Online video is a compelling way to draw and maintain traffic to your website. The social aspects allowing others to copy and paste the video into their own websites or blogs using the embedding code can dramatically increase the viewing of the video, and possibly garner greater traffic to your website.

Implementing videos needs to be done carefully however, as to not turn away clients, here are some things to consider when using videos on your homepage:

First, focus on the quality of the content over the quality of production. The messaging is most important. This video is your opportunity to connect with your audience, so the majority of time spent on creating the video should be put into what it is you are communicating. Certainly, it helps to have full HD, professional sound, lighting, acting, etc.. but always keep in mind that it’s the quality of the messaging that matters most.

Second and perhaps most important, is the length of time of your video. Keep in mind, this video is on your homepage, and not deep into your website, so most likely, these will be first time initial visitors to your website. You don’t want to scare them away, so keep the video short, sweet and to the point.

You might be intersted in knowing what the average visitors attention span is when watching online videos. It turns out that nearly 90% of visitors will only watch about 10 seconds worth of the video.  Approximately 46% of your audience wil stick around for the full minute, and only 10% will stay to watch 5 minutes worth of your video. So make it impracting

Lastly, when deciding what type of video to serve up, you need to weigh several factors, perhaps the most overlooked is the questions of, who is delivering the messaging. Is it authoritarian, such as a newscaster, a business professional, an authority figure who is giving you advice. Or is it more personal, and social in nature, like the spokesperson could be a friend or spouse. Research the demographics you want to target, and make sure you have the right spokesperson speaking to the right audience.

According to a 2010 AffStat Report, approximately 30% of affiliate marketers reported that they would be integrating video into their affiliate marketing plans. As creating and editing videos becomes easier, we would expect to see this number grow.

Source: http://blog.clickbooth.com/2010/06/15/videos-landing-page/

Dave Lakhani has an interesting post on the future of marketing and mass communication in which he coorelates it with singularity.

So as I studied The Singularity it occurred to me that the answer to how do you get your message to the masses and have it be heard most likely won’t be answered by us, it is much more likely to be answered by the individuals collectively that we hope to communicate to. In fact, it is my belief that another form of singularity will occur, in which potential customers will become evermore sophisticated in their ability to filter and consolidate information. As they become more sophisticated, they create individual influence streams from which they get all of their information, information that is highly personalized and highly selected. Rather than trying to increase the number of people they follow they become increasingly selective about who they receive information from ultimately reducing the noise while becoming much more connected to the channel through which they receive information. RSS was the first glimpse and promise of the idea that you could consolidate the information that you wanted into one single feed. In social media FriendFeed is trying to do that. And overall web wide Twine is also trying to do it. But for most consumers they don’t go far enough.