This guest post is by Andy Havard, a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company that also does corporate vids.

You’ve no doubt seen the slick, professional video blogs Google and its representatives have churned out lately. Videos shot with pristine white backgrounds, inviting speakers and a whole lot of views. They’re impressive video blogs right? Well the following article explores how you can make the same professional looking corporate video blogs from the comfort of your own home.

Why Create A Video Blog

A video blog is a great way to showcase your brand or business as an approachable and engaging organisation. Corporate video productions allow organisations to connect with potential clients and show a human side to their brand or business. A prospective client will always feel more comfortable using an organisation if they feel they know the people behind it.

Sales pitches, adverts and marketing strategies can’t connect with an audience like a personal one-on-one video can. This is why so many organisations of all niches and sizes are starting to create video content to engage with their future customers.

Where Should I Film My Video Blog?

You don’t actually need to step foot outside your house or flat to find a great filming location. A garage, spare room or simply just a room that has a bit of free space to set up your equipment could work perfectly as a makeshift studio.

What Equipment Do I Need?

What Background Should I Use?

The infamous Google white background can make any video look powerful and professional. It’s a background technique used by many corporates in their video blogs and it works like a charm. Surprisingly it doesn’t actually cost an awful lot to create this effect. If you’ve got a bit of a budget then perhaps you can afford a film standard white screen, but you can create the same effect with some white sheets or even just by painting a wall in a glossy white shade.

What Camera Should I Film With?

Depending on the style of your video, whether you want to appear sat down for a desk-side chat or standing up for a more animated performance you may need some different equipment. If you’re sat down you could use anything from a standard Webcam to a high end film camera depending on your budget. If you’re presenting a standing presentation you’ll need either a Flip cam or a standard camcorder and you’ll definitely require a tripod to position it. If you’re shooting at desk height you may find you can rest your camera on an object nearby to save you purchasing a tripod. The quality of your images will depend on the quality of your camera, but even the most poor quality visuals can be boosted in post production.

What Lighting Should I Buy?

Your lighting is what makes both you and your background look slick. You can use anything from household standing lamps (around £40) to industry standard florescent lighting (around £100+ per light). The brightness of your image can also be boosted in post-production so don’t fret if the lighting isn’t as bright as you’d hoped.

You’ll need to position your lighting as follows; one light to the right of your background, one light to the left and one left next to your camera positioned at a 30 degree angle to the subject you’re filming (perhaps yourself). This three-point lighting will help to give you the best quality lighting for your video production.

Here’s a quick sketch of what I mean:

What Microphone Should I Use?

If you’re using a Webcam or any type of video camera you may find you have a built in microphone that works rather well. Whether you opt to buy an external microphone will depend on your cameras positioning and whether it can efficiently pick up your voice from your presenting position. If you have to get an external microphone choose a lapel/lav mic. These mics capture great quality audio and are very easy to hide during filming.

What Do I Do When I’ve Finished Recording?

When you’ve wrapped finishing your video blog it’s time to get editing and work on the post production side of your corporate video. You can get a variety of free editing software if you’re a Mac or Windows user (iMovie/Windows Movie Maker), but it might be worth paying for a more extensive piece of software (Adobe Premier), which will offer some extra tools in post production.

When you edit your video try and keep it as short as possible; short and snappy is always a winner.

The post production stage will allow you to:

• Increase the brightness on your video if your lighting wasn’t bright enough during filming,
• Alter any colour aspect of your image you wish to enhance whether you want to give your video a warm orange hue, a black and white finish or a neutral white hue to make the image seem more crisp
• Get rid of any shadows that are being cast during filming or reduce any light glares or reflections spoiling your shot.

Using such tools will help make your videos look as professional and polished as possible.

In Sum…

Follow these tips to create effective corporate video blogs that present your brand or business as a powerful and approachable organisation.

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Hey Ladies and Gents!

Did you miss SphinnCon 2011? Sucks to be you! Fortunately, Elan Perach got a bunch of pics, videos and slides from the show.

Here’s the video of my own preso, on delegating and scaling link building.

On a related note, if you’re in Israel and need SEO services (or in most other parts of the globe), PPC Proz are a sharp-minded shop you can check out!

If you like this post, check out more in the blogroll category, and get a free chapter from my book!

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• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In response to Google’s efforts to block access to Latma’s We Con The World parody, which is another proof of Google’s political bias and unreliability, I am going to go a month without Google search. I look forward to seeing how this works, and will report back. If you want to make a widget to this effect, or do the same, please feel free, and do let me know.

Again, this censuring of Latma shows the problem we have with Google’s dominance in search. If you rely on the information highway for access to information, and people put roadblocks up on certain branches of the highway, the highway’s very essence is undermined.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I knew for a while that I wanted to try out UserTesting.com, based on the referrals from my friends at Closed Loop Marketing and various blogs on usability I read (Future Now, Usability Post), but I never really had the opportunity to go ahead and get on it.

A former client wanted to to hire me again for SEO, despite the higher return provided by usability / conversion optimization, so I decided I’d go ahead and put the site to the test and see if it might not convince him of the value in usability testing.

(They’re a former client because I let them go once they were ranking well and I wanted to work on other projects.)

The site in question is for this downtown Montreal hotel, the Hotel de Paris. (Yes, I realize Montreal is not Paris; that’s the original name.)

Rather than drone on about how incredibly valuable the service was, I’m going to share the raw data of 1 of the users I tested and let that speak for itself.

And the written summary provided by Tatiana, the tester:

What would have caused you to leave this site?

* I really wanted to see the special offers for this site, but clicking on that didn’t bring anything up.

* The text was also hard to read as there wasn’t much contrast between the background and the text colour on most of the pages, and all of the lists were horizontal (prose format) instead of vertical (bulleted lists) which saves space but makes it hard to quickly compare different choices.

* Having to agree to a policy that is written with abbreviations that I can’t decipher would have made me leave for a site where I didn’t have to guess what I was agreeing to.

* I don’t really like the idea of making an account on a site that I may only use once or at most once per year. I have enough accounts to keep track of online as it is.

What other ideas do you have about how this site could be improved?

* I had a real problem making comparisons between options on this site because of the way the information was formatted which started to become quite frustrating. Maybe adding icons or reformatting the lists so that they can be easily scanned would help.

[Me: Reformatting in a vertical table format for easy scanning would probably be a positive change; icons can help too if the legend explaining them is obvious enough.]

* The pictures on the front page were nice, but it wasn’t clear what the second picture was. It looked like a restaurant of some sort but didn’t say where. A label of some kind would have helped.

What did you like about the site?

* I liked that you could book online (although some of the dropdown menus didn’t work) and that availability was shown on the calendar.
* I liked that I could see the price breakdown before I paid. Especially since that seems to be the only place to find out about the taxes being charged and because the price looked wrong and it was a good way to check the calculations.

Anything else you would like to say to the owner of the site?

* I may have this wrong, but to me ‘double occupancy @ $89′ always meant that the price listed was per person (so the price for the room was 2x$89). But on your site when I book a room for two people, the price breakdown at ordering time shows 1x$89 for that same room for two people.

This seems wrong and the discrepancy affected which room I booked.

My Conclusion: I love the service and plan to use it much more in the future!

While I’d picked up some things like the non-working special offers button and limited amount of room pictures, other problems she raised were novel to me.

To wit:

- I hadn’t considered that outsiders to the hotel wouldn’t know there’s a little restaurant/bistro on the premises. Tatiana’s confusion about the bistro picture shows a need for clearer captions than “Experience the charm of Montreal.”

To the same effect, the separate explanation about the bistro on the Hotel Highlights page is clearly insufficient.

- The pricing clarity is obviously an essential issue for any online transaction, but as I’m single and only book rooms for one person, the per person/double occupancy pricing problem never occurred to me.

Other problems I noticed myself while reviewing the site, but this test clarified their importance.

- I guessed that the abbreviation Cxl probably meant cancel. But outsiders to the hospitality industry can’t be expected to know insider jargon.

(This is also true for mystery meat navigation, like date based blog archives.) Furthermore, as Tatiana’s video and written report highlight, this is something that could lose the sale.

- In the same vein, the pricing clarity thing is immensely important because you’re affecting your average order size if people think the rates are per person instead of the rate for the room.

The bottom line is that UserTesting.com is an easy way to double your bottom line.

If you liked this case study and usability  tool review, add my rss feed to your reader.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

No, you shouldn’t buy GenericKeyword.ExoticExtension domain names. The only people making money there are ICANN and the registrars responsible for those extensions. This includes extensins like .pro, .aero, .travel, .asia, .me etc. Watch my new video for more. The production quality isn’t tremendous, but I’m slowly getting the hang of this.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I get into:

• widget ecommerce, where people can buy directly off an affiliate‘s site through secure, embedded widgets,
• price match guarantees on shipping to avoid folks abandoning their cart at checkout to go see if other retailers ship for less,
• alternative payment methods such as cell phone minutes and how cell phones may become the credit cards of the future.

The audio’s not perfect because I had to re-record it due to a little lag between the video and audio in the original, where my lips moved a split second before the audio was heard. (I’m faster than the speed of sound! )

Would love to hear your reactions!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.