One of the largest challenges a business owner faces is capturing the attention of a customer or viewer long enough to tell your story and make them understand what your business is about. Video allows you to do this in a limited space and time. You can tell a lengthy story in a condensed and appealing manner. Video is often seen as a costly endeavor, but short, well planned videos can be put together professionally for under $5000. As business owners, you must always remember the quality of the video and website should be on par with the quality of …

This is the million dollar question — well, maybe not a million dollars, but quality video isn’t cheap. So making a good decision about whether to pursue a video production project or not is important because the stakes are high. In my experience, creating video content for a client’s website often costs more than 25% of the total cost of producing the website in the first place. Logically speaking, the video content should account for a great deal of the overall impact and effectiveness of the site.

Let’s take, for instance, a website that is built around marketing a single product. …

This week’s vein of online ore can be found at http://vimeo.com

Vimeo is a high definition, community driven video sharing site.  While most video sharing sites limit the quality or length of the clips you upload, Vimeo allows the full 1280×720 resolution supported by HD TVs and monitors.

As with other video sharing sites, you can embed your favorite clips into your own website, indicate which films you like, and leave comments for the video creator and the other community members who like their work.

And speaking of community, Vimeo’s is highly collaborative, creative, and encouraging  - with their …

This is the third part of a 3-part blog series focusing on producing dynamite video footage for your website while getting the most bang for your buck.

In the second installment, I offered a number of tips for the production phase. In this installment, I address the post-production phase, i.e. editing. Remember, the tips I provide below are based on a conventional corporate-video formula intended to yield about 5 minutes of final, edited video footage. Remember, they are just guidelines and may not apply to every project.

Post Production

Keep Graphics Simple

Flying, flipping motion graphics, even from templates, take lots …

This is the first part of a 3-part blog series focusing on producing dynamite video footage for your website while getting the most bang for your buck.

The tips I provide below are based on a conventional corporate-video formula intended to yield about 5 minutes of final, edited video footage. They are just guidelines and as such, you can tweak them to fit your situation.

Pre-Production

Secure 5 Interviewees
3 happy customers and 2 expert employees. Getting customers is often challenging …

I’d like to thank Debbie Fried (@DebbieFried) for pointing me towards this video of Don McMillan’s “How Not to do PowerPowerpoint” stand-up routine. It was fun to watch and reminded me of the conversations I had with our own Scott Stiefvater as he was preparing for MB/I’s “Avoid Causing Death by PowerPoint” class.

If That’s Bad, What’s Good?

Well, whenever someone asks me what I think a PowerPoint presentation should look like, I can’t help …

For the past two months the Small Business Administration has been posting informational and advice videos to YouTube.  Last week they went a step further and formed an SBA Channel on the video sharing service.

The Delivering Success series, which form the bulk of the channel’s current content, offers tips on topics ranging from hiring, to marketing, to mission adaptability.

These videos on their own would be a sufficient reason to visit the SBA Chanel on YouTube, but there is another lesson that can be learned while there.

While on YouTube you may also look at the historical viewership data of each video.  …