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Video Marketing is hot and I have got to tell you, I am always staggered more photographers aren’t using this medium to drive targeted visitors to their websites. Just incase you haven’t actually looked at it yet, here’s a few statisitcs to get you thinking …

• There are more people that watch YouTube videos than all of the 4 US News Networks put together!
• Over 40% of net users watch online videos on at least a regular basis; over 70% at least monthly.
• Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL are among the tons of Search Engines that give priority rankings to websites that host video content.
• 4.7 billion videos were viewed in the UK in April 2009 alone, up 47 percent compared to April 2008.
• 68% of people that watch web videos, will in turn, pass links for these videos onto their friends…turning them into viral traffic machines.

What plenty of photgoraphers miss is how powerful video slideshows can be helping them sell stock photos on the web. For starters, we are already working in a visual medium, and we already market our work to creative/visual folks … so it is a perfect match . We have the content. We simply need to format it for distribution and get it out there. Very simple really!

By this point, I’m sure most of us have made a digital slideshow of some kind, and it isn’t a massive step to convert that to a video file. Add some background music, overlay some text captions, insert one or two transitions and you’re ready to go. You then ‘syndicate ‘ these videos thru any of the video sharing web sites, and suddenly you’re getting laser-targeted visitor traffic from those sites, AND you’ll often find your videos ranking highly in the search engines, Plus the backlinks from the video sites will also improve the ranking of your website.

It’s a win-win-win situation and I suspect any serious photographer would do well to think about it. You need to use a free service like Animoto to make slick video slideshows in minutes, complete with text captions, background music and professional animations.

The Video Promotional Strategy

Ideally I’d suggest 2 short ‘slideshow videos ‘ for each of your Key Subjects. For Search-Engine-Optimization purposes (S.E.O) … Ie. Ranking highly in the search websites to generate maximum targeted visitor traffic … Specific focus on a single subject for each video is the best path. A short slideshow of 12-15 photographs is plenty. The videos do not need to be long. Keep it short and leave the viewer wanting more. That way they’ll be more likely to click through and visit your website.

OK, so after you have the video, you’ve got to publish it. Obviously YouTube is the best-known of the Video Sharing web sites and gets the most traffic, so you must start there, but there are tons of other places to consider. You can do this by hand if you like, or there are tons of commercial submission servcies who will do it for you. I actually recommend Traffic Geyser as it also includes submissions to numerous Blogs, RSS Aggregators, Social Bookmarking websites and even Podcast sites where acceptable, making an instant network of content and back links.

The better part about these bulk submissions services is, as the new content appears online, Google is fast to index it, and it’s common to secure page one search listings inside hours or even minutes of posting your slideshow.

There’s lots of info available on video marketing on the internet, but there’s not a lot of need for photographers to go to that extreme if all they’d like to do is promote their photography business and sell stock photos. Make short basic slideshow videos and submit to YouTube. It’s the main site … You can submit to other video sharing sites if you like … But if you’re doing it by hand there is not a lot of extra benefit for all of the extra time.

If you’d prefer to hand the whole process over to the gurus. Visible Web SEO offers pro website promotion services especially designed to improve search website ranknigs and increase website traffic for creative professionals, including photographerss, illustrators, designers and artists.

Matt Brading is a shutter-bug, writer and web marketing specialist. Matt would prefer to sell his digital stock photography thru the direct contact libraries like GlobalEye Stock Image Agency.

This is the 2nd installment of our look at the three most important habits I see in the most successful, professional photographers who pass through the GlobalEye Stock Library each month. We covered Lighting and Patience in the first installment — if you missed that, you can check our sell stock photos blog — otherwise we’ll dive back in and look at technique.

For all the convenience of automatic-everything cameras, I sometimes wish they were somehow available only after the photographers had passed a manual photography course. Sadly, it is so easy and so handy, that most photographers who start out on automatic mode never go back and learn the way to control those settings themselves.

And that means there are a large number of photographers out there producing images that are nearly great … But because they have no theory and only very basic technical skills, they won’t ever know what’s holding them back and more importantly, how to correct the problems and make great photos.

I see this each week with the membership application submissions. Shots that could have been very marketable if the {photographer} had only turned off the center weighted auto focus and gave more attention to their point of interest. Shots that could have been spectacular if they’d turned off the preset exposure mode, and thought about their depth-of-field. Shots that could have been spot on if only they’d thought about the effects of shutter speed …

The other disappointment is those photographers who do not even take the time to read the manual that came with their camera so they’d take full advantage of the features open to them. Here are just a few problems .. And the photographer’s excuses … That I’ve seen just lately …

1. Great submission of photographs, but they all had a serious colour cast that even I (seriously color-blind) could spot.
“Yes, I saw something about setting white balance, but figured the factory settings would have it covered…”

2. Superb subjects & compositions, but too grainy to ever use …
“That’s probably because I keep the ISO set to 1600 so I haven't got to worry about flash using up my batteries … “

3. Amazing submission … Technically spot on & material ideal for stock, except they were captured as medium jpgs …
“I didn’t want to run out of space on my memory stick … “

The last one might sound absolutely ridiculous but is a familiar story around here … The photographer had a $2000 camera and was shooting tons of great images each week with real stock potential, if he would only splurged another $50 on 2 extra memory sticks. (The average point-and- shoot nowadays captures a better quality file than the one this bloke was saving!)

So my final idea here is, if your whole photography experience is digital-auto, each chance you can, switch off the auto-everything and learn to do it yourself.

Even better, call into the local second-hand shop and pick up an old manual film camera … They’re giving them away these days … And put a few rolls of film thru it. You may learn more from those 100 shots than a year with your digital auto-everything!

OK, that’s just a few general ideas to get you started. Next time around I’ll cover 1 or 2 more specific elements we see in the top selling pictures and a straightforward trick to be sure you get them right ever single time.

For now, feel free to visit our blog and post your own thoughts on what makes a photographer a professional!

Matt Brading is a photographer with GlobalEye Photo Stock Agency who prefers to sell stock photos using the direct contact systems and content-based photo marketing. He also published instant photo web sites using the photo site secrets method.