Finally read this post off your Twitter feed after holding it for a week. In general, I completely agree with you, and I’m curious if my BubbleTweet videos would pass your “valuable, well-produced” test: http://www.bubbletweet.com/channel/chiefsparkler

But I also have to ask: Did you really just end a rant about people cravenly pitching their services with a pitch for your services?

All the best -
Andy

Onsite videos and offsite videos. Both need to be used in the proper way.

Where a talking head video might be a “bore” and unappealing on a video sharing site. It will give you instant authority when used in specific ways on your own website as well as increase your sales up to 1,700%

Also depending on the niche if a “low budget” video or professional style video will be best suited.

Also your video marketing needs to coincide with your onsite or offsite videos

Frank Bruno
http://VideoMarketingTactics.com

Video is where it is at AND where it is going!

Your right – we have not even started to scratch the surface yet with video marketing…

But, just like Steve in the above post hinted at, the reality is that many people when they start out as new IM’ers can’t afford to pay for professional video marketing.

So, I am fortunate to let you and the rest of this social network know that I have found an affordable and highly effective solution for those that just can’t throw down $500 to over a $1000 per video they need to make.

ENTER: Pro Slide Videos!

With the Pro Slide Video method ANYONE can make a high end production quality 60-second video for less than $60 which includes a professional voiceover and background music!

To watch the video and read the highly acclaimed product testimonials on creating your own Pro Slide Videos just go to:
http://www.ProSlideVideos.com

I have to agree with your latter statements about the situation for small business owners. I’m interested in developing a series of videos for services I promote but don’t have the money it takes to put together a professional package, and yes, I am capable of producing the screen capture videos you mentioned.

As for distribution, I’ve got in mind the Traffic Geyser system you mention elsewhere.

Steve Maclin’s last blog post..Free Reverse Cell Phone Lookups? [Digg]

I’m a member of your Social Power Linking site, and a full-time professional IM, working at an SEO/SEM firm “down under” (and my own projects “after hours”) in West Australia.

Like you, I’ve been mostly unimpressed with the video marketing I have seen so far. It just blows me away that so few of them even include their URL in a watermark and at the end of the video, along with a call to action to visit their site.

Something this simple is (to me) obvious, but then I guess 15 years spent in sales & marketing gives me that perspective, which perhaps many others don’t yet have.

And as for el cheapo product whoring videos which are EVERYWHERE, they’re just as bad (and sad). I think your very BEST sales video is giving fantastic quality content – educating & informing the watcher. This has the knock-on effect of getting them to know, like & trust you, and from that you can grow a business relationship that you might never have achieved by any other method.

At the moment, the vast majority of my video is Camtasia-based screen capture style (I’ve been doing this sort of stuff in 1 form or another since 1999 – remember Lotus Screencam? ) but I have stuck my toe into the water in the last year or so with talking face video in front of a camera and plan to get a lot more seriously into that market from now on.

So far, I find that uploading camtasia stuff to Youtube tends to produce horrible graphical quality (Youtube’s converters shred it into something barely watchable), so I have not put more than 1 or 2 videos up so far. Any tips in that dept are welcome…

Anyway, I thought you might like to check out a camtasia educational video I recently uploaded to the web. It needs some work (I put it up quickly with minimal editing so a colleague could see it) – there is no call to action or anything useful (YET), since it’s actually meant to be part of a dvd-based training series, of which this is one topic, but you’re welcome to check it out and I’d certainly welcome your feedback.

The link is here:

http://eranmalloch.com/blogs/7-ways-to-make-money-with-your-blog-free-video.html

Keep up the great work – I alway enjoy your posts, and have a great day.

Eran Malloch
Perth, Western Australia

Eran Malloch’s last blog post..7 Ways To Make Money With Your Blog (Free Video)

Jameseo’s last blog post..Link Tunneling Explained – Link Building SEO

I was talking more about the smaller, mom and pop shops. The DIY crowd or the smaller companies like the “guru” marketers who have some staff.

I will get into the whole production part of this in another post as I see a lot of questions popping up about this. Think about the massive amount of training and the millions that have been made from teaching people all the tactics involved in copywriting over the years.

There is a huge black hole in training for people to produce videos with the same attention to detail in copy and triggers (both in the script and visual) as it relates to video.

Getting people shaken up about this issue will snap their attention to the fact that video marketing is completely in the infancy stage and mom and pop all the way to Fortune 100 companies have a lot to learn about production, scripting, and triggers as well as how to appeal to the web 2.0 surfers who don’t want to watch commercials. The internet isn’t TV.

You’re right about how to videos, but people who cannot afford someone doing their videos for them, (you need a lot of videos to take full advantage of syndication and hitting the different market segments you have), the screen capture video is the easiest thing for average people to get done.

I respect that video production firms would like to drum up new business by professionally rendering all kinds of viral video pieces, but I know that my market isn’t interested in or able to pay for that just yet. They are just starting (no money) or are very capable of doing it themselves, so that’s the angle I came from.

A small business owner is spending their time extremely wisely by doing this themselves. This IS marketing and it is time well spent to learn the basics and produce better quality viral videos of all kinds, or at least the easiest, how-to screen capture videos.

How are you coordinating your vids from YouTube with another site – a home base? They are good content, but one of the secrets is how you then use a good video series to develop not just on YouTube – where it’s very difficult for people to find you who might not be looking directly for your vids.

If you build a community, blog, something around those vids and use YouTube to serve the vids you can get a lot more out of them from BOTH places.