5 Ways to Use Video on Your Website

According to Forrester research watching one minute of video is the
equivalent of reading 1.8 million words! That's more than you could ever say an article and YouTube gets over a million viewers per day. If your business could use more exposure and wants to share a bigger message, you need to be using video on and off your website.

If you're like most people you understand that you need to use video but you're not sure how to start or you might be camera shy. Here are five ways to use video on your website or to promote your product that don't require a video camera.

Welcome page

The home page of your website and the place where many customers decide if they want to do business with you a highly professional welcome video will help you establish the "know like and trust" necessary to do business with them. A professional video of you, the face behind your business, is best that can be time consuming and costly.

If you are camera shy or a professionally made video is beyond your budget you can still put a great looking video onto your home page. Keep reading to see how.

PowerPoint Presentation

Turning a PowerPoint presentation into a great video is easy with the use of software. My favorite video creating software is Camtasia studio but that costs about $300. There is a free version called Jing and another called Cam Studio. Both will allow you capture your screen and narrate your PowerPoint with your computer's microphone. The limitations of these alternative is that they only allow you to capture 5 minutes of video at a time.

Animoto.com and OneTrueMedia.com

Both Animoto.com and OneTrueMedia.com allow you to create up to 30 seconds of video using your pictures or uploaded video. You can create longer videos by upgrading to a paid subscription. The neat part about these services if that they offer creative templates to make your video zing. The process is super easy. Just pick a template, upload your photos or video, and like magic you have a professionally created video!

I made the video below to promote my latest book using a template from Animoto.com. I didn't like the lengthy intro of the template, so I cut it out using Camtasia Studio and I added the call out at the end that reads "Available at Amazon." As you can see in the video, you don't even need photos to create a video..you can just use text.

Prezi.com

Prezi is a unique video creating platform that has a much larger learning curve than Aniomto.com and OneTrueMedia.com. It offers complex templates which help you walk through a presentation. Prezi is free to use and has a couple of upgrade options that have more to do with storage than video creation. They also have lots of videos and a forum to help you learn the best way to make use of their service.

Where to host your videos

Once you've created your videos, you will need a place to put them. YouTube is the most popular place to upload your video and it is free to use. Screencast.com is another popular choice. There is also BlipTV , Metacafe , Revver , Vimeo , Yahoo! Videos and I'm sure a slew of others. Camtasia Studio software will allow you to upload to either of those sites, or download an mp4 file to host it on your own website.

You can easily host your video on one of these platforms and embed the file onto you own website. The benefit of doing this is that someone can find your video on YouTube or Screencast and then go to your website for more information. It is important that you include a link to your website in the video's description so that they know where to go!