Videolean blog

When is the last time you indulged in a series? *House of Cards*, anyone? The fact is, a successful series of any kind (TV, book, business video) c...

All the Videolean technology is now available for your business. Add the video creation service to your portfolio subscribing to any of our plans.

This is extremely interesting for companies in:

hosting,

web creation or,

ecommerce.

Add a new revenue stream selling general or bespoke templates in your site, without your users having a clue about Videolean.

You can also create a more Premium subscription plan that includes video, so you increase the average revenue per customer.

Visit http://videolean.com/ to make a video like this for your startup, blog or idea.

Buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0976...

More at http://tractionbook.com/

Most startups end in failure. Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don't have is traction -- real customer growth.

This book introduces startup founders and employees to the "Bullseye Framework," a five-step process successful companies use to get traction. This framework helps founders find the marketing channel that will be key to unlocking the next stage of growth.

Traction is a guide to getting customers, written for startup founders, marketers, and those interested in how today's startups grow and get traction. This book shows you how the founders of several of the biggest companies and organizations in the world like Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Paul English (Kayak.com) and Alex Pachikov (Evernote) have built and grown their startups. We interviewed over forty successful founders and researched countless more growth stories to pull out the repeatable tactics and strategies they used to get traction.

We’ve been featured on Product Hunt top 10 and I want to tell you how you can do the same, or even better, step by step.

What did Product Hunt bring us?

As most of PH listings, it was out of the blue. A satisfied customer or a friend posts your product there and you start seeing an exceptional increase in visits and sign ups.

How exceptional you might be asking?

150% increase in visits and 20% sign ups. How many free listings can say that, really?

In addition, this week we’ve received more API leads than in the last 3 months.

However, this is not about bragging about vanity metrics. Other people have had outstanding numbers, like Front and their amazing comparison with being featured in other medias like TechCrunch and Hacker News. BrandiD also had some crazy numbers in sales due to PH.

How to benefit from being featured on Product Hunt?

My point here is how you can benefit the most from being listed on PH.

By the time this video is recorded (September 2014), you need around 300 upvotes to make sure you're in the top 5.

In other words, you better have an already launched and working well product so you increase the likelihood to be upvoted.

If you are in the early days (aka a coming soon landing page), I rather go to Betalist. We did that two years ago and got hundreds of sign ups there. Pretty cool place if you’re at that stage.

These are the 3 steps I recommend you to follow if you are listed on PH:

1. Comments

It's very likely you can't comment if you're brand new on Product Hunt. However, their team will reach you out very quickly to let you do that.

@videolean Videolean is trending on @ProductHunt! Please check your e-mail, I'd like to give you access to comment. Thanks! 🐱

— Nichole Elizabeth (@NikkiElizDemere)

August 28, 2014

Once you have access to comment, be the first commenting on your listing saying you're the founder of your app and you'd be happy replying and listening to any question or feedback people have, like Derek from Knowtify did.

If whilst you're getting access to comment, someone says something about your product, that's an amazing opportunity to work on a remarkable reply that will catch other people's attention.

For example, in our case, someone wrote a critic about our marketing video but we still didn't have access to reply there. So we filmed a video like this, and posted on the comments once we got that access. I believe plenty of our upvotes came through that reply.

2. Share your listing

Let your users know you've been listed and that they can upvote you if they genuinely love your product.

Start with the basics, and share where you already are (Facebook, Twitter, G+,...). Bear in mind shares with images normally rank better and have better click through on those social networks. Make a screenshot of your listing and attach it to your updates. Also make sure you are sharing your PH listing URL, and not Product Hunt's homepage (i.e http://www.producthunt.com/posts/videolean)

If you use a newsletter app (Mailchimp, Awebber, etc.), why not reaching out your database with such a great news?

Disclosure: this doesn't mean you should offer any discount or whatsoever for upvoting you. Product Hunt guidelines say you should not incentivize people for upvoting your product.

3. Email outreach

What a better excuse to follow-up a potential partner you don't talk with since ages ago than saying you've been featured in one of the trendiest startup directories?

Drop them a line saying you've been listed on Product Hunt and if there is any chance to resume your last conversation. Worst case scenario, you don't get an upvote but at least you move on in something that makes you a sustainable business - sales.

Other way can happen as well. Received a congratulations email from Derek from Knowtify, actually.

Google gives lots of credit to video because:

it's harder to make,

it's information dense and,

there is not many people making it yet.

// <![CDATA[ wistiaEmbed = Wistia.embed("j5k9csg5y4", { videoFoam: true }); // ]]>

Hey Kevin,

many thanks for your comment on Product Hunt.

Unfortunately we are not able to comment there yet, so wanted to give you a proper explanation through this video.

Why our marketing video is not done with our software (yet)?

Well, we come from Meideistudio and Motion4Startups - both creative agencies where we create videos from the scratch to be used as traditional advertising and online videos.

Two years ago, when we ran Videolean, thought why not taking advantage of all of that equipment and talent we had together and produce a high-end video that will help us to stand out from our competitors.

A lot has happened since then and nowadays we could make our marketing video a template on Videolean gallery. So thanks for the suggestion!

Dogfooding

In the early days we were reaching out bloggers like Alex Barrera - one of the most famous bloggers in Spain and in Europe, creating marketing videos for them with our template videos.

Alex posted on Press42 blog we actually were eating our own dog food.

Hope I've replied well to your comment. Otherwise, more than happy to call you and have a chat.

Just finished one of those campaigns that might open a new format to promote brands on Facebook. It's what we've done in Videolean with Mauro Icardi, Inter Milan football player.

Prize was the player's shirt signed by himself - which might be a relic for his fans but it was something already seen before in other contests.

However, this time it was asked much more than just a like or a share in order to win what would've been the umpteenth promotion by a brand on Facebook.

Those who wanted to win the shirt, would have to create a video about the player using Videolean technology in the subdomain created exclusively for this campaign.

Although we've designed the tool in order to be the easiest solution in the market to create videos with a professional end result - even though if you've never done any video before, this means having the person really involved with the brand looking for photos and typing texts that will lead him to the perfect video and becoming into the contest winner.

Benefits for Mauro Icardi #MI9 brand

Was it really beneficial to Icardi?

Firstly, we better define what "beneficial" for Icardi means. His objective was to increase his audience and, specially, spread out his personal brand "#MI9".

Secondly, although Icardi would promote the campaign from his Facebook and Twitter profiles, would be this first the most valuable because there is where videos would be published and votes counted.

With this challenge ahead, Videolean gathered the data powered by Welovroi, which showed the following at the end of the campaign:

3,588 new fans on Facebook,

1.28 millions of impressions on Facebook,

678.34% increase on Twitter mentions to @MauroIcardi and,

1,680% increase on Twitter mentions of hashtag #MI9.

All of those fans translate into one thing: more people who's expressly said they want to have Mauro Icardi brand in their daily timeline on Facebook.

Among those people, is the contest winner with updates like this: 

Besides touching, Mauro Icardi (and Inter Milan) can proudly say they have a brand ambassador such as Adonis is. 

Campaing hasn't go unnoticed for other big brands which already has shown interest in creating video marketing campaigns with Videolean technology and its API.

Future of Facebook promotions

Facebook bans incentivizing users to like pages from 5th November onwards. You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a page.

Brands have to keep looking for innovative formats - like Videolean videos might be, in the same way videogames did it after Facebook banned the constant updates from Zynga and Farmville in our walls.

Creating your Videolean is extremely easy. Just follow these 3 steps:

In order to make sure we save all your changes, need you sign up in first place. Would be a shame to lose all of them otherwise...

You can sign up either by Facebook either by email. Might make more sense the second one since the contest is on Facebook though.

Select your favorite template,

upload photos from your desktop your any social network,

type texts,

preview and come back if you want to change something.

Upload to Youtube,

copy the sharing link and,

paste it in the video contest tab, in Icardi's Facebook.

In the past 2 months Google made big changes to its search results. Webmasters saw lost both authorship photos and video snippets. Here at Moz, we've closely monitored our traffic to our own URLs to measure the effect of these changes on our actual traffic. The results surprised us.

Google+ Authorship Pictures Dropped Tears have been shed. Voices have been raised. Keyboards have been pounded. Our beloved Google+ authorship pictures and circle counts were dropped in the Google SERPS this last week. Google’s own John Mueller announced that they have been working to clean up the design in order to create a better mobile [...]

 Google may have removed authorship snippets but video thumbnails are still prominently displayed in the the SERPS.

Video now appears in 70% of the top 100 search results listings

This is why Videolean exists

Conversation between a video producer and an early-stage startup called Clique. They needed a video produced cheaply and quickly for an investors pitch and an accelerator programme.

Transcript of the conversation:

JB I just downloaded your doc and I see the script is over 500 words. That's more of a 3 minute video than a 1 minute video.  For a good 1 minute video you need at least 2 weeks, 3 minutes would go much over that time frame. I'm telling you this cause I understand you need it done in a week. Thanks,

Antoin

Thanks JB. Maybe we can cut down the script, depending on the animation. I have an investors pitch on the 26th, and an application to an accelerator programme needs to be in by 30th - both of which need videos! Maybe I can get something produced cheaply and quickly for the above, which can lead on to a better budget video for the web site which takes a few weeks to perfect?

Videolean

If a Picture Says 1000 Words, Then Video Is… Priceless