Lessons learned from our Beta Test

I thought some of you Internet Marketers might benefit from me sharing my experiences in our beta test for our new Internet Marketing Videos site.

One of the things we wanted to do was offer free videos. A few of the free videos are introductory level things. A few are higher level that provide some really powerful training. We wanted to have at least a couple of “wow” videos that people got excited about.

So far only one of the videos really seems to be a “wow” video. So that’s something we may need to work on. We may need to make a few more videos free videos as well.

We also decided to make the free videos YouTube videos. We thought this was clever because we wouldn’t have to pay for the bandwidth associated with all the free members watching those videos. We also thought it would help us with viral marketing because YouTube videos all have a “send to a friend” link. In addition to having lots of people watch the free videos our total views of those videos would go up and it might help some of our videos become Popular videos on YouTube thereby helping us promote the site even more.

Unfortunately there was a lot of negative feedback!

The YouTube videos were roughly half the size of the paid videos. This wasn’t clear to our members so a lot of the free members began to question the quality of our videos. Additionally because the size was so much smaller the text within the videos was hard to follow so our users weren’t learning much. What’s more is because of YouTube’s requirements for our videos we had to compress them and it made the quality of the video rather grainy looking. Finally we had users complaining because they felt YouTube videos were public domain videos and some users were confused as to the difference in Paid Videos vs. Free.

Needless to say last night we decided to take down all the YouTube versions and only put up the high quality videos. We wanted our videos to be so power packed that people were learning a lot and actually craved access to the full line of tutorials.

So far the response has been overwhelming since we got rid of the YouTube videos.

This is an important lesson for us as well as for our readers. By beta testing and doing a small launch to a few people we know personally we were able to test out something. If we had launched to a wide audience and had this problem we probably would have hurt our reputation and it assuredly would have had a negative impact on our launch and how many subscribers we will get.

In the long run paying for the extra bandwidth is worth it to us, since our users are very pleased with the high quality free video content as opposed to the junky YouTube versions we had up originally.

Want to see the videos for yourself? Check out Marketing ICE. (ICE Stands for Interactive Creative Education)

- Benjamin Fitts

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