I’m sure if you’ve visited various video sites like youtube, vimeo and metacafe, you’ll probably have noticed the calibre of the videos are not exactly ‘outstanding’. Awful quality of sound, weird technical issues, or just completely boring content can cause the viewer to simply stop watching. The rest of this article will discuss ways to avoid these problems in your own videos.
You should always remember that web visitors have very low attention spans. With this in mind, remember that the shorter the video, the better. if you have a lot of content, splitting it down into smaller videos would be more effective.
Pithier, interesting and shorter videos are usually better. Creating a series of videos on one topic will create higher percieved value, and more information can be spread over multiple installments. If viewers are impressed by your first video, then their will be more incentive for them to come back for more content, or go on straight away to watch your other videos.
Another advantage to multiple videos is that the more videos you have out there, the more likely it will be that your videos will be found and watched.
The other major factor with video creation is the quality of the production.
You don’t need to become qualified as a professional film producer, but it is important to create videos that are engaging and interesting to the viewer.
The key to good videos is sticking to some form of structure or script you’ve thought through, so you don’t miss anything when recording.
A majority of vids are made by people who are not following any structure, and the final result is not too pleasing — too many pauses and taking too long to get to the point.
Adding branding to the videos will also be profitable. if all your videos are related to the same market, adding similar branding to each of them will make your brand more memorable. You could also use high quality stock images and video clips from places like istockphoto.com and bigstockphoto.com in your videos to make them look more professional.
If you are consistent, and use the same stock clip or image at the beginning of every video, people will begin to remember your brand, and associate it with the niche you are marketing to.
Adding a custom ‘skin’ to your videos can also improve veiwing experience. this can be used when embedding videos to your own web properties. Skinning doesn’t only involve the outside of the video, but the controls as well (play, stop etc.), differentiating your videos from the standard youtube displays.
The content may not be different, but the ‘percieved value’ will be higher. Although the video will be the same, the quality is percieved as higher due to the overall presentation.
How “watchable” the video becomes will depend on the type of video created.
Perhaps you are not willing to stand in front of the camera to record videos. if you don’t want to do this, the alternative is to use a screen capture software, or a slide show with audio. Once you have relevant feedback from viewers of your videos, you should become more confident, and perhaps consider advancing to more ‘live action’ videos.
