This is the first of a few articles about creating videos for your website and publishing them on the Internet.

The first question is why bother, which we will look at here. Other questions are how to produce the videos, where to post them and what to do with them after that.

Why would you even bother making videos?

Video gives you an extrarordinarily rich means of communicating with your audience distinctly different, though not neccessarily better, than other methods.

Rather than make up some example, I will give you my own experience and you can use your imagination to apply the lessons I am learning to your business.

I teach dancing and have written a book that I am self-publishing called Partnership Dancing(sm) - How to Communicate Every Step in Every Social Dance Unambiguously.

For me, videos serve two main purposes.

1. Product and Support - additional educational materials that I can give away or sell to go along with my book. While you may not be teaching a physical activity like dancing, videos can serve in many sedentary fields as training tools.
2. Marketing materials

Here are some ways video can help your marketing efforts.

1. Video sales letter - video can serve as copy on your website to sell your product. You can use video to tell your story about your product to your visitors. Listening to a video is easier than reading and may be effective for your audience.
2. Video demonstration - you can demonstrate your product on video and overcome customer concerns, showing them exactly what they are going to get.
3. Video lead generation - video can serve as a means for building links and directing visitors to your website. Posting your videos on video sharing sites cleverly can give you links back to your business and get you more traffic.

To give you an example of this last one, you can go to my video websites on:

1. Vimeo - Partnership Dancing(sm) : dance lessons on how to dance with a partner
2. Youtube - Partnership Dancing(sm) - social dance instruction

Notice in the links above, I include a number of good keywords for my product.

These videos each attract some visitors. In the descriptions for these videos, you will see I put links to my websites. People do click on those links and I get visitors that way. Each video is a little ad, that once posted, keeps working for you long after you created it.

Search engines also index those videos. They count the links back to your website, I guess, so your website may get a higher ranking.

Search engines do show those videos in the general search results as well. If you search for "Partnership Dancing" today, you will see near the top of the first page one of my videos.

You can put links to your videos in your newsletter, on your website, in emails, on your blog, on Facebook and anywhere else you can find, which further helps your rankings and gives you access to new people.

Video can be a good addition to your arsenal of tools.

Here you can find some video sharing websites where you can post your videos.

Here is an article on using the Kodak Zi8 camera to shoot videos for your website.

By Andrew Weitzen, Bronze Inc. Copyright (c) 2010.

Bronze is the publisher of several online Internet journals including: InternetHandholding.com, DomainNames.gs, DotNetNuke.bz, Programmer.bz, Software.vg, WebHosting.vg