There are countless ways to incorporate video into your internet marketing strategy, but educational videos are often overlooked. Simple videos that teach your visitors new concepts or take a deep dive into important principles can be a great way to engage your audience and attract new visitors to your website.
Internet marketers and SEO professionals often talk about video as “link bait,” a way to tempt others to link to your website. Positioning videos as link bait means that companies often over-think their videos. They go out of their way to try to be funny or entertaining, and unfortunately, this often ends in a flop.
But educational videos can be a great way to gain natural links and diversify your link profile. Developing a video series like this means you don’t have to try to be funny or cute, you can just be yourself. You can show off what your business does best, help your visitors reach their own goals, and position yourself as a go-to for information.
SEO Moz Whiteboard Fridays
If you aren’t an SEO professional, you may not have heard of SEO Moz (the company recently rebranded as simply “Moz”). But among the SEO nerds of the world, Moz is one of the top industry blogs and software providers. Almost every Friday they put out an educational video, part of their “Whiteboard Friday” series. Each week, Rand Fishkin or another Moz staffer, presents a useful educational video designed to teach and inform.
The concept is simple. Rand stands in front of – you guessed it – a whiteboard and delivers a short, informative presentation on SEO. The videos are valuable to the Moz audience because they provide real, usable information. They are incredibly popular and are shared across blogs, microblogs, and every single social network.
Why Educational Videos Help You Grow Links
There is no secret sauce that makes this video series a success. The concept is extremely simple. The videos are fairly short, always useful, and are easy to share. The main reason the videos get so many shares and backlinks is because they provide a service. Moz Whiteboard Fridays answer real questions and provide information SEOs can put into practice immediately.
You don’t have to give away trade secrets in an educational video series. But you have to be willing to give away free information that can truly help people. And the topics should be about common concerns. Before putting together educational videos, you should conduct some research. What are the most common questions your customers ask about your products and services? What are the top search queries that bring people to your website? Do a little keyword research and determine what people are asking about your industry and plan educational videos that answer those questions.
If you provide solutions to common problems and questions, viewers will be more than happy to share it with their peers.
Make Sure Your Videos Link Back to Your Own Site
Here is an example of a Moz Whiteboard Friday Video about using social media to earn links:
You’ll notice that the video has a Facebook Like button, a Tweet button, and an Embed button. This allows users to share the content with one click. We used the embed code from the video, and you can see that those share buttons show up here, on the E3 Blog. If you click those buttons, you’ll notice that the share directs back to the original Moz page, rather than to E3’s blog. That means that you can share this piece of Moz’s content from our blog, but the link goes back to Moz – a very smart idea to gain an exponential amount of links.
It Won’t Work Overnight
Another key to Moz’s success with educational videos involved the audience itself. They had a loyal following of readers for quite some time before they started doing Whiteboard Fridays. If you don’t have a lot of visitors, you won’t gain thousands of links from a few educational videos. Instead, you will have to engage in rigorous self-promotion in order to build your audience and promote your videos.
The good news is, if you produce great videos, your work will speak for itself.
Quality Counts When Producing Video
But no matter how wide your audience, or how thorough your promotional efforts, if your video isn’t well produced, it won’t go anywhere. Your videos have to be useful, but they also have to be visually pleasing and have high quality audio. No matter how much fans love Moz, they won’t watch a video that they can’t clearly see or hear.
If you’re putting the time and effort into planning educational videos, don’t waste your energy with low-quality video. Invest in top-tier equipment, or hire someone to produce the videos. The internet is a competitive place, and if you’re going to throw your hat into the ring, it better be a darn nice hat.
Have you used educational videos on your website or blog? What has worked for you? What hasn’t? Let us know!