Helping you shoot for the moon

The value of video

These days it can be surprisingly easy to put short video clips on your site, and they have a lot of benefits. They can be a big help to your existing customers, a draw to your potential customers, and even bring new visitors to your site.

Movie ideas

Here are a few ideas for video content:

Demonstration videos

If a picture paints a thousand words, video's even better. This is especially valuable if you work in a field that isn't very well understood by some people, such as alternative therapies. For example, if someone is considering trying acupuncture, they may feel a little uncertain about it because they're not sure what's involved. You can help put them at ease by placing a short video on your site with a brief demonstration. Then they have a better idea what to expect, and are more likely to give it a go – and likely to be more relaxed when they do.

Instructional videos

I've talked before about giving something for nothing. It's a great way to make people feel good about your business. Video is a great way to give something for nothing. Perhaps you're a massage therapist; you could have a video demonstrating some easy self-massage techniques. If you're a caterer, you could have a recipe-of-the-month video, or a video demonstrating tricky techniques like making pastry or souffles.

Getting-to-know-you videos

You can use video to show people a side of your business they don't normally see. Perhaps you're a jewellery designer; you could have a video showing your process, with scenes of you sketching designs, choosing materials, making your jewellery. This allows people to see the care and love that goes into your work, and the quality of your product.

Here's a great example: Tara at the Blonde Chicken Boutique makes and sells gorgeous hand-made yarn. She has a video page where she shows you how she makes her yarn. It's fun to watch her spinning and dyeing, and you can really see the care that goes into what she does.

Making a movie

There are three stages to making your own movie:

  1. Plan it
    First work out what you want to shoot. How long will it take? (Allow for mistakes – you may need to do several takes.) Can you do it in one shot, or will you need to film different clips and edit them together? Where will you film it, and what objects will you need? Will you need a volunteer? (If so, make sure you get their permission, and that they understand what you'll be using the video for.) The easiest thing, of course, is to film something you're doing anyway, like a lecture or performance.
  2. Shoot it
    You can throw money at this, but you don't have to. Sure, if you want something really glossy, you'll need to hire professionals, but for most purposes a friend and an ordinary digital camera will do just fine. If you don't have one and can't borrow one, you can buy small cameras to attach to your computer (if you have a laptop, it may even have a camera built-in). Play around with it a bit first to get the hang of it. Experiment with lighting.
  3. Edit it
    Computers generally come with easy-to-use software for editing video. If your computer has Windows, it has Windows Movie Maker; Macs have iMovie. The software will come with help files, but there are also lots of tutorials on the internet – just google 'tutorials windows movie maker', or whatever the name of your software is.

Hosting your movie – YouTube is your friend!

For people to be able to see your video, it needs to be hosted somewhere. You could host it on your own webspace, but that requires a little technical knowledge. Instead, I recommend YouTube. YouTube is your friend. Not only does it host your videos for free, it adds controls so that people can pause, mute, etc, and it gives you the code you need to embed the video in your website.

But here's the best bit: it can actually bring you new customers. That's because YouTube is designed to share videos. It's basically advertising your video for free. It does this in three ways:

  1. Search.
    Like most websites, YouTube has search feature. If you host your acupuncture video on YouTube, it will appear in the search results when people search for acupuncture. To make your video easy to find, you just have to enter appropriate 'tags' when you upload it – it's easy, it's all part of the uploading process.
  2. Related videos.
    When someone watches a video on YouTube, a panel on the right shows links to related videos. If someone's watching a video about acupuncture, there's a chance your video will appear in the related videos panel.
  3. Sharing.
    YouTube is designed to make it easy to share videos. Every YouTube video has a bit of code that anyone can use to embed it into any website. Anyone can put your video on their website. If this makes you worry about copyright, forget about that – what this means is that if you create a really great video, people may be publicising it for free to internet users you would otherwise never reach. Because it's so easy to put a YouTube video on a website or blog or in an email, popular videos spread like wildfire – I'm sure you've seen the phenomenon. Any kind of word of mouth advertising is worth its weight in gold, and this is no exception. (Incidentally, if for some reason you need to restrict your videos to your own site, go for Vimeo instead of YouTube – their paid account will let you do that, and it's very affordable.)

As an example, last year I built a site for a group who perform baroque dance in 18th century costume. We filmed one of their performances, hosted the videos on YouTube, and embedded them in their site. People who were on YouTube watching videos of other baroque dancers, or baroque music, or costume videos, came across our videos through the related video panel, and then followed the link to the group's website to find out more. The group had a lot of new enquiries, both from people wanting to hire them for their events, and from people wanting to join them. (This worked especially well for them because their field is quite specialist. Obviously, the more videos there are on a subject, the less often your video will be among the related video links.)

Here's a great example of how video can be easy as pie. Jennifer Bratt is a tango teacher. Her site, close-embrace.com, has videos of her performances, but it also has a section of tutorials, where she tells you how to do various little embellishments – giving her visitors something for nothing. Each tutorial has a short video demonstration. You'll see she's hosted them for free on YouTube, so anyone searching YouTube for tango videos may come across them. She's filmed them outside, with natural light, and probably using a very cheap little digital home camera, so it cost her nothing to shoot them. And each one is just one shot, so she didn't even have to edit them.

Some video dos and don'ts