How To Attract more Viewers for your Videos
One of the simplest ways to attract more viewers lies in not ignoring a small but larger-than-you-likely-realize segment of your potential market: Namely, those who are still on dial-up. While admittedly a small segment of the global population, their business can boost your sales more than you might think possible.
One of the strongest reasons? You’ll be providing a service 98% of all other video marketers ignore – making your videos much easier to load and view for those to whom a 5-minute video load can often equal over an hour of waiting time.
“Get over it. Get high speed”, is something you hear on forums, if those on dial-up dare to complain about load in times. But the simple truth is, there are those in rural areas all across North America for whom dial-up is still the only available service. Perhaps a tower has not yet been built, or geographic conditions just don’t facilitate signal.
It’s not always about these viewers being “stubborn” or “cheap” – most of them would kill for high speed!
How can you make your videos accessible to those on dial-up?
1. You’ll speed up dial-up viewers’ load in times considerably, if you provide a simple “low fidelity” option. And your high speed viewers can still access your high fidelity version
2. Keep your video segments short. It’s much easier to load in a 3-minute video than an 8.27 minute one. In fact, 3.46 minutes seems to be the cut-off time at which video views drop by half (as you’ll quickly discover, if you spend a day browsing view rates and marketing video lengths on YouTube)
3. Allow purchasers to download video series you are selling in individual zip files, rather than one huge one. It can easily take 6 hours to download a 78 mb zipped video file containing 12 “lessons” for someone on dial-up… and chances are, they’ll sit through that (on the rare occasions they’re dedicated – or foolish – enough to try, only to find that their rural phone line couldn’t sustain the download… leaving them with a corrupt, inaccessible file to show for all that effort. (Nothing is more frustrating!)
4. Let them know your video files are “dial-up friendly”. Mention it in your sales pitch; on your web page; in your blog… or even in your signature! (What’s the use of creating short, low fidelity videos – if nobody knows you have them?)
Believe me, the sort of gratitude you’ll get may not propel you towards a six-figure income, but these dial-up viewers will get high speed eventually – and you’ll have earned their loyalty and dedication for life!
6 YouTube Video Formats Explained
The easy answer to the question, “just how many video formats are there, anyway”, is a glib: “Probably more than either of us realize!”
However, that’s not exactly helpful to those new to video marketing and video making, so here are 5 YouTube compatible formats – with some clues to the differences between them…
.WMV
“WMV” stands for “Windows Media Format”, and is Microsoft’s standard video file format. It is highly versatile, with its main advantage lying in its video compression abilities, which allows it to function at varying bandwidths. If you use Windows Movie Maker, you can easily output your files as WMV files. (Notice, however, that among all the file types that YouTube accepts, the standard Windows Movie Maker .MSWMM file format is not one of those “on the list”).
.MOV
The MAC version of .WMV. Works best with QuickTime, if you’re going to download and play. You’ll find many .MOV files on YouTube.
MPEG 4 (MP4)
The advantages of the .MP4 file format lies in the way it discards any non-essential information, reducing file size to the minimum.
MP4 format is most often used with PSP’s and iPods.
.3GP
Yes, Virginia – you can upload this popular mobile phone format! But be aware that you can lose quality when transferring .3GP files to YouTube.
.FLV
Adobe Flash format. Flash movies work well on YouTube – but to play .FLV files, you’ll need a Flash Player such as Adobe or Applian installed on your computer. (Run your spyware program after downloading the latest Adobe Flash Player. The last two times I’ve upgraded, I’ve immediately been hit by an Adobe spyware program, according to my anti-virus.)
.MKV
Written in open-format Extensible Binary Meta Language, Matroska is quick to point out it is XML-based, and not a video compression codec. Free to use, it aims to become “the open source alternative to existing containers such as AVI, ASF, MOV, RM, MP4, MPG”.
You will need to be familiar with all these types of video file extensions, in order to make the most of your video marketing – but mercifully, of course, you don’t need to know how to use them all.
Just knowing what they are can make a difference to how you choose your hardware and software.
Bruno