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RSS FeedUsing Videos to Increase Sales; Add YouTube Videos to your PDG Generated Product Pages
A recent study from Forrester Research, Inc. found that one of the number one reasons that online shopping "holdouts" resist shopping online is because they want to see things before they buy them. An amazing 40% of holdouts stated this as the #1 reason they don’t shop online. There is little dispute that investing the time and effort required to present quality optimized images for your online products is a worthy investment and pays tremendous dividends in the long term. There are, however, certain things that the most well made graphics in the world still can’t properly demonstrate about your products. How does your new "super deluxe boomerang" fly better than a standard boomerang? How easy is it to apply your "ultra scratch proof" screen protector to your electronic device? Would you dare to demonstrate how scratch proof it is with a demo?
Fortunately, the masters of the internet universe (AKA Google) have provided the perfect means of demonstrating these and any other sellable characteristics of your products… YouTube! Armed with a video capable digital camera/camcorder, anyone and everyone can create their own YouTube videos to demonstrate their products… AND have Google host them and provide all the bandwidth required for users to view the videos for free!
Once you create a free YouTube account (Google account holders can login via their existing Google Account), you’ll immediately have the ability to begin uploading your own videos. A thorough explanation of how to upload your video content can be found at http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/topic.py?topic=16560 . Once uploaded, your videos immediately become available to anyone searching YouTube for relevant content, ultimately leading visitors to your website and increasing inbound links to your site for search optimization purposes. In addition, you can now embed the videos directly into your PDG generated product pages so that visitors to your site can watch the videos from directly within your site, without having to click away to the YouTube site.
When you are viewing a YouTube video on the YouTube site, they conveniently provide the HTML source code needed to embed the video into any web page (immediately below the video’s description on the right side of the page). To embed this into a specific product’s “detail” page within your PDG storefront is as simple as copying this code and pasting it into the PDG Commerce administration panel. You’ll have a couple of options with where you paste the data. Most users will prefer to use one of the PDG Commerce "custom fields" (User Defined Fields), so that they can control positioning on the PDG product page. Simply choose which of the 10 user defined fields will be used for storing the embedded code, paste the code, and then position the corresponding PDG "tag" on your PDG Item template (e.g. <!—USERDEFx—> with the correct field number in place of the ‘x’). If you prefer to not have to modify your templates, you may also paste the code directly into the "Specific Product Text" (long description field), which is already part of the default PDG Item template and would not require any modifications to the HTML coding of your template. The embedded video would automatically display immediately under any existing product description.
As an example, one of the most viewed YouTube videos of all time is a cute "boys will be boys" video called ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’. When we visit this page on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM , we can copy the following embed code:
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_OBlgSz8sSM&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/_OBlgSz8sSM&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
This exact unmodified code is what would need to be pasted into your PDG admin. The resulting embedded video would appear on your page as:
Adding videos of your products, although still not providing the ability for the user to touch, feel, taste, smell, etc. your offerings, can often be the next best thing… Try it out and see what is can do to help you convert more visitors to purchasers.
[...] Become a “destination” site: Just as Home Depot offers free classes to show you how to tile your bathroom, thus practically guaranteeing that they will be the source of all your tiling needs, think of what you can offer on your site to attract visitors. Users are far more likely to link to an informative video on your site that demonstrates how to best use one of the products that you sell than they are to link to a standard old “add to cart” page (learn how you can add YouTube videos to your PDG generated pages). [...]