Guide To Easy Video Marketing For Your Martial Arts School Pt. II

How To Get Eyeballs On Your Videos…

In last week’s post on video marketing I covered how to easily create online videos for marketing your business.

In this second half of my article series on video marketing for martial arts schools, I’m going to discuss how to get better exposure for your videos online so more of your potential customers view your video.

First off, let’s begin with the end in mind. Your chief and primary aim in online video marketing, as it should be with every form of online marketing you do for your school, should be to drive traffic to your offer.

Now remember, your offer is primarily going to reside on your lead capture website. That means that you should be using video to drive traffic to your school website, and preferably to pages on your site where the most relevant offer resides. This sort of specificity helps focus your marketing efforts, thereby increases the effectiveness of your marketing by targeting your promotions to specific markets.

So, if you’ve created a video that is targeted to people searching for children’s martial arts classes, then you need to use that video to drive traffic to your children’s martial arts page and offer on your site. This may seem obvious to some of you, but it bears mentioning if only to remind you to always focus your marketing.

Online Video Marketing and Things You Need To Focus On

To begin, let’s go over the things you can control about your online videos that will have an impact on how many times they are viewed by your potential customers:

1. You can control the video quality and presentation (i.e. content, production, and editing, which I discussed in a previous article) –
2. You can control where they are displayed –
3. You can control, to a certain extent, how well the videos are optimized for higher search engine ranking –

Let’s begin with a discussion of the various places you can post your videos, and how that affects your search engine exposure and ultimately your exposure to your target audience…

Where To Post Your Videos Online

The top video sites you should post your videos to, listed by order of importance by traffic and search engine exposure are:

1. YouTube – Owned by Google, this is the number one place to list your videos. By far it gets the most traffic, garnering more monthly traffic than all the other sites on this list combined. If you post your videos on only one site, post them on YouTube.
2. DailyMotion – A YouTube clone.
3. MetaCafe – Another YouTube clone. Also has an 18+ section, so it’s not exactly a family-friendly site.
4. MySpace Videos – MySpace recently relaunched, and it remains to be seen if it will become the social media giant it once was again. Regardless, their video site gets a lot of traffic, so it couldn’t hurt to post your videos here.
5. Vimeo – A great place to post your videos online, and for many the default alternative to YouTube for filmmakers and artists. However, you should review their guidelines before posting, as they frown on commercial videos (unless you pay $200 for a “pro” membership, in which case you can apparently do anything you want).
6. Break – Mostly funny and novelty videos. Might be good for additional search engine exposure, especially if you can come up with something out of the ordinary.
7. Veoh – Another site along the lines of DailyMotion and MetaCafe.

So, if YouTube is the 800 pound gorilla in the online video website world, and all these other sites are pretty much clones of YouTube, why should you post your videos on all these other sites?

Good question, and the answer is because for some reason completely unknown to anyone but the mad scientists at Big G, sometimes videos posted on these other sites with rank well in Google. Bizarre, since the other sites are competing with Google’s own YouTube, but it happens.

Also, while YouTube gets about 450 million visitors a month, these other sites all combined get around 125 million. So, theoretically by posting to all the other sites you’re increasing your viewer exposure by about 25%. Sure, it’s a lot of work, but it may be worth it if a video you creates trends or gets ranked in Google.

Other Places You Should ALWAYS Post Your Online Videos

First off, always post your videos on your own sites. A single video makes for a great blog post. And, if you’ve read any of my marketing materials or if you’ve been one of my coaching clients, you know I like for you to post to your school blog at least once a week. Posting videos makes that easier to do, since you’re basically repurposing content.

Second, post your videos to your social media accounts. Yes, YouTube is a social media site, but after you post to YouTube you should always post your YouTube videos to Facebook and Twitter.

Yes, always. Facebook alone can easily double your video’s exposure online. Plus, again it’s repurposing content, which makes the task of keeping up with social media posts not so daunting. (Note: I’ll be covering social media marketing for martial arts schools in my next article.)

Video Marketing and SEO

I’d like to first point out that most of the information I covered on site optimization for better search ranking in my previous article on martial arts school websites also applies to your online videos. If you’re unfamiliar with search engine optimization, read the last section of that article before you move on to the rest of this article.

When you post your videos there are four things you need to consider in order to optimize your video for search. These four video optimization factors are:

1. The name of the video file –
2. The title of the video –
3. The description –
4. The keywords you enter –

As with website optimization, you should know which keywords you want to focus on for search engine rankings, and include those keywords once in the file name, the title, the description, and of course, the keywords you enter when you post the video.

Doing this will help ensure that your videos rank well and hopefully get more traffic, thus increasing your overall exposure to your audience (your target market).

Driving Traffic To Your Offer With Online Videos, Revisited

Also, you need to make sure that the very first thing you put in the description is your website address for your offer, using the full “http://www.yoursitenamehere.com” version.

Why? Because some video sites will automatically convert web addresses that start with “http://” to hyperlinks (a clickable link), making it easier for people who view your video to get to your offer.

Now, with regards to driving traffic to your offer, you should be aware that not all sites allow you to have a hyperlink in your description. Thankfully YouTube does, but what about other sites that don’t?

Well, that’s why you need to make sure you have your contact information in your video, much like a T.V. commercial or infomercial where the phone number and website address scrolls along the bottom or appears at the end of the ad. So, make sure you include this information when editing your videos.

If You Get Stuck Or Need Help With Your Video Marketing

Remember, I’ve been doing this stuff for a living for a while now, both to promote my own studios and as an internet marketing service provider to small businesses. So, if you decide you don’t want to do this on your own feel free to contact me for help.

Questions? Comments? Feedback?

As always, I encourage questions and welcome your feedback. Please post any feedback or questions regarding online video marketing for martial arts schools in the comments below.