YouTube Announce Channel for Non-Profit Organisations

This announcement by Google caught my eye today as it relates to an article I wrote last week about clients using video on their web site and how services such as YouTube have now made that very easy to achieve.

Google has just launched a free service which provides non-profit organisations with their own YouTube channel. Many of my clients are non-profit and while it looks like the offer only applies to non-profits in the USA at the moment, it’s bound to rolled out in Europe sooner or later.

But YouTube is free I hear you cry. True, and that was the whole point of my article last week. But they are offering more than a free account. They are offering a channel. This means you benefit of your own dedicated, branded area on YouTube, promotion of your content on premium areas of YouTube and support in professional productions.

Of course Google are very smart people and this package comes with a very nice sweetener. They have included free on-line donation processing using Google Checkout, their own version or PayPal / World Pay etc. Donation processing is free with the package until at least the end of 2008.

You can read their full announcement here googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/youtube-and-checkout-for-non-profit.html

You can find out more about the initiative at youtube.com/nonprofits

Filed under: NGO, Promoting Your Website and Organisation , charity campaigns, ngos, non-profit associations, not for profit, video, youtube

It’s Not All About The Home Page

Your web site isn’t a book. It’s not linear like a book. People don’t necessarily start at the beginning and take a series of predictable paths through your web site.

Once established, it is high likely that the majority of your visitors will not enter your web site via the home page. That’s a good thing. From the visitor statistics that I collect on client sites I usually see that the home page is the entry page for between 20-30% of their visitors. This is particularly the case for those sites publishing regular and useful content.

Now, this often comes as a surprise to many web site owners. Some of them find it a bit difficult to get used to, but, again I say, it is a good thing. It means that your web site is doing well. It means that people are finding exactly what they want via a search engine such as Google and clicking directly through to the relevant page. It probably also means that other sites are linking directly to useful pages on your web site.

The natural inclination of a web site owner is to place new or important information on the home page and be done with it. This type of strategy can actually reduce the potential visibility of important information.

Let’s illustrate this with a scenario.

Imagine you sell digital cameras on your web site and your site has been well designed so that it’s optimised for search engines. You are about to have a sale and want all visitors to your web site to know about it. If you are a big name brand then people may well just type the address of your web site into their browser or search for your company by name. However, most companies are not in that luxurious position.

Many people searching for information about a digital camera would use a specific brand and model e.g. Nikon D80 as their search term. In this case, when links to your web site appear in the search engine results, it is likely that they will choose to click through to the page on your web site that deals specifically with that camera. If the information about your sale only appears on your home page then this information will only be seen if the customer also visits your home page.

Now you could argue that the customer has found the information they want and will buy the camera and doesn’t need to know about the sale, but they may not just be visiting the site with the intention to buy. If the information about the sale is placed in a part of the site that is common to all pages such as the masthead, navigation or a sidebar then everyone will see it no matter how they enter your web site.

So remember, placing something on the home page provides no guarantees that it will be seen by all your visitors.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website , home page design, search engine visibility, web design, web marketing, web site navigation, writing for the web

Who Dares Wins! Time For Video On Your Web Site

Or “How the SAS can help improve your web site.”

Okay, so I’m not really referring to the UK’s Special Air Service, but rather, SaaS or Software as a Service. In particular I’m talking about services that have removed so many of the technical barriers of putting video on your website.

Software as a Service is nothing particularly new, but it is now a lot more prevalent. Many of you probably use it in one form or another in your daily lives. Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are all examples of Software as a Service because we can access them from anywhere using only a web browser. They replace or complement traditional software on our computers such as Outlook. The companies that provide them store our email on their servers.

It’s the same with services such as Google Maps. In the past, if we wanted to look up a location or route using software we had to buy and install a programme on our computer, now we just go to the Google Maps site, enter and address and it shows us a map. We can also access the Google Maps service directly from our own web sites, putting maps on our contact pages etc.

So while the differences are subtle, Software as a Service can usually offer us greater flexibility.

Time for Video

I’m not usually one for recommending technologies to clients as I feel that it sometimes places them in a position where they feel they have to have a feature, but they don’t have the resources to fund it or the time to create even more content.

My experience has shown that initial enthusiasm for a new trend or must have feature wanes and can lead to very out of date content or very blank pages. So my approach is usually to let clients suggest new features when they are ready and have the capacity.

But from time to time we reach a tipping point where visitors to our web sites expect to see certain things. They just become part of the constantly evolving visual language of web sites.

Nowadays if a visitor to your site sees

or

they know to click on the play button if they want to see the video. It has moved from the realm of the techie to become second nature.

Most of our web site visitors now access the internet using broadband so there’s no waiting for vidoe to load in the background, making video much more viable.

Good video content also generates word of mouth recommendations especially if you can convey something very simply or powerfully in a short amount of time.

Good video content on your site can help differentiate you from the rest of the crowd.

How YouTube Has Changed Our Options For Using Video

There’s nothing new about any of this though. Video has been around for ages. Video on web sites has become more and more common. What has changed is the cost and ease of integrating video.

Freely available services such as YouTube have massively reduced the costs of integrating video into your web site.

Services like YouTube take away a lot of the burden and risk of adding video to your web site because they have created the specialist infrastructure necessary to ensure smooth delivery of video content from your web site.

Because YouTube host the video files that you want your customers, members or employees to see, the risk and cost of having to invest in the capacity to deliver video to many concurrent users is removed. They take the strain.

However, because the service is provided for free, there are certain limitations on the video files they will host for free.

• Each video must be less than 100MB
• Each video must be less than 10 minutes long

In my opinion these limitations are just what the doctor ordered. They impose a structure and discipline on your project that will benefit it and ultimately help you to keep your message focussed. By removing the opportunity to simply upload all 2 hours of the Chairman’s latest AGM address (riveting though that might be), you have to think carefully about your audience and how to condense your message into the most pertinent highlights.

New Audiences

Another advantage of using a service such as YouTube is that YouTube is a web site in its own right. It’s a searchable web site where people can find instructional videos on topics that interest them (no really, there is some good stuff on there!). Like any other web site, we end up browsing, discovering new things and stumbling across new things we didn’t necessarily set out to find in the first place. Therefore placing your video content on YouTube offers you another opportunity to reach an audience that may not seek out your web site for information. Take this a step further and people can also place your video content on their web sites. “Letting go” of your content in that way can be a bit scary, but can bring great benefits if you have something useful to say.

Of course, when you upload videos to YouTube, you don’t have to place them all in the public domain, so you don’t lose all control. Likewise, on your own web site, you can place videos in areas of your site to which only registered customers or employees have access.

Video presents many opportunities and fresh ways to deliver your message, entice your customers or train your staff. Now you just need something to say! Over to you dear client..

Filed under: How To Manage A Website , online video, video, web marketing, youtube