When I’m talking to companies about video, I’m often asked how much footage they should shoot. To put it in the simplest terms, too much is never enough.

Why use online video by Krishne De via Flickr

Take a camera up and down the aisles of your business. Shoot anything and everything that you think might set you apart from your competition. Having this extra footage means you have more on hand to edit when you need it. And you can use it to create videos to tell your business’ story.

“But I don’t have the budget to run television ads,” you say? So what? Online is where you want to be anyway. TV is just icing – a well-made cake is delicious even without icing. Add the icing when you can afford it.

When you get video that tells your story, you can place it on your site – creating a video library that visitors can interact with to really feel a part of your business. And don’t just put them on your site. Put them out there on the social media sites, too – create a channel on YouTube, bring your Facebook page to life, blog about interesting happenings and use video to make it really compelling. You could even play it on monitors at your place of business to make visitors feel more knowledgeable to your offerings!

They say a picture is worth 1000 words. Since video displays at 30 frames per second, wouldn’t that mean a 10 second video is worth 300,000? Imagine being able to say over a quarter of a million words about yourself – and still keeping people’s interest! The more video content you have out there, the more it’s going to do for you. Compelling content generates interest and catches the “attention” of the search engines, improving your rankings. That means more, happy visitors, more people who want to do business with you.

And isn’t that the name of the game?