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Showing posts with label Web Presence Optimization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web Presence Optimization. Show all posts
7:15 AM

Six Ways to Produce Online Video on a Budget

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Online video is hot. (Yeah, and people gamble in casinos, I know; what a profound observation of the blatantly obvious.) According to Compete.com, YouTube had nearly 86 million unique visitors and more than half a billion site visits last month. Business-friendly video sites like Vimeo, Viddler and Blip.tv are also seeing impressive traffic growth.

But small businesses who want to take advantage of online video can be caught in a quandary. Shooting a basic home-video style piece with a Flip Mino or Samsung SMX-F34 (my personal favorite YouTube-friendly camcorder) may not project sufficient sophistication, while a professionally-produced video costing $8,000-$10,000 or more is simply not in the budget.

Here are six options for producing reasonably high-quality videos, or at least something beyond standard home video camera fare, at a modest cost.

Convert PowerPoint to Flash

While Flash programming is a challenging and specialized skill few business people probably want to master, almost everyone can use PowerPoint. There are several tools available for converting manual or self-running animated PowerPoint presentations to Flash, with or without narration. Robin Good reviews three tools here: E.M. PowerPoint Video Converter ($46), Lecturnity ($215), and iSpring PRESENTER. Other options include PresentationPro's PowerCONVERTER ($149) and PowerFlashPoint ($199). Your best bet is take advantage of the free trials offered by most vendors to find out which product works best for you.

Capture Screen Action with Camtasia or Captivate

Both Camtasia Studio ($299 from TechSmith) and Captivate ($799 from Adobe) enable you to capture any on-screen action (e.g. a software demo, PowerPoint presentation, online video) along with narration, edit the production, and output the final result to a variety of common file formats including Flash. Captivate offers greater options for interactivity, but also a significantly higher price tag. Either will work for basic screen-to-video production.

Jing

For really limited budgets—and simple needs—Jing Pro provides the ability to capture any on-screen action (including web video), add commentary, and upload it to YouTube with one button. The negligible $14.95 annual fee even includes a free 2GB Screencast account. Editing capabilities are limited, but the price makes it worth checking out for straightforward needs.

Faculte

Though technically more of a video distribution platform than a production tool (similar to Flimp), Faculte does offer some useful video assembly functions, such as the ability to upload video and images; arrange the elements; add narration; and add notes, drawings and annotations to the video mix. Pricing starts at free, which includes full video editing/production features, but is limited to 200 views. The $50/month base plan allows 4,000 views, plus adds advanced viewer tracking, the ability to use a unique URL for the video, and faster load times than the free option.

ArticleVideoRobot

Got the need for speed? ArticleVideoRobot will turn any written article into a narrated video in minutes, no camera needed. The basic package ($47/month) provides basic editing capabilities; one-click distribution to 17+ video sites including YouTube, Metacafe, Break, Vimeo, etc.; and a choice of "human-like" voices to narrate your video. The Pro package ($97/month) offers higher video quality, a Flash output option, and an advanced video editing tool. Since you aren't recording your own narration, the results can be...interesting. Check out a few sample videos here.

SlideSix

With SlideSix, you can upload a presentation (e.g. from PowerPoint or OpenOffice), record audio and narration, attach external video files, and create a widget to share your SlideSix presentations on your blog. Though editing, distribution and formatting options are more limited than with other tools, SlideSix is free.

With the explosive proliferation of online video, the key to making your video stand out is creativity. To maximize the impact of your video production, think beyond conventional ideas both in terms of your content and your video production options.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom
Posted by jame at 7:15 AM 0 comments
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5:39 AM

SEO Is Not Dead, Just Changing: What This Means

Monday, December 1, 2008

"SEO is dead." Making a statement like that is a great way to generate lots of traffic, and comments, as Micah Baldwin and Mike McDonald have recently demonstrated. But it's still nonsense. As I noted in my comment to comment Michah's post on Learn to Duck, articles like this have been appearing since at least 2003, so if SEO is dying, it's an awfully slow death.

It is changing, however, as Google's plans for search personalization are rolled out. Using factors such as geographic location, "preferences" as indicated by your search history, and even integration of tools like SearchWiki and Google Friend Connect (nicely explained by TechCrunch), Google will customize search results for each user.

This means that, very soon, your site may show up at #1, #5, #12 or some other spot for any given search term depending on who is doing the searching. Already, automated position-checking tools like Rank Checker and SEO Chat produce erroneous results with Google; that soon won't matter as there will no "right" answer as to where your site appears on Google for a specific search phrase anyway, other than "it depends."

But again, none of this means that SEO is dead, only that it is changing (as it constantly does). Considering Google's move to make more of universal search and personalized search, here are some important points to keep in mind:
  • The basic principles of good SEO (proper use of on-page factors like title, meta tags, headlines and quality content with sufficient keyword density, along with building high-quality external links) principles still apply. Although your precise search position will vary depend on the searcher's location, demographics and other factors, it won't rank highly for anyone if it isn't well-optimized.

  • The changes may help local businesses. With more of an emphasis on location, even small company sites may appear more prominently in searches on broad, highly competitive phrases such as CRM consulting services in their local area. In the b2b realm, this could raise the profile of value-added resellers, systems integrators and managed service providers relative to software developers and hardware manufacturers, making strong channel relations more important than ever.

  • If Google's changes actually succeed in making search results more relevant, it could help both searchers and site owners. If you're the owner of Ace Dry Cleaners, for example, you really don't want traffic from people who are searching for Ace Insurance or Ace Hardware any more than those searchers want to find you. So, the end result could be less traffic, but more relevant traffic.

  • Google's moves are likely to have the greatest impact on broad, highly competitive, ambiguous words and phrases. There will be much less variation in search results between users for long tail and specific niche phrases—which is, again, why SEO is far from dead.

  • Since there will no longer be a reliable measure of search engine position for any individual site and search phrase, other metrics will become more important: overall search traffic, quality measures such as bounce rate, and SEO page grade as measured by tools such as HubSpot's Website Grader, the search engine optimization analysis tool from SEO Workers, or Traffic Travis. There will also likely be more emphasis on search-driven conversions, though this is, strictly speaking, more of a website optimization than an SEO issue.

  • SEO requires a mix of skills—coding, design, copywriting, link building, PR, social media optimization—that most organizations don't have in-house. Larger companies may be able to form internal SEO teams, but SMBs will still need to rely on outside agencies that can provide this mix of skills on an affordable, as-needed basis.

  • Search algorithms are constantly changing. One day the meta keywords tag is critical, the next it doesn't matter. First you should get linked in as many online directories as possible, then you needn't bother. A tactic that is white hat one day becomes gray hat, or even black hat, the next. Only specialists can keep on top of the constant change and assure that current best practices are being utilized.
Finally, SEO will gradually morph into web presence optimization (WPO)—a term so important I'm giving it its own category. There will be more to come on this soon. For now, rest assured that reports of the death of SEO have been greatly exaggerated.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom
Posted by jame at 5:39 AM 0 comments
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