Going through just one additional step in your video publishing process can increase your exposure hundreds, thousands of times while at the same time increasing the number of times your material is referenced.

Breaking: Written Word Kills Video Star

While online video, the “second screen”, and video via mobile devices, the “third screen”, is all the rage and its market keeps growing virtually overnight, video consumption is far behind regular web content.

This is the perspective: about half of the Internet users in the USA view about 1-10 videos … per week – while the same average Internet user surfed 111 domain, 2554 pages in a month. That’s 576 pages in a week.

576 pages versus 10 videos – think about that before doing your next vlog (video blog) post.

Why Written Words Outperform Video

1. We like to gauge value by scanning a page; “is this of interest?” – you can’t scan video

2. Video requires extra equipment; text on page doesn’t

3. Text is copy-and-paste friendly, encouraging and enabling sharing

Video: Shared, Not Referenced

Sharing is forwarding a link to someone.

Referencing is you quoting someone somewhere and linking back to the source.

You don’t get that with video.

The best you can hope with video is that, like Lyndon does in the tweet above, it gets shared. Knowing Lyndon, this content must be top-notch or he wouldn’t share it but I can tell you two things about it:

1. I can’t quote anything from it here – because it was a video
2. I have about half an hour to an hour in the morning to do “stuff” before my workday begins; I don’t have time to watch a 4 minute video.

In that same time I could have read tens of pages – and that’s what I rather do then.

It’s the number 4 under “Why Written Words Outperfom Video”: video eats actual time. It’s not that it’s not worth the investment; it’s that we don’t get to gauge it (no scanning) so the safe bet is to click away.

How To Increase Video Views & Exposure

Video, audio, images, Flash: what they have in common is that on a web page they should play a supporting role, an almost decorative role. They should be the “also” not the “instead of”.

Once your video is made, go through the simple step of transcribing and possibly describing its content.

The added on-page text will:

• increase exposure as more people are aware of its content even without watching
• increase viewership as people get a chance to gauge their return on time invested
• increase backlinks as people will copy-and-paste actual quotes from your video
• increase the number of people coming to the video via search engines

Additional Reading

• Online Video Subtitles (Duh!)
• The Next Wave For Online Video
• YouTube Video Ad Optimization: Send in the SEMs!

Tweets by Elisa Gabbert (Wordstream Keyword Research) and Lyndon Antcliff (Cornwall SEO)

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6 brilliant comments

Very true

I'd venture that anything that is 'real time' is going to suffer in the face of 'written down' and 'search'.

Its about automation isn't it? The ability to write down your best stuff and have it available 24/7 to people who are specifically interested in what you have to say….that makes economic sense.

However, on one page, a customer video improved conversions by about 50%… so, salt and pepper for my hat please.

Matt
matt lambert recently posted: What should you blog about?

matt lambert  ^#

5,760%? I think you mean 5,660%

Nice absolute comparison, but is it relative? Have you considered that users browse more text pages than videos *because* there are more text pages than videos? Especially in search it seems, you've got Sage Lewis and Whitebored Friday (not a misspell) facing up to 100s of text posts per day!

Jack Adams  ^#

Those are valid insights, Jack.

My gut feeling is that, no, people browse more text pages because it's text. On-page text is the fastest consumable expansive content carrier. This 20 minute TED Talk, one of my favorites, can be shown on this one page.

Mind you, I don't want to argue do one instead of the other; I suggest to combine the two.

Ruud Hein  ^#

It is also valid that people can get access much faster to whole of the information via text based pages instead of waiting for the video first to load up and then see whats inside. Don't you think?

sticker printing  ^#

I was expecting an "epiphany" from the title, didn't realize you were simply going to suggest adding a transcript…. I guess it is that simple.

PowerPoint Templates  ^#

I wouldn't think videos were so "unpopular" – the numbers you have used really surprised me.
Great article.

Scott  ^#