Although, personally, I cannot say I derived much new knowledge from the book – since I’ve been creating videos for a few years now – I can say that it is a good overview of the subject. I recommend it to anyone who is getting started as a video producer for the Web.

In fact, since the above encapsulates my review of the book, and since I get asked questions about video production in general, and specifically for YouTube, I decided to write a few notes from the book so that this may serve as a resource to cover some rudimentary points.

Of course the following will not be a substitute for reading the book, and the points I selected are arbitrarily chosen for general interest.  Further, I also included page numbers in case you want to learn more about a particular point. In other words, buy the book and go right to the page of interest.

Notes from the Book, YouTube for Business

The key to converting eyeballs to dollars is to generously highlight your company’s website address or 800-number within the body of the video. [p.15]

The biggest mistake that companies make is to communicate “what we do” instead of “what we do for you.” [p.23]

Be Entertaining

Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are humorous ones; the funnier the video, the likely it is to gain a large audience and go viral. It’s OK to make fun of your company, your product, or yourself, of just to treat the topic in an entertaining fashion. YouTubers like to be entertained, and they’ll tolerate a promotional message if it’s a funny one. [p.33]

Shoot For A Smaller Screen

The best YouTube videos are visually simple, with a single main subject filling up most of the small video window. [p.36]

Visual contrast is highly desirable with small footprint videos. Put a pale or white-clad subject in front of a black background, or a black-clad subject in front of a white one. And consider using brightly colored backgrounds, which pop in YouTube thumbnails. [p.37]

Be Entertaining and Informative

Being entertaining is essential, but so is being informative. [p.40]

The typical name for this combination of education and entertainment is edutainment.

People might come for the entertainment, but they stay for the information. [p.40-41]

Keep It Short

My recommendation is to keep your video no longer than two or three minutes – and the shorter, the better.

If you want to post a ten-minute speech, edit it into four segments of two to three minutes apiece. [p.41]

Avoid the Hard Sell

On YouTube, the soft sell works better than the hard sell. [p.42]

The key to marketing on YouTube is to lead viewers away from your video on the YouTube site to your company’s website – where you can then directly sell your products and services. [p.43]

Link From Your Profile

Although you can’t include a live link in your video or its accompanying text, you can include a direct link to your website in your YouTube profile. [p.45]

Technical Stuff: Compression, Encoding, Codecs and Video Files

If you want to know more about the technical aspects of digital video from this book, click Popular Digital Video File Formats for a separate post.

Professional Video Productions

The average YouTube video looks amateurish. Which is what you expect when amateurs are doing the shooting using consumer-grade equipment.

So, if you represent a big company with a big message and a big budget, going with a professionally produced video makes a lot of sense. [p.102]

Expect to pay in the range of $1,000 to $3,000 per minute of finished video. [p.103]

Video Editing

Even though Pinnacle Studio Ultimate [video editing software] costs a little more than the other second-tier programs, the quality and quantity of the special effects offered make it the program of choice for many budget-conscious video makers. [p.116]

The transition should go unnoticed by the viewer; what’s important is moving seamlessly from one scene to the next. [p.125]

Video Blogging

Because the goal of a video blog, just like a text-based blog, is fresh content, you get more points for frequent posts than you do for high production values. [p.185]

You can register your vlog posts with podcasting distribution and syndication services, such as Apple’s iTunes. [p.186]

If you have a WordPress blog, you can also embed a YouTube video into your blog using the following code: [youtube=url]. [p.191]

You want to enable your blog/vlog for both RSS and Atom syndication.

Atom is a feed format similar to RSS, with a few extra features. [p.198]

Realize that a good video blog is just like a good text-based blog: It’s engaging, relevant, timely and personal. It’s a two-way communication between the people of your organization and your customers. It’s not an overt commercial. [p.201]

Video Promotion

If you upload videos to multiple video-sharing sites, several services can help you both upload your videos and track each site’s relative performance. The most popular of these video syndication/analysis services includes TubeMogul (www.tubemogul.com) and Vidmetrix (www.vidmetrix.com). [p.220]

You can drive a lot of traffic to a YouTube video by getting that video mentioned on relevant blogs.

In some instances, you might be able to pay bloggers to mention your videos. This pay per post (PPP) approach seems odious to some, but it’s increasingly common in the blogosphere. If you’re unfamiliar with the practice, you might want to check out Blogitive, (www.blogitive.com), a company that helps businesses build a buzz by placing paid posts with a large network of sympathetic bloggers. [p.231]

You should also promote your video on social news sites such as Digg (www.digg.com) and StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com). [p.234]

If you video neither entertains, informs nor educates, people won’t watch it. That’s the bottom line. [p.240]

Create videos that offer unique value – that entertain, inform or educate. Viewers will flock to useful and entertaining videos, as long as there’s no hard sell involved. Offer value and sell subtly; that’s the key to YouTube business success!

I’ve gobbled up a bunch over the years and continue to do so as much as possible. And although I have a few favorites, in my opinion, the most important one is not a new one. In fact, it may very well be the oldest:

Scientific Advertising was written by Claude C. Hopkins in 1923 and is truly a seminal book for the world of direct response marketing. The principles of testing and measuring that Hopkins established are as important today as back then. The difference being that what took months to test back then, can be tested with extraordinary lightning speed nowadays.

The uninformed would be staggered to know the amount of work involved in a single ad. Weeks of work sometimes. The ad seems so simple, and it must be simple to appeal to simple people. But back of that ad may lie reams of data, volumes of information, months of research.

So this is no lazy man’s field. (1923)

The mantra of 21st century marketing is the same as back then: Test, Test and More Testing!

Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them—not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort—the buyers of your product. (1923)

For more info, click on “Testing” Your Way To Internet Marketing Success.

Of course, the point of “why” one is giving away anything for free is completely missed if one is not also selling a product or service.

Low Cost Advertising

The notion of giving something away “free” as a low-cost advertising media to garner attention for your product or service has been so heightened via the Internet, that it’s now an expectation for many web users that they should be able to find any information they are seeking for no cost. Regardless of whether one can find “any” information for free, or not, the notion of “free” is certainly not new.  And I’m sure anyone who would argue “against” the merits of giving away freebies could also cite examples of when they, themselves, received free product samples, or free consultations, or free trial offers, before they every used the Internet. (Well, I guess that would depend upon one’s age….)

Scientific Advertising, by Claude Hopkins

Regardless, the point of this post is to simply draw some attention to “how long” freebies have been in existence. Although I would bet free samples and free trial services goes back to the beginning of commercial enterprise, what I can cite as a reference goes back to 1923, in the book Scientific Advertising, by Claude Hopkins.

Chapter 3, “Offer Service,” is all about offering something for free. In fact, in the first sentence of the second paragraph Mr. Hopkins states, “The best ads ask no one to buy.” He further goes on to say, “The ads are based entirely on service.” He offers real-world examples of giving away hair brushes, coffee, cigars and sewing machine trials, and refers to a consumer “…anxious to reciprocate the gift. So the salesman gets an order.”

Of course not every free gift or free service will result in a sale for one’s paid product or service, but the opportunity to make sales based on giving something away can be easier (and more economical) than repetitiously telling people, who don’t know you, to buy from you.

For more info, click What Are YOU Giving Away For FREE?

The New Rules of Marketing and PR (copyright 2007 and 2009), highlights that marketing and public relations is significantly different on the Web than in mainstream media. Scott writes that the “old rules” of traditional media are about “controlling a message.” He states that the only ways to get your message out using conventional media channels is to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write about you.

Instead of buying or begging your way in, Scott says anybody can “publish their way in” using the tools of social media such as, blogs, podcasts, online news releases, online video, viral marketing, and online media.

Godin defines the title in this way: “A tribe is a group of people connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.”

Here’s why I recommend reading this:

1) It’s a great book on 21st century leadership
2) It’s inspiring
3) It’s short

There are a number of practical quotes from the book that I might include in the future, by here is a simple one that is pertinent to this website:

“The Internet is just a tool, an easy way to enable some tactics. The real power of tribes has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with people.”

It’s easy to get lost in how technology works and lose sight of its purpose. If we consider technology as a way to facilitate communication, that simplifies the varied ways it can serve us.