At this point I want to summarize the steps involved in this video production campaign to promote a fictional product or service.

Traditional methods would include creating a blog or Web site, optimizing for on-page factors and promoting off-page, using link building with keywords, tags, and bookmarking. The goal is getting to the top of Google results for your product name or phrase keyword.

YouTube is second only to Google as the most popular search engine. So more people search via the YouTube site than through Yahoo and MSN. But how does that affect marketing tactics? Obviously putting your message in front of the most people is desirable. With so many people searching on YouTube is it also helpful to focus on video as a contributing media platform? Does the traffic convert or can your product or service be sold to video viewers? How do you optimize video for search? How do you promote video off-page? Does video help your Google ranking and authority?

These are the questions and challenges for a video production campaign. I chose to do a series of blog posts to test search engine results to video content and with less emphasis on text content such as blog posts and articles.

The first challenge is to come up with some content suitable for video. A quick and easy way would be to just turn on the web cam and speak for a few minutes, then load it up to YouTube. Quality standards on YouTube are typically fairly low both in terms of subject matter and also image resolution. Part of my experiment was a curiosity about high quality video and and which hosting sites offered High Definition and widescreen format.

Not wanting to put myself on video I chose a slide show format and music background. This is not the quickest nor easiest method, and it lacks some motion impact, but it is better than your viewing my talking head.

I began by writing out a list of questions about ‘clean red widgets’, a fictional product, and created 5 topics containing 5 – 10 items. These topics were classic sales categories of features, function, benefits, pain points and their solutions, and potential for imaginative use.

Using Powerpoint I created slides and saved each as a jpg file, or alternatively you might choose tif image format for better resolution. Then I used MS MovieMaker to import the image files into a slide show sequence. MovieMaker is very easy to learn and contains enough features, such as fade transitions, titles, credits, overlays and audio track additions, to create an acceptable video production. A commentary could be created separately and added, but in my case I chose royalty free music.

PC users can get MovieMaker as a free download, and if you don’t own MS Office Powerpoint you can download OpenOffice for free and use Presentation.

Mac owners can use Keynote or OpenOffice Presentation for slides, and use iMovie for video editing.

Editing audio, and matching audio length to video, is a much greater challenge than editing video clips. It is probably easier to lay down the audio and clip the video to length.

The video in this post is a YouTube video embed using default settings. You can also view the video directly on YouTube and see some significant differences. Notice the windowing effect of the black sidebars, the blurriness, and the video settings option at the bottom right.

To view the individual video clips see the prior Video Production posts.

Next time I’ll discuss some other options to the standard YouTube video hosting default viewing settings and see how they affect the display of the video production.