Your Essential Guide To Creating & Marketing Your Own Online Videos From Home

Guest Blogger - Andy Havard

Businesses, brands and bloggers have long been under the illusion that creating effective online video content is a marketing prospect reserved for only the chosen few. Such an illusion couldn’t be further from the truth. The following article explores just how affordable marketing online video is and how you can create an effective piece of video from the comfort of your own home.

Pick Your Location

Big Corporates may choose to book out a pricey studio space or rent a lavish location for their video shoot, but you really don’t need to go to such measures to create effective online video. A garage, spare room or any free space you have in a bedroom or living room could be the perfect studio set up for your video.

Choose Your Backdrop

A professional backdrop or swish looking background is actually more important than the space you are recording in. The background of your video is the only part of your location that will ever be visible on camera.

All you need to create a corporate looking backdrop the likes of which Google and Apple would adore is either a film standard white screen, a white sheet or you could just simply paint one of your walls pristine white. A screen could be a bit pricey, but sheets and paint are certainly within the budgets of any brand or business.

Set Up Your Camera & Tripod

A camera is the most vital tool you’ll need to create your online video. How much you spend on a camera and its supporting tripod is entirely up to you. The more expensive the camera is the better the quality, but also the more complex it is to use.

You’ll have to think about how much money you realistically want to invest in your online video campaign and what equipment you really need for the job.

You can generate a lot of great images on any camera, and creating a lot of on-screen effects can be done in post-production. Due to this you may find a cheap camera does exactly what you need it to. As far as tripods go they only act to keep your camera steady so you could quite easily just rest your camera on a table should you wish to save on the pennies.

Set Up your Lighting

This set-up will help to illuminate your backdrop and make it look crisp and bright.

Record your Sound

You may find your camera has a built-in microphone that provides a good sound quality for your videos, but more often than not you’ll need to invest in an external microphone. The best mic for one-to-one video is a lapel/lav mic.

This kind of mic gives great audio and is very easy to conceal on camera. You can use a variety of other mics such as boom mics or directional mics, but just like with your camera and tripod you’ll need to think about what audio you’re trying to capture and what mic is best for your video.

Get Editing

If you’ve been feeling a little pessimistic about the whole bed-sheets, cheap cameras, lamps and make-shift tripods then your editing process is where you can really make your online videos pop.You can get hold of free editing software if you’re a Windows or a Mac user, which are very handy, but you might want to invest in an affordable piece of paid software.

Such software will give you a few more tools and will still be quite easy to use. Altering your contrast/brightness will boost that backdrop of yours making it look like the slick background you were hoping for. You’ll also be able to use your software to edit your video into a short, sharp, essential piece of online content.

Upload Your Online Video To A Free Hosting Site

Now that you’ve created and edited your online video it’s time to start marketing it. Uploading your video to a free hosting site like YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler or Daily Motion is a great way of getting your video out to a wide audience without paying for anything bar your Internet connection. From these sites you can embed your video onto your website or blog and ensure all of your site traffic is checking out your content.

Optimize Your Online Video For Search Engine Results

When you upload your content to free hosting sites ensure you’ve optimized your video content to help it get found in the search engine results. YouTube as a hosting site is also the world’s second most used search engine, which is why it’d be great for your videos if it brought up your content in its search results.

By using titles, descriptions, tags, closed captions that feature your keywords and phrases you can begin to optimize your online video content to help it get found by search engine results in both Google and sites like YouTube.

Market Your Online Video

There are some fantastic free marketing avenues that free hosting sites offer. The majority of free hosting sites integrate with Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn allowing you to post your content in Pages, Groups, Discussions, Wall Posts and Statuses.

You can also use features such as YouTube’s Video Response to make your online videos become Comments to other users pieces of content. A site like YouTube also offers marketing tools that come with a fee like Promoted Videos, which works like Google Adwords to help get your videos seen.  By making use of the tools free hosting sites offer you can market your content, easily and effectively to a staggeringly wide audience.

Track Your Online Video

On a website like Vimeo you’ll have to pay for tracking tools, but luckily sites like Tube Mogul and YouTube offer free tracking analysis. What tracking your video does is allow you as a marketer to see how your video is performing.

You can track everything from when people are turning your videos off to where they are finding it on the web and where in the world they are watching your content. By using great free tracking services like these you can amend your current or next piece of online video content to make it as popular as possible.

Summary

Following this 10 point guide to creating and marketing your own online videos from the comfort of your own home will help you to make the most of the affordable nature of online video and online video marketing.

Using the pointers in this guide will help to open the door of online video marketing to businesses and brands of all niches and sizes who have yet to consider such a strategy in their marketing mix.

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