M & A Rainmaker

If you have read a couple of my Marketing related posts here you will know that I consider Internet Video to be one of the  ” referrers ” of people and links back to your website and you.

My interest in Internet Video Marketing goes back some way. In fact I realised that I had a couple of timelines for this that I could check and I’ve surprised myself with how the time has flown by !!

In  December 2006 I produced ( or had produced ) a video for the Glan Yr Afon Inn. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1YGFgQHsno

and it comes up on Google alongside it’s Google Video version when you search on The Glan here:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=glan+yr+afon+inn&meta=&aq=f&oq=

Now, I think that the thing that sparked me off then was that I noticed how simple and high quality online videos had become. ( not all of them were simple and high quality but some were ).

I came across Mike Koenigs ( who I will talk about later as it is he that has sparked off the recent renewed interest ) and his ” Internet Video Marketing with Internet Infomercials “(  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5R660ePBuI )  and also came across Guy Massey of The Internet Video Company ( see examples of thier work here http://www.ivc4.com/ivn/ ) . There were other people and companies that influenced me at the time – I just don’t remember them all. 

I guess that it was probably Mike who made me decide to produce a video myself and get it online. Fortunately for me I had access to a professional filming and editing team that had been recommended to me and I hired them, gave them a brief and sent them up to The Glan for a couple of days.  A couple of weeks later I went to thier offices and they showed me the demo. of the film. We made a few tweaks, added some ( not expecially brilliant ) music and I had my film on a disc. One of the children ( young adults now ! ) ” ripped ” it off the cd and  put it up on YouTube  and Google ( before Google bought YouTube ) and the other integrated it into The Glan website. So, we had videos on YouTube,Google and the website. Hey!! – I was pretty proud of the whole team !! Although I did not do it all myself it was great to know that we had started from nothing and got to a video on the Internet.

Then we started on our ” biking videos ” , with a new filming and production team. Aberdare Park was our first video:

http://thebikechannel.ning.com/video/945189:Video:4

which we all thought was great and then we moved on to our ” bike upgrade videos ” e.g.

http://thebikechannel.ning.com/video/945189:Video:962

here

http://thebikechannel.ning.com/video/945189:Video:1945

and here

http://thebikechannel.ning.com/video/945189:Video:2222

What exactly were we doing – Hey !! we were just exploring and having fun – ok ??

By this stage I had experience of working with three filming and production crews !!!

Now to put it simply you could say that The Glan video was just about improving the experience of looking at The Glan website and nothing to do with search. Hopefully if people looked at the video they would be even more interested in visiting The Glan. 

The Aberdare Park video was about us starting to produce a programme or a channel of bike related films and the upgrade videos were about educating people as part of the channel content and also some product placement ( Mikuni Carbs and Kuryakyn Hypercharger ). Again not about search.

However, I knew that Mike Koenigs was focussed on using internet videos to get good search rankings. In many ways he worried less about content and quality of the video and more about getting it up there  to generate more traffic and leads.

I also knew that Mike was developing a product called Traffic Geyser whose basic purpose was to upload videos across multiple video platforms. I also knew that Google was ( apparently ) going to start taking more notice of pictures and video. 

Fast forward 4 years ( yes 4 years !!!! ). What’s changed ?? What happened ???

Well I signed up for Traffic Geyser for about 18 months but I didn’t use it ( I was not producing any videos and I did not need to upload them to one video site never mind multiple video sites ) so I let the license fee lapse. I was also off exploring various other way of getting good rankings on the Internet. Oh !! and of course I was busy learning about Social Networks. That’s how I have at this point thousands of connections on Facebook, Twitter, Ecademy and LinkedIn ( not as many as some but more than most ! ).

I was also developing my ideas for the equivalent of the ” great universal connection theory ” or something, latterly known as the ” Marketing Whirlpool ” !! So, I have just expounded my theory when this   

http://www.trafficgeyser.com/poweredby/?p=3

lands in my inbox. Now Mike is also very good at email marketing and obviously tends his database with loving care 🙂 so, despite the fact that I let my Traffic Geyser account lapse I am still on his mailing list. ( I just have not taken any notice of his emails for the last couple of years I guess ! )

After viewing his first videos and having a bit of ( very interesting ) email discussion with him he ends up sending out another email and video here

http://www.trafficgeyser.com/poweredby/?p=160

Now, what you’ll notice here ( and Mike pointed this out ) is that in the first video case study Brian was clearly not very experienced but managed to pull in some good business really quickly whereas Valerie was clearly a pretty switched on and experienced lady ( let’s ignore the ” stay at home mom ” disguise shall we 😉  ) who had developed her business out of another business. Really focussed and niche.

Ok – so what’s the issue here then ??

Well, it’s sort of the old quality versus quantity debate:

Is it better to produce high quality videos and content that are distributed in single or small numbers and are optimised carefully OR is it sufficient and indeed effective to produce loads of  mediocre videos that rank highly in Google – at least for a while ???

Stay tuned while I explore – and please let me have your thoughts !!