March 22, 2006

How to Improve the Quality of Online Dance Instruction Videos

I did a search yesterday for dance instruction videos. What I found was pretty horrendous. So what will it take to improve the quality of online dance instruction videos?

My thoughts:

1) Create good quality dance instruction videos. I don't mean fancy - I mean that I can clearly see the dancer or dancers' entire bodies, the audio quality is good and the lighting is more than adequate so I can see the moves/routines. Don't waste my time with your promotional hype or slick video editing. Just start the video with a brief intro and show me the moves/routines you plan to teach. This can all be done very inexpensively.

2) It's important to break down the moves and routines in a coherent way. Show the moves at a slow pace from different angles, explain challenging parts and finally show the moves to music.

3) There are many types of instructional videos that will make for good online viewing. If you teach Jazz, show a portion of your warm-up exercises or a routine. If you teach Salsa, make videos available of moves and combinations for different levels of dancers. You can also create supplemental videos so that students can more easily practices moves, combos and routines outside of your class.

4) When you prepare your video for the Internet, make sure the video quality is good enough so that viewers can actually see the dancers. You can post the videos to your site, but it's more important to post your videos to the large video sites that host millions of videos.

5) Now for the tough part: Do you sell your instructional videos or give them away for free. Clearly, you want to make money. But first, you are better off making a limited number of videos available free of charge. If your videos are good, then you have the potential to reach a large online audience, which will help you get more students and help you sell more DVDs, if you offer them.

In terms of selling video clips online, my thinking at this point is that it is possible to do but we are just at the early stages of people getting used to the idea of buying videos online. I have to do some more research in this area, but I think that over the next 3-6 months it will become much easier for anybody to sell their videos, whether through iTunes, Google or other services. The opportunities here are potentially phenomenal. If you can build buzz for a single instructional video and you start selling thousands of clips at $2.00 a piece, you'll be doing pretty well.

6) You'll build buzz if the word spreads that you have a good video that's worth watching, whether it's free or requires a payment. How do you build buzz? Well, there is only so much you can do. In the end it's up to dance students to classify, evaluate and promote your video.

To elaborate: I've been writing posts lately about the Web 2.0 and social networking software programs. These applications represent the future of the Internet. What they are all about is groups of people with similar interests organizing and ranking the resources they like and don't like. Here's an example: Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. You can save and classify websites you like and see the websites that other people have saved. If you search for "dance," you'll see a list of links with the number of people who have bookmarked each dance resource. The higher the number of people who have saved a particular resource, the more popular the website/blog/video/picture/song is.

The same thing can happen on video sites. You upload a dance instruction video. Users come across it and start classifying it with "tags." For example, they may tag your video with "jazz" "dance" and "instruction." Then, when other users search for videos that are tagged "jazz," your video will be on the list.

Whether your video is at the top of the list of jazz dance instruction videos depends on how popular it is. If people save it in their favorites or give it great ratings, then it will be on the top of the list and people will watch it or buy it.

The bottom line is that the emerging collaborative web is turning the marketing process upside down. Users are in control and will create good buzz if you deliver good dance instruction videos.

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