Creating great preview videos is one way to help boost interest in your content and help increase sales. Some of you may think it's very difficult or don't know some simple, easy things to do to show short previews of your videos. It turns out that it's not rocket science.

Wouldn’t it be great to go to a car dealer where you can only see a photo of the car before you buy – never test driving it, hoping that your roll of the dice doesn’t land you a four wheeled enemy? Or wouldn’t it be just awesome to go to see a movie seeing just a still shot from one scene, hoping that it won’t suck wind? Wouldn’t it be just great to buy a tickle video clip never seeing a video preview, just hoping the single still image shown equals some passionate jaw dropping action and not ANOTHER pathetic display of “shit on steroids”?

Turns out, humans like to preview before purchase. Who knew? (Sarcasm people, sarcasm).

People who produce fetish video clips for sale are running a business. Unless they are wealthy and financially fat enough from some other source (thereby not needing to entice droves of customers to buy), the goal is to get as many people with their particular take on their fetish of choice to come in and buy some dam goodies.

Remember the good-old-days when we went to the record store to hunt for treasure? As consumers, it was a fun adventure (mostly). As content producers, for record companies, it was quite the challenge – how to stand out among the masses. Today’s record store is the online clip store. Since we don’t have to wait for the mall to open, get dressed, get in the car and go to the record store, since it’s online 24/7, many of us go to the clip stores frequently (if only to window shop – ‘silly humans’ don’t really change).

If you’ve discovered a well travelled and focused watering hole such as a fetish forum dedicated to your brew of happiness such as the Ticklingforum.com or TickleTheater.com (for us ticklephiles that is), then you will regularly see lots of video previews. But what is a great video preview to you?

Believe it or not, some video producers think it is absolutely unnecessary to produce preview videos at all. I’m no Kreskin, but I think this is because they have some level of sales without the video previews and use this as their validation for their policy. If any such video producer is reading this article, I offer only one point, “how many customers are passing you by because they’ve been burned before by buying clips sight unseen”?

I’m the kinda guy who isn’t easily motivated by anecdotal references, personal feeling about a topic or anyone’s gut. I like data. So I‘ve been running a survey at http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.as...7-6aaad52bb30a to collect info about what customers want in their tickle videos. At the time of this article (August 2009), there are approximately 500 respondents (out of 6 billion freakin humans on the big ball) to the survey. From this sampling, here is the response to question number 9 (How important is it to you to see a 30 - 45 second video preview or detailed text description of the video before purchase?):

So, for any video producer not yet producing preview videos, “get it in gear buddy”!

There’s a bit of a tug-of-war between the producer and the customer base on the issue of preview videos. Producers want to entice viewers (showing ‘just enough’ leg) to buy without making it seem unnecessary to pay for the complete video. Viewers want more FREE stuff. Both sides have valid concerns. In a thread about a preview video, a producer voiced his concern that he didn’t want viewers to get off (literally) on the preview video without paying for the full video. As a producer, while I get his point, my goal in producing a preview video is to either have someone get off or get convinced that the full video will do the job (pardon my implied French).

It may be helpful for video producers to accept that some people will always only enjoy free previews and not buy your full clips. Here’s the good news – According to my survey data, such people are in the minority (as shown in question 8 of my survey below).