Video Marketing 101

[Alan Egan]

There are remarkably few owners using video and even fewer doing it well.

So I've put together a series of posts showing loads of pro tips and tricks.

I've also got some holiday rental video professionals sharing some dos and don'ts.

I'm posting 10 articles between now and Christmas (one a week) to help teach and inspire you to make a video that showcases your property.

This course is completely free.

You can see the first post here http://rentmoreweeks.com/2015/10/16/vac ... eting-101/

[NeatandPicky]

Thanks Alan. What an inspirational video... looking forward to learning more.

[Alan Egan]

Thanks Nikki,

There are some lovely touches in there aren't there.

I hope that starts you in the right direction (ie, encourages you to want to make a video).

Stay tuned...

[kevsboredagain]

There are remarkably few owners using video and even fewer doing it well.

I was curious to see how you use video on your own site but couldn't find it. Perhaps you could point us to the appropriate page?

BTW you've made the #1 error making a website and some of your images are way bigger than they should be.
eg. 1,024px × 768px (scaled to 334px × 251px)
You are making the user download a 1024 pixel image and then the browser has to re-scale it into a smaller viewable size. That particular page would load 9 times faster if the images were the correct size.

PNG format is also not a good choice for photos on a website.

[Alan Egan]

Wow, Kev you really are bored aren't you.

I don't have video at the moment but I decided that I would add some so started researching the subject and thought that I would share what I found in order to help inspire others.

I'm no expert in video, that's why I have asked experts in holiday video creation for their imput.

Thanks for the tips about our website. I will look into those things.

Quicker loading is always a good thing. I will see what I can improve on.

You may want to check your own page speeds.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

[kevsboredagain]

I'm no expert in video, that's why I have asked experts in holiday video creation for their imput.

Thanks for the tips about our website. I will look into those things.

Quicker loading is always a good thing. I will see what I can improve on.

You may want to check your own page speeds.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Sorry my misunderstanding. I thought you were the expert who was going to show us how to use video.

Fixing your website is fairly easy as you are using Wordpress. There are a few free plugins which will optimise images on a WP site and fix the problems I mentioned with a couple of clicks.

I've tested my own sites for speed and they are not super fast either. It's always a compromise between size of images and speed but you definitely don't want to be wasting valuable loading time with images which end up being shrunk by the web browser.

One thing I have been testing recently is the use of video instead of banner type images. ie. background video. Several large websites are using it and it can sometimes look very impressive. Technically it's easy but the hard part is making quality video in the first place.

[Alan Egan]

I've tested my own sites for speed and they are not super fast either

No, in fact they are quite a bit slower than mine.

But let's see if we can make them faster, I'm sure we can.

Technically it's easy but the hard part is making quality video in the first place.

I hope that the course will help with this

[kevsboredagain]

I've tested my own sites for speed and they are not super fast either

No, in fact they are quite a bit slower than mine.

The header images I've used are much bigger by choice, at nearly 1300 pixels wide. Please don't take the comments personally, I simply spotted a technical problem on your website which is very, very common.

Try testing http://www.holidaysonbornholm.com/our-top-10-list/ which I where I noticed the problem.

[Alan Egan]

Kev,

Thanks, I'll have a look.

Regarding an opening video

You could always experiment with an opening video using your existing photos and by using a Ken Burns effect.

There are some plugins that do this or you can do this in Imovie if you are on a mac (not sure about Windows).

Just an idea, it's not something that I've tried.

[KathyG]

Fancy doing a website review on my site Kev? Mine's in desperate need, much more than Alan's I suspect.....

[kevsboredagain]

You could always experiment with an opening video using your existing photos and by using a Ken Burns effect.

Had to Google that one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uBxELOFGCY

I use Sony Vegas Movie Studio for video but despite making many home videos I still don't have anything of the property itself. Taking decent video indoors is something I've never succeeded with. It's one thing staging a room to take photos but I've found it much harder for video.

[Alan Egan]

That example is more complicated than I had in mind.

I was just thinking of a little pan and or zoom to turn the images into video. You can add any transition you like between photos.

I'm also guessing that you could host video with the likes of Vimeo and that may speed loading. (once again I've never tried that).

[kevsboredagain]

I was just thinking of a little pan and or zoom to turn the images into video. You can add any transition you like between photos.

I'm also guessing that you could host video with the likes of Vimeo and that may speed loading. (once again I've never tried that).

Ah ok, yes I have that already on my Youtube channels.

Certainly hosting on the likes of Youtube does solve the problem associated with streaming to different devices at different rates. I have a couple of videos on one of my websites but run into problems of what size of file to attempt to stream. For some people it's too big a file and the video does not stream very well. Make it too small and the quality is bad.

[kevsboredagain]

Fancy doing a website review on my site Kev? Mine's in desperate need, much more than Alan's I suspect.....

I can have a look. I tend to be blunt

Alan's is absolutely fine other than the image problem, mainly on one page too.

[KathyG]

I can have a look. I tend to be blunt

Yes! I think it's got to the stage where I need blunt! I'm even considering starting all over again with something other than DW, but not sure I can do yet another learning curve.....