Posting 30-Second Mock-Up Videos to YouTube and Pinterest Tripled Traffic to My Site
Tutorial to create short mock-up videos of your products to boost traffic to your listings on Shopify, Etsy, or any Print-on-Demand platform
This article is for people who sell print on demand (POD) products through their own site, Merch by Amazon, Etsy, or any other print on demand platforms like Redbubble, Teepublic, or Society Six. Whether you use a POD platform that comes with its own audience (like Merch by Amazon) or have your own website, you can significantly boost your organic traffic by creating video mock-ups, posting them on YouTube and Pinterest, and including a link to your listings.
According to a Pinterest study, 67% of Pinterest ‘pinners’ say videos inspire them to take action, and video pins are a great way to tell a more comprehensive story about your brand, idea, or project.
Placeit is the industry leader in mock-up generation. In addition to their standard photo lifestyle mock-ups, they also offer professional-looking video mock-ups for a host of different products (T-shirts, mugs, tote bags, etc.)
Before I go any further, this is what I’m talking about:
This 30-second clip strings together four Placeit video clips for a total of six shots. Some mock-ups have a single shot, like the shirt-only shot at the end (00:20–00:30), while others have two or three shots, like the medium and close shots of the girl in the laundromat (00:10–00:20). The music track that accompanies the video was also added within Placeit.
Let me show you how to quickly build a 30-second spot for a T-shirt design using Placeit assets and then add some background music. The same process can be used for any other POD product.
For this tutorial, I’m going to be to using this Placeit ninja design. Make sure you download a transparent image by selecting the transparent background.
Let’s first add the first video mock-up.
Select black for the T-shirt background and upload the ninja graphic that you previously saved.
You can resize the graphic and change its placement on the shirt. I generally have to move the graphic closer to the top of the canvass.
At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a timeline of the shots, and it should look something like this:
Click “Add slide” to add the next video mock-up. You’ll see a window like this one with a search box. Type “Window and yellow door.” Select the only clip that comes up in the result:
Select the next clip from the timeline to make it active, and modify it. Again, select black for the T-shirt color, and upload the ninja graphic. In the timeline, you can click on “Play All” to preview the results.
We’ll add a third and final shot to our video. To mix it up, I like to include a garment only mock-up. Following the same process, “add slide,” search this time for “Video of a shirt hanging on a line,” select it, change the T-shirt color to black and upload the ninja design.
At this point, you can download your video and add your own music, or add a copyright-free music track from inside Placeit. Let’s do that now. Click “add audio.”
I’m picking “Deep Urban” by Eugenio Mininni. Now download the completed video. Placeit will take about two to three minutes to render a 30-second video. You’ll get an MP4 1080p video file, 1920 x 1080, which you can then upload to YouTube. I uploaded the finished product to YouTube.
A few tips to make your life easier:
- Remember the window that comes up when you click on “Add slide…”
…well, it’s not super user-friendly. Unlike the music library, it does not allow you to select your favorites. That’s why I have a cheat sheet of my favorite videos where I jot down the URL name of the video. For example, the “window and yellow door,” I got from the URL of that video:
The cheatsheet has about 10–15 different clips where I write down a short description (“Several shots, woman, Hispanic”), the actual search terms I need to paste in the search window to pull up the clip (“window and yellow door”), and the URL. I have clips for men, women, and garment-only shots. Some clips have several shots with medium shots and close-up shots. I like the close-up because you can really see the design up close.
2. Favorite about five music tracks to get some variation.
3. Remember that you will need to use horizontal videos if you’re putting them on YouTube. Although you can use the same video for Pinterest, vertical pins work better for Pinterest (see this Pinterest article for their video guidelines).
This is what the video I created for this tutorial looks like on Pinterest.
4. Finally, if you have hundreds of products, consider hiring a virtual assistant to create your Placeit videos, and if the trust is there, to upload them to YouTube, Pinterest, and other social media platforms.
