So lets first start with search engine optimization. When I first built a blog called SpeechRep.com I only wanted a site that allowed me to write simple posts and comment on others work. It does just that. Simple stuff. Then I wanted to rank for a simple keyword phrase “Internet Marketing Consultant.” I made a feeble attempt to do that knowing full well I did not care if I did or not, and all the while knowing exactly what I had to do to rank for it. The reason I bring this up is I got a call the other day. Tim Pipher of Major League Video said he was perusing the web and found me by typing in “internet marketing consultant.”

What is interesting about this is I potentially did not find a customer, but a supplier using SEO. Cost = $0.00 and a hour plus of simple SEO and maybe a few links from some articles I wrote. It gets more interesting. Tim has a company called South Eastern Studios. These guys have spent a small fortune building a studio with all of the special effects and hi-def camera equipment and on air talent. So at the end of the day you can get a super high quality video for less than a $1,000 bucks for a minutes or less. People do business with people they know like and trust, online video does a great job at communicating this.

What can this do for you? It can even the playing field with your competitors as a small business competing with players with bigger budgets. Tim is going to drive the profits out of many typical DRTV production studios and other studios competing for the same advertising dollars. What will make Tim’s business fly or not are the business processes he has in place to actually produce the videos or the direct response commercials. He is going to have to do volume and have smooth production processes to make this all work profitably.

In this brilliant article The Collapse of Complex Business Models by Clay Shirky he surmises what the media executives are thinking, “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.” I think the last sentence is a pure cultural thinking problem and should read, “And we won’t do that.” Every blogger and Twitter user is in some way giving Rupert Murdoch a run for his money. While some of might not pay for “journalism,” my question is do we need to pay for journalism? And is what we were being force-fed on i.e. TV News and the Newspapers “journalism” at all? The guy who sent the Tweet of the US Air plane in the Hudson published “news.” Does that make him a “journalist? Hell no, but do we need a professional journalist to then spin the “story” dozens of different ways and then call it “news,” and is that worth paying for? Maybe not.

So if the media can’t get the advertisers to pay the “old cheap” prices they were charging, guess what? More of “the news” will move into the studio and be manufactured infotainment in my view.

Now advertisers have two options, pay “the new cheap” rates and pay “the new cheap” production rates and create their own channels and create their own “online media” with Tim and Southeastern Studios.

(Note how this is wreaking havoc in the news industry). It is easy to write and post text and it is also easy to record and post video. However video has different components that make it not as easy for some to be able to produce, or at least that is the appearance. At the end of the day it is super easy to produce and as you can see by some of the online video statistics below from comScore it is generating some significant volume.

• Online video viewers are 20% more likely to make a purchase online
• 16.8 Billion Online Video Streams
• 151 Million people can be reached 110 times per month
• Online Video can reach 70-80% on internet users per month
• Total Online Internet Videos are up over 66% in the past 15 months as of April 2009
• Online Video is also big in Europe as well as the US
• Online Video is big across all age categories
• Youtube videos are up 98% in 15 months
• Online Video Advertising is in the Early Stages

While it is “nice” to see some of these exciting numbers the real goal is to get the video content message or advertisement into the right viewers hand and this is something that we are doing at Direct Response Television Advertising Agency. Distribution is key. testing tracking and measuring is also as important if not more important. Don’t forget the message in the video as well does it have a call to action to get the user to take the action to click or call?

If you want to have a little fun to see what we are talking about do a Google search for Big Fish. Note the video results above the fold (no scrolling on my computer hopefully you have the same). The idea is to get your message in a similar place in the SERP’s.

In most cases we won’t even send the user to a web page but directly to a telephone so they can talk to a customer service person and they can close the deal or capture the lead.