Myth – Shorter videos “don’t” rank better

How many times have you come across video marketing sites and forums recommend that the ideal length of the video is 2 or 3 minutes. With a two-minute YouTube video, one could hardly provide the viewer any useful information. When people look for informative videos on YouTube, it is natural for a person to prefer a video that has a longer playing time as it is obvious that the video would have more information. As a YouTube user myself,  if I am looking for a video on say “Tips for effective Video Marketing”, I would generally look for videos that run atleast for 5-6 minutes (many times I prefer YouTube videos that run 10 minutes) as I know I am getting a better idea on the subject than a 2-minute quick pick.

Use Pictures

In a recent study, it has been found that the video thumbnail is very critical and is a major driver behind video hit rates as viewers are more likely to click on a video whose thumbnail looks intriguing and appeal to the viewers based on the content they’re searching for. So how could you make your ArticleVideoRobot videos more engaging? Use Pictures. ArticleVideoRobot provides you the option to add picture to every slide. When we say pictures, we don’t only limit to images of your product, but also charts (to represent data), symbols or flow diagrams or decision trees that consume the content that is being displayed. YouTube automatically generates thumbnail of the video taken from the frame that is at the mid-point if the video, so if your video is 5mins long, then the thumbnail is the frame that is displayed at 02:30mins. ArticleVideoRobot provides the Headin with One Picture and the Heading wwith Two Picture paragraph styles.

Focus on Content, use Watermarked Backgrounds

We’ve seen many users drive many marketing messages into their videos thus translating to additional frames when the article is converted to video. This increases the video length sans providing any useful information. When you publish a video about your product or service in YouTube, it is understood that it is video marketing so it is recommend to focus on content than devote extra “marketing” sentences about your company on the video itself. Well, hang on, you still have quite a few unused area in the video – how do you leverage it? Use watermarked backgrounds, i.e., engloss your company or product logo on the right-hand corner of your flash video. This is very effective as the watermarked logo or tagline would constantly remind viewers about your product or service. Just in case you’re looking for me, ArticleVideoRobot provides the option to show a business logo on the initial screen which should more than suffice.

The constants are:

a) Your website URL
b) Your primary keywords

The variables are:

a) Your video – you may have multiple videos generated for the same content, product, service or campaign
b) Your video title with subtle changes
c) Your video description that includes your “constant” website URL and “constant” keywords in “variable” description in various videos.
d) Your secondary keywords – that complement your “constant” primary keywords

Now, when you have a constant link (website URL) associated it with many videos targeted at similar keywords then search engines add more weightage to your URL. You use Dynasubmit to achieve this, i.e. post the same video to video sites, with a different title/description pair for each site. Not that the video content is the same. So let’s say for example, you have a video that says “How to increase traffic using ArticleVideoRobot”. You could post this to YouTube as a single video. However, what you could alter the title slightly and say “How to drive traffic using video marketing” or “Tips ans secrets to increase website ranking” and post the alerted titles to YouTube again. Now you would have 3 videos in YouTube, that would have the same URL (in the video description), a combination of constant primary keywords and variable secondary keywords (secondary keywords broaden your search scope). Now assume you post the same video to 15 videos sites, each with 3 variations, you would end up with 45 videos (15 x 3) out of a single video. With more combination of title and keywords, you could treble the scope of your video. So even if you have hundreds or thousands of videos on YouTube and other video sites that targets the same keywords that you’re targeting you might easily end up with more videos that have the link to your URL than any other video that on YouTube targeting the same niche. THis completes only one half of the video marketing.

The second half of the video marketing is to promote the video URL in popular blogs, forums and social networking sites. For example, you may have someone at a forum or a blog looking for a specific information that your video might actually have the answer or was targeted for. You could reply to the forum post and send him to your video URL. You could also tag your video URL in popular bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Twitter, etc. Infact, posting the URL to Twitter could itself increase the traffic to your video overnight. ArticleVideoRobot has built in support that publishes your video to bookmarking sites as well (note that no credits are charged for this).

Use Dynasubmit to generate hundreds of videos in minutes

Let’s say you have just a single video article. You post the video to YouTube, the chances of your video generating traffic is very low when compared to millions of videos that are posted every day. But ArticleVideoRobot’s Dynasubmit does the magic by turning your single video into hundreds of unqiue videos thereby hugely increasing the chances of traffic to your videos. How? Let’s say you want to submit a video named Online Forum Marketing with 3 different titles to three video sites. You fire up ArticleVideoRobot’s video submission wizard, and select the Use Dynasubmit feature. In the Dynsubmit Video page you would select the first video site, say YouTube and then enter the first title/description pair for YouTube. You would then select Metacafe and then enter second title/description pair to Metacafe. You would then select the third video site, say DailyMotion and enter the third title. Once done, you would click Next. After you submit the video in the first cycle, you would have submitted the video to YouTube, Metacafe and DailyMotion but with a different title. To make sure all 3 titles are present on all 3 video sites, you would have to do two more cycles (i.e. repeat the video submission wizard), then on the second time you would post the second title/description combination to YouTube, third combination to Metacafe, and first combination to DailyMotion, third combination to Yahoo Videos, etc. So on the third or the last cycle, you would have all the 3 different tile/description pair posted on all the 3 videos. Consider if you could come up with 10 different video titles (for your single video) and post it to 10 video sites which means you would have ended with 10 titles x 10 sites = 100 video postings just out of a single video!
Use One-Click Wizard to keep ArticleReel up to date

We know that ArticleReel keeps working in the background to generate traffic to your website and keep it on top of Google Rankings. However, as I had mentioned in many of my earlier posts, Google loves updated content. Googles loves ArticleReel too because ArticleReel implements what is called Google XML Sitemaps, which Googles uses to index your website and ArticleReel pages. Now, when there is a new content in your ArticleReel site, Google would automatically know because ArticleReel implements Google XML Sitemaps. But how do you keep your ArticleReel page up to date? By creating new videos ofcourse. But it could be quite taxing to create new content every other day. That is where the New One Click Ezine Wizard comes into the fore. With the New One Click Ezine Wizard you could create any article to video in seconds. So even if you have only a couple of articles, you could simply re-use the existing articles, make simple changes to your content, launch the Ezine Article Converter wizard (the New One Click Ezine Wizard that is), select the Other Website option and simply paste your article in the wizard after making the changes (change the Article Title, Article Body, etc) and finish the wizard to dish out a new article. What this means is that when you create a new video article, it is automatically updated in your ArticleReel website/page, which means the Google XML Sitemap is also updated triggering the Google robot to re-index your ArticleReel website. Now, this is something Gooogle loves to do and Google would happily re-index many times a day if you keep your ArticleReel pages up to date by creating new videos. Assuming you manage to create three videos every day (which should take say only a few minutes altogether), you keep Google busy which is very important as Google ranks websites that it indexes many times a day on top of the rankings compared to websites that it indexes few days once.

Digg it, Tweet it – let the world know

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool when it comes to any form of internet marketing and that which is not utilized to the core. Publish your video to bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Tweeter, StumbleUpon and see your video hit rates go over the roof within a couple of days.With ArticleReel’s integrated publish features, you could easily publish/post your videos to 230 social bookmarking and networking sites. Simply open any ArticleReel video, navigate to the bottom of the page, and click the icon (shown below) to open the integrated publish options. Select the site you wish to publish to and you’re done!

Social bookmarking is a powerful channel that can get you targeted and quality audience that could directly translate into immediate sales. Even if you would post to just 10% sites of the 230 sites, you’re easily publishing your video to 23 sites which by any means a large number of sites. And remember that there are other bookmarking and indexing sites that get updates from Digg, StumbleUpon which means your video would go places without any effort from your end.
Hope the topics discussed were useful. I will discuss more techniques in the upcoming posts that would explore ways to generate more traffic as always

Why ArticleReel?

ArticleReel works in the background and keeps generating backlinks to your website through its unique technology. The regular SEO tools/services do “optimize” your website to be SEO friendly and this does work, but only for a while. Why? Search engines like Google are getting more smarter by the day and track websites not only based on its keywords but factor in a number of other points such as content quality, frequency of content updates, number of backlinks, weightage of backlinks, etc.  to name a few. This again is not set on stone – Google keeps improving its search algorithms to make sure the rankings are accurate as possible which means your website needs to be tuned to match up with the expectations of the search engines to make sure you’re always in Google rankings. This is where ArticleReel steps into the picture – ArticleReel is that someone who could keep your website SEO optimized, keep generating backlinks to your website, keep improving (and sustaining) the Google traffic rankings and make sure you’re website is indexed for the maximum possible keyword searches every other day!

How does ArticleReel work?

ArticleReel incorporates sophisticated technology with the years of marketing experience that puts your internet marketing on auto-pilot leaving you to concentrate on your core function. When you create an ArticleReel website, ArticleReel automatically creates backlinks between ArticleReel sites that fall into the same category. So for example if you have installed ArticleReel on your website http://www.articlevideorobot.com and there is another ArticleReel website named http://www.toufee.com and if the two websites fall in the same category, then the two websites would start exchanging backlinks automatically. That is not all. If http://www.toufee.com is already exchanging backlinks with other ArticleReel websites, then http://www.articlevideorobot.com would start exchange with “sites” that link to http://www.toufee.com as well.

Hang on, don’t think that ArticleReel is just another link exchange – absolutely not! What I’ve mentioned is just one of the ways in which ArticleReel increases backlinks. ArticleReel is a full featured video blog that is automatically updated as you add new ArticleVideoRobot videos. This means that the content on your website is updated regularly which keeps search engines like Google busy and your website is always on the hot list.  On every ArticleReel video page, you get your entire article posted which means you don’t have to worry about keyword optimization since you have the entire article for Google to index. This is a double-advantage since ArticleReel not only sets up a video blog, but you now also have all your text articles posted along with it searching as a great repository and that which serves as rich content for Google to index. How does this translate into generating traffic to your website? Because your ArticleReel is set up on your website, and because you have your articles setup in your ArticleReel, Google indexes your website URL (let say http://www.articlevideorobot.com) every time it indexes your article,  Google associates your website URL with top keywords that it indexes your articles for. In addition, ArticleReel generates only quality backlinks, has its own alogirthm to determine the weightage of the backlinks so you could be rest assured that your website gets quality sites linking back to your website.

How do I get started with ArticleReel?

Setting up ArticleReel is pretty simple. I would first recommend that you have a look at this video that provides a quick walkthrough:

http://www.articlevideorobot.com/articlereel_vid.html

Once you ready to go ahead, setting up ArticleReel shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes using the ArticleReel wizard. To launch the ArticleReel wizard, login to your ArticleVideoRobot account and then click on the ArticleReel image on the left. Alternatively, you could go navigate to the below URL directly after you login to your ArticleVideoRobot account.

http://www.articlevideorobot.com/videomarketing/articlereel.html

The ArticleReel is a self-explanatory wizard and you should be able to find your way without much problem. Also, you would just have to spend a few minutes to allow the ArticleReel wizard to convert your ArticleVideoRobot video into ArticleReel’s format.

Time to get started!

I doubt if you would be reading this line as I am sure you would have already launched the ArticleReel wizard and started getting your videos ArticleReel-ed. The clock starts now and let ArticleReel take care of generating traffic to your website. Time to go ahead and grab a hot coffee

Firstly, let me re-inforce the fact that YouTube likes fresh content, so make sure the first time you post the videos, its absolutely perfect – in terms of the right keyword combination, that the Video Title is keyword-optimized, and the Video Description has your website URL and all the right keywords properly woven with the keywords that you’re targetting. Let’s look at each of them in more detail.

Leverage the YouTube Tags

YouTube (and all the other video sites currently supported by ArticleVideoRobot) provide you the Tags field that could provide great results if effectively used. So let’s say one creates a video about making money with Twitter, we’ve seen most of our customers use only four or five keywords at the maximum. For example, more often than not, it would be “How to make Money with Twitter”, “Twitter Money Making tips”, “Make Money Online with Twitter”, “Online Money Making Tips”, etc. However, when you submit tags that has spaces, most of the video sites (and that includes YouTube too) split the tags into individual keywords. So in the case of a tag such as “Make Money with Twitter”, the video sites would split it into three individual keywords namely, “Make”, “Money” and “Twitter”. Well, this is something that you might not want though it might still work. What you might want is your video being associated with more targeted search phrases, so when someone searches YouTube for the phrase “How to make money online with Twitter”, your video gets listed in the top search results. For this, we’d need to use something multi-word keyword tags. With mult-word tag, we’d be combining the keywords with an underscore (_) symbol such that  the new tag (after using multi-word keywords) would look something like “Make_Money_Twitter” which YouTube and the video sites would treat as a single tag and not break them up into separate words. To achieve best results, you would use a combination of multi-word tags along with your regular tags for every video that you submit to YouTube which means that you would use both the tags “Make Money with Twitter” and “Make_Money_Twitter” in the same video. Also, make sure you’re to use descriptive multi-word tags, such “Online_Money_Making_Tips_with_Twitter” as there are chances of the tags directly matching the search phrases when compared to regular space delimited keyword tags (e.g. “make money Twitter”).

Conclusion

The bottomline is to use a combination of multi-word and space delimited tags to ensure maximum visibility. Remember to use descriptive keyword tags as these greatly improve the chances of matching search phrases. Where possible, use a mix of popular keywords as well as niche ones so that your video is associated with all possible search patterns. When effectively used, tags can improve traffic to your videos giving the much needed impetus to your marketing.

Let me first introduce some of the new changes. The most important of them is that the Members Area now lists the AVR (Video Download) and the VSR (Video Submissions) credits. A number of our customers have lots of confusion over the credits. Note that you get two sets of credits with your membership every month.

The Members Area would also now list your Account Level on the top left. The Members Area also now has the new Follow us on Twitter link if you wish to follow ArticleVideoRobot on Twitter. Just below the Follow us on Twitterlink is a quick preview of the latest blog article with the the blog title and a short description of the article.

One of the new features of the Your Recent Projects section, is the quick preview box that shows a quick description of the article along with important options which include Preview This Project that opens the Quick Preview window, Download/Distribute that opens the Select Publishing Options screen from where you could choose to download or distribute the video as well as the Edit this Project that opens the video in the Full AVR Wizard.

Staying on with the Members Area, you’ll notice a new tab called Projects that will list all your recent projects. The difference is that the Projects tab lists all the video articles with the detailed preview and all of the options. However, one of the immediate question one might notice is where have all the existing projects gone? Here is how you access your existing video projects

1. In the new Members Area, click Start Full Editor button available under the Full Article to Video Editor option. This would open the ArticleVideoRobot wizard
2. Click the Open Existing Projects button. The wizard will list all your videos
3. Select a video and on the right panel you’ll see the buttons Edit Selected movie and Distribute selected movie. Click Edit Selected movie option to open the video. If you would like to distribute the video, select Distribute selected movie

Notice the flashy bar on the top that says Return to Article Video Robot’s old Member’s Area. Click this if you wish to switch over to the old Members Area. Clicking on the close icon (the cross sign on the bar) removes this bar permanently, but just in case you wish to switch over to the old Members Area page, simply navigate to the following URL http://www.articlevideorobot.com/members/home.pl and you should be right there.

Hope this helps. Should you have any questions, please raise a ticket to Support Desk (http://www.articlevideorobot.com/support) and we’ll be glad to assist.

See you all in my next post,

Ganesh

To publish your video to your website or blog, follow the steps below:

1) Login to your ArticleVideoRobot.com account

2) Click on the Full AVR Editor button. This will open a new window. Click on Open Existing Projects button

3) Select the flash video project and click Distribute this movie button

4) In the new window that pops up, click on XPressPublish (Blog, Twitter, Facebook) button.

5) The Publish Online window will open up. Copy the HTML code and paste it into your website or blog

ArticleVideoRobot flash videos have a scaling of 640×430, the default HD-quality size. However, when you publish your video to blogs, you’ll generally have to reduce the size or you would notice the flash video being cut off on the right side. To fix the issue, you’ll have to reduce the scaling of your ArticleVideoRobot flash video by using the iScale parameter. Below is a modified version of the HTML code that will publish your video at 60% scaling.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.articlevideorobot.com/movies/player.swf" style="width: 384px; height: 249px;" height="249" width="384">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.articlevideorobot.com/movies/player.swf">
<param name="quality" value="high">
<param name="scale" value="noscale">
<param name="salign" value="lt">
<param name="wmode" value="transparent">
<param name="flashvars" value="userID=56&projID=SOMEPROJECTusto-tweb&iScale=60&domain=www.articlevideorobot.com">
</object>

The following are the changes made to the HTML code

1. Add a new attribute named iScale and set its value (note its a percentage) to the size that you want to scale the flash video. In the above code, the iScale attribute is set to 60 which means that your flash video would be scaled to 60% of its original size (the original height and width parameters are 640 pixels and 430 pixels respectively)
2. Change the height and width according to the new scale. In the above code, I set the width to 384 (60% of 640) and height to 249 (60% of 430) respectively. Note that the original width and height are 640 and 430 pixels

The values are not absolute, which means that you could scale the flash video to 70% or 75% and adjust the height and width parameters accordingly.

1. Prepare a list of keyword-rich titles for your video: This the key concept of Dynasubmit. That you could use a single video with different titles and submit it in an instant to video sites. For example, for the video article that shows how to make money with Twitter, you could have various titles such as “How to Use Twitter to Make Money”, “Make Money Online With Twitter”, “Top Twitter Money Making Tips”,  “Online Money Making Secrets with Twitter”, etc
2. Prepare a list of related keywords that relate to the niche you’re targeting: It is important that you capture as many keywords as possible associated with your target niche/audience. Once you’ve worked out the list, use the keywords with each variation of your video instance.
3. Now for the real action. Use Dynasubmit to post as many variations of the video as possible.  Let’s say there are 100 videos in YouTube that target the segment “money making with Twitter” and assuming that you post at the least 10 variations of the same video (using different video titles), your videos would make up 9% of all videos on YouTube that target the niche. The share of your videos would significantly increase if you could work up more video titles – you could go anywhere between 15-20%  of overall share of videos pertaining to a niche. And assuming you have associated all the keyword combinations with all your videos that you posted, your videos would easily be returned on any search made on YouTube and that directly translates into traffic to your video.

This is not all. So far we’ve looked only at YouTube but to really treble your video traffic you would simply have to repeat the same on all the 15 videos sites supported by ArticleVideoRobot such as Metacafe, Yahoo Videos, DailyMotion, etc. With the minimum assumption that you managed to build 10 variations of the video (i.e. changing the video titles ofcourse), you could easily end up with 150 video postings (10 video titles x 15 video sites) across all the video sites. Going by the numbers that is certainly a lot of videos considering that we worked this all up just from a single video! All we try to do is change the video title and use Dynasubmit to let the video be posted to the video sites.

Let’s cook some backlinks

Alright, you are ready to churn out 150 videos all across the Internet just out of  a single video but do remember to include your website URL in the Video Description field which is the secret to generating huge backlinks to your website. Refer step 4 (screenshot) of the following article that shows the Video Description field in which you should enter your website URL:

http://www.articlevideorobot.com/blog/how-to-submit-your-video-article-to-youtube-using-videosubmitrobot.html

When search engines index your video, they also your hyperlink (i.e. your website URL) and this would mean valuable SEO optimization since search engine would associate a higher ranking to your URL as it comes from popular video sites. When you include the fact that your website URL would be instantly available on hundreds of your videos across the Internet in a matter of a single video.

1. Support for multiple article directories

   The new One-Click Article to Video Converter supports top article directories that include iSnare, ArticleBase, ArticleAlley and ArticleDashboard in addition to EzineArticles. The new additions are among the top article directories which means you could now convert all your articles to video like the same way you would for your EzineArticle.

   

   If you thought that the support for the article directories are a mere addition, think again. The new additions unlocks great article sources that you could use to convert your articles. Not limited to your own articles, but as long as you obtain necessary permissions from the author you could now convert your favorite article to videos to be distributed to YouTube. Also note that the new article directories (iSnare, ArticleDashboard, ArticleAlley and ArticleBase) are one of the top-ranked sites on the internet so any video that you create out of the article that is already on these sites would mean you get immediate backlinks when you publish the video article to YouTube, Metacafe, DailyMotion, etc. This greatly increases the chances of your video article indexed and associted with top-ranking keywords when searched in Google. Another aspect is that your video article would then add valuable backlinks to your original article on let’s say ArticleDashboard.com resulting in a chain reaction of backlinks that directly translate into increased traffic to your website.

2. New Features to Customize the Video Article

   The new One-Click Article to Video Converter wizard now comes with options to customize all aspects of your video article as a whole. This saves a lot of time and re-work as one would not have to launch the video article in the full AVR wizard to change the background settings of a video. We’ve regularly received feedback from customers who wanted to set properties such as the voice-over character, the intro name (you could now change the name “Pat” to your name or remove it completely) and the background music/image. All these could be now customized directly in the new One-Click Article to Video Converter as shown below:

   

3. Customize the Voice-Over of your video article

   The voice-over character that is used with the new One-Click Article to Video Converter can now be cutomized as discussed earlier. You could now set a single voice-over character read out the entire video article, a feature that was requested by many customers.

   

   Also, should you wish to include your own voice-over with your video article then you could set the option such that no voice-over is used. Just in case you weren’t aware, ArticleVideoRobot has built-in functionality that allows you to record your own voice and add it to your flash video on-the-fly without having to use any additional voice recording software and having to upload the recorded voice as an MP3 file. Please refer the following KB article for detailed instructions:

   http://www.webmarketingrobot.com/support/index.php?page=kb_view&id=26

   
   

4. Customize the Background Picture and Music

   One could now customize features such as the background music and the background image of the video article by enabling the customization options. Again, this is a great time saver as since the new article to video conversion wizard gives you all the options to plan your article upfront.

5. Customize the Introduction Frame
   This is one of the top feature request from our customers. A number of our users wanted an option to customize the default name “Pat” in the video article when the article is being converted using the One-Click Converter. This feature hsa now been incorporated in the new article to video conversion wizard.

   

As you might have noted, the new One-Click Conversion Article to Video Conversion wizard is a welcome change that can greatly improve your productivity by reducing the time spent on converting your articles to videos. The new One-Click Article to Video Converter is just a start…we are working on a number of major changes to a large collection of ArticleVideoRobot features that should significantlyincrease the overall productivity. Besides, we have lots of new powerful features lined up in the next major upgrade due in a few weeks that should boost your video marketing efforts.

The One Click Article To Video Converter

Using the One Click Article To Video Converter wizard is pretty simple. Follow the steps below to turn your articles to videos even faster with the One Click wizard.

1. Login to your ArticleVideoRobot account by going to http://www.articlevideorobot.com/login.html
2. Under Create New Project select Convert Article option
3. Enter the URL of your EzineArticle in the Ezinearticles.com Article URL field and click Convert My Article To Video.
   
4. If you are prompted for a Captcha, then enter the text that you see in the image and click Convert My Article To Video button. This is a security measure to ensure that only real humans are using the One Click Article to Video wizard
5. You’ll see a progress bar for a couple of seconds before your article is converted. Once the conversion is complete, you will see a confirmation that your article has been converted to video successfully. To immediately preview your video article, click Watch The Video button. Note that the converted flash video article would be automatically added to your account

Article Not on EzineArticles? The One-Click converter still works

A common misunderstanding is that your article needs to be on EzineArticle site. This is not entirely true. As long as you have an article, you can create a flash video out of it in a matter of seconds except that you will be entering the entire article content into the One Click Article To Video wizard instead of providing the EzineArticle URL. Here is how you do it.

1. Launch the One-Click Converter wizard but click on the Article Not on EzineArticles? link
2. Enter the article title and its content in the Article Title and Article Body textboxes respectively. You would also need to complete Article Category, Author Name, Author’s Website fields and finally the Captcha verification before clicking on the Convert My Article To Video! button