Free Internet Marketing Help

Today I attended a webinar hosted by Bettina Hein the CEO of Pixability. Her guest was Mark Robertson who is the founder of ReelSeo.

I wrote notes as fast as I could on things I thought may be of help to us all. What notes I have, I then had to try and read my handwriting so, I'll do the best I can for you. Hope they send out a link so, I can post the recording & then you can see it for yourself. These notes are not verbatim, so if I have messed anything up…I suggest you get over it. I work in my pajamas for God's sake, what do you expect? LOL!

*** 38% of all Universal Search results include videos

Mark was ask what were the most popular types of videos…

He said right of the bat that Commercial or salesie type videos were NOT popular!

When people watch a video they are leaning forward & watching because they want to…you need to reward them for hitting the play button!

How To's are a Big Hit!

People want honest videos! Be relevant, informative, authentic, and hopefully a little entertaining.

Find your target audience!

Identify who (what type of people) will benefit from your product,

Go for highly a focused group, Do NOT go to broad.

How to get your video seen…Do your SEO! Do NOT be Lazy!

Your TITLE must convey what your video is about, be honest, use keywords without stuffing!

Think about the description you write. You have 5,000 characters to use as you would for a seo'd article. Do NOT just copy and paste duplicate crap. Write original content and add a link to your site. If you can add a link to the specific product you are talking about in the video.

Make sure to use the TAGS! Make them relevant keywords but, don't go freakin crazy and look like a bloody spammer.

We were also told that to learn more about getting your videos indexed and ranking to check out the Webinar that was held in October. I have a review, notes, and links to this at Video Sitemaps Best Practices with Google Review.

More things to consider when looking at your competition videos that may be helping them rank higher than you…

The age of the video,

Number of Comments,

Number of Likes,

Number of time Faved,

Number of times it is embedded on other sites,

Number of comments.

And with all of that keep in mind that YouTube is a SOCIAL site! Social as in you must participate to get more out of it. Just uploading your videos and leaving will be of no help to your rankings or views. Go out and comment of other peoples videos, reply to your commenters…Social people…social! Get active people!

Closed captioning on YouTube…

Why add the Closed Captioning option?

Hearing impaired people can then make use of your video,

People that may be at work or just not want the volume can then get your message,

CC makes it easier for people of other languages to translate your message,

Some people only search for videos that have closed captioning,

The closed captions can get indexed!

You can get some information about Closed Captioning for Video's at YouTube Help. I am going to be trying this very soon…I have not tried it yet. There are free and paid tools to do this with, which you can find on the help page.

How to convert your video views into customers…

Put a hot link in the description to your site or preferably directly to the product being talked about.

Give a direct call to action. Tell them to click the link, go to, fill in the box…

Give a coupon code in the video for a discount or special bonus…this can be said or it can be added as an annotation. An annotation can be changed at anytime so you can change the coupon for different campaigns or even remove it for a limited time offer.

Add an Overlay Ad to your videos. At the webinar it was said that overlay ads may be 1/20 the cost of the same keyword on Adwords as a cost per view. Some keywords are only a penny and will give you a hot link to your site. Here is where having a very targeted audience would come in handy.

This is an add on by me and was not mentioned at the webinar but, you may find it usefull…I wrote a post How To Get a Link to YOUR Site from Your Videos. It may help get a link to your site when others pick up your embed code to place your video on their site.

A few of the QandA's that have not been answered above…

What about music in videos?

Adding copyrighted music to your video could get your video blocked for copyright infringement,

Many record labels have a profit sharing with YouTube so they will allow the music to play on your video and then just put an ad at the bottom so people can buy the song,

You can use Royalty Free music without worrying about being blocked or having the ad for the song. ReelSeo has a list of some places that offer Royalty Free List.

How much does production quality count?

This would depend on your product (if you are in the video production business the quality better be freakin great),

People are not near as picky about quality of videos as they would be TV or Film,

If you have the ability to upload in HD…do it,

Use real people not actors (Zappos made 60,000 videos using real people that work for them), you are the perfect person to display or tell about the benefits of the product you offer. My note – If you can't tell me how great it is then why would I want to buy from you?

Added notes that I have no idea exactly what part of the webinar they fit into…Yeah, that's my grand note taking for ya. ;-)

Playlist…

Playlist help you keep your videos organized,

They help you get listed in the search results,

Keep your playlist relevant to the topic of the videos (don't add all your videos if they are about different things).

Annotations…

These can be added or changed at anytime,

You can use them to display a link to your site (the link is not hot but they can see it),

As mentioned above, you can add them with a coupon code,

They can also reinforce a call to action.

*Videos improve the conversions on your site even if all the people don’t watch the video

*People leave a video within 15 second if you haven't grabbed their interest. Get a fast hook.

*YouTube is the largest searched video site.

*You can make a video of FAQ's to go along with your FAQ typed page so it is also available on video sites.

*Facebook is the 2nd largest site for video views…Put your videos on Facebook!

Ok, that is all I have today. There may have been more note but, the dog ate them.
Now be sure to go over and checkout Pixability and ReelSEO if you are serious about using video in your marketing. Even if you are only half-assed interested in using videos you know that at some point it will become necessity so you may as well get all the info you can.

I see so many people doing article marketing (or attempting to do it). They have part of it down yet, they are missing one part (and that is the part they bitch about).

So, you have just spent your precious time writing an article. You have it so it reads well and is useful to others. Heck, you even have a few keywords in there that don't look silly. Yeah! Job well done, pat yourself on the back because you have accomplished something!

So, what do you do now?

Many people have already set up an account somewhere like Ezine Articles and know they can submit their article in just a few minutes.

Just remember that submitting your article there means that unless others pick it up, you are wasting your time even posting it. Sure you get a standard end of article link from the article site but, how is that really helping you much after the first few links? To get a variety of incoming links from different domains is the real purpose of doing the process to begin with.

So if you are using an article site like Ezine Articles you will need to get your name and articles found by posting links to your Authors page. If you belong to forums, most have a section where you can write a post to promote your article marketing profile. You can also send out a Tweet to each article and hope that people see them and pick them up to post on their own site. If you submit to more than 1 article marketing site, you will need to build links to your articles and author pages there also.

Another type of article marketing that people are using is a community type site like SEO Link Vine. Here you will have a fee to submit your articles. The fee charged normally helps keep out all the blatant spam. This type of site does let anyone pick up articles and post them. Normally the person has to put in the blog URL and will have the articles of their choice automatically posted on their site once they approve them. This does seem to help cut out the people that only copy your article and never seem to grab your author box.

This type of article marketing site also allows up to 3 text links in your article text. That way you can target different key phrases and use deep site links. Most of these also include an article spinner. Now before you go batshit, articles can be spun and very readable. If you do it the lazy way and just use the built in Thesaurus then it will look like crap and no one will accept it. But, spinning is a whole other article.

Ok, so this is the 1st step to article marketing and most people can get this far. Many people now will be saying that even if their articles get posted somewhere the sites may be low ranked. Ok, I can't fix that. You can't make only high ranking sites post your articles so, deal with it.

The next complaint is that even if a site that has some rank post your article that once it falls off the front page of their site then it is sitting on a no rank page. Why, that is true…YOU can help fix that. YOU can help keep that article with the link to your site indexed. But, you will have to put a little work into it. There is no free ride buddy so, get over it.

There are 3 things you will want to do to track your articles.

1. Copy each of your article titles or a very unique sentence that you can put in your Google Alerts. This way you will have a chance to see when one of your articles is found by the big G.

2. Check your backlinks in Yahoo Site Explorer for any links that may not have come in through your G Alerts.

3. Check your Google Analytics for any Referring sites. If a forum, blog, or any site sent a referral then they had a link to you somewhere.

Now, each time you locate a site with one of your articles you will want to keep it. So, make yourself a DOC that is only for 'Articles to My Site'. This way you have a handy list and can throw out a link to one of those articles on Twitter, bookmark it, or even go to a forum and right a mini post with the link pointing to the article. Since you want to help keep the links as 1 way, do not post a link to your article from the site you are promoting with your article. You may even set up a separate site to link out to your articles and others in that niche ( you can see more about that Here . YES, the links will be going to someone else's site which in turn will help your site. You can see a post I wrote about this in Jan 2010 Are You Linking to Your Links.

See, just writing an article is not going to work if that is all you do. It is like any post on your own site, you have to build links to it.

Bonus Tip – If you find a good site that is using your articles, you may want to contact the site admin and offer to write articles specifically for them. This means writing unique articles for them that will not be offered to other sites. It would be like guest posting I guess.

Sheryl

Ps. If you are going to ask why I put links to post I wrote on the forum because that takes away from the 1 way link idea…It is because I am not rewriting those post again on here.

I just got done LMAO! Really, it's not that funny for some people but, I got a huge kick out of it.

NING just announced that they are cutting out Free!
Yep, you either pay for your community or GTFO!

I find it so funny simply because I know people that have spent years spamming every free NING community there is. They make a profile, fill it with links, comment on everyone else's profile with their ads, copy & paste stolen articles in the blog or forum sections (all without proper credit to the original), and they make NING a useless platform.

Then you have the lazy site admins that all they do is build more and more "communities" so they get to put all their crap on the front page and never do anything else. They want YOU to add useful content but, give nothing back but clutter up the interwebs.

I've said for awhile now that Free Communities/forums/blogs will be gone due to lazy freakin spammers....Now, we are seeing it happen.

I am happy that NING is putting their site under new law. It will make the good communities worth joining. People that pay for a site, don't let others shit in it!

The problem for everyone now is that these spammers will have to go elsewhere. That leaves us poor bloggers in the spam hole. The crap comments will multiply because most NING Spammers don't know how to do anything except copy and paste an ad.

Hey all you NING spammers that worked sooooooo hard to build a million links....kiss them Goodbye! You might want to try to actually do something worthwhile with your spare time.

You can see the NING Announcement Email Jason Rosenthal, our CEO, sent to all Ning employees

Ok, that was fun,
Sheryl