YouTube – Video Marketing Made Easy
YouTube is easily the number one video sharing site online today. Some statistics say that at any one time YouTube has half of all internet traffic and that the average user stays on the site for over an hour. Pretty amazing stats if they are even half true!. The good news is that they make it amazingly easy to get your feet wet in video marketing.
Just about every laptop computer sold today comes with a built in webcam and microphone. Software wise, if you get a PC chances are you automatically get Windows Live Movie Maker. So most people are all set with all they need to make videos of themselves talking on pretty much any subject you can imagine. If you need to make screenshot videos, grab CaptureFox. It's a totally free plugin for the Firefox browser.
It's also insanely easy to "scrape" videos on other sites and upload them to Windows Live Movie Maker and make a unique video of your own. For this I like the Net Video Hunter plugin. Again for Firefox.
Just don't violate anybody's copyright. Many times people will give you permission to use their video in part or whole. You can also use other people's videos if you chop them up for a review or commentary purposes.
A few SEO Notes:
- Make your video titles keyword rich.
- URLs in the description area on YouTube are automatically clickable but may not show unless you put them first in the description.
- YouTube's huge amount of traffic plus their search function make them one of the largest search engines online. Worth the effort to rank for your keywords.
- If you post the link to a YouTube video someplace that doesn't allow for anchor text you still get credit for your video's title so name those videos carefully!
Once you have uploaded a video to your YouTube account you can quickly and easily embed it to your blog or website just by grabbing a little bit of code. Once you have done this a time or two it becomes easy to change the size of the video player by changing the code around. Just keep the Height/Width ratios the same and you will have not problems. Just be sure you change it both places in the code.
If you don't have any ideas for videos, a great way to get started is to just upload a few images to Windows Live Movie Maker and record yourself reading one of your articles or posts. This is a very effective way to get the most out of your content and get some great traffic from YouTube.
Be sure to go out and make some friends on YouTube as well. Remember, the more friends you have on any social media site, the more effective your efforts will be.
Twitter – Microblogging On Steroids
Twitter is a uniquely interesting animal. It is considered a microblogging platform because your posts, or Tweets as they call them are limited to just 140 characters. This is 20 characters less than you get when you text someone on your cellphone!
To make it easier, if you include a URL that makes you go over 140 characters, they shorten it to get you in under automatically. For SEO purposes you will want to try and make those URLs come in under the limit.
Twitter will allow you to get some backlinks to your site automatically, and like most social media sites the more friends you have the more backlinks that gives you. This is because your Tweets will show up on the pages of all of your friends or followers as Twitter calls them. You can get more attention paid to your Tweets by making the main keyword in your post searchable. You do this by putting a pound sign in front of it like this: #keyword
Doing this allows people that are interested in the same topics to find each other and follow each other's Tweets. You should also do this. And think about what to search for with related keywords. So if you were Tweeting about a dog grooming business, you may search for: #doggrooming #dogcare #dogtraining
And then you simply follow everybody posting Tweets with these searchable terms. If they don't follow you back, just unfollow them. This is important as if you end up following more than 2% more people than are following you, Twitter will stop you from following anyone else til the discrepancy is rectified.
We'll be talking a LOT more about Twitter ongoing as well as a few other microblogging services like Plurk and Orkut. They are each important for different reasons and objectives, so watch for more here.
Marketing on Facebook
To successfully market your products and services on Facebook, you must master the art of becoming a part of the conversation without selling. You do this by finding where the conversations are taking place on Facebook and diving in with insightful responses to people's queries. This is all a part of the process of becoming viewed as an authority within your niche. Do this successfully and you will start to get sales from your fans.
"Wait a second, how did they get to be my fans?!"
Good question! As a business you need to set up a Fanpage instead of just a personal profile allowing people to hit the "Like" button as opposed to becoming your friend. The upside here is that you are not limited to just 5,000 friends as on a personal profile. You can have an unlimited number of Fans that have liked your Fanpage.
You can (and should) build your fanpage so that you are building an opt-in email list of subscribers that get some form of newsletter on your business' topic. The best way to motivate your fans to fill out that little form is to bribe them with a free report, a coupon or some other form of giveaway. This is a tried and true method that will build your list day in and day out. If there is one thing that the internet marketing community is in agreement about it is this:
The Money is in The List!
Once they are on your list, keep them reading your newsletter the same way that you got them to initially like your fanpage, and eventually opt-in to your list. Give them valuable information on your niche and leave your marketing message at the end of the email as almost an afterthought. Let it be a postscript, or simply a part of your signature.
Of course, now and then it doesn't hurt to send out an announcement of a sale or special deal you are offering. If feasible, make it a deal unique to your subscribers to add value to the subscription itself. If you are building a list of cellphone numbers to use in text message marketing it is a good idea to require the client to show the text message with the offer much like a coupon. Again, this will build value and keep your subscribers from dropping off your list.
Facebook is the largest social media site online today. What works here will work on other such sites, but may need to be altered a bit. Marketing successfully on social media sites is all about adding value to the community. Keep this in mind at all times and you will be successful marketing with this lucrative media.
Website Creation – So You Are Finally Ready For Your Own Website
The fact is that we have finally gotten to a point where each and every business out there really needs a website to reach their prospects and market their products and services to their existing customer list. We know that this is a pretty bold statement, but truth be told can you think of a single business, large or small that would not benefit from a website?
Fortunately there is a website creation solution for every budget, and every level of need, as well as every level of technical ability.
Let's start with the most basic of needs. Maybe all you need is a webpage that let's the world know that your business is there. That isn't to say that you may not decide later on to create a more elaborate site, or even a blog to promote your business.
A great place to build a simple webpage is on Squidoo. It's really simple for people of just about any level of ability to build a great website using the various modules supplied. One of the big benefits of using Squidoo is that not only is the onsite SEO work pretty much done for you (other than choosing good keywords and using them in your module titles) but Google absolutely loves this site! You will have an easier time getting your paged ranked with search engines on Squidoo than any other service.
When you decide it's time for a standalone website, then it's time to look at a blog platform or content management system. There are a ton of these out there, but these days the best two are Joomla or WordPress. We use WordPress for all of our sites for reasons of flexibility and because it is the easiest platform for people of all ability levels to get trained on. It is also the most widely used which translates into the widest range of available plugins, and therefore functionality.
We will be sharing a great deal of WordPress information in our posts as well. Watch for it!
Intro to Social Media
Unless you've been living under the proverbial rock, you have heard about social media sites. Facebook and Twitter are probably the two best known but there are literally hundreds of thousands of social media sites online right now with more being launched every day. So what qualifies a site as a social media site?
A social media site is really any site that allows you to interact with other members of the community. You usually have the ability to add friends, follow other members, or some other way of building a list of site members that you choose to share your onsite activities with. Hence the name Social Media. You are socializing with your list of friends on these sites. So whether we are talking about posting your pics on Flickr, your videos on YouTube or your brief Tweets on Twitter, you are involved in Social Media.
So how do we use social media sites to promote businesses?
The two most effective tactics here are a bit surprising:
- Stop Selling
- Give Your Business Away
Stop Selling:
Your goal on social media sites is to become a part of the dialogue going on in your business niche, and to become considered an authority or resource to others in the community. You won't succeed at this if you seem to only be interested in making sales directly on the site. This is at the heart of the paradigm shift we have seen over the past 15 years from push to pull marketing.
Give Your Business Away:
One of the most effective ways to accomplish the above is to give away your expertise to those that have elected to be a part of your community. On the surface it would seem that, in many cases, you're at best making your services unnecessary to your potential clients or customers, and at worst creating your own competition. You can do this with slowly with posts and tips, but there is another far more effective way to do this which creates sales and revenues far faster.
"Give your business away" at seminars and events that you promote via social media sites. These can be either paid or free events. If you charge for the event be sure that your content is very low on sales content. Likewise if you give a free event, be sure that your "Commercial" is at the very end, and the rest of your program is usable without purchasing anything from you at all. These events are one of the most powerful tools you will find to build your business with social media.
Read our posts on the various social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for the most effective ways to use these all important sites.
