Video Blog Essentials for Real Estate Investors and Entrepreneurs

As the internet has had an impact on every aspect of our lives, entrepreneurs, business owners and investors realize its importance in every domain- one of them being its use as a marketing medium. The most advantageous thing about internet marketing is that it happens to be a near zero-cost, wide-reach platform that gives new meaning to competition and innovation.

If you have an upcoming product or service you would like to promote, or if you are looking for various investment opportunities such as real estate, stocks or gold, your best bet lies in using internet marketing to expand your reach locally and globally.

The latest rage in internet marketing today has to be video blogging, and in this article, I will provide you with a basic introduction and strategies for using this dynamic marketing tool:

What is video blogging?

As we all know, blogging is maintaining an online journal that is set up to share information and opinions, whether personal or professional, with others. Blogs can be used to promote products and services and generate traffic to your website by writing great content. In video blogging, the idea is to have some or all of your content in a video format. The videos can be embedded in the same page, which makes the experience more intense; you can also link your page to services like YouTube, MetaCafe, and other video hosting websites. A third option is to host the entire website yourself, but that’d be too costly and would defeat the purpose of low-cost advertisement. As an example, with video blogging, a real estate investor can show a video of a property in her investment web site and market it for sale to home owners. There are so many other uses of videos in web sites such as showing a product, real estate or other items, using a video so you can invoke positive emotion in site visitors. Your goal is to tie the positive emotion to whatever you are selling!

Why video blogging?

This is a very good question, the answers to which are given below:

• Human beings respond more to sight than sound. That is why we remember faces but forget names, and find charts and graphs easier to interpret than lengthy analysis. In a video, the senses of sight and sound are used simultaneously, giving an experience that is completely engaging and satisfying. In one of my many sites, I use video testimonies to utilize the powerful concept of "social proof" (http://www.web2marketingsystems.com/testimonials.php). Can you notice the effectiveness of a video testimony as opposed to a written testimony? Can you imagine the effectiveness of showing a video of a house to prospect buyers compared to just providing a written description. Get the picture?
• Even though there is tremendous interest being shown in videos, the field is still in its infancy. As an estimate, there are 160 million unique viewers on various video sharing websites, and this number is set to explode in the coming months. Once the proliferation is complete, there will be excess crowding, and people will be hard to reach. So now is the best time to ride the video blogging wave. You can start this journey by registering for a free blogging account at www.blogger.com. It is simple and yet offers a variety of features such as adding photos and videos to your blog.
• The internet is developing at breakneck speeds. Every month, we are witnessing faster services and greater bandwidth at cheaper rates. People don’t care about download limits now, which have become endless. All this points toward an entire untapped market that is waiting to be made the most of and the best vehicle right now is the video that is compressed and modified so that it takes up less space than an MP3 file.

A successful video blog

We will now discuss a few things that can ensure popularity for your blog:

• Passion - Nothing beats the passion for your job; if you don’t care about what you are posting, you will have a hard time convincing people, no matter how professionally produced your videos may be. People want intense experiences today, and you will be able to give them that only if you feel very strongly about your line of work.
• Sense of urgency - Because there is so much to see and explore, the average viewer is critical and judges a video in a span of mere seconds. Make sure that the first 2-3 seconds do something to grab the viewer’s attention and keep him/her glued to the seat; otherwise, it won’t take long to lose the viewer- perhaps forever.
• Originality - There is hardly any point in replicating what the others have done, because in the entertainment industry, a dish once served is sour forever. People want to see something unique enough to bide their time and patience.
• Visibility - Once you have a video blog, make sure it is visible. Inventive promotion is required to make you stand out from the crowd and reach out to the audience in a way your competitors cannot. Make sure you post your videos on all major video hosting websites.

Video blogging can be more challenging than traditional blogging, but is also a lot more fun. Follow these steps to make sure that your blog becomes popular in no time. And remember, there are no short cuts, but utilizing a video in your site can make a difference between success and failure.

• Create your first blog at blogger.com. Notice the public URL of your blog, so you can give it to others to view your blog postings
• Use a simple camcorder to shoot a video of your subject (e.g. House, product, etc.)
• Transfer the video from your camcorder to your computer using USB cable (or other cables)
• Edit your video using free video editing software provided with both PC and MAC systems
• Add the video to your blogger account so that everyone can see your masterpiece
• Make sure major video blog directories and platforms index your site for further publicity and exposure

And what if you have no camcorder or even a computer? No problem. You can visit the nearest internet café in your neighborhood, to use a free online tool that creates a video, based on pictures and music. A good online tool can be found at http://animoto.com. It turns your photos & videos into an amazingly effective video.

According to the site, this powerful technology, "automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from your photos, video clips and music."

So what are you waiting for? Let’s increase our investments ROI and business profit with the creative use of a video blog.