Video or Podcast: Which is Right for your Business?

Video or Podcast: Which is Right for Your Business?

Video or Podcast: If you are a business owner it is no longer a question of whether you should invest in internet broadcast such as YouTube or a Podcast. The only question is: which is right for your business?

 Don’t Assume Others Like What you Like

Videos-icon39-Podcast-iconWhat works well for you might not work for your best friend. I’m a visual learner, for example. Video attracts me. I rarely listen to podcasts. I often “tune out” the radio as I drive around town. My friend Maureen is the opposite. She’s a podcast junkie, rarely watching a video and paying close attention to every word on the talk radio station she loves.

Don’t assume others like what you like. Consider your audience carefully, and search out research that allows you to see trends in the behaviors of the people you wish to attract.

 Weigh your Content

Video requires two senses – vision and hearing – and full attention. Podcasts require only hearing, which means some people will multi-task, giving only partial attention to the broadcast. The more your viewer/listener needs to think, the more senses you should include.

Is your topic light or heavy? Does it require people to “think through” something, or is it intended more for entertainment? Run your content through the Fleisch Scale for a better understanding. If your content is rated “difficult,” you’ll need to rewrite your script.

Short is Sweet

At a recent video shoot for a client, our President and Lead Consultant, Jeff McElyea, chatted with the videographer recommended to us by Comcast. He told Jeff that Comcast recommends business videos be only about 2 minutes in length, and podcasts only 30 seconds – like a commercial spot. Both are meant to promo your company with “fast fact” info. Anything much beyond those guidelines and you begin to see dramatic fall-off from viewers/listeners. This suggestion is backed by HubSpot research, which shows that 33% of viewers move on after watching just 30 seconds of a video. 44% leave at the 1-minute mark, and 60% bail on your video after 2 minutes.

 On the Lighter Side

A while ago our Marketing Specialists, Erin Vezzetti, came upon a YouTube video that has become the “poster child” for the type of work we like to create. The commercial, which based on Erin’s research cost about $5,000, has been viewed 10,821,818 times as of today. They have 110,000 followers on Facebook. What made this 1.5 minute video a smashing success? The attitude, the approach – poking fun at themselves and their business while presenting a great deal. But would it do well in a podcast? I don’t think so. Take a look and see what you think!

Lucid Business Strategies

 

Lucid Business Strategies helps people like you build profitable companies and great social media marketing strategies.
email for info or

call 586-254-0095

 

 

 

Read More

Do Stock Images Hurt Website Rankings?

Do Stock Images Hurt your Website Rankings?

Do Stock Images Hurt Your Website Rankings?

Do Stock Images Hurt Your Website Rankings?

Adding images to your website is a good thing. From the reader’s perspective, images help people connect to your words and add visual interest.

Meanwhile, the SEO industry and web developer community has been questioning whether Search Engines mark you down for using stock images rather than original images.

Matt Cutts, Head of the Webspam Team at Google, recently said that there is neither negative nor positive impact on your organic web rankings if you use stock images rather than original images. See Matt’s 59-second YouTube video.

How Search Engines Read Websites

When you see a picture of a woman laughing, you know she’s heard or seen something funny – because you are human and have eyes. You SEE it. Search Engines – and the screen readers used by the visually impaired – read the code.

There’s a huge difference.

You see images; the search engine sees programming. These are two very distinct and different languages.

It’s a big help to the search engines when you give your images names that relate to the page on which the image is placed. Regardless of whether you are using stock images or your own, naming the images with the keywords for that page will assist in improving your page rank.

If, for example, your web page is about the physical action of laughing, our laughing woman photo would add to Google’s impression of your site if it was laughing woman.jpg, because Google would read that the photo is about the same thing as the page content.

If you load the same image onto your site but it’s called Disc_068743.jpg, Google would scratch its head and say, “Hhmmm… this has nothing to do with laughing,” and consider your web page irrelevant to the reader, and that has a negative impact on your page rank.

The second half of the equation is the “alt” tag you give to the image. This is the text a site visitor sees if something is stopping them from seeing the actual image. Just make sure that whatever you call the photo, you also use for the “alt” tag.

Stock Image or Original, your website rankings will improve when you follow these simple steps.

Let us know how you are doing!

Lucid Business Strategies

Lucid Business Strategies is building a GREAT company that helps other people build GREAT companies.

Learn more about our strategies and services on the Lucid website or call us at

586-254-0095

Read More

Reading Between a Spammer’s Lines

Reading Between a Spammer’s Lines

Every so often I get an email from a client saying, “Hi Erin, do you know anything about this?” with a questionable website contact form attached. They want to know if the message is legitimate.

Perhaps it is a side effect of my profession, but my brain operates a little differently than most. I don’t “read” these messages, I dissect them, looking for the tell-tale signs of spam and/or fraud that other readers might pass right over.

I regularly take messages like this apart:

Reading Between a Spammer's Lines

I don’t mind getting the “SEO professional” phone calls, e-mails and form spam. From my perspective, they are hilarious, and they make me proud of the honest value and results we provide our clients.

Do you get messages like this? 

Is so, I’m looking for the worst of the worst.  Send your next “SEO Professional” spam e-mail to me.

If your submission tops the list of ridiculous SEO claims, I’ll perform a complete complimentary SEO analysis on your website that will blow any of the SEO “professionals” who send you spam messages right out of the water.

And that’s a promise you can trust.

Lucid Business Strategies

Lucid Business Strategies is building a GREAT company that helps other people build GREAT companies.

Learn more about our strategies and services on the Lucid website or call us at 586-254-0095

Read More