Producing video content: A primer
Image by Andy Pierson
Providing videos is a good way of breathing new life into your site or blog and engaging with your audience on a different platform. It’s a viable approach to content production as it makes your posts valuable, serve as a way to repurpose content, bring more followers into your fold and beef up SEO efforts.
All these sound good and though it may seem quite easy, it takes more than just turning your Web cam on and then babbling away to produce good video for your audience. Because you’re representing a brand and attempting to reach out and appeal to a demographic on behalf of it, the quality and contents of your videos will determine its overall reception and, ultimately, you and your brand’s reputation.
There are other things involved that you have to take note of and we here at SEOP.com intend to tackle some of them to help you along the way. Today, we start with a list of tips you need to imbibe even before you hit the record button.
Intent
There are many reasons why you may want to cast videos upon your demographic, some of which we’ve doled out within the previous paragraphs. The good thing about video content is that you can actually achieve many goals simultaneously. Determine and create a list of what your objectives are and highlight which one you’d like to prioritize; the rest you can just as easily integrate as you go along. This list will help you keep you focused on your goals and can help you gauge your next steps like follow up videos, written blog posts and advertising strategies.
Video SEO
Videos have also gotten better priority with Google’s blended search placing videos and photos at the top of every search engine results page. This poses both as a challenge and an opportunity for content providers and SEO practitioners to leverage on to drive traffic to your site. There are many ways to capitalize on this Google SERP refresh including proper linking techniques, casting the video upon social media streams and effectively using keywords among many others. We’ll be discussing these in detail in a future entry so keep posted.
Content
Notwithstanding the audio and visual qualities, the meat of your content has to be both informative and actually useful for your audience. But droning on about facts, figures and studies could really be strenuous for the viewer so it’s also good if you’ve managed to squeeze in some entertainment value into it. The combination of both makes for a good balanced viewing experience that’ll compel your audience to stay and dig through your content archives and build up a good reputation for your brand.
For instance, CNET’s The Buzz Report delivers tech news and highlights the facts with humor and it works because the primary and interim hosts’ comedic timing jives with the cold hard facts but they can still manage to squeeze in unique insights into every topic.
Length
The length of your videos will definitely rely on both your intent and its content. If this is going to be an episode of a video podcast, you can stick to the traditional 30-minute or one-hour timeframes. How tos, on the other hand, depend on the completion of the instructions you’re relaying though it would be best to have keep it under three minutes to prevent your casual viewers from straying away.
Equipment
If you’re only starting to implement videos for your yet-to-be-popular brand, it’s okay if you don’t have professional video recording equipment. After all, there’s a lot that you can do with a relatively cheap digital camcorder, a brightly lit studio, a computer with Internet connection and a little imagination. But if you intend to make videos a constant product your audience can regularly expect from your site, then it’s probably best to invest every now and then on some serious video capture and editing hardware.
In either case, make sure you have a tripod. Speaking from the standpoint of a member of the general viewing public: we can live with the decent but uneven lighting, ghetto video production and the obviously nervous host, but a shaky cam is a bit too much…unless, of course, you intend to spoof a reality show.
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RSpears @ August 2, 2010
[...] a previous post, we shared a handful of suggestions you should consider when planning a video for your audience. [...]