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Nowadays if a person is looking for romance, they might use an online dating service such as Match.com. To use one of these online dating services, you first register your account with them and then setup your profile. In your profile you tell a little about yourself, such as smoker/nonsmoker, drink/don’t drink, kids/don’t want kids … and so on.

Now, here’s what baffles me: many people don’t even bother to include a picture of themselves in their profile! I mean, yeah I know, looks shouldn’t matter and a person’s personality is what’s really important. But let’s be serious; looks do matter as that is what gets our attention … especially us men!

If you don’t include your picture of yourself in your profile, not many people are going to bother checking you out. I don’t care if you are the greatest person around – most people won’t bother reading your profile if they don’t see a photo.

Note: If you are going to upload a photo to your profile, be sure to use a favorable picture of yourself. Don’t just add any ol’ photo for the sake of adding a photo!

We humans are visual creatures that want and need visual stimulation. Your potential date on Match.com needs to imagine themselves being with you before they will even think of contacting you. And don’t kid yourself — online dating is a form of advertising. The difference is that instead of trying to sell a product, you’re trying to ‘sell’ yourself!

So what do you think would happen if you decided to include a short video of yourself in your Match.com profile? In your video you could talk a little about yourself, your likes, your dislikes … what you’re looking for in a companion. If you present yourself as genuine and sincere, your video will make people feel as though they already know you.

Don’t you think that would get a potential dates attention? Don’t you think that the people who responded to your ad would be much more compatible with you then if you didn’t include the video? Isn’t that what marketing is all about – getting targeted traffic to see what you have to offer?

How well do you think your dating ad with a video would do as compared to a dating ad without? It would do a lot better, right?

Advertising products and services on the internet is no different. People respond to visual aids much better then plain text. Suppose you have an exciting new product that you want to tell your potential customers all about.

This new product is a bit complicated and technical to use, so you need to explain it properly for your potential customer. You could try to explain it with a text article … or you could create a video of the product being used. Don’t you think that would be much more effective?

I mean, which would you rather see:

A 6 page ad telling you about it?

-or-

A video demo of a new product?

Of course, you would rather watch the video. Who wouldn’t? Just like you would rather watch a baseball game on tv instead of reading about it the next day in the newspaper.

Now it’s time to apply online video advertising to your business!

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.