So you have a great looking website that works well, has large beautiful photos, some decent textual content, and you’ve put some thought into SEO. You’re getting some traffic, but for some reason, it’s not translating into sales. For some reason, the people that go to your site don’t seem to be staying on your site.

Don’t panic. This isn’t something that you can’t do anything about. If your design was done well, and you aren’t using a template site like Joomla or Drupal, then you’ve set yourself up well for success. There’s nothing holding you back. At this point, it’s all about content. One approach, which we talked about last week, is to implement a blog, which imparts bite sized segments of important information to your visitors in an easy to navigate format. This is a great idea, and you should go and get one yesterday.

What your site really needs to keep up with your audience, and competitors, is video. Video blogs are an even better idea than written blogs. Better yet, use video throughout your site. Do you have paragraphs of text highlighting the benefits of your products? That’s great! Now stick a video at the top of those paragraphs for today’s customers that would prefer to watch rather than read, and show off your product while you’re at it. There are so many different ways you could use video to spice up your website and marketing.

Now, you may be thinking that this all sounds great, but you don’t have any knowledge when it comes to video production. Where do you even start? And it is true that video production has a lot to it; however that doesn’t mean that your videos have to be complicated to make.

Video blogs for instance, can be achieved by using the video feature on your iPhone or iPad, or an HD web cam. You just have to come up with your script, practice it, and you could have a very simple video blog. Want to make something a little nicer? These days you can get pretty fully featured video editing software that isn’t very expensive and have a relatively easy learning curve that can add some extra pizazz. If you’re looking for more of a “pro” look, without the “pro” price you can look into getting a better HD camera such as many of the consumer DSLR’s that have video capabilities. One of our partners will even take the video that you shot yourself, and edit it for you, taking a lot of the learning curb out of the equation.

You may also want a video with real professional production values, and for something like that, you would want to contact our partners at Story Sellers. The point I am trying to make, is that depending on your needs and budget, there are ways for you to add video content to your site. Depending on your budget, the major difference in approaches will be more of a difference of how much of your time it takes up. Doing it yourself will take a lot of time because you still have to figure out what it is you don’t know. Having an expert lead you through it will take almost no time at all.

Adding video to your site will most definitely pay off. Video has replaced text as the primary method of distributing information, and every day you don’t use it, you’re getting more and more behind. It isn’t the way of the future; it’s the way of now.