Website Design and Promotion

Using Video To Drive Traffic to Your Website

Marketing Experiments did a cool study to explore whether a video could increase targeted traffic to your site and guess what they found? Yup, it works amazing well.

Here is what they did:

They put entertaining (not promotional) videos on YouTube and Google video and then measured the times they were viewed, how many people clicked to the website (mentioned in the video), and how many site visitors converted to subscribers.

They concluded that it was well worth the effort and came up with these suggestions for using video:

1. Keep your video clips short, preferable under 5 minutes. Most people browse through a number of videos when visiting sites like YouTube and Google Video, and may be unwilling to give any one video too much of their time
2. Ensure that your video has interesting, entertaining or provocative content. If it doesn't "wow" people, they will have little incentive to share it with other people they know, or across their social networks.
3. Be cautious about including commercial or promotional content. The most powerful short videos are those which are purely entertaining. It's when people click through to your site that the time is right to add your sales message.
4. Don't plan on creating just one video. It is hard, if not impossible, to accurately predict which videos will enjoy wide, viral distribution. Our own testing demonstrated that some videos were shared more than ten times as much as others. So plan on creating a series of clips, and learn from the one which performs the best.
5. Optimize your video clips to maximize distribution across social network sites, use tags and bookmarking links to help people find, save and share your videos.
6. Create videos that multiple people (possibly some of your customers) appear in. The best team of viral marketers you can hire are people who appear in your video and pass the video to their friends and family.

You can read more about their research here and watch one of the videos they used in the study here.

Comic Sans - Do I Amuse You?

Okay, the second part of that title is one of my favorite all-time movie quotes, from... anyone?  Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.

Anyway, just a quick note on font usage here, in particular the use of Comic Sans. Why do so many people like this font? It's the most casual of the "web safe" fonts. Stay away from it, unless you really don't want to be taken seriously.

Stick with the more accepted and more conservative fonts on your web site, such as Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman. Spice things up a bit with Georgia and Trebuchet. But, if you want your site to look at all professional, no Comic Sans. Ever.

Green Cars on Yahoo!

It's always nice to see big corporations trying to "green their act" a bit (whether it's a marketing ploy or not — obviously the demand is there, which is the important thing). Yahoo! has introduced a Green Cars section to their site, for new and used cars.

Yahoo! gives each auto a "Green Rating" on a scale of 1-100, based on each model's environmental friendliness. #1, with a rating of 87, is a Honda Civic Hybrid, just ahead of the Toyota Prius. In fact, Honda and Toyota are pretty much still running the show in terms of producing environmentally friendly cars.

There's also information on most of the green technologies and fuels as well as a community where users can discuss green cars in general.