Every few months we like to remind you that the internet is not just about your jewelry website, or about Facebook, or Twitter, Google+, or any number of blogging sites, etc., etc., etc... It's also about video.
Where would our Holiday 2011 Run-Up be without some new information about video? So let's get to it.
In the past, we heavily recommended the Flipcam as one of the best portable video cameras. Even though these hand held video cameras are still available today, Cisco has officially discontinued the product line and will not support it after December 2012. These are still fantastic cameras and if you can find one in a store lower than $150 you should surely grab it.
Those who are video camera challenged might have video capability already hidden in their pocket, that is, if you have a smartphone. Most smartphones have good video quality, or at least good enough for the videos you should be publishing for the holiday season.
Online videos do not have to be expensive commercial productions; in fact, the best advice we have is to do short presentation videos of the new inventory that just arrived so you can showcase it on your website.
To make it easy on yourself, you should publish your videos to YouTube (since it's free) and share the videos via email and on your website. In order to get your own creative video juices flowing, we're going to explain a few YouTube videos we found and reference the public statistics available for each.
Here's an example of a (rather long) video that showcases a princess diamond eternity engagement ring and matching wedding band. This video shows a rotating engagement ring, a presentation held in tweezers and on a hand. It's 2 minutes and 8 seconds long and should have been cut down to less than a minute.
http://youtu.be/mYP6p5LOvdA
This next video is more like the type we want you to create. It's only 28 seconds long and presents an 18K rose gold Cartier Love Ring. This video was launched on April 26, 2009 and has received visitors searching for "cartier love," "cartier ring," and "cartier love ring." On September 20, 2009 this video was viewed on a mobile device and has been viewed via mobile a total of 636 times! In fact, it's been viewed more times via mobile than any other single method.
http://youtu.be/SUiXFwsLxh4
This next video is a horrible compilation of many still photos of jewelry. We're guessing it was created as a promotional ad for something and was uploaded on September 20, 2010. What's interesting about the public statistics for this video is that on September 21, 2010 the video was first viewed on a mobile device and has been viewed via mobile 123 times in total since. Other viewers came from keyword searches for "cartier wedding band," "men wedding ring," and a few others.
http://youtu.be/KXEof930QHw
Here's another video that is a lousy compilation of rings. It's 2 minutes and 28 seconds long and shows photos of rings with animated descriptions for each ring. We can understand the images fading in and out, but if this video publisher was smart they would have used the built-in YouTube title feature instead of animated words in the video. (Refer back to our YouTube Nuggets from the first week of May 2011 for SEO and video directions.) It looks like this video was part of a pre-Holiday 2010 ad campaign. It was uploaded on November 6, 2010 and had its first view on November 9, amazingly enough from a mobile device. This video has attracted search attention from keywords "jewelry stores," "jewelry store," and "online jewelry store."
http://youtu.be/82OhFQ63RqI
If you happen to have TV talent in your blood, and a lot of money for a video production, you could create a professional quality video like this next one. This is a Q&A presentation, no doubt created to attract specific attention for "platinum ring" searches. The public statistics show search phrases of "platinum ring" and "platinum engagement ring." Continuing with our mobile madness we see since September 5, 2009 this video has been viewed 129 times via mobile.
http://youtu.be/YC-W9iodNfg
Lastly, if you do have your own TV commercial produced you should upload it to YouTube. Your advertising dollars will go a lot further with YouTube than the limited TV campaign you run. This video came up on our radar through a local search for "online jewelry store." The video is for our neighboring town of Wayne, NJ. Our YouTube search was able to geo-target our office as the neighboring town and offered this video in the results. This is a great video to end on, not because it's a highly produced video, but because it proves that you can also put up a video and have it served to people looking for "online jewelry store" in your area. This video was uploaded on September 18, 2011 (only 19 days ago from this Nugget) and already it has 346 views and is showing up in searches for "jewelry wayne" and "jewelry wayne nj." This could be you...
http://youtu.be/ZuJYxG5fBUU
After you capture and upload your video, you also need to give the video a good name, a long description, and a good set of keyword tags that associate with the video.
Since this is the Holiday 2011 Run-Up, we'd like to see you create videos that cover each of the following phrases, and you should use these phrases as your video titles:
{town name state} Holiday 2011 Gifts for Mom
{town name state} Holiday 2011 Gifts for Dad
{town name state} Holiday 2011 Charms
{town name state} Holiday 2011 Jewelry Gift Ideas
You should refer back to the previous Nuggets this week for other keyword phrase ideas.
You descriptions should also use a few of the previous keywords we've mentioned this week.
And finally, as part of your local search targeting, you need to make sure to geo-locate the video to your town.
So few jewelers are using these video techniques, and we really can't express how important it is to make time for this. Jewelry stores who don't get involved with video soon will find themselves wondering why their business evaporated so quickly while the rest of the economy is slowly crawling out of the recession.
