Poolandspa.com Acquires Poolandspa.TV

The best promotional tool that we discovered in 2007 was the use of How-To Videos on our web site. Although we here at Poolandspa.com like to think that we are very technologically advanced and ahead of the game when it comes to web site technology, very few of us had dabbled in the world of YouTube and online videos until last August 2007.

Dan Harrison, Poolandspa.com

It wasn’t until our company president, Dan Harrison, saw a news clip on CNN about an odd looking person screaming something about “Leave Britney Alone”, that we all gathered around one of our computers and, for the first time, logged onto this “YouTube” we had heard about, to get a glimpse. Turns out, that seemingly unimportant piece of pop culture struck a chord with Dan. He actually went to Hofstra University in the late 70’s and majored in Film and TV Communications, but had never seen much of a connection with the pool and spa industry.

He spoke to our staff and computer people about it during one memorable staff meeting. He wanted to know if we could possibly put videos on our Poolandspa.com web site. The frightened looks of “a deer in the headlight” darted across the room as each staff member said “I don’t know”. Others said it would be too expensive, it would take up too much bandwidth, no one would be interested, etc., etc., etc.

Dan had heard this type of “it’s not possible reaction” before when he opened one of the first “all hot tub” stores in the early 1980’s. Also when he started one of the first mail order catalogs for pool and spa supplies in the mid-1980’s. And again when he started one of the first pool and spa web sites in 1994. People said it was crazy to have a store that just sold hot tubs…how ridiculous. People said no one would ever buy pool and spa supplies through the mail…that is absurd. And people certainly said that the idea of people using a computer to purchase pool and spa products from a web site was just plain insane, and the Internet was just a “flash-in-the-pan”.

Within a week of that fabled staff meeting, the UPS packages started to be delivered to our office. Video cameras, tripods, wireless microphones, monitors, cables, camera cranes, video and sound editing equipment and the like. We could all see that here would be no stopping Dan once he got a new promotional marketing idea in his head. We quickly acquired a few new web addresses, Poolandspa.TV, PoolandspaTV.com and PoolandspaTube.com. We could all see that there was no turning back.

We made a separate section of our web site for Poolandspa.TV and posted a few videos at first. Some were from YouTube, some were from customers and some were from other pool and spa companies that had produced videos or promotional DVD’s about their products. Almost immediately this area of our web site started to get thousands of visitors each day.

We produced a few crude How-To videos just to get something up there and to learn how to use all this new equipment. We had to hire a few technical folks to help us out as well. But after a few weeks, some of our staff members took the reigns and learned how to make a decent video. The most popular video we produced in 2007 was “How to Close a Pool”, which was a 30 minute show in a “Hometime” home improvement show type format.

This spring, we produced a few more elaborate How-To videos which included “How To Open A Pool”, “How To Drain, Acid Wash & Paint a Pool”, and the runaway YouTube hit “How To Clear A Green Pool” which to date has had over 25,000 YouTube views. We have been getting thousand of web visitors each day who watch our videos. It is driving a lot of fresh traffic to our site and it is also increasing sales of the products we feature in the videos.

Although there is a very steep learning curve with this type of promotion, and there is also a very high cost in both time and money, we can see that video-on-the-web is definitely here to stay and will greatly benefit the pool and spa consumer by providing very detailed information that may not be as easily relayed with just the written word on a web page.

For further information, contact:
Daniel Harrison at 702-437-4343 ext 105 or dan@poolandspa.com

You will be seeing the .tv extension more and more in the future. The .tv comes from the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu, complete with it’s red hot top level domain name .tv. Less than three years ago Travel.tv sold for $65,000 while Mail.tv sold for $35,000 and these are not even close to the highest reported sales of all-time. It was rumored that Golf.tv sold for $600,000 in years past but can not be verified. Other top reported .tv sales include; China.tv, Free.tv and Net.tv, all of which had over $100,000 price tags.

Why so much fuss over this tiny island country of just 11,636 inhabitants? It’s simple really, the acronym TV is known around the world as the abbreviation for television, this acronym has no language barriers. It is without question one of the most recognized two letter combinations in the entire world and we all know the world has an incredible fascination with their beloved televisions. In fact in many countries throughout the world watching television is their favorite past time. From one study we saw it showed that an average person watches TV for nearly 30 hours on average per week. That’s nearly 1,000 hours per year...this a lot of time to devote to the tube. And broadband web use is also growing exponentially worldwide. So the mixing of web-based content with TV content is a natural next step.