Has anyone done this? How do you go about it & with what results? A friend has some customer testimonials up on her business’s site & on YouTube but is not sure how to best utilize them.
Not mine, but Will It Blend? has a lot of fun videos.
I think the plan is:
- Make video
- ???
- Video goes viral
- ???
- Profit
bump
I’ve only seen it successfully done with video sites who give a little bit of a preview, and provide a link to either view or purchase the whole video, both in the video itself, and in the description. They must be doing pretty well, as they keep using that method.
Our web maven dopers hate my site but mine might be a decent example, I have a video clip on my main page of a tv interview with a local news/local interest show.
What I’ve seen SEO companies do is encourage their client to have a blog (that gets updated regularly), a Facebook page (that gets updated regularly) and a YouTube channel (that gets updated regularly).
Then when you post a new video on YouTube you announce it on your blog, with description of the video and the video embedded. You announce the new video on Facebook with a proper sharing link (description, thumbnail, etc).
That’s the reasonable thing to do to use YouTube to promote your business. You gotta work at the promotion, tho. You don’t just put a video up on YouTube and hope people see it.
Otherwise, you just use it as a means to host video that you can post to your site without having to host the video on your site (which is a pain).
The way he uses the videos on the site are actually quite good. The main objection I had was that he used Flash for the entire site. Please use HTML, and just use Flash on the YouTube videos. There are too many people who can’t or won’t view Flash content.
I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you’re asking about, but The Perfect Bass is an online store that sells bass guitars and related equipment, and they have a YouTube channel where they post product-demonstration videos.
Will It Blend was the one that sprang to my mind when I read the thread title. The gimmick there was that they made the videos interesting in and of themselves, regardless of the fact that they are a product promotion.
That’s part of step 2 - making your videos interesting enough that people want to watch them and share them. The other bit is getting them exposed to the web, but that part can happen all by itself just because people find the videos for themselves, then pass them on.
Blendtec must be making a fair wedge of cash just from the ad revenue sharing on their videos (as well, of course, as promoting sales of their product).