One Simple Step to Increase Online Video Exposure by 5760%
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 Innovative Technology News by James BullisGoing through just one additional step in your video publishing process can increase your exposure hundreds, thousands of times while at the same time increasing the number of times your material is referenced.
Breaking: Written Word Kills Video Star
While online video, the “second screen”, and video via mobile devices, the “third screen”, is all the rage and its market keeps growing virtually overnight, video consumption is far behind regular web content.
This is the perspective: about half of the Internet users in the USA view about 1-10 videos … per week – while the same average Internet user surfed 111 domain, 2554 pages in a month. That’s 576 pages in a week.
576 pages versus 10 videos – think about that before doing your next vlog (video blog) post.
Why Written Words Outperform Video
1. We like to gauge value by scanning a page; “is this of interest?” – you can’t scan video
2. Video requires extra equipment; text on page doesn’t
3. Text is copy-and-paste friendly, encouraging and enabling sharing
Video: Shared, Not Referenced
Sharing is forwarding a link to someone.
Referencing is you quoting someone somewhere and linking back to the source.
You don’t get that with video.
The best you can hope with video is that, like Lyndon does in the tweet above, it gets shared. Knowing Lyndon, this content must be top-notch or he wouldn’t share it but I can tell you two things about it:
- I can’t quote anything from it here – because it was a video
- I have about half an hour to an hour in the morning to do “stuff” before my workday begins; I don’t have time to watch a 4 minute video.
In that same time I could have read tens of pages – and that’s what I rather do then.
It’s the number 4 under “Why Written Words Outperfom Video”: video eats actual time. It’s not that it’s not worth the investment; it’s that we don’t get to gauge it (no scanning) so the safe bet is to click away.
How To Increase Video Views & Exposure
Video, audio, images, Flash: what they have in common is that on a web page they should play a supporting role, an almost decorative role. They should be the “also” not the “instead of”.
Once your video is made, go through the simple step of transcribing and possibly describing its content.
The added on-page text will:
- increase exposure as more people are aware of its content even without watching
- increase viewership as people get a chance to gauge their return on time invested
- increase backlinks as people will copy-and-paste actual quotes from your video
- increase the number of people coming to the video via search engines
Additional Reading
- Online Video Subtitles (Duh!)
- The Next Wave For Online Video
- YouTube Video Ad Optimization: Send in the SEMs!
Tweets by Elisa Gabbert (Wordstream Keyword Research) and Lyndon Antcliff (Cornwall SEO)
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
One Simple Step to Increase Online Video Exposure by 5760%
