Video Transcript on the Page Pattern

Summary:

Video Transcript on the Page pattern is about putting transcript of you video on you video pages, whether it’s a video blog post, video squeeze page, or video sales page. There are certain rules of applicability of this pattern which you should follow to make it useful (see below).

Name of the pattern:

Video Transcript on the Page.

When to use this pattern:

When you market anything with video page (blog post, squeeze page, sales letter) and:

• You need better rank on search engines, or
• Your visitors may have problems with video (discussed below).

There are also certain limitations. You cannot use this pattern if you are using video to intrigue, hold attention or filter potential prospects, like it happens with long sales videos without fast forward and no order button until video ends.

How to use this pattern:

There are two main ways to use this pattern. You can either put the transcript right after the video and order/opt-in form, or put a link to the transcript again right after the video and order/opt-in form.

Both ways Google will index the content. The second way will work better for video-style visitors, but it will get away from your order form those who’d choose to read it, so don’t forget to put a link back to the order form into the report.

If you are using the first way (transcript right in the HTML), don’t forget to duplicate your order/opt-in form in the end and reinforce it with some P.S.

Again, clearly you cannot use this pattern, if your conversion strategy is based on sequential feed of the information. That is, if you want the prospect to wait until you reveal the whole thing, whether because of organization of your video, or because you are building tension during it, or because you are using it to filter out those, who are not interested enough.

Attribution:

I’ve seen Frank Kern doing that, and I also noticed it done by Yaro Starak, who follows Frank very closely. However, I cannot say for sure who invented it.

Related patterns:

Video post, Video squeeze page, Video sales page

Related anti-patterns:

None

Comments:

You may wonder why your prospects may have issues with video. After all, video is a craze, anybody, who is somebody, is doing video today and claiming great conversion rates. Right?

Right, video is a great tool. However, there are cases when it may hurt. Think, what if:

• Your prospects are busy. They can scan text in a few minutes, but they may have no time to see you blabbering on their screen for 60 minutes.
• Your prospects move between locations with Internet access and without it. Think of students travelling on a bus. They could have got to your page back at home or in the library, put the notebook on standby, and then want to read it on a bus. Video won’t work for them. You may wonder, why would you care about students? They normally don’t have that much money. First, some of them have. Second, what if that’s the page where you recruit your affiliates?
• Your prospects still have their 9 to 5 jobs and visit your page during this time? You may not approve such behavior, but the bottom line is that they normally cannot consume video at that time, and when they get back home they are dead tired from the day job and busy doing their own business.
• Your prospects postpone the action from the first view but seriously consider coming back and maybe buying. Spending extra hour watching you again just to get to the order button will actually hurt sales in this case. Just to consider: Ryan Deiss reported that sending exactly the same letter twice more at different times doubled his sales. Some of these people just did not opened the letter or followed the link in the first case, however, some of them did and postponed the decision, taking the action on the next visit.