The first rule of Video is you don't talk about Video!

JUST PRODUCE IT!

Now that I’ve paraphrased both Fight Club and Nike I guess it’s time to explain:

The point I’m going to make in this post is that instead of procrastinating and postponing producing your first video, why not commit to:

Make your first video today!

Don’t spend a ton of cash on production. You can create decent quality videos by stitching together a few photos and adding in music and narration. There’s no need to buy any expensive software – you can produce video with free tools like Google’s Picasa or Videospin. Internalize these two simple facts:

Producing a single video these day is EASY and you can do it for FREE.

A narrated slideshow looks and feels like a video to your audience, and more importantly, has the same impact:

A 60 second product video based on a slideshow backed with narration simultaneously addresses the learning needs of different types of people. It WILL have a positive effect on your sales conversions.

These videos are effective because the voice-over narration attracts auditory learners – who absorb information best when hearing it ,while the visual cues, such as bullet point slides, work well with visual learners – who absorb information best when seeing and reading it.

For both types of learners the dynamic aspect of the video draws attention to the content because human eyes are designed to follow movement.

If you Embed it they will watch

Anyone care to guess where that movie reference comes from?

Actually it’s from a corny (literally – the movie is about a field of corn) Kevin Costner film that is very much in the “Just do it” spirit of this post.

The point of the reference is that once you have a video on your site it’s guaranteed your visitors will watch it (at least for a few seconds -whether they stick with you is a question of how compelling you are and how long your video is).

You may rightfully ask:

“O.K. But how do I get my video on my site?”

Well, there are a ton of ways to do this but I’m going to offer you just one - use YouTube.

It’s not that other options aren’t great, it’s just that I’d rather you get busy uploading than start procrastinating by comparing the pros and cons of different services. Not to mention YouTube is by far the most successful video service online today:

Get busy uploading!

1. Uploading a video to YouTube is free and simple.  Here’s a short clip explaining how it’s done:
2. Once you’ve uploaded your video to YouTube all you need to do is embed it on your site:

Congratulations, You’ve added your first video to your site!
What next?

Now that you have video on our site, it’s important to follow up by meticulously examining your site’s stats and check how your video enhanced pages  are performing.

Here are a two basic A/B test you should run:

• Page performance with video vs. without.
• Prepare another version of your video and compare performance for version A vs. version B

Ideally you should repeat this cycle continuously:

Shoot > Uploading > A/B test > Optimize > Shoot

Scale is an issue…

The time cost involved in committing to this type of effort for every product in your inventory tends to be such that, although you’ll definitely see results and increase your bottom line, at some point you wont be able to keep up. Especially if you’re inventory consists of more than just a few select items. That’s where Treepodia comes in. Our ecommerce video platform automates the entire process outlined in this post. We’ll boost your entire product catalog with auto optimized video enhancement in 24 hours or less. Furthermore we operate on a Pay-Per-View model guaranteeing that you’re only paying for videos your clients actually saw. Contact us now to learn more : )

Thanks to the Internet, everybody and his cousin can now star in his own production, using techniques straight out of the Hollywood playbook

Slide, Animoto and Masher – online slideshow tools

Animoto Online Video Slideshow Solution (image credit: mobology)

David then goes on to introduce a number of the online tools available for people who want to transform their photos into smart-looking videos accompanied by music or narration. David mentions Slide and Animoto, which I was familiar with, and Masher, which I’d never heard of before and found to be still slightly buggy.

What if I don’t like online services?

I think that although David’s suggestions are excellent, some people might find working exclusively with an online service slightly frustrating, especially if/when connectivity and speed are an issue. Personally, if your interested in making your own video slideshows, I’d recommend looking at Picasa, Google’s cool photo editing tool which is backed by a photo sharing service of the same name.

Picasa as a video slideshow tool

Picasa has a built in video tool that has excellent support for stitching photos together into a slideshow, and uploading it onto Youtube. This slideshow I created last month for Semantic Web startup Semantinet was done exclusively with Picasa. Check it out to get an impression of what you can expect:

So what are the pros and cons of using Picasa?

The pros are:

• It’s quick and easy to learn and use
• Ample support is available online via Picasa help forums
• You can connect your Picasa and Youtube uploads to your Gmail account (if you haven’t got a Gmail account yet, now’s the time to get one…)
• It’s completely FREE!

The cons are

• Picasa’s simplicity also means you’re offered rather limited customizing options
• Unlike with Animoto and Slide, you have to supply your own music (a great resource for this is FreeMusicArchive.org).

How scalable are these solutions for ecommerce?

If you’re a smal scale operation with only a few products in your store, and you’re only interested in testing what effect slideshow videos can have on your conversions rates, Picasa is a great tool to use and I’d definitely recommend it. For all other purposes however, Picasa still requires far too much human labor to make it effective. Serious vendors are probably best served by automated video solutions like our own, even for the pilot phase.