Creative ideas are everywhere, if you know how to listen.
In this article I’m going to show you how you can automatically split videos into images and then use those images to generate traffic for your website. When John Pozadzides (aka the man behind One Man’s Blog) did this, he got 10,000 pageviews on a single blog post in just 7 days.
At a recent Dallas WordPress Meetup, John P. gave an excellent presentation on how he uses content to attract visitors to OMB. John gave a lot of great tips and advice during his presentation, and the one thing that stuck with me most was the few minutes he spent telling us how he used screenshots from a video to attract a ton of website visitors.
As a traffic experiment John had manually screen captured a bunch of images from a Lady Gaga music video, cleaned them up, and then uploaded them to his WordPress blog. He included the final 60 images in a blog post using the built in WordPress photo gallery feature.
Since the gallery is meant to take the work out of displaying images in columns and rows, it also automatically created the thumbnails he needed to present the images as a collection. When his blog visitors click an image in the post they’re taken to another page that shows a larger version of that image. At the bottom of every one image John links back to the 60 images he posted.
I thought this was a great idea for a couple of reasons. He is feeding Google images, which a lot of people use to visually search for popular celebrity figures like Lady Gaga. That means he is using more of Google’s power to attract visitors to his site. Also, by using the photo gallery feature he is automatically getting 60 pages created for him that all point back to one topic related Lady Gaga post.
Each of these images can be tweaked for keywords using titles, descriptions, and captions so they are keyword searchable, which is a good thing for Google images and a good thing for Google search in general.
So, with all these benefits, I definitely wanted to do something similar on my own websites. The only problem is, I am extremely lazy and the idea of manually taking hundreds of screen shots, cleaning them up in photoshop , and then sorting through the images to pick the best ones doesn’t appeal to me at all. That’s when it occurred to me, why not automate the process?
After a few minutes on Google I found a collection of tools that let me automatically download videos, convert those videos into images, and then quickly filter those images to help me pick the best ones.
Here’s how the entire process works.
Downloading Videos
Since I’m assuming the video John used was from Youtube or some other video sharing site, I found a tool called iSkysoft Free Video Downloader with a built in sniffer that would automatically download the Flash format video file to my computer when it detected them on a webpage. This is very cool because most the other Youtube downloaders make you copy and paste the embed code or the video url into a text box. The one draw back of the tool though is that it doesn’t let you pick where you want your video downloaded to, so I had to accept the default download location. It wasn’t a show stopper, but it would be a nice to have.
Converting Videos
Once the videos were downloaded, I could manipulate them however I wanted. Before I could strip the video to images though, I had to convert them from Flash format (.FLV) to a format that my video to image stripping software would accept. That means I needed to convert them into another format like .MOV or .AVI.
By design the iSkysoft Youtube downloader has a video converter built into it. So, if I was willing to pay for that feature, I could have converted the videos straight from the tool. But I already own a copy of another iSkysoft video conversion tool that provides the same video end product, so I decided to use it instead.
Because I use a Mac, I usually convert my videos to .MOV format, but I would recommend that you play around with settings and formats because the quality of your video will directly affect the quality of the images that are produced. I know this for a fact because I stripped images from a lower quality Youtube video and then compared that with images stripped from a high quality DVD movie. The high quality movie produced great images, while the low quality video produced lesser quality images.
Stripping Video Images
With the video in .MOV format, I could then run the video through software to automatically convert the video to a series of images. The software has several options for stripping images. It let me create images using frames, second, minutes, or hours. This is very handy because not all videos are the same length or have the same frame rate.
Most videos are produced at either 15 or 30 frames per second (FPS). That means there are 30 images between each second of video. If I wanted I could tell the software to create an image for each frame. That might be a little over kill for most videos, but depending on your subject matter and the quality of your video, it might be exactly what’s required.
As an experiment, I decided to create one image for every 30 frames. For a 4 minute video that translated to 241 images in 27.7 seconds (yes, I timed it). The software let me preview the images before exporting them, so I could try multiple settings before picking the one that worked best for my video.
Filtering Images
You might think that 241 images is a lot to pick through to find the best shots, but I found a tool for that as well called Xee. It’s a photo viewer that lets me quickly flip through images in a folder and delete the ones I don’t want.
Before I used that tool though, I opened up the exported images folder, bulk deleted all the obvious images I didn’t want and then used the tool to refine the list. Xee lets me use arrow keys to flip back and forth between pictures and deleting an image automatically takes me to the next image. So I was able to get down to just the images I wanted very quickly.
Renaming Image Files
At some point during the process I noticed that my image file names weren’t named what I wanted, so I found a tool to bulk update them as well. The tool is called “Name Mangler” (yes, I love that). It lets me find and replace words within a file name, number file sequentially, add a prefix or suffix, etc. Using Name Mangler, I can rename all 241 images just as quickly as I created them originally.
Posting To WordPress Gallery
Once the images were all created and filtered, it was time to post them to the blog. Creating a gallery in WordPress is not a straight forward process so there are a few things you have to remember when creating a gallery in WordPress.
The first thing I had to do was upload the images to my blog using the WordPress Media Uploader.
This next step is very important, so pay attention here.
When you upload images to WordPress it puts them in the Media Library. If you click the “Save All Changes” button after the images are finished uploading, the media uploader will association those images with your post and it will automatically create a gallery tab in your media uploader. This is an important step for getting all the images into the gallery and associated with that post. If you miss this step the gallery won’t be automatically created and you won’t know why.
The other important point I discovered is that the image descriptions must be updated directly after the gallery is created. So I had to expand each image and insert the text I wanted. In John’s case, he probably copy and pasted the same text and link in all 60 images. Once the descriptions are inserted, I had to click the “Save All Changes” button again to update the images.
Again, this is important so pay attention
Make sure to update your image descriptions when you create your gallery. As of WordPress 2.9, descriptions don’t seem to update on the page once they have been updated in the editor. I don’t know if this is a glitch, but it drove me nuts during testing. So play it safe and make sure your descriptions are correct from the start.
Once the images were uploaded, I still needed to keyword tag them so that Google Images and regular Google Search would be able to properly understand what they were and index them. This process took a good bit of time. I would recommend that you take as much time as was necessary to get all the images done right. This is a value add part of the process, so I didn’t try to automate it.
I made sure to update all the image titles, alternate text, and captions.
After you click the “Save All Changes Button”, you can click the “Insert Gallery” button to insert the gallery place holder into your post.
The resulting gallery should show up as a collection of thumbnails in your post.
When visitors click one of the images they are shown a page with a single view of that image along with your image title and description. If they click the image again they will see the full size image that you uploaded to the media library.
And that’s it. You can use this process to create picture galleries, attract visitors to your website, or export images of your kids first sporting event. All the pieces can be easily mixed and matched to meet your needs and although I referenced Mac tools in this article, you can find Windows equivalents just as easily.
One thing to keep in mind in term of traffic though. John P. picked a popular subject and used provocative headlines as a traffic experiment. Depending on your subject and audience, you might not get the exact same results that he did. But, with a little creative application, I’m sure you’ll do just fine.
By Guest Star: Charles McKeever of OpenSourceMarketer.com.
Charles is the Founder and co-geek at Open Source Marketer where he shows people how to use open source tools to run their online businesses.
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