Samantha Dascher represented Grab Media at the Horizon Media & Jack Myers’ 500 Women Strong WIMMI event in NYC last week! 500 women in the media, advertising and entertainment industries attended the networking event on Tues, April 23rd. Click here to read more about last week’s WIMMI event.
GrabPress, our video syndication plugin for WordPress, continues to generate buzz and gain recognition with several thousand downloads to-date. VideoNuze predicts the strong adoption will continue in the future since it is now easier than ever for WordPress users to find quality video content for their sites. GrabPress offers an unmatched workflow solution to those publishers looking for better viewer engagement, including more clicks and lower bounce rates, while simultaneously earning revenue. Click here to see the full story from VideoNuze.
The most successful site owners and publishers have a series of videos on hand that showcase relevant content and keep their visitors engaged. This can be achieved with the use of video content feeds. But using these can be like shooting for the moon if you’re not in control. Below are some tips on managing your video content feeds and how to take charge of them to your site’s advantage.
Prioritize Content. The use of video content feeds for your site can take up precious time and resources, and sometimes, we just settle for fairly entertaining videos without focusing on any particular subject. For better productivity and potentially better site revenue, consider what type of video content will be popular to your audience, yet still be in line with your overall site content. You must know what videos you should focus on for your website.
Think of the 80/20 principle. Channel your resources to the most bankable video content feeds to get better results. Your most relevant videos may just be a small part of your site but they may be the most interesting content, attracting more of the visitors you target, and in return, translating to better site revenue.
Consider Viewers. Content is king, they say, but you must put yourself in the shoes of your viewers. Do some analytics research and see what your target audience is searching for online. You may already have a specific subject in mind, but do you know what your audience wants to watch? What are the keywords they use when they do a search? What keywords should you use to represent your video feeds?
Apart from analytics research, you can do your own study by checking out sites like YouTube. You can read comments and note the number of views of specific videos that are similar to what’s in your feeds. The information you gather can narrow down your audience. You’ll know just who to target and where in the world you should direct your efforts. When targeting, it helps to be local these days. Going local is one way your popularity can spread fast.
Do Hands-on Embedding
If you have the time and patience, you can embed specific videos on your website. You can look for accounts that feature subject-specific videos which are closely related to what your website is all about. This is important if you want to engage your audience and get more targeted visitors to your site. This is a necessity if you want only the videos of your choice to be viewed on your site.
Use A Video Feed Service. Getting video feeds from user-uploaded videos on sites like YouTube can be a tiresome process and even RSS content feeds can give a headache to non-techies. Some video users go online for help in places like forums, but the provided answers may not always be direct, or correct, for that matter, so they still have to figure things out on their own. Help pages and technical support sometimes only test your patience to the highest level and if you’re not a computer or Internet person, you won’t get far. A dedicated video feed service can spare you the headaches.
One of the easiest solutions is to use a video feed service that for the most part does the work for you. All you need to do is fix the settings and embed the videos on your website or blog and the service will do all the feed work for you. Grab Media provides such a service so your video management duties as a publisher are lessened dramatically and you have less to worry about regarding videos on your website.
As a site publisher and owner, you already have an idea how videos can help your website earn you money. Seems easy, but if it’s beyond your expertise, it can be frustrating, especially when there’s so much material out there on how to do it. It can be quite a chore sorting through all the stuff you can find online and you might not have the patience for it. What you need is a minimalist’s guide to making money with video.
Basically, you need to know only three things in making money with videos. You can…
1. Sell videos for profit
2. Monetize videos through ads
3. Partner with a company that pays you to play its videos
Yes, that’s basically the minimalist’s guide to making money with video and you can’t get any more minimal than number three.
One company you can partner with as a publisher is Grab Media, which has just launched GrabPress, a video plugin for WordPress. GrabPress is a free plugin that helps you make money with video. It only takes up to ten minutes of your time and it’s designed to serve great video content, which in return fulfills the publisher’s intent of increasing his or her reach. Creating and uploading your own videos can be a costly and time consuming burden that GrabPress helps bypass.
The GrabPress video plugin gives publishers access to 500,000 licensed video clips. With this gold mine, websites stay updated with content-rich videos which help to keep the interest of users. With fresh free video clips regularly available on your site, visitors will stay longer to learn more about your business and ultimately become loyal customers. “This plugin helps us drive video monetization,” said Declan Carney of BlueLink Marketing. “Our page views are more valuable with the revenue contribution video advertising provides, plus, we’ve found that the more free video clips we post, the higher our video engagement metrics, which ultimately leads to more page views.”
Before GrabPress, publishers would have to brainstorm at least 30 targeted words and phrases to make their videos more searchable. The GrabPress Video Plugin simplifies this rather complicated process by publishing the free video clips with keywords, descriptions, and preview images for better search results. The plugin can also provide publishers with more information on video engagement. You can click this link to find out how you can use Grab Media’s GrabPress for WordPress.
So you want more people to watch the videos on your website and you want to keep their attention? It’s not as hard as you think, but it’ll take some effort. You can accomplish this goal by avoiding these 6 pitfalls when improving video engagement for your site.
Avoid Stale Content
Whenever you watch web video clips, you probably go for the fresh clips in the video library. Having fresh web video clips available is one way to make visitors keep coming back to your site. Try to identify elements that would separate your new videos from your previous ones. Fresh offerings give your audience something to look forward to every time they visit your site. One great way to keep things fresh is with an automated posting tool like the GrabPress Plugin for WordPress.
Choose Videos with Maximum Relevance
If fresh videos are not a problem, you should make sure that your content has substance and relevance. Your videos must offer something interesting or useful or it will get the thumbs down by viewers.
Keep ‘em Short
According to studies, a user’s attention begins to wander after the web video clip hits the one-minute mark. That’s how long you have to get viewers glued to the monitor. Ensure that you get the most important message in the first opening seconds of your video. You must show what it’s all about from the start. If not, then there’s a good chance you’d lose viewers who are particular about what they want to see.
Use Content from 3rd Parties
Never limit yourself to your own videos. Use licensed videos by working with a third party provider who gets permission from the owner. Failure to get authorization may stain your reputation and could get you blacklisted. Ouch. Using both your own videos and third party clips can prevent you from being confined to just a few selections and also improve video engagement.
Prevent Unwanted Ads
We all know how annoying video ads can be and how they ruin the playback experience. Some sites have pop-up videos that play by themselves. It’s an annoying experience and also slows down your browser. In a survey used by media agency UM, 96% of respondents are turned off by these videos and had an unpleasant feeling toward the advertisers. 25% of the respondents said they left the page after the video started playing.
Sites like YouTube give the option to skip the ad after a few seconds, but the user often has no control over video ads. It’s just a reality we have to accept until the service providers get hit on the head, come to their senses and remove the ads. It’s unlikely though, because that’s how they earn revenue. To compensate for delivering these annoyances, they give you the option to get a share of the profits. Maybe that’s what “going green” means these days?
Don’t Play Hide and Seek
To drive engagement through video, it needs to be out in the open. In fact, we have found that on web pages where video is the editorial focal point of the page—rather than just text content alone—bounce rate on those pages goes down by 15%. Also, consider that you must embed your videos where they can be seen based on how the eyes scan the webpage or how visitors use the scroll bars. Yes, there’s research done on this and the usual flow of the eyes is from the left to the right and from the top to the bottom. Plus, don’t forget your title keywords and tags must be strongly associated with your video content.
One easy way to increase video engagement is to create automated feeds of relevant video using Grabpress, Grab Media’s new autoposter plugin. It’s only available on the WordPress platform, so if you’re a WordPress user, check out the GrabPress Plugin for publishers – it’s free!
Have you typed a search term in video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe and came up with a number of similarly-themed videos, but only liked a handful of them? This only proves that not all web video clips are created equal. Some clips continuously accumulate views while others apparently do not have what it takes to get enough people to even finish viewing them. If you are a video content creator or user, you would want your material to be right on the button of your audience. How can you be sure your video encourages video engagement?
The Title Says It All
Careful analysis will reveal that catchy videos may not deliver on what’s promised in the title. There are videos out there that may catch your attention with a great headline but the content may be next to worthless. Viewers will only take a peek and exit after the first few seconds. Nevertheless, it goes to show that writing a good title is a great way to pull your audience in to want to watch the entire thing.
Delivers the Expected
Unless it’s a practical joke, you should always deliver what’s expected in your web video clips. People do not appreciate being tricked even when the idea is to improve video engagement. How would you feel if you clicked on a video titled, “2013 Oscar Awards Bloopers” and all is fine for the first few seconds until the video cuts to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up?” While many people believe “Rick-rolling” is funny – and it can be – it’s also something that can damage your brand and your reputation with your audience. If your audience doesn’t trust you, it will be difficult to increase page views or video engagement metrics.
Crisp and Clear
Web video clips are meant to be watched and listened to. If they are murky to both your eyes and ears, then no one would bother to watch them even if they’re novel videos with substance that’s sought after by many people. Those kinds of videos will only be a source of frustration and viewers will see the uploader as unwelcome and undeserving of their attention. To be appreciated, the video does not need to be in high definition; it just needs to be crisp and clear enough to be a great experience for the audience.
These are only three ways to help in video engagement. Keep in mind that it’s not just about the title or content or quality. You yourself will instinctively know if a video is good or not by just watching it. If you feel that what you’re offering isn’t good at all, then it’s probably true. So do something about it for the sake of video engagement.
Limit the number of videos you create so that you can invest in resources that will make them higher quality. Then, augment those videos with web video clips sourced from a reliable provider.
One easy way to increase video engagement is to create automated feeds of relevant video from Grab Media’s new autoposter tool. This only works if you are on the WordPress platform, but if you are, check out GrabPress Plugin for WordPress publishers – it’s free!
You may have heard about the tons of money earned from videos posted on sharing sites like YouTube. This may be true for some people, but it’s not the norm. Read on if you want more of the shocking truth about video monetization.
Your Web Video Clips Make Cents
Did you know that most songwriters who are supposed to earn lots of money from their videos on YouTube aren’t! YouTube revenue typically earned by a recording artist ranges from just one or two percent of what their record label gets from YouTube video monetization. That would be roughly less than a hundred dollars for a million or two streams.
Consider what the Korean pop star Psy’s estimated YouTube earnings from the song Gangnam Style based on data from TubeMogul. Based on what’s reported, Psy’s YouTube channel had really earned $870,000 in 2012 from 1.3 billion views/ad clicks. You can do the math. As YouTube’s parent company, Google actually takes half of that, and let’s not forget the share of Psy’s agent and record company. So what he’s left with is practically just cents. This is because while there are branding benefits to producing your own videos, video monetization requires a more robust strategy. By working with a 3rd party provider of video and ads, you can earn significantly more per video view.
You Spend More than What You Earn
While Google does not reveal exactly how much you can earn from ad clicks or the number of video views, it’s not substantial as we’ve illustrated. For a YouTube video to become a hit, you need three things: a good video, an audience, and the kind of reputation that can make your video viral. To guarantee that you’re covered in these areas, you sometimes need to spend some money—lots of it.
If you cannot provide what’s required due to budget constraints, then your video may not make a good revenue generator at all. Since posting is a regular activity, you will be repeatedly taking money from your pocket. The result is what you spend in making custom web video clips may actually be more than the money you will earn.
Not All Channels Qualify for Video Monetization
Most people aspiring to be YouTube video moguls don’t realize that there’s a process for a video channel to qualify for monetization. Basically, your video content should:
1. Appeal to advertisers
2. Not infringe on anyone’s intellectual property
3. Have audio and video rights
4. Follow YouTube’s Terms of Service and Guidelines
Getting qualified is a lot of work and that’s just the start. If you don’t have the patience to do all that is necessary to make your custom video a hit, your efforts may not be worth your while. So now that you know the shocking truth about video monetization, you should take a closer look at your options.
Web Publishers looking to increase video monetization need to avoid limiting themselves to playing the lottery in hopes they will get a viral video and increase their odds of monetary success by adding more web video clips without making more work for themselves.
If you are still looking to build your video monetization with web video clips, be sure to get the skinny on the GrabPress Plugin for WordPress publishers – it’s free!
Every minute, users are uploading around 60 hours of new material to YouTube. This staggering figure proves our insatiable appetite for videos and there seems to be no end to this trend anytime soon. When done right, users will linger on your site longer, click on more content, and ultimately generate more money for your site—not only from video advertising revenue, but from increased page views as well.
Whatever your goals are in your video campaign, standing in the way of your success are bad choices that you make. Fortunately, there are signs that warn of a poor strategy. Here are five to keep in mind when you begin your campaign.
1. Visitors Just Take a Peek
If you run analytics and see that your visitors stay only for a brief moment, you can bet that they didn’t watch your video. There can be a number of reasons for this fickleness, but as consumers of video content ourselves, we are always yearning for something fresh every time. Just remember the last time you clicked and watched a whole video. You probably went for the most recent and updated version if there is any, right? Do you regularly update your content? Regularly coming up with new material helps develop a good following. So set a schedule of posting for your videos. To keep your visitor traffic flowing, you can promote more than one video at a time.
2. Viewers React Negatively
If you see viewer comments that are negative, see if they are about your video. Do they say your video is, well, let’s use the word, crap? If so, try to be in the shoes of your audience. Pretend you’re a visitor, watch your video, and look for what the problem could be. Is it the content? Is it the quality? You hate watching poor quality videos, right? When you watch a movie trailer, you would probably pick HD quality, never mind if it takes longer to load. Like you, your audience would prefer to have a great viewing experience. While it may take effort and resources on your end, you must be able to meet the audience’s standards. Besides, you don’t want your company to be associated with sloppy videos as it may ruin your credibility.
3. Your Video Gets Deleted
If making videos is not your cup of tea, you just might go to someone’s site and download a video that suits your purposes without permission and upload it to YouTube or some other video-sharing site. Later, you get comments or perhaps even an email asking you to cease and desist from putting up that video because you did not obtain permission to use it. If not that, your video simply gets removed and you get blacklisted. Now that’s bad, really bad for you. If you really want to use licensed videos, then get permission from the owner. Using licensed videos with permission together with your original ones may do wonders for your video strategy. By doing so, you increase trustworthiness and your good reputation may boost audiences’ video engagement.
4. Your Video Is Not Getting Played
So you’ve made a great video that you’re sure will get viral, but you check your analytics and are surprised to see that no one is even playing it! What could be the problem? If you have this kind of experience, the most probable explanation is that your video isn’t getting found, whether it’s on the page or in a search engine. There’s no point in creating a video or any content if people can’t see it on your site. You may have allocated just a small space for your video or placed it where it’s not immediately visible, like the bottom of the page. If you use a service like YouTube, check your keywords in the title. Do they refer to the content in your video? If your video is about a cat playing with a monkey and you title it “My Cat Video”, it will not likely get found by people typing in “cat with monkey” and “cat plays with monkey” in search fields.
If you are technically inclined, consider different formats to fit it with your target audience’s viewing preferences. If most use the iPad, then you shouldn’t use Flash video since that format is not accepted in Apple devices. For a broader reach, use standard formats for different platforms such as smartphones, laptops, desktops, and tablets, among others.
5. Only One Road Leads to You
YouTube may have become the catchphrase for videos and the site may already be in your mind even before you tackle the intricacies of your video strategy. Consider other video platforms out there. When you upload to other competing sites, make sure that your posts do not compete with each other. Use specific keywords and target different groups of people if you can. Most importantly, improve the visibility of your site to develop a strong following of people who share the same interests. Create blog posts and articles that point to your videos so you don’t rely on just one road to take visitors to your content. This means more people can view your video and you earn more revenue from ads. On the other hand, if you use your video as a tool to take people to a selling page, then it’s important for you provide a link which visitors can click upon viewing your video. The more people click this, the higher the chances of conversion.
Whatever you do, there really is no magic solution to a 100% effective video strategy that will help you earn more site revenue. But if you see any one of these signs of failure, do what’s necessary to make the changes that will give you a better chance at success.
Web publishers looking to increase video engagement and site revenue with video need to avoid these tactics, which are likely to destroy your online video strategy.
If you are still looking to build your video strategy with free video clips, be sure to get the skinny on the GrabPress Plugin for WordPress publishers – it’s free!
Web Publishers today know they need to incorporate video into their monetization strategy in order to maximize their site revenue. For business web professionals, however, knowing this and making time for it, are two different things.
In today’s post, we’ll review a few of the easiest ways to make money with video and increase your site revenue – all while maintaining high quality standards and protecting your brand.
Many people will tell you the best way to make money with video on your site is to create your own. Creating your own content is a great long-term monetization strategy, it’s true, but in the short-term, creating videos takes time and incurs costs rather than generating positive site revenue. Of course you can partner with a site like Blip.TV to incorporate video ads into your original content, but the effective CPMs are paltry and once you subtract the cost of your time and materials to shoot and edit the video, it’s an upside down transaction.
So if creating original content has a negative financial impact in the short-term, how does a web publisher bankroll that branded content while keeping readers engaged?
What we find is that the web publishers who are most successful when it comes to video monetization are using a combination of branded, in-house content with high-quality, content from third parties. For many people this is content they find on YouTube, however, this is not the most cost effective approach. Beyond that YouTube videos are not always properly licensed and can lead to broken links on your site.
A better solution for third party video is to find a video network that can provide licensed video clips that are fresh, relevant and always generating positive site revenue. This means you need to be able to integrate a lot of video onto a significant percentage of your site’s pages but with minimal effort and maintenance.
For web publishers working on the WordPress platform, the GrabPress Plugin is worth checking out because it does just this – it’s a set it and forget it solution for how to make money with videos.
Get more information about the GrabPress Plugin for WordPress publishers and see if you can increase your site revenue without increasing your workload!
If you are a publisher and you don’t have a video strategy, then you are losing out on engagement, conversion, and ultimately, new revenue. If you want to increase the amount of time your visitors spend on your site, decrease your bounce rate, and improve the amount of site revenue you earn, then having a powerful video strategy is one of the most important investments you can make.
Adding high quality, relevant video to your site is a way to improve all those metrics, create a strong brand, and build your audience.
According to comScore, over 182 million users have viewed nearly 39 billion clips in December of 2012 alone. We know people like to watch free video clips. The hard task is finding out how to monetize video. The answer is you need to build a video strategy that steers clear of these common mistakes.
Five ways to destroy your online video strategy:
Create or Post Low Quality Web Video Clips
High quality video production is key to maintaining viewer engagement. The average Internet user today has seen it all and doesn’t have the patience for garbled audio, low lighting, or other distracting production elements. Pretend you are the viewer and ask yourself “Is this easy to watch?” If you notice quality issues, won’t they? There is more to a great video than just a great message. Give your audience the pleasure of watching something of high quality. With Hulu, Netflix and HBO to-go there is no room for web video clips that aren’t produced professionally.
Hide Your Video in the Side Rail
A good video strategy goes beyond selecting the right video clips – short and long – it also requires placing the content where you can make money with video. Even if your web video clips are awesome, if you bury them in the side rail of your site then they will not help you improve video engagement or site revenue.
While everyone dreams of having a video “go viral”, the fact is that most videos don’t. Although this doesn’t mean your video is unsuccessful, you will never know the potential a video has for views and revenue unless you place it in a strategic location. Unless you already have a very large following for your brand, who specifically look for where you post each video, then you will need to post fresh video on your homepage and on each section’s homepage. In addition, you’ll need to do a little marketing to drive traffic to your videos.
Don’t Have Frequently Updated Video
Nothing ruins a video strategy more quickly than stale content. If you want to use video to grow a loyal audience that frequently returns to your site, then you need content feeds that automatically make your web video clips the freshest around. However, just freshness isn’t enough. Your content needs to be fresh and relevant.
Every video on your site should be in line with your goals of increasing site revenue and engagement. In general, that means your videos should do one or more of the following:
. Instruct
. Inform
. Entertain
Only Run Videos You Make
A strong video strategy consists of augmenting the videos you create with high-quality, licensed, professional web video clips. Just running videos that you make can kill video engagement and decrease credibility with your audience. By integrating relevant high-quality video clips from other sources, you elevate your own brand and increase video engagement. Companion videos can enable you to contrast your spin on an existing topic. It’s a fun and creative way to share a message or create a brand theme that you can repeat on a weekly or monthly basis to keep viewers coming back for more.
Run One Video and Wait for the Magic
Another video strategy mistake web publishers make is creating and promoting just one video or one video at a time. Thinking one video is enough or to treat your video content as a series of individual projects is a huge mistake. While it’s true that sometimes one video can be a huge success in terms of video views; a week or even a few days, the traffic will subside and you will have to rebuild it. For search engines, it’s better to see a steady flow of traffic to your site rather than random spikes and valleys. To achieve this through video, you’ll want to implement regular content feeds that don’t require heavy lifting from editors to compliment your custom created or curated content. In addition to creating a steady flow of organic site traffic, there are often significant cost and time savings on licensing and staffing when videos are added to the site through automated content feeds.
Web publishers looking to increase video engagement and site revenue with video need to avoid these tactics before they destroy their online video strategy.
If you are still looking to build your video strategy with free video clips, be sure to get the skinny on the GrabPress Plugin for WordPress publishers – it’s free!