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.

This article aims to quickly explain how to use the New One Click Ezine Wizard to convert any article (contained in any document) to a video and also have it read and displayed in full. The New One Click Ezine Wizard not only lets you convert an article to video, but let’s customize the video conversion features. For example, you could choose to have different voices read the different slides in your video, you could choose to display the entire article or only the key phrases, customize an introduction frame for the video, etc.

Let me quickly take through the process of converting an article contained in a Word document to a video article.

1) Login to ArticleVideoRobot and click the New One Click Ezine Wizard option in your ArticleVideoRobot Members Area.

2) The One Click Article to Video Converter wizard opens and you see the Enter your Article screen

3) Select Other Website from the My Article is on dropdown list

4) Copy and paste your article into the big textbox

5) Select Enable advanced video customization options

6) Then select Customize Article Narration Settings and Customize Video Style and Lengh options

7) Click Next

In the Select Your Narration Settings screen, select I want only the following voice to read my whole article.

9) Click Next

10) In the following screen (Select Your Video Style) select I want to show the full article text

11) Click Next

That’s it. You should now have a new copy of your article converted that displays and reads out the entire text on screen.

Note: ArticleVideoRobot recognizes paragraphs as separated by single spaces. If the double-space paragraph is not recognized (i.e. not converted properly), then use single space for your paragraphs.

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).

To show you a working example, search for “the phrase video article marketing” in YouTube. If you would notice carefully the first video that is returned in the video search results, the Video Title has all the keywords that you searched for in YouTube and in a combination that matches the pattern of your search phrase, i.e. the full title of the topmost video is Article Marketing Meets Video Marketing: Turn Articles into Videos Part 2). Observe the concentration of the keywords in the video title (Article Marketing Meets Video Marketing: Turn Articles into Videos Part 2) of the topmost video in the YouTube search results. Also note that the video title has alternating patterns of the search keywords but in the same order as the search phrase, i.e. three matching patterns (article marketing, video marketing, and articles videos) for the search prhase “article video marketing”. Though the video has only very few hits (132 views), it still tops the search results.  Notice the last video (Nuesion: HowTo YouTube & Web Video Marketing Part 1) in the below screenshot has 170,864 but still isn’t the top rated.

If you check out Metacafe for the same search phrase (“article video marketing”) you would notice a similar pattern.

What is imperative is the fact that video sites return search results by Relevance which is the default option. What it means to you is that when you post your videos using ArticleVideoRobot’s video submission wizard you could still garner higher traffic and possibly the highest visibility on YouTube. Even though your videos might be relatively new, have very low views (i.e. hit rates), you could still have your video article listed in the top of the video search results by careful construction of the video title with the right concentration (in terms of the various combination) of your target keywords as well as the logical placement (i.e. order) of the keyword phrases.

That is not all. With ArticleVideoRobot’s Dynasubmit feature, you could publish many versions of the same video but with different video titles and each video title optimized with the target keywords. All it takes is simple planning and you could not only top the video search results but could get many of your video listed in the top 10 search results for any given search phrase.

I hope this article helps you in improving your video traffic. We hope it does and we could be happier to see you succeed with your video marketing efforts.

Firstly, you get to help Google have a lot of keywords that it could associate your video with. Because you have your entire article right there on the video description, you make matters easy for Google to associate search keywords/patterns to your YouTube, Metacafe or DailyMotion video (or any of the15 video sites supported by our VideoSubmitRobot). Remember that people are using more long-keyword searches which means that users are not simply entering  just keywords to search in Google but instead searching entire sentences. For example, it is very common now to find people search Google using sentences like  How to improve website traffic using  video marketing (this definitely isn’t two or three keywords but an entire sentence!). Also remember that Google gives weigthage to repeated occurances of the search phrase (or keyword or sentence, however you’d like to call) on the same page when compared to a single occurance. What this means is that posting the entire article in your video description results firstly in a rich set of keywords that Google could use to associate your video but most importantly, Google finds far many sentences(because its the entire article and not just a simple description)  that is related in context to the search keyword or phrase which results in very high rankings in Google search results. Ideally, this translates to high visibility for your videos and naturally increased viewership. This directly translates into increased views for your video which inversely increases YouTube own internal association of your video (since your video enjoys high viewership and is thus ranked popular by YouTube) with a number of related keywords and phrases.

I can hear your abuses already and you have valid questions – why on earth would you use ArticleVideoRobot’s automated video submission service only to end up editing the description field manually? Excellent question, but I wish the video submission API allowed us more space (the number of characters/words that is). Considering the double-effect of Google and YouTube rankings, keyword search associations and viewerships that one could leverage by simply pasting your article content in the video description, I guess its worth a deal to edit it manually. But we are not trying to escape the fact that our Description field is far limited in the amount of words it can hold at the moment. You can be sure we are trying to get this improved!

The new features to the VoiceOver engine one would immediately recognize are the options to adjust the Speed and the Pitch of the built-in voices. To increase the rate at which the voice-over reads the text, simply select an appropriate value from the dropdown list.

The pitch of the voice-over, or the rate of vibration in the voice is particularly useful when you wish to lower the robotic tone in the voice. We’ve heard from customers that some voices sound robotic. Increasing the pitch of the voice (to Higher or Highest values) would lower the robotic tone. By increasing the speed of the voice and increasing the Pitch value, one could subsequently improve the voice-over quality and lower traces of robotic sound.

Also, clicking the B icon on the VoiceOver window increases the emphasis of the voice-over on the particular text. Use it when you want to put across important text in your video. One instance where you might want to use the emphasis feature is on the closing slides where you put across key points or the summary of the entire video

Build your own pronunciation vocabulary

Most often we’ve come across instances when the voiceover does not pronounce the word correctly. This happens on complicated words such as medical, scientific or engineering terms, names of people or persons and acronyms (such as FSMO which is actually pronounced as fizzmo). With the new feature, you could build a library of pronunciations which AVR replaces everytime it encounters the term on any of your flash video. This option could be launched by clicking the book-like icon on the Voice Library window.

One could also associate a pronunciation with a particular voice. This could be useful during instances when a particular voice-over does not prononunce the word properly (this is because we purchase the voice-overs from a third-party vendor and sometimes the pronunciations are not the same or better doesn’t sound the same across the voice-overs). By associating the corrections with individual voice-over, you make sure it doesn’t affect other voice-overs that pronounce the word correctly.

Record over phone:

Another new feature is the option to record your voice-over through phone. One might wonder why would we need this since there already is an option that to record the voice via the microphone option.

The Record over phone could actually prove handy in instances where you have someone else lending the voice for your video. You could ask the other person to dail into (513) 428 9972, enter the 5-digit passcode and then start recording their voice. Upon hang up, you would simply have to click the Import Message. The voice recording would be instantly added to the paragraph for which the recording window was open.

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