Top Reasons to Add a Video to Your Squeeze Page
Show Your Readers the Real You!
Whether it’s promotional content, short films, or unique skills that are on display, videos are “in” more than ever. Placing a video on your squeeze page should be very high on your to-do list, even if you’re just starting out in your business. People have been glued to TV screens since the middle of the 20th century, so it’s time to join in and…
Get You on the Tube!
With the help of a simple and impactful video on your squeeze page, you’re only further establishing yourself as a force to be reckoned with in your niche. This personal touch can add a lot of value to your site and ultimately your business.
Here’s a list of top reasons for why you need to add a video to your squeeze page.
1. You Get to Reveal Yourself Professionally: Videos are an excellent way to increase your exposure as an author because they show your visitors what you’re all about in an easy way. You don’t have to go door to door or put your face on a billboard. You’re able to expose your strengths in a unique way by giving them a sneak peak of your personality. Your creativity and how you present your message are all up to you. Having your company’s vision in the video will also add to your professionalism. Just be sure to leave your ego at the door and let anyone and everyone listen to your message.
2. It Instantly Improves Your Design: Think back on a squeeze page you came across that had poor design. Did it only give you minimal information followed by the usual, “enter your email here” text field? Boring! When you visit these pages, unless you’re already sold on the offer, they’re not very appealing for prospective customers. Adding a video is an excellent way to increase the appeal and layout of your site. Your design needs to be in top form, even on mobile devices. You can read more about the topic of responsive web design here.
3. People Are Getting Lazier: It’s no secret that the majority of people would rather watch a video than read about the same topic. Viral videos help promote your brand and can be done in an entertaining way. You don’t hear about many viral articles… if you do, they end up on video the next day and the video is what gets shared around the web. People are more patient to view videos because they can do something that the written word cannot: entertain audiences with live action. Continue to spend your time writing and producing quality content. However, think about what bits and pieces of content are going to be added to your next video.
4. You Can Repurpose the Video: Even though you have the freedom to include any details you’d like, it’s important that your presentation be clear. Your video quality should be easy on the eyes and your material should be organized in a professional manner. These things are important not only for your site, but for all of the other ways you can repurpose this video. You can include it on your company blog, on social media sites, as a link in an ebook or other mediums that are able to show video. Or course, the best way to let your readers see your video is still on your squeeze page through a link in your article.
5. Other Companies Will Take Notice: You never know what type of visitors will come to your site. You may get the casual browser who stumbled upon your page, or you could get a respectable businessperson who’s looking for a fresh advertising opportunity. Your video should stand out and display your talents. Sure, you want to grab contact information from potential customers, but the bigger fish is your competition who could be interested in joining forces.
6. It’s Easy to Create: If you think creating a video for your squeeze page is too time consuming or difficult, quit the negative talk! Any smartphone that came out in the last 5 years will most likely produce a video with good enough quality. Don’t worry about the extra time it may take in creating the content in your video; it will be worth it in the end. You should focus on what you’re going to say, what tips or lessons you can offer, or how cool it will be to showcase your skills and past achievements on video. If you’re still under the impression that you need to be an expert at EVERYTHING, read our article 5 Talents Content Writers Don’t Need to Succeed to give you some clarity.
7. You’re Free to Promote Your Business: Every company wants to get the word out there on their products, or to create buzz around a new business offer. Since this video will be on your squeeze page and not in an article submission, you are free to promote yourself as well as your business. You can have a brand new product, your bread and butter products, or testimonials from satisfied customers. Try to answer questions about yourself and your company without having to be asked. This is your chance to quickly promote your products and services in a fun and enjoyable way.
These were just a few of the reasons why you should focus your attention on videos on your sites. You may not have the itch to put yourself behind (or in front of!) a video camera or smartphone yet, but maybe someone you know has experience and can lend a hand! If you’re looking for other ways to improve your squeeze page, this blog will certainly get you started.
What are your thoughts on adding videos to your squeeze page? Do you agree they are relevant, or do you think otherwise?
Share in the comments below!
David,
Great response. I agree with many of your suggestions, and thank you for increasing the length of our blog! It’s true that creating a video that is both visually appealing and gets to the point in a professional way can be challenging. Our point was to encourage readers to try it, as it is much easier to film a video now more than ever. Maybe we’ll offer tips on “how to create a video” in a future blog. Keep the comments coming!
June 7, 2015 at 6:25 PM[Reply]
I’d even say that you don’t even need to shoot a video of yourself. I made mine on my Web site by collecting telling pictures that illustrated my message and superimposing the text they were meant to illustrate, and I chose a dramatic piece of music for the audio. I got 150 subscribers in 2 days, so it must have had its own little sucess :-) but of course making this kind of video takes quite some time:
– scripting the video: choosing the text for the message, determining for each sentence the kind of picture that goes together with it
– researching the Web for appropriate pictures
– adding them and editing them one by one
– superimposing each text, determining the length of each sequence
– again, researching the Web for an appropriate piece of music that fits the progression of the message
– above all, seeing that the message remains readable!
It does take some time, but it is not impossible to realise even if you have close to no experience creating videos (which was my case when I did mine!).
September 6, 2015 at 11:52 PM[Reply]
Thanks for that good idea, Jackie, and for the tips on how to make it work.
I tend not to use these – though they work well – for two reasons: the time it takes, as you say; and the copyright problem, which can also be time consuming to solve (which is why I have collections of free images and music).
So a suggestion to any writers who plan to use images and music on the web:
If you use stuff you find on the web for a small presentation locally and offline, it might be OK (educational use?) But if you put up something on the web for anyone to find, the owners of any copyright you break will quite likely chase you, and if they’re a big corporation, you may well get a punitive bill which you will have to pay to avoid being chased in court for stealing their property.
Fair’s fair: if YOU make a great commercial presentation which then gets wide circulation, you’ll be pretty angry if other people rip it off and present it as their own work, when you could be improving the income from your hard work by charging them a small sum to use it legally. So give others the same respect. Still pictures, video clips and music are all likely to be under copyright. Google and other search engines do make it quite easy to discover if copyright exists; and how to get permission if it does: it will cost more if a wide audience is expected or if you could make a lot of money using their work.
But don’t just cheat: do as you would be done by!
September 8, 2015 at 11:02 AM[Reply]
Hi there David :-)
I am well aware of the copyright issue. I used quite a lot of free stuff to make my video. However, copyright is tricky both ways: once a copyrighted piece has been edited first, the edited piece is no longer under copyright. This goes so far that for text, changing a single comma is enough for the edited piece to be considered a different text! For images, cropping, changing color, hue, lighting, resolution… would do the job as well. Time to learn how to use Photoshop ;-) If Coca-Cola copyrighted a lot of different versions of their famous logo, they did it for a reason!
Of course it means, once again, some amount of additional work and time… Whichever way you go, this route is not for the lazy ;-) But I think it is rewarding :-)
Thanks for having taken the time to comment on my two cents’ worth.
September 10, 2015 at 8:58 PM[Reply]
Hi, Jackie.
I had to research this one again to be sure, but sorry, you’re wrong about copyright: sue-yo-ass-off wrong!
“once a copyrighted piece has been edited first, the edited piece is no longer under copyright. This goes so far that for text, changing a single comma is enough for the edited piece to be considered a different text!”
This is simply not true, Jackie. There are computer programs out there solely to ‘spin’ text: changing as many words as possible without changing the sense. The aim is to make the work unrecognizable, so the the re-publisher doesn’t get sued. Apart from the fact that the text produced is terrible, it doesn’t break copyright; if the original author can show derivation, which isn’t difficult, it’s damages time! That goes for long quotes and editing of any kind. You’ll be relieved to know that your copyrighted articles (and scripts of your videos) are pretty-well bomb-proof copyrighted simply by the fact that they got published. Getting those damages paid is another matter, of course.
“For images, cropping, changing color, hue, lighting, resolution… would do the job as well. Time to learn how to use Photoshop ;-) ”
Same goes for images. The changes you suggest may make it harder to catch the copying, but once spotted, it isn’t hard for an expert to absolutely prove the theft, and usually easy for a normal human to say, “Yeah, that’s a steal.”
There’s lots about this on the web, but here’s a quick quote from US Copyright Law (similar throughout the world, and copyright applies worldwide):
§102. Subject matter of copyright: In general
(a) Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include the following categories:
(1) literary works;
(2) musical works, including any accompanying words;
(3) dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
(4) pantomimes and choreographic works;
(5) pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;
(6) motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
(7) sound recordings; and
(8) architectural works.
(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
Finally, this Amex article (why them? I dunno) gives a quick summary from an expert:
September 11, 2015 at 12:26 PMhttps://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/sharing-vs-stealing-5-myths-and-legal-truths-about-online-copyrights/
[Reply]
Now THAT’s a relief for sure :-)
In fact this is where I got my info from. In a former life I worked in the field of technology transfer, and one of my colleagues was a certified lawyer and claimed that IP issues were her speciality, and that’s what she told me about text so being no lawyer myself, I trusted her word. So much for trust!
I think I see what you mean by article spinning software. Are they those articles that mix up things and place an expression about the topic of an article in the midst of a totally irrelevant context – not to mention spelling, grammar and syntax mistakes by the dozen? I came across such articles on review sites. Yikes! How they can even be called “articles” is beyond my comprehension. Surely their “authors” don’t even read the software’s production to let those pass as such! :-(
Once again thanks for taking the time to research the matter and set things right :-)
September 13, 2015 at 5:31 PM[Reply]
That’s it, Jackie. If you google it, you’ll find lots of spinning programs for sale – and they’re all rubbish!
Years ago I got fascinated by Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is, in effect, a hiring website where people get paid a few cents for performing simple and sometimes not-so-simple tasks that would be almost impossible for a machine to do (a kind of super Turing Test). Amazon hosts these for the commissioner. One set, now stopped, was to identify street furniture, utility covers, signs and such things on a Google Street Level photo, so that the utility companies could buy the data for their employees to use. I think now that we were training some powerful Google computers to take it over!
It’s amazing how many of these tasks, though, were for rewriting a paragraph of text so that it was completely different but said the same thing. I got quickly bored, but you can see where this is going… Still, I earned over $200 doing the Google thing, enjoying myself as I did so. Take a look at the tasks available today, though – there are plenty of spinning jobs that would make a stolen article hard to spot (though provable by analysis).
September 13, 2015 at 6:08 PM[Reply]