If you’re selling anything online these days, you must realize that video is soon becoming king. For a long time, the seemingly vapid cliche, “content is king” had ruled supreme. That meant that you had to write something compelling, interesting, and unique if you hoped to survive in the online world. After all, most people go online to be entertained, informed, or get some problem solved. Nobody wants to come to a website to read some rehash of something they’ve already seen before.
You had to be special. You had to come up with a different angle on things. Something that attracted people’s attention and made them want to come back for more. Well, no matter what the environment is, the laws of economic scarcity reign supreme. People have a limited amount of time, patience, and energy to devote to deciphering your site and deciding whether or not it’s worth their time.
There’s an endless battle going on, and the prize is people’s attention. Whomever can attract and hold their attention will make the most money. Wherever attention flows, money is soon behind. And because there are so many different platforms that are delivering content quicker, better and more compelling, you’ve got to adapt or die.
One of the key forms of communication is video. Most everybody has a fast connection, so streaming video isn’t a problem. A decent video camera is fairly cheap, so producing content isn’t a problem. And for the vast majority of people, simply reading a bunch of text just doesn’t do it anymore. Especially when some of the most read text online these days is short burst of characters that won’t take more than about twenty seconds of the readers’ time.
That’s making videos is the way to go. People don’t want to have to read. They’d rather just sit back and be told information. Whether or not this will lead to the inevitable doom of society is beside the point. The point is if your readers have a choice between watching a compelling, interesting and persuasive video, and reading a bunch of dry text, which do you think they’re going to choose?
If you’re selling a product, which is better? A 3000 word sales letter that would take the average Internet surfer twenty minutes and three cups of coffee to get through? Or a three minute video that delivers the same information, and is much more entertaining and doesn’t have to be expensive, you can compare the promotional video production cost from different companies online until you find the most suitable one.
Sure, there’s plenty of time left to generate a lot of interest and sales via text alone. But you’ve at least got to be thinking about how you can get your message across in a format that is much easier to be accepted by the average Internet person.
