So you want to start an online business or you want to use the internet for an exiting offline business? While the decision to do so may stem from many reasons, the internet is a wonderful to conduct business and can be very profitable if you do things the right way.

The most important thing you want to consider in starting an internet business is website design and the way it is perceived y your potential visitors. This is something tat you can do by learning the skills of the trade, or accomplish by hiring a professional. If you design your own site, then you are going to have to learn basic design and implementation using HTML, CSS or PHP depending on what file format is easier for you.

The cost of hiring a professional website designer these days is expensive. You could end up paying $1,500 or more for a basic design concept. Some designers have been known to charge far more. If you design your own site, you can save a lot of money and still get a great looking site.

There are a lot of benefits in learning basic website design. First, you will always be able to design the layout and core components of your website the way you want it. When you are depending on others to do it for you, you will never get exactly want you want. However, you do have the option to tweak things once you receive the finished product.

When you learn the skills to creating your own site design, this will help later on when you want to make changes. A well developed website will always undergo periodic change to reflect new technologies. If you had to pay a web designer each time you wanted to incorporate a change, it could get costly.

The best tip I can give for success is to never create a website that is all about you. Basically, keep in mind that your visitors and their needs are the most important thing and should influence the entire reason for your website’s existence. The site you create should be bout their wants, desires, needs and aspirations and how you can help them.

By building a site that speaks to your visitors, they will gain confidence in your ability to help them solve their problems and achieve their goals. Too often, this is not the case and people wonder why their websites are not converting into new leads and generating sales.

Websites that target specific needs, wants and desires of a market or niche with specific solutions always win. When a person comes to your website and sees that you truly understand what they need to accomplish, most often they will reach out to you. This may result in you getting a new lead or making a sale.

As a rule of thumb, use the AIDA formula when you are planning out your site design and copy. The acronym AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire and action and should be the guiding principle for your success. You want your site to get a visitors attention, keep their interest, build a desire for your solution and get them to take action. This is how you succeed.

Promoting a Video

1. The keyword for the success of any online marketing video is "submitting". The best choices are video hosting sites like YouTube , Yahoo! Videos , or Google Videos . The main advantages are that your videos will be hosted for free and they will not take up any of your site’s bandwidth.
2. Share your videos. If you really want to make yourself known, allow users to be able to link to your videos. Viral marketing videos are the best way to make companies (and, subsequently, their products/services) known across quite vast Internet user communities. They carry a company’s name across the Web at far greater speeds than any other marketing tool in existence.
3. Don’t forget to add such phrases as "Tell a friend" or "Visit our Web site" at the end of your video.

Use online marketing video to supplement the "traditional" TV ad campaign. Online and broadcast go hand in hand, they don’t exclude one another. Online marketing videos give you the opportunity to communicate important messages to people more accurately and efficiently than ever. Use videos to differentiate your business from your competitors, to make yourself known and stand out of the crowd.

The Internet marketing videos must be short enough no to get Web users bored and drive them away from your site. Video ads on the Web must be significantly shorter than those usually seen on TV. Web users don’t like to waste time, and they are fed up with never-ending ads.

Optimizing Videos for Search Engines

Here is a small list of ways to optimize videos for search engines:

1. You should optimize not only for video search engines, but also for content search engines. A good approach would be to use meta tags for the content (text) of the page where your video is placed.
2. Make sure you give relevant names to your videos. It’s highly improbable that your video will show up in the SERPs if it is called "12032002.mov" rather than "XYZ- antivirus-demo.mov".
3. Use keywords in the video titles and their descriptions. Video search engines will find it much easier to index your video files and link it to your web pages.
4. Use anchor text if you link to the video from other pages of your Web site.
5. Make sure the video files you submit have the proper extension.
6. Make it short. Say in 2 minutes what would take a normal person 10 minutes to read on paper (or on a Web page).
7. SEO professionals recommend creating separate video site maps, which can be submitted to video and content search engines alike. Both kinds of SEs will index these site maps.
8. Remember to include RSS feeds. Metadata can be inserted here.
9. Research, measure, test, report and optimize.

It is important not just to take the video you made and put it in a video directory and just sit back and wait for it to bring you loads of prospects. The road to a nice result is similar to the regular Search Engine Optimization (SEO) way. Bear in mind that videos are a gourmet dish for search engines, so it’s best that you take some time and prepare it accordingly.

Technology today offers you many opportunities to track traffic and analyze results. Take your time and make an effort (which will be rewarded in the end) to measure the impact that your videos have had on the prospects and to measure their performance. Search for tools that can tell you how much of your video was played before the visitor closed it, how many prospects actually decided to pay your site a visit after watching your video add on a different website, how many of these visits converted into sales, and so on.

Just because you have invested some time and effort in one or several videos, it doesn’t mean that you should leave out content. It’s still an important part of your business. Offer your visitors enough information on the site. Remember that marketing videos are meant to promote your business, to inspire Web surfers to visit your site and, luckily, convert into sales.

Many experts advise to use the videos on the first page. It’s like handing out your business card. The first page recommends you, and we all know that first impression counts. Don’t tuck your marketing video away, on some page that a visitor might not even get to. Make it visible. Anyway, give your site visitors the opportunity to skip your video. Maybe they’re not in the mood for watching it, and the last thing you want is an annoyed visitor.

When to Use Video

Marketing videos can be used when a company decides to promote, a bit more aggressively (in the good way), one or more of its products/services. They can help reach the prospects better, on a well-trodden path, that of visual advertising, laid before them by television. Given that more and more people nowadays turn to Internet in search of information, Internet marketing videos come naturally to supplement the Web user’s need for new, for useful, for sensational.

Advantages of Video Advertising

If you decide to use video in your marketing campaigns, it’s a very good option. It is catchier than other types of advertising. It captures the Web user’s attention easier and transports your message to prospects much faster than simple text.

A video ad can contain a demonstration of a product’s use and usability. Add to that a human face and a very pleasant voice (or even a well harmonized combination of a woman’s voice with a man’s), and you can have your prospects wrapper around your finger. By using these techniques, the prospective customer can relate more to your company and to what you’re promoting.