Visual Power on Your Site with Online Videos

We've had a love affair with Video on our website and as an add on product/tutorial for some time.

We decided recently that adding video to our website to illustrate the power, simplicity of Web Studio would be a good thing. We did an analysis of what we think are the most powerful points of the product and proceeded to create videos that illustrate those points.

It helps to have a son who is a USC Film School graduate and cinematographer when you approach a project like this! The videos we got are professional quality, as professional as it can get on the web, but we'll get into that in a little bit.

Here's the meat of this. We added a new "landing" page to our site. It includes the videos and a message to both our business customers and our consumer customers on how Web Studio can help them with their sites. Each page has links to the videos, and they all play on that one page. We're pretty proud of our videos! But what happened next was unexpected. First a little background.

We have visitors come to our site via three ways: they type our web address directly into their browser; they go to a search engine and their search leads them to us; they see one of our "sponsored listings" on the major search engines and click on our Ad.

What we did was direct all of the visitors who come to our site via the sponsored listings, also known as PayPerClick or PPC, to the new video page. This is the page they "land" on when they click on our ad, hence the term "landing page."

What we found after our videos were in service for a period of time is that the number of people who came to the new landing page was the same as to our previous landing page, which was expected. However, the number of people who stayed on the page, watched the videos, and subsequently downloaded our 30-Day-Trial software was 55% higher than before the videos!!

Clearly, illustrating your product via video on the web is a very powerful tool!

Here's how to go about doing this for your site.

First, determine what things about your product or service are the most powerful features in terms of solving a problem for your customer quickly, and cost effectively. Once you've determined the top 10, 9, 8 or however many you want, powerful features, draw up a script that conveys that message. The script is a verbal script describing your product's benefits and features. Then put together a "story board" that illustrates visually what you want to show in your video(s). Then put them together and you've got your video.

Ok, so the last step is the hardest, and I didn't describe how to do that one. We'll you'll need to get some software tools to do it, and possibly some hardware tools. Here's what we did.

We have a recording studio, but you can get the hardware needed to do it easily and cheaply. We used a single microphone, a digital recorder, a compressor, and turned the audio track in to an MP3 file on a CD. You can get a microphone for less than $100, plug it into your computer's microphone jack, and record CD quality audio on the computer's CD burner. No need for a studio!

Next, you'll need video. We were doing video of our software program, so we used the computer to provide the video. We used a Macintosh (sorry, PC fans) program to "watch" Web Studio in action and record it. Once the raw recording was created, it was put into another Macintosh program, Final Cut Pro for editing. In Final Cut Pro, the audio tracks were edited and the video timed to match. There were a bunch of cinematographer techniques added, like panning, zooming, etc., to help focus attention on the important parts of the video. And finally they were turned into video files a computer can read and display.

This turned out to be an interesting section of the project. There are many differnet formats that can be used to display video on a computer. Which one to use is the question. We looked at who our audience is to determine the answer. The original videos were QuickTime ".mov" files. The Quicktime files were the highest quality of any we tried, and also the smallest -- another Machintosh advantage. However, our audience is people searching for web design software for Windows. Many people with Windows do not have Quicktime on their computers. Microsoft hasn't added Quicktime to the list of video types that Windows plays. So, we couldn't use Quicktime, even if it was the best quality and size. We had to look at what Windows could display and use one of those formats. We tried ".avi" files, but they are huge, look bad, and are a very old technology. We tried MP4 files, but Windows wouldn't play them either. We settled on ".mwv" files. They looked almost as good, were a few megabytes bigger, but they had the least amount of negatives relative to the Quicktime files.

So, that's what we used.

There are a ton of video production sofware programs available today. We can't recommend one because we haven't tried any, we used the professional Macintosh software. If you are making a video of a software program, there is a production tool named ViewLet Maker that we can recommend. All of our other online videos were created with this tool. Also, the videos on our Video Tutorial CD were made with this tool. It does a great job and results in a Flash Animation file, which you can insert or drag and drop right onto your Web Studio pages. It lacks in the audio department, however. We tried to use audio with it and found the computer slowed down to a dead crawl.

So, armed with a video camera, a microphone, video software, you can make videos that provide a exceptional view into your products, educate your customers to a much greater degree than possible with just a simple web page, and increase your business- hopefully by 55% all in one shot!

Oh, and one last "tool" and shameless-plug... if you'd like to contact that son who created our videos for help with your project, email him at jason@cochard.net

Control Your Website—Control Your Life

Everyone accepts that having a good web site is “pay to play” — no matter what size the business might be. But how can a small business create and maintain an effective web site without paying an expensive web designer? There are some simple steps businesses can take to web site success that won’t strain the technical expertise or budget of the small business owner. By managing their web sites on their own, business owners find that they can better control their businesses and their lives.

It’s important for business owners to select a web site design software package that will work for the business. They should look for products with live people for technical support. If the company is only available via e-mail, or through a form on a web site, it’s best to look elsewhere. No matter what the user’s technical skill level, the web design program must be simple to use, so that companies don’t spend too much time building the site, and not enough time building the business. It’s best to select software that allows a trial period and use it to build a few pages to understand the options and real level of complexity the software provides. For example, some tools start out as drag and drop, but quickly revert to HTML code, but there are programs that produce sophisticated web sites with no coding at all.

Tricia Corman, TC Designs (www.etcdesigns.com), a web site and graphic designer based in suburban Washington D.C., tried several web design programs. “I found other programs to be terribly cumbersome. I don’t like to stick with templates. I customize all my sites. So many of the programs out there require you to use their rigid templates in specific ways. They aren’t flexible and become a cookie cutter approach to building a site. Web Studio allows me to do what I want from a design standpoint; I can create my own designs, then drag and drop them anywhere I want on the page.”

Previously, Corman was an interior designer. She discovered her web design program when building a family site, and found it so easy to use, she started building sites for other people. Having a really easy program with great flexibility gave her a lot of control and allowed her to build her business from the ground up. Now, she designs and builds sites for many regional, and even international, businesses.

“After just a few months, I was able to stop my interior design work entirely, and work from my home on my schedule,” continued Corman. “I do other design work as well, but web design is 90 to 95 percent of my business. I really see this as a logical evolution in my career – I used to design physical spaces, now I design virtual ones. Because of the flexibility my business gives me, I’m able to spend more time with my family and be more active in my community.”

When building the site, it’s easy to focus on the design, then select a hosting provider as an afterthought, but it’s important to select the right hosting provider at the outset. Working with a hosting company can be complicated. Some of the common problems small businesses report with hosting companies are that they give incomplete information, use different terminology than what the company is used to with its web design software, hook up the domain names to the wrong web sites, or have technical problems that block site uploads. It’s ideal to find a web program that offers a hosting solution, so the systems are integrated and headaches and confusion are minimized.

While some businesses start on the web, many are existing off-line businesses that find they can move to the next level with an effective web site. Gunpoint Graphics (www.gunpointgraphics.com) in Brunson, S.C., offers custom painting services for motorcycles. Owner Jody Davis began taking on side jobs on a part-time basis in addition to his full-time job at a local paint and autobody shop, but that meant working nights and weekends on side work he mostly got through word of mouth. Davis and his wife, Jennifer, thought it would be a good idea to post a portfolio online where they could direct prospective customers to review his work to try and build the business. Jennifer priced having a site designed, and found it prohibitive for her purposes. In her search for a designer, however, she found a program that she felt would work for her.

“I had some very basic computer skills, but certainly not the time or the level of skill I would have needed to build the site I wanted to using many of the other software products that were available,” said Jennifer. “But with the program I chose, it was so easy – I could visualize something I wanted to do in my head and it was easy to make it happen online.”

Within about a year of starting the web site, Jody was able to build a shop on his property, quit his day job, and pursue his business, full-time, on his own time. “Now, we have the flexibility of running our own business, so he’s more available for our family, and we have greater financial security than we ever had before,” said Jennifer.

In addition, controlling its own web presence has allowed Gunpoint Graphics to grow nationwide. “With our web site, we’re able to reach people all over the country, so now most of our business comes from out of state,” Jennifer stated.

One of the most important steps in building a successful web site is to optimize it effectively for search engines. This can feel complicated and overwhelming, but there are a few simple steps that every company can follow that will make a huge difference in the success of the site. Companies must determine what key words prospects will enter into search engines to find businesses like theirs. It’s best to try searching on a number of different words and combinations to determine the most likely options. Then, the company can include those words in the text on its home page, in headlines using large, bold type, and in product descriptions. Just this simple step can mean the difference between being found by prospects and not.

Pam Boles, founder of Floor Mania (www.floormania.com), an online flooring company, based in Gadsden, Ala., learned the importance of search engine optimization. Floor Mania did $14,000 of business in the first month when she launched her Web Studio site and several eBay auctions the same day in July 2005. The next month, after optimizing her site for search engines by adding key words and meta tags, the business shot to $40,000 in sales. By August, Boles was able to quit her job and she and her husband now work full time with their own business, which grosses over $500,000 annually.

In the flooring business, as pricing and availability change constantly, it’s important that Boles has the ability to update the site easily and quickly on an ongoing basis.

“The real difference that having control over my web site has made in our business and in our life is that we have peace of mind – the peace of mind that comes from financial security and hope for the future,” said Boles. “We’ve been able to build up more savings, we plan to install a pool in a couple of months, and we hope that when our children get older, we’ll be able to pass this business along to them so that it is truly a family business.”

No matter what size a business is, companies can move their business to the next level by making their web site part of the solution.