Animoto




Animoto is my favorite video production platform. It’s easy to use and reasonably priced.

If you know how to take pictures with a digital camera, move the pictures from your memory card to your hard drive and send those pictures via email, you can be a video producer.

Video, or motion pictures, is simply a series of images that appear at a specific speed. Animoto takes your images, produces a slide show with transitions timed to the music and renders a video at 360p in a matter of minutes.

I like to think of online MOJO as the ability to get your message on the first page of a search engine. Since Google is the top search engine with more than 900 million unique visitors per month, ranking on Google’s 1st page is the goal.

While you can accomplish the goal of ranking on Google’s 1st page with a blog/website of text and images, it is difficult and time consuming, requiring a significant commitment of time to SEO efforts. Add video, and you’re power is increased, significantly.

Once the video is produced by Animoto, you have some options. The first, and most important, is to push the video to your YouTube channel.

Once on YouTube, you can copy the URL link, and the embed code to begin distribution. This is the MOJO part of the deal. You’ve probably heard the rhetorical question: “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it make a sound.” It’s similar with video. If you have a great video but no one knows about it, does it really matter? So, distribution is the critical part of the equation.

Animoto + YouTube x Distribution = MediaMojo

So, let’s talk about Distribution, or Optimization, as I like to think of it.

According to Dictionary.com, optimization is the process of making something as effective and useful as possible.

Placing a video on YouTube, is equivalent to putting an message in a bottle, throwing it in the ocean and hoping someone, somewhere, will find it, open it and see your message.

Once you produce a video, you have to put it some place that people will see it. Well, actually, you need to put it in as many places as possible. The starting point is YouTube, but it’s not enough.

Obviously, you need a YouTube channel. Then, you take the embed code and put it on your website, your wordpress.com (free) blog, your blog on you domain. You send the URL out on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Yes, you do need an account on all three.

Once you place the video on other sites, and add some text as part of the distribution, you will be surprised the first time you see the video on Google’s 1st page for your keywords. After that, you’ll expect it to happen.