Video = Fastest growing website feature for Small Business

Small Businesses need all the help they can get. A short video to tell your story not only educates your potential customers but helps personalize their shopping experience and will more likely bring them in your door. Here is a great article from Reelseo.com on why you should incorporate video into your website.

Video content on the Web? You'd better you bet.

A recent Kelsey Group study estimates that 74% of the online population is watching video content. Video has become part of the core behavior of all online demographics. Online video even challenges television. The projected growth is enormous; in 2009 there were 187 billion streams which is projected to double to 310 billion by 2013. That is an exponential number! The possibilities are endless for people, businesses and non-profits, large or small, who are thinking up new ways tell their story, advertise and increase their online presence and/or profits. Leveraging video-sharing sites like Youtube, Vimeo and Revver is also a fantastic way to boost search engine returns for your company because of the "add keyword tags" option on each of these sites. I witnessed firsthand the power of this tool in a previous role as Marketing Manager for Test Drive Videos. We were able to deliver top ten search engine results for a Portland Metro area Toyota dealer by strategic keyword placements within all their video content at the top five video-sharing sites. In today's marketplace it is no longer enough to just have a web presence. Having dynamic content, like video, is a crucial piece of the puzzle in the chaotic landscape of today's marketing strategies.

Sixteen - is the magic number.

For all of you video geeks out there! I just learned a little something important, and very cool. When exporting .mov files from Final Cut - via - Compressor, occasionally I would get this bizarro vertical green line down the right side of my frame. It was happening infrequently and no matter how I changed the settings, it was still there. Turns out, when you're using the H.264 codec (which I do for most everything), your video's final dimension needs to be divisible by the number 16. Apparently, H.264 encodes in blocks of 16, or something like that. In any event, since I frequently change the dimensions of my final file due to overall file size, or where it's going to be delivered, etc., I just had to incorporate a little math to make it work. And indeed, work it does! Example: A current project is being output at 520 x 390 pixels. This equals 202,800 pixels. Divide by 16 = 12,675. A whole number! God bless Apple forums.