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Hi. It’s Aaron Kassover here from AgentMethods. And today I want to talk about adding videos
to your agent website. Videos are a great way for you to interact with your customers
in a different way than just text. It allows people who like to sit back and just sort
of watch to get information as opposed to more actively reading or researching in-depth.
And there’s an added bonus to videos which is that it seems like search engines love
them, that sites with good video content, lots of video content, tend to rank better
than sites without it. And so adding videos to your site tends to be a really good idea.
Now, you can create videos on your own, like I am, just using your webcam. It doesn’t
need to be fancy; it can just be you sitting talking in your office, like I am right now.
You can also find videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo that you can embed on your site
that others have created. And so there are a lot of options out there.
Now, for our example, we’ll use YouTube. It’s just — probably has the most content
and is the most common. So what you do is you’ll go to YouTube and you’ll find the
video that you’ll want. You can create a video and upload it, or you can just go and
search for videos on health insurance or auto insurance. There’s some really good content
on YouTube already available. I’ll link some of it in the blog post. Once you find
a video you want to use, you just scroll down beneath the video see a button that says “embed”.
Click on that button. Now, open up the embed control panel. Now, if you scroll down a little
more you’ll see there are some options where you can choose the size of the video you want
to make it fit the space you have and you can also select different types of embedding
code. Now, as a note, AgentMethods users should use on YouTube the old embed code. There’s
an option to use old embed code, at least for now, and so go ahead and select that.
Now, you’ll copy the code that it creates; just do a Ctrl/C to copy. And then go over
to your site editor and browse to the page that you want the video on.
Now, for AgentMethod’s customers, once the page is open to edit, you’ll see an HTML
option all the way over on the right of the tool bar and just click on that to be able
to popup the window and edit the HTML. What you do now is just take that code you got
from YouTube and you paste it into the window, click on “update”, click on “save”
and then you can preview the video on your site. It’s really easy; it takes just a
few seconds. It’s something I recommend going, and whenever you find a video that
you find is useful just go ahead and adds it to your site.
Now, a few tips. First one, don’t overload your page. It’s easy to get excited about
adding videos and start to put 15/20 videos on one page. Try to keep it down to three
or four. It will slow the page down and also just kind of gives people a place to focus
on all the videos that you really want them to look at. The second thing is if you have
a choice, turn auto-play off, if it’s an option. I sort of think of having video or
sound that just pops up when you come to a page, I heard somebody describe it as being
like having your cell phone ring at church. It’s okay to get phone calls, but just not
church. And the same thing with the web, it’s okay to have video playing, but just don’t
surprise people so turn auto-play off. And the third thing is to not be afraid to
be yourself and have a sense of humor. This is a great chance for you to show people that
you are a real person, that you are a human like them, and you’re somebody they can
relate to. So go and find some videos that might be funny, might talk about insurance
in a new way, or just present you as you really are. So with that, I think you have enough
to get you started. Go ahead and take a few minutes today and add a video to your site.
Thanks and I’ll see you again soon.