According to Melinda Baxter, director of marketing services for ExactTarget, you should use an image from the video. “A frame of the video with an arrow is the best way to go,” she told BtoB magazine, “so people see what they can expect when they click through.”

I found this great article on Hubspot that explains how to optimize your YouTube videos for maximum exposure. Check it out at SEO for YouTube - How to Search Optimize Video for B2B Marketing.

Basically, the landing page consists of a video, an opt-in box and maybe some simple text to explain what the video says for those who can view the video.

Here is an example of one I created for Seasonal Minisite Templates:

Click on image to see a larger view.

There are two ways you can do a video squeeze page:

1. Have the video automatically play
2. Have the visitor click the play button

Personally, I favor the later. I hate landing on pages that automatically play any form of audio or video. But, some swear that this increases conversion. So, you’ll have to make that decision for yourself.

Tools I Used:

• Cell Phone: My digital camera was on the fritz, so I took all the pictures using my cell phone camera. Also, as an experiment, I used the note recording feature on my phone to record the primary audio.
• iMovie: I used iMovie to pull together the audio, images and background sleigh bells.

I found some free, royalty free, sleigh bells to loop in, giving the audio a more festive sound. Many people thought I was actually shaking bells in the background!

To see more of my videos, visit my YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/profile?user=cspothitt

Tools I Used:

• Photoshop: To create the images and format them as JPGs.
• Animoto: Uploaded the images to animoto.com and followed the simple directions to create a free 30-second music video!

See! Very simple if you don’t need a synchronized voice over.

To see more of my videos, visit my YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/profile?user=cspothitt.

Tools I used:

• PowerPoint: I originally tried to create the video using PowerPoint, but couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted. So I printed all the slides to PDFs and used them individually.
• iMovie: I imported all the PDFs into iMovie and created the entire video using this software that comes with every Mac computer.
• Audio Recorder 3.2: This is a simple program I used to record my voice over for each slide. I created each voice over separately to make it easier to edit in iMovie.

The music playing throughout the video was some royalty free music I had on my hard drive. You can find your own by searching the Internet using the keywords “royalty free music”.

Once all my pieces were in place, I worked in iMovie until it played the way I wanted it to. Then I exported it for web streaming and uploaded it to YouTube.

To see more of my videos, visit my YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/profile?user=cspothitt