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If you are advertising on the internet, then you already know about the cost of buying advertising such as banner ads, pop up ads, and Google Adwords text ads. Well, you may find this hard to believe but video advertising is twice as effective as those methods.

Don’t believe me?

Test it! Try video ads for one month and compare your stats to your old advertising methods. You will find that you will get many more views with video advertising than with plain text advertising.

Of course, the cost will depend on how you wish to use the video to market your business. For example, if you simply upload the video to your website, it won’t cost you anything (except hosting fees, which you are already paying if you already have a website).

If you want a more professional looking video for your website, there are plenty of companies out there that will provide this for you. It’s your choice: you can have a really professional video ad or you can have a homemade video ad. You should test this, but in some niches the homemade video ad will draw more attention (and more views) as it is perceived as more “believable”.

If you want to advertise for free, there are plenty of places on the internet where you can post your video ads for free. These sites will also give you stats on how many people have viewed your video. Some video hosting websites even allow viewers to rate your video and leave comments too.

It will cost you slightly more to have your videos featured on other websites. If you want to see how effective this is, test it. Effectiveness will vary from niche to niche and from site to site.

There are many professional companies that can help you out with video advertising. They can offer everything from creating the video, uploading the video to the proper websites, and including the video in e-mails to your clients.

Many businesses keep a database of their customers. You can either hire a professional to email your clients your advertising video or do it yourself to save even more money.

There are plenty of ways that you can be creative in your video ads. I recently witnessed a very effective and clever use of online video advertising. I was browsing online for shower curtains when I found this website that was quite different from all the others. This particular website had a video that featured a scene from the movie “Psycho.”

Yes, that famous shower scene. The caption under the video was “Remember when the only thing you had to fear about the shower was….” and then it stopped. The video then showed the familiar scene of Janet Leigh in the shower and “Mother” coming through the door with the knife. It was clever, entertaining and certainly caught my attention. In fact, I ended up buying my shower curtain from this particular website.

You may be thinking, “How can they do that?”

Well, the film “Psycho” is not in the public domain so the website had to pay synchronization rights to the producer of “Psycho” in order to use the shower clip. But the cool thing is that synchronization rights on film are based upon the actual footage used … not the whole video. So the website did not have to pay for the rights for the entire film, just the brief portion of the shower scene.

Now if you have a clever imagination, you can film your own video that will attract attention to your project in the way that this shower curtain company did. You can purchase rights from film producers if you want, or you can simply make up your own video.

Be aware that films created before 1923 are in the public domain. Many of the films published from 1923 to 1963 are public domain material, BUT be sure to check before you use it! You can check this with the US Copyright Office.

Now that you have learned the many benefits of using video advertising, you are probably wondering how to begin. This depends upon whether you want to self market your video on your website or if you want to use an internet advertising agency to market the video for you.

The one way a business knows if its advertising is succeeding on the internet is through statistics. For example, if you are advertising on Google, you get reports on the number of times your video ad was clicked on each month. Then you will have to pay accordingly, and Google will share a percentage of that revenue with those websites that allowed Google to place your video ad on their site.

It is important for you to know how many people click on your ads for many reasons. First of all, if you are advertising on several different sites, and the stats for one site are much higher than the others, you may want to consider changing advertising strategies. If Google is using your ad on a blog and it is getting no activity, this may mean that you owe them no extra money, but it also means that no one is interested in your ad on that website. By keeping track of your statistics regarding ad views, you can tell which sites are worth more advertising and which sites are not.