Online video publishing has indeed taken the Internet by storm in recent years, making the use of video for marketing, promotion, news and PR online a true key strategic component and a key business differentiator for internet marketers who want to communicate effectively about their product profile and benefits within the shortest possible of time.

The Internet is full of information and the average attention span of a web user today is measured in seconds. When web users search for their information at a search engine, they will get thousands of search results; when they visit your website, they may only spend a few seconds and little efforts to scan through what you are selling or proposing and decide whether your content, style, look and approach are a good fit for what they were actually looking for. These first few seconds are crucial and if you can delivery clear and targeted message by offering a fast, highly visual way to get their further attention and engage their interest, you have done bingo.

Does this mean that you just need to simply put up 10-min video tutorial on your website or just slamming some video contents up on your web pages, you will instantly sell more products or services? If this is your way of marketing with video on the web and hoping to get high conversion rate of traffic-to-sales, you will more toward getting disappointments than good news.

In order to make your video to effectively market your products/services online and convey your product/service key traits and characteristics within a very short amount of time in a unique, memorable way. These are a few rules of thumb to follow:

1. Get Your Video Seen

If you want your video to be your effective marketing tool, it must be able to see by as many web users as possible. Hence, don’t just keep and tight your video inside your web site borders. Let your video content be free and distributed to the majors video sharing websites such as YouTube and Google video so that not only others can watch and talk about it, but they can easily download it, redistribute it, if not even publish it directly on their own sites.

2. Small File and Load Fast

Statistics show that average web users spend their time waiting for a page to load is about 7 seconds. Web pages that take longer than 7 seconds to load, their visitors normally are on the verge of clicking away and visit other website. Hence, you need to make sure your video file is small enough, ideally less than 1 megabyte and load almost in real time to keep the interest your visitors. AVI is the most common video format, the file size can easily exist 10 megabytes for a short 2-3 minutes video; hence if you share your video in this format, you most probably will get click away from you visitors because of long loading time of your video file. Hence, you must get a video format conversion tool to convert your video to a more internet friendly format such as SWF format.

3. Let Them Know It’s A Video, A Short Video

If the web users do not know that it is a video, they won’t click it and play it; hence your video will get watch. So, you must let the web users know that the box is a video; the best way is to make it look like a video / VCR-like by having a play and stop button where the web users can click to play the video and stop it whenever they want to stop it.

Let the web users know also this is a short video. No one wants to sit through a 30 minute presentation on the history of your company; be focused on your products/services and deliver your messages preferable within 2 minutes.

In Summary

Effectively market with video on the web is not just slamming some video content up on your web pages, it more toward effective video communication through video publishing & sharing on the web.