29 Dec Succeeding with Online Video Marketing
One of the hottest trends over the last few years for successful Internet marketing includes videos. When people think of putting together videos, a lot of time they think it’s going to cost a fortune and entail a production crew with significant amount of high end editing and acting.
In reality, this is not necessary at all. When looking at the various places to publish your videos to promote your practice, YouTube is very popular, Vimeo is an option and then there are quite a few others. My recommendation on where to focus is very simple.
Google owns over 70% of the search engine market. A few years back they bought YouTube and now incorporated into the search engine algorithm. They allow individuals to create YouTube channels for free, and as people subscribe to your channel they will automatically be notified when a new video is placed into your account. In addition, you can place links in your videos to your website which have significant authority in the eyes of Google.
For these reasons, plus the fact that YouTube is over 10 times more popular than any other online video site, I recommend placing videos on the YouTube site.
First of all, you should go to YouTube.com and create a channel for your videos. It is not complicated to do this, and be sure to complete every aspect of the channel. This means filling in the description, uploading your logo and any other pictures it allows you to insert. Also make sure to verify your channel.
The main thing to remember with publishing videos is that you are an expert in your field. Potential patients are on the Internet looking for education and providers for the particular problem they are having. For healthcare this may be a cosmetic dentistry procedure, in vitro fertilization, epidural steroid injection, any number of things that are pertinent and if you do any type of “fix it” you can show how to do what you do.
The average consumer can’t do what you do. So educate and be helpful and then offer your services by branding and having a call to action at the end.
That’s the first step in creating videos for your YouTube channel, is putting together an initial list of video topics. Each video only needs to be 2 to 4 minutes. Anything much longer than this is stretching the attention span of the average American.
In addition, please remember that you will be speaking to prospective customers and not colleagues. Therefore, make sure to speak in layman’s terms and slowly enough so that you can be understood clearly.
With regards to the technical aspects of how to shoot these videos, you do not need a production crew. You can use your video camera or your phone if you want. The iPhone for instance, now has an HD video camera that works wonderfully.
There are also cameras that you can pick up off Amazon or at Best Buy for instance, that are inexpensive and also have HD capability. It’s actually a very good idea to pick up an inexpensive microphone called a lavalier that will make the sound quality excellent. Because of this, if you going to pick up an inexpensive HD video camera make sure pick one up that has an input for an external microphone. You can do this with the iPhone for instance with a simple adapter that comes out of the input on the top of the phone. (May be out of luck with the iPhone 7 though).
Usually I will shoot the videos outside at an area with an attractive view. This may be with a mountain in the back, a pretty lake or golf course. After a couple years, my schedule became too busy to include travel time and worrying about people walking through the background and things like that.
For less than a hundred dollars, you can pick up a green screen backdrop kit with lighting that you can sit in front of and shoot your videos. This may sound complicated, but it really is not. And then you’re in a climate controlled setting!
What you can do is pick a simple topic that you’re comfortable with, and then talk about it for 2 to 4 minutes on camera in front of the green screen backdrop. You can do this in a frequently asked question format or have notes sitting in front of you on a laptop screen to make it top of the mind. Within a few takes, we should be able to nail it if it is a topic you are comfortable with discussing.
At that point, the iMovie software from Apple makes it very easy to drop the green screen video over a background picture. I learned how to do this in 30 minutes looking at a YouTube video on how to make the green screen video in iMovie.
You can make an intro video Clip that is a few seconds long to use for all of your videos which is also something I learned in 30 minutes looking at the YouTube video. You can get a cool 5-10 second intro clip
with your logo from fiverr.com to use too.
Once your video is complete, simply upload to your YouTube channel directly from the video editing software. You do not need to put captions in the software as YouTube allows you to do that itself. It is better to do it there as annotations put in in the YouTube software directly will get picked up by the search engines.
Once you upload the video is important to completely optimize the video in YouTube. This means initially placing a title which has keywords in it and potentially either the name of your company or your phone number. There is an area to place keywords, and my recommendation is to put in as many as you can until it lets you know no more will be accepted. For instance, if you are a chiropractor in Oklahoma City, go ahead and put in all the iterations of those terms. This may include chiropractor Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City chiropractor, Chiropractic clinic Oklahoma City and the like.
In the description box, the first thing you should put in is the URL of your website. This does not necessarily need to be the homepage of the site, for instance, if you are discussing a topic that has its own page on the website go ahead and place a link directly to that.
When placing a YouTube video, only use one link. Do not stuff more than that into your description as Google will potentially penalize you. Make sure to put in a paragraph or a few paragraphs description including keywords and information about your practice.
Make sure to click on the advanced tab and place the city and state along with the recording date for the video. The next thing you want to do is click over to the annotations tab and inserts a title and notes 
throughout the video of anything you think would be appropriately descriptive. These annotations get picked up by Google as keywords and can be helpful for rankings.
Once you have finished this, take a look and see how your video appears to the general public. Definitely check and make sure that your video is in the public category and that it was not uploaded mistakingly as a private video. If the video shows up with a thumbnail that is unattractive, YouTube will let you choose from one of three thumbnails.
Whether or not to monetize your YouTube channel is a matter of personal preference. If you are going to monetize your videos, make sure to place your annotations higher up on the video screen as the overlay ads usually take up the bottom portion of the screen. One concern with monetizing the video could be that a potential competitor could show up in one of the ads.
The great thing about having a YouTube channel and placing videos into it every month is that you can then embed those videos on your blog as well as your website.
You should definitely place blog entries that discuss the topics in your videos. You can have a couple paragraphs about the topic and then say something like watch Dr. Smith discuss the topic more in the video below.
You can also place the videos on your website in the footer, sidebar or there is also WordPress plug-ins that can have a video page that automatically places your YouTube channel on that particular page.
There are any number of possibilities when it comes to embedding videos onto your website. It is a great idea to publish multiple videos every month into your channel in order to keep your subscribers coming back and new fresh content flowing onto the Internet to obtain search engine rankings.
After placing over 150 videos into my YouTube channel for pain management, we were at a clip of getting approximately 5 calls a week on people interested in becoming a patient after viewing one of the videos. If you think about it, YouTube is free and there’s not a lot of production cost putting together a channel. The videos get indexed very nicely, and result in education for prospective customers to find out about your practice and hear from an expert information about their condition.
This information places you in a great light as an expert who is educating that person, and potentially resulting in a phone call for that person to receive help. Then when that person comes into the business, they are somewhat meeting a friendly face as they feel like they know you somewhat from watching your video.
Video is a powerful medium for Internet marketing and something that should definitely be taken advantage of in the campaign for your Internet domination!
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