletproof solution that enables the display of emails equally across all of your subscribers’ dashboards, you can optimize the situation. Here are four solutions to consider before planning to have your emails appear on all of your customers’ devices:

1. Consider offering a mobile-only email preference choice. Here you can deliver a text version of an email — which works best on mobile devices — or an HTML text version.
2. Make sure your name is easy to identify and recognizable from sign-up and welcome. If your customers anticipate your emails, they’ll most likely keep you out of the delete/spam folder.
3. Be sure your subject line passes the “scanning eye test.” Mobile views are shorter, so they need to quickly tease subscribers to open or return later.
4. Add text messages in your pre-headers. These messages can play off subject line teasers to entice immediate opens. Treat subject lines and pre-header text as working couplets. This also helps strengthen the preview-pane view when viewing on a computer screen.

These solutions help quickly communicate intent or value and minimize clicks to the delete or spam folders. By the way, they’re also strong strategies for computer screen views.

Melinda Baxter is the director of marketing services at ExactTarget, an Indianapolis-based on-demand email marketing software solutions provider. Reach Melinda at mbaxter@exacttarget.com.