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You can easily add videos as a regular feature of your insurance agency website by using free (or nearly free) services such as YouTube, Eyejot, and a camcorder, web cam, or your digital camera. You can paste the videos right into your website, or set up a separate blog page for videos. There are a myriad of uses for videos: Introducing agency services, providing updates, introducing account management and service staff. Because there is no cost to producing and posting videos, you can update them regularly, and the use to which you put them is limited only by your imagination. Feel free to share ideas or questions you may have...and start the cameras rolling.
There are a few differences between YouTube and Eyejot that you might want to consider before selecting one or the other for your video storage and playback on your insurance agency (or other business) website.
YouTube videos are publicly accessible via the YouTube site. This can be a good thing or not, depending on what you want to accomplish. Video information can include links back to your business so the fact that your videos may be found on YouTube may help with web traffic. Inasmuch as YouTube is available via m.google.com offerings, videos you may upload to the service and your videos can be viewed on a mobile browser.
YouTube also allows you to permit or deny others the ability to copy and embed your video in another website. You can also add annotations (like your agency web address), and allow or disable comments from others via the YouTube site. YouTube also provides a number of options that are worth checking out like RSS feeds, statistical tracking that can all help draw people to your videos on YouTube, and to your insurance agency website.
Eyejot videos are accessible to you through an in-box that Eyejot provides. The only way to gain access is if you use Eyejot to send a video email, or if you add the video and player by pasting the embed code onto a web page.
Set Up a Blog for Videos
Pasting embed code onto a web page should be very routine maintenance item that your web master, or hosting provider should turn around quickly. If you aren't able to get quick updates from your provider, or control them yourself, you should really think about changing providers. As an alternative, you can create a website for content you want to change with some frequency, like videos, by using a free blog service like Blogger or WordPress.
Even if you get satisfactory service from your web hosting provider, setting up separate blog pages may be something to consider. You can use these forums as an interactive testimonial page, and you can include information, and resource links that are more tangential to your agency business. You will need your provider to link to your blog page, but that is a one time service request. After that, you can easily control content and changes via the blog administration.*
Eyejot Video Email
As noted in the Act cFluent newsletter article, Eyejot is primarily a video email service The idea is simple, fire up your web cam, do a video, enter an email address and hit send, and the recipient gets an email with a video player embedded in it.
Recipients of your video email will also be able to copy html embed code that the recipient can use to paste into another website.
You could use video emails to extend a personal invitation for an account review, to remotely - yet personally, introduce key staff to customers who might not otherwise get the chance to meet the people that work on their account. Any other ideas?
*Blogs are part of the 'Web 2.0' landscape. One hallmark of Web 2.0 is the ability for the non-technical to use internet based communications by controlling functionality that previously could only be set up and altered by those with technical skills. If you can type a document in Microsoft Word, you can set up and administer a blog site. It's that easy.
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