The online video revolution continues to boom!  It seems like EVERYBODY wants to use video to promote themselves and their message to the world.

And no wonder!  Online video  has proven to be the single BEST way to communicate with and convert website visitors into customers.

LET US MAKE A VIDEO FOR YOU!

Here at Video Production Tips, we encourage everybody to delve into video making.  We provide tons of free tutorials and articles so even those with zero experience can learn how to make video.  At the same time, we recognize that for many people, it’s simply not practical to take the time to learn how to produce their own videos.  It can be MUCH more practical to simply outsource video production.  We’re here for that too!  Here is an example of four different visual styles we created for an opening to a You Tube video series for Deb Allison, who makes adorable polymer clay ornaments.

Deb’s YouTube video series about making clay ornaments is one way she promotes her business that sells ornaments.  As a novice video producer, she does a great job on her series but when it came to creating an open/close for the series, she decided to outsource it to me.  In the above video, you can see how I presented her with a wide variety of choices.  She ended up selecting version #3 and I tweaked it a bit from the way it is presented here.   I personally liked version #4 best, but they customer is always right!

WHAT KIND OF VIDEOS DO WE MAKE?

We  specialize in a variety of styles, often creating information oriented documentary style videos.  You can think of them sort of like an in-depth “About Us” video if you will.  Here is an example of one such video I did for Darlene Quinn, an award winning novelist.

Here’s another information-oriented video we did for a gold and silver business that is structured much like a news story.

Here’s one that more resembles a standard advertisement.  (The squeeze page video at the top of the page is another advertisement-like example of what we can make for you.)

AFFORDABLE VIDEO PRODUCTION

If you’re interested in having us make a video for you, please contact us at VideoProductionTips@gmail.com. We strive to make our production services very affordable. Some of the above videos were done for around $500, some were a bit more depending on how much time it took to produce. Compare $500 or even $1,000 with how much it will cost you to learn to make video yourself. Remember to factor in your time! Let’s say you pay $2,000 for a huge video production course, then spend a month struggling your way through it. What’s your time worth? At the end of the month-long training, you probably will still have lots of questions. Now, wouldn’t it be easier, and yes, CHEAPER, to just hire us?

Like I said at the beginning of this post, we encourage folks to learn to make video and enjoy providing free tutorials and advice. But in the end, sometimes it’s more practical to concentrate on what you do best and leave the video making to us!

Thanks for being a Video Production Tips reader.
Lorraine Grula
Internet Video Gal

Watch to discover a brand new way to take advantage of EASY, AFFORDABLE  online video marketing!

This video demonstratesthe Video Customizer, a brand new web service that takes online video marketing to a whole new level with easy video email, easy video landing pages, and amazingly low-cost video commercials!  Professionally produced and ready to be customized with your logo and specific details.

The Video Customizer removes all the barriers people normally face when trying to become involved with online video marketing.   Now you can take advantage of easy video emailing and easy video landing pages, all for a very affordable fee.

Read on to see why now with the Video Customizer, you can even carry on an effective video campaign without ever having to learn how to make video yourself!

ARE YOU ONE OF THE 5%?

I heard a shocking statistic the other day.

For every 100 businesses who say they want to use online video marketing, 95 DON’T.  For one reason or another, 95%, obviously the overwhelming majority, are not using online video in their marketing strategies like they know they should.

Why is that?

In my analysis after working with hundreds of clients, it usually boils down to some combination of these two main obstacles:

• Cost
• Degree of Difficulty

Unless you’ve got fairly deep pockets, hiring a professional crew to create videos for you is not practical.  The alternative, learning to make video yourself, can be so time consuming as to not be practical for too many folks either.

I’ve pondered how to help people overcome these barriers for some time.  That’s my job!

How can I take what is normally a time-consuming, expensive process (Video Making) and turn  it into something that is TRULY quick, easy and affordable?

By changing the process by which the final video is created.

To  me, the solution requires a Henry Ford moment.  Henry, of course, made the car affordable to the masses by coming up with the concept of the assembly line.

I needed to come up with an assembly line process for video making.   One that results in a final video that does not LOOK like it came off an assembly line.  After all, quality video making is all about creativity and uniqueness, the opposite of what comes off an assembly line.

But after over thirty years of making videos I can guarantee this next fact to be true:  Completed videos have lots of common elements.  If you set out to make a video about the housing market, one of your main elements will be images of houses.  All kinds of houses.  Big, small.  Fancy, plain.

No matter what your final video needs to be, you will need those images.  So if you gather up those images, edit them together with music and more images conveying family, finances, and life in general, then you’re halfway done.

In other words, put together professionally edited sequences of related images that could easily be customized with added details.  A logo, some specific text on the screen, some specific narration.

This takes the royalty free video clip concept to a new level.  With this new paradigm of video making, the customer doesn’t just get one isolated, silent royalty free video clip.  They get a video sequence, complete with music, special effects, and a variety of storytelling elements.

Basically, a video that is about 80-90% complete.  All it needs to be 100% in-the-can, is to add some unique elements such as the client’s own logo or narration.

This brings the cost way down because the base video can be used repeatedly but customized in an infinite variety of ways.

THE VIDEO CUSTOMIZER

I was not the only one who was thinking along these lines.  A businessman in Ireland, Brian O’Connell, was involved with online video by owning Anistock.com which provides low-cost computer animation.  Brian came to the same basic conclusion.  So he developed the Video Customizer, which uses this exact paradigm of video production.  They also provide a complete online video platform.  The Video Customizer also provides an excellent video email platform and an easy way for you to create video landing pages.

You can see my VPT video landing page here.

Pretty cool, huh?

I am pleased to be working with Brian to help create the video templates for the Video Customizer’s ever-growing library of pre-made marketing videos.

So go check out the Video Customizer and see if it isn’t the best deal you’ve come across in a long time!

Thanks for reading Video Production Tips

Lorraine Grula

Here is Jeff’s checklist for best SEO results with videos on You Tube.

Tips For YouTube Search Engine Optimization

By Jeff Gilden, EVM, Inc.

Google owns YouTube. Therefore, Google will watch YouTube carefully. Google looks at YouTube for videos to list in the search engines. How do you get your video production on the homepage of Google? Using the steps below will help you increase your visibility in YouTube and Google using some simple tweaks.

Here’s a checklist you can follow to optimize your videos in YouTube:

• Title text: You have 99 characters to optimize your title text. Remember to include your important keywords in this section that you will want to be found with. For example, if a flower shop were trying to optimize, they might list the keywords Flowers, Roses, Arrangements, Bouquets, and other important keywords here that might help Google and YouTube decifer what your video is about. Remember that if you don’t get ranked number one, related videos also get lots of views.
• Description: You have 5,000 characters. You will want to use all of the space provided to write as much about your video as possible. Remember: User ratings and views play a factor in your search rankings within YouTube and Google so make sure to ask for people to rank your video and also to share and embed your video onto their site and other places on the web.
• Tags: Useful for search terms you used in your title text and description. For example, if a flower shop were trying to optimize, they might list the keywords Flowers, Roses, Arrangements, Bouquets, and other important keywords here that might help Google and YouTube decipher what your video is about.

Broadcasting and sharing options:

• Privacy: Remember to set this to public when you are ready to go live so that Google and YouTube can “see” your video.
• Comments: Allows other people to talk about your video and add more text for discussion and the search engines.
• Video responses: These help you get more video views because the video responses of others are automatically linked to your original video.
• Ratings: Set this to “Yes”. Ratings are important to rankings.
• Embedding: Blogs and social media shares really boost views. Allowing people to share your video helps your message get to new audiences outside of YouTube. I recommend keeping this enabled.
• Syndication: Keep this enabled.

Getting views:

• YouTube considers a video “viewed” after eight seconds of runtime. Make sure your video is interesting enough to get you past that point.
• Embedding it in your company blog or on product pages can boost video views and encourage discovery from new viewers.
• Post your videos to your Facebook channel.
• Encourage others to share your video on social media platforms within the video itself by asking people to share it in your video itself and in the description.
• Seed your videos on bookmarking and listing sites.
• Distribute links to your videos in press releases and embed them in social media releases.
• Promote views of your video by buying them through Google AdWords.
• Chunk your videos into smaller parts and link them all together using playlists.

Getting ratings:

• Rank your own video.
• Encourage others to rank your video by asking for it within your video, description, etc.

Video Quality:

• YouTube recommends using the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 640×480 resolution with MP3 Audio. Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your clips look better on YouTube.

Results!

YouTube is the best way to get great SEO results for your video. Even if it is just a 30 second TV Spot, if optimized and positioned correctly, your video will gain more views than you thought possible through television media.

Jeff Gilden, EVM, Inc.

EVM Web Design, Greenville, SC

EVM Web Video Production Services

I appreciate Jeff taking the time to write this article for Video Production Tips readers.  You Tube is such a humongous force in the online video world.  The vast majority of online video is on YouTube.  Success on You Tube brings many benefits.

Lorraine Grula, Video Production Tips

What is Spidvid? from Spidvid on Vimeo.

Bringing people together in order to create quality online video as a team.  Now that’s a goal I can support!

A new friend of mine from Canada named Jeremy Campbell has created a marvelous new website called SpidVid to do just that.  Whatever your personal interest in online video production, chances are high you can benefit from Spidvid.

The idea first came to him about three years ago.  Jeremy saw incredible potential with online video but was a touch disappointed by the low caliber videos flooding You Tube.  I can relate!

Jeremy decided his mission in life was to help raise the bar but he didn’t want to open up “just another small production studio.”   Again, I can totally relate!

Jeremy Campbell

With online video being such a HUGE niche, Jeremy knew he needed to be unique and have something mighty powerful if he was going to stand a snowball’s chance in hell of competing.

Being a follower of Seth Godin, Jeremy read a lot about the power of connecting people and facilitating collaboration.

After lots of brainstorming,  and a year of research and development, all this morphed into Spidvid, a site designed to bring people together to create online video content.

If you are a video professional who can contribute to the production, spidvid is a site where you could find some projects to help with.

If you are wanting to create a video but need to find a team to help you put it all together, then Spidvid is where you could find the wide a variety of folks, from actors to directors, writers, videographers, or editors, etc., etc., to help you.

One concept Jeremy hopes to emphasize with spidvid is the value of joint ownership to match joint effort.  He’s hoping people will embrace the idea of collaborating on projects with the payoff being joint ownership in the finished project, instead of  just charging a standard day or hourly rate.

He told  me in our telephone interview that his strong belief in the power of like-minded people working together to accomplish what might be too daunting to tackle alone was what inspired that idea for that business model.  Jeremy is positive such a model could benefit all collaborators and is one of his main concepts behind  SpidVid.

It certainly seems logical to me that more video projects will make it from the idea stage to the finished product stage if people have simple ways to pool their talents and resources.  No one can do it all alone!  The older (and hopefully wiser) I get, the more I realize that important fact.

I wish Jeremy much success with Spidvid.  It’s a marvelous concept so I am happy to share the word.   Spidvid is free to join and this post has nothing to do with any affiliate arrangement, it’s truly something I think my readers can benefit from.

Thanks for reading VPT!

Lorraine Grula

I can either go out and shoot everything myself or, I can save a ton of time and buy royalty free video images and digital backgrounds.  In the video above, every single visual element except the on-screen words came from a place called Footage Firm.

Trust me, I wish I had time to go to all those gorgeous places and take video but I have neither the time nor the travel budget.   So I buy from Footage Firm, one of the most well known and trusted video providers in the business.  Their list of clients is a who’s-who of the industry.

Footage Firm sells high-quality stuff, but they are also exceptionally generous and give away a ton of stuff for free! 

Footage firm is GIVING AWAY a collection of very cool HD looping backgrounds.  Click the banner ad below to get yours!

They are giving away 11 different collections containing 250 looping video clips in high definition and standard definition. From Brilliant Light to Colorful Moods to Explosions/Effects and everything in between, these are a must have.  Honestly, I DO have them all and I use them every day.  They are the backbone of my online video production business.

If you want to take advantage of this spectacular offer, you had better hurry.  Footage Firm is only giving away a limited number of these collections, so request yours before they are gone:

Thanks for reading Video Production Tips.  Do yourself a favor and take advantage of this particular tip!

Lorraine Grula

Could you benefit from one-on-one video coaching?  Or, would you like a professional video made for you?  Either way, Video Production Tips can  help.
Sometimes it makes practical sense to speak with someone directly about how to get your video project done.  You can read online articles and watch tutorials all day long, but you will get your specific questions answered more quickly if you have the ability to speak directly to someone who knows.  Every video project is different.   What works for you is not necessarily what’s going to work for someone else, so it’s hard to give good blanket advice through impersonal articles or tutorials.

I love corresponding with my readers one-one-one and helping you out with your specific video production issues.   Email me today to see if some personal coaching would be an efficient way to get your video project done.

Or maybe you just need to get your video done NOW and don’t want to learn how to do it yourself.  I understand perfectly.  The most practical solution for the busy person is to simply outsource your video production needs.   I can help you with that too.  Some clients shoot video and send it to me for editing, other clients have me create the entire thing from scratch.

Whatever works for you.  Like I said, every video project is different so I customize a plan that works for you. Email me today and get that video project off your to-do list and online!

Thanks for reading VPT

Lorraine Grula

Internet Video Gal

NEW:  USE INTERACTIVITY WITH ANY THIRD PARTY PLAYER

Up until now, to use the interactivity you needed to have your videos hosted on Veeple’s servers and use their complete CMS.

What if you already have all your videos hosted in an Amazon S3 account and don’t want to move them? Problem solved.  Veeple added a new function called Interplay that will allow you to apply their interactivity and analytics to your existing hosting and content management system.

If this interests you, you might want to preregister for the beta version, available November 3.

Interplay will be free if all you use is the interactivity. You get the analytics free for 30 days too, but after the trial period there will be a monthly fee to access the analytics.  They have not yet decided precisely what that fee will be.

Here is a video interview and a review on Vidcompare with Veeple CEO Scott Broomfield.

To use the interactive features, Interplay will let you into the veeple editor to create clickable links or logos, or embed your documents. The company promises the interactivity will remain free.   Serious business people will want the analytics of course but if someone is using interactivity mostly for fun or their business is brand new, they can take advantage of the interactivity without any fees.

Interplay works with most players, like Brightcove or JW player.  It will not work on videos on sharing sites like You Tube, but Veeple says they are working on that.  In the meantime, if you are a standard Veeple member, you can take advantage of their distribution through Tube Mogul which goes to all the top sites including You Tube and carries the interactivity with it.

I have integrated Veeple’s interactivity and analytics into my Video Marketing Express product. At VME, you can select from pre-made squeeze page videos and other marketing videos that I customize using Veeple’s interactivity. You can also order a talking head video with interactivity.

Thanks for reading Video Production Tips.

Lorraine Grula