Why you need video on your site

I have always loved creating videos.  A Video can use sound, images and words to build emotion and elicit a response. A video can be shared, be memorable, and have a real impact on the audience.

There is enormous flexibility creating online video in length and content. Video can be a very quick and efficient way to communicate  information or to entertain or to sell.

Online video is useful for not just for introducing a product or idea and building awareness, like a 30 second TV ad, but also for helping people really understand and get to know you or a product. 90% Of Users Say That Seeing A Video About A Product Is Helpful In The Buying Decision Process. Video content is about 3 times more effective than text-only content. As well, Nearly two-thirds of all U.S. Internet users in August streamed audio or video through a Portal and almost 50 percent did so from an Entertainment site

(Comscore).

At Talent Hounds, we create videos every month across the various themes of our site : health/fit dogs, training, hot diggity news, fun/funny, tricks/talent, rescues and heartwarming documentary stories. We host the videos on our YouTube Channel and have over 1400 subscribers and well over half a million views. We embed the videos on our site and share. We are constantly testing what works. This one about a boy Max, and his dog NSD Chester, is one of our most successful videos so far- it got discovered on YouTube and just got licensed for a Hollywood film to demonstrate the human animal bond:

We have started working with brands to do a few videos together for example Bullwrinkles and Dog Lover Days.

Here is one of my favourite branded entertainment video series from BuzzFeed for Friskies:

We have even featured celebrities like Doug the Pug on our channel:

I developed one of the first YouTube Partner Channels in Canada (a dance channel) in early 2007 back when there was far less competition, but there were also far fewer viewers and opportunities to share or monetize . It was also more expensive to create and upload good videos. Today, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. It has way more than 1 Billion users.  Every day, people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.  Half of YouTube views are on mobile devices (NB Leading publishers saw mobile revenues surpass desktop revenues in 2014, signalling a shift towards mobile as the primary digital media platform.)

Apparently, your website is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search engine results if it includes video. eMarketer estimates that the number of US digital video viewers will reach 204.6 million by 2017 or sooner. Over one third of online activity is already spent watching video. Brands are getting on board, with ad spending on video rising.

If you are going to do videos, you need to plan, promote and execute well. It is very competitive. The barriers to entry are so low and people under 35 are known as the “Maker” generation. Over 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

When doing videos, follow good SEO practise and use Key words in the title, description and tags (however do not use misleading words to get traffic, be clear and honest about what to expect), do a longer description (100-300 words), use a great thumbnail, then share the video across all your platforms. Do Playlists and use SEO in your Playlists too. Include Call to actions (eg subscribe) and annotations.

Check out our previous post on creating sharable videos

Will you make money from YouTube and videos? Probably not a lot, especially at first. More than a million channels in dozens of countries are earning revenue from the YouTube Partner Programme (out of many millions uploading), but only thousands of channels are making six figures per year. Big brands are talking videos but tend to go with their ad agencies or established TV and video producers. But smaller brands often like product reviews or brand integration, and unboxing videos can be hugely successful.

Here are a few very different examples that each really show the power of videos for helping Rescue and Shelter Dog Campaigns :

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and feel free to contact us with any questions or share any videos. 

We subscribe to lots of dog related channels. Note your channel in the comments so we can all grow together.  

sources:

https://www.youtube.com/yt/creators/

https://www.digitalsherpa.com/blog/category/video/

https://www.comscore.com/

eMarketer
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