Of course you didn’t need me to tell you that right? Just look around you online and you’ll see the major search engines working video into their offerings. Everywhere you turn there is a video of some sort. In anticipation of this, I even created a special video category.

I love videos. Watching and creating them. But when it comes to marketing with videos, there are many ways to do it. First there is what Jon Udell coined as Screen Casts or Screen Casting. This is where you would capture desktop activity complete with audio (if one so wishes) and publishes it online. For an example, take a look at my RSS Digest screen cast. I think this will probably be the leading method of video marketing. There’s nothing better than actually showing someone and this is great.

The one big thing I noticed voiced consistently among viewers – including myself – is, people really need to be motivated to sit and watch a video. Screencasts are much like TV they demand full attention and if you’re going to go on and on, you’ll lose your viewers. So? Keep it short and to the point. Give people a short text excerpt about the video before they click through to watch it. Then, jump right in, don’t beat around the bush. If you have other things to add like ideas or elaboration that doesn’t actually need to be showed, take that out and text those or create audios. You could also create a hotspot within the video that says something like “more about this click here”.

Ok there are lot’s of ideas in my head on this and need time to spill it 🙂 hope this is a good start for those interested to use video or screen casting as a marketing tool.