Archive for March, 2010

How To Market and Optimize YouTube Videos

Friday, March 26th, 2010

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YouTube has been around for a while now, and we all remember the “instant hit” sensation that YouTube experienced when it started to become part of our modern vocabulary. The fact that YouTube is free, is available to anyone with an internet connection and creates a connection with the viewer through it’s “anyone can make their own video” marketing plan set it apart from other video sharing sites, who mostly hosted more professional and commercially-driven productions.

There have been thousands of stars born overnight thanks to the YouTube sensation and a little bit of personal creativity, but keep in mind that it takes more than just a good idea to get your video going viral on this most popular of video sharing platforms.

Think about things from the video viewer’s point of view:

1. You get to the YouTube site
2. You’re looking for something specific, so you search that specific term in the YouTube search field
3. You’re bombarded with hundreds of results, and it’s up to you to select the one(s) you find are most relevant to your search

With this in mind, it’s a no-brainer to market your video to the specific target market looking for the content displayed in your video. This may seem obvious, but next time you do a YouTube search, have a look at how many results come up that appear relevant, but once viewed, have nothing to do whatsoever with your search term. Why? Because just like it is with websites, there are people out there who want to bring in as much traffic as possible regardless of search relevancy. Consider these the bad apples of the search world. They waste their time optimizing and marketing products that aren’t relevant to searcher’s needs, and waste our time by having to rifle through nonsense results.

Though Google (YouTube’s parent company) has done well at cracking down on these people in the website search realm, it’s a little more difficult in the video search world as search engines can’t really read the content contained within a video, as  there isn’t normally any textual or coded content that you’d normally find on a given website.  So, it’s up to the video producer to ‘tag’ and title their video as accurately as possible, and up to the viewer to rate and provide feedback on the production.

As a video uploader on YouTube, there are a couple things that you can do to market your video properly:

1. Once you’re logged into your YouTube account and have uploaded a video, go the “Info & Settings” tab of that video.
2. Under “Title”, choose a short and descriptive title that accurately depicts the video you have uploaded. If possible, use your most popular keyword phrase in the title if it accurately describes the video.
3. Under “Description”, again use your most popular keyword phrase in a sentence that fleshes out the title of the video in increased detail.
4. Under the “Tags” section, input your most popular keyword phrases, and separate each by commas and spaces. I recommend keeping to less than 150 characters (including spaces) in the Tags section.
5. Choose the category that most accurately describes your video and not the one that you think is the most general and will bring the most traffic. The more specific the category that accurately describes your video, the higher quality the traffic will be that watches the video.
6. Click “Share your video with the world” to publish the video, and click “Save Changes” at the bottom.

These steps will help ensure your video is seen by the right people, and will help YouTube become a better service for everyone to enjoy.

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Using Online Video To Help Market Your Website

Friday, March 19th, 2010

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Online videos are a great way to help market your business online, and can help separate you from your competitors, giving you that leg up that you’ve been searching for.

I know, I can see many of you cringing already at the prospect of having to invest thousands and thousands of dollars in video production to result in little more than a few minutes of product. However, unless you’re making a statement of wanting to show everyone how flashy your videos can be, a huge production investment in online video is not necessary. Think about the most viewed online videos over the last few years – what is common about them? To answer, they’re all, for the most part, executed with little more than a laptop, a $40 webcam, and a creative idea…think YouTube! This raw production style helps connect with others because the vast majority of us don’t have the resources to invest in anything more than this type of footage.

This said, there’s no reason why an inexpensive video production can’t look great and deliver a fantastic sales message. It’s all about identifying with your audience and supplementing the content of your website with an interactive message. Not all of us, after all, learn the best from reading straight text. Many people learn best through video or audio, or a combination of both. Just remember, the point of integrating online video onto your site is not to make your site look flashy, but to help improve sales and conversions. To do so, here are some quick tips to consider when producing such a video:

1. Keep the video as short as possible. Edit, cut, edit, cut, then edit and cut again. An effective sales video should be under 3 minutes in length – just long enough to deliver your core messages.

2. Start your video by presenting a specific problem that the viewer will identify with. Present challenges and fears that will encourage the viewer to keep watching, suggesting you can help alleviate these fears.

3. Pose a solution to these challenges, and consider using a happier audio overlay or a more positive tone of voice during this segment of the video. Describe how much easier the customer’s life will be with this solution in place.

4. Conclude by letting the viewer know that you are the only one who can provide them with this consumer satisfaction, that nobody else has this solution. Brand yourself during this portion of the video and make your brand/business known.

5. At the very end of the video, drive home the call to action. Show a clip of a toll-free number to call, or present a short URL that the viewer can visit to take the desired action.

If you’re using a platform like YouTube to deliver this message, consider not making the video public after first uploading the video. Chances are, you’ll be making more revisions and you won’t want the public to see you’re unfinished copy. Once you’ve got it all straightened out, publish your video to the viewing public. Lastly, it you’re integrating this video onto your website, you need to have text on the site to support the content of the video. Just sticking a video on an otherwise blank web page is not doing yourself any favors, as the viewable content within a playing video is not SEO-able. What I encourage doing is creating a short text page, highlighting the main points of the video as well (remember what I said about catering to different types of learning) and providing more options for the call to action at the end of the text. Here you can create clickable links that you can’t, for the most part, do within a platform like YouTube. All that’s left to do is put the video on that page and you’ve got yourself a bona fide multi-dimensional marketing page!

Need help creating or integrating a marketing video on to your site?

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Pay Per Click Marketing As Your First Step To Traffic Building

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

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Long ago, pay per click marketing was often stigmatized as a cash-grab. Many thought the idea of paying a search provider for incoming traffic via text and not visual ads was a dishonest method of profiteering. After all, search engines should provide unbiased results to prospective searchers, right? Well, it wasn’t long until businesses began to realize the advantages of pay per click marketing.

It’s a game of mathematics and statistics. If you’re familiar enough with your products and services, you’ll most likely know how much a lead is worth to you, and what the profits and costs of each sale are. This is where you can measure exactly how much you want to spend in your pay per click budget. For example, if you sell a product on your website and know that each sale costs you X amount of dollars, you can set your pay per click campaign bids and daily/monthly spend to not exceed that amount. Additionally, you can set your pay per click ads to direct exactly to that sales page when clicked on, versus non paid-advertising where most traffic will be directed to your homepage and therefore rely on the website visitor to navigate through the site and eventually end up on the page you want them to see. This, unfortunately, results in a larger exit rate (the more pages a visitor has to click on to get to the page they want to see, the more unlikely they are to see that page).

The biggest advantage pay per click marketing has over traditional SEO, especially for the sake of this blog, is its ability to bring in as much traffic as you want, as soon as you want. When launching a website and having it go live on the internet, it can take a while for the search engines to see that your site now exists. The fastest way for this to happen is to have outside sites link to the new site – it’s a matter of building an incoming network that directs search engines to a new presence – but this is a topic for another day. Still, even when search engines become aware of a new website, it can take up to a full year for them to properly index your site (rank your site properly in accordance with its SEO factors, in relation with the competition). This translates to very limited search traffic during this transition period…unless you supplement traffic with a pay per click marketing campaign. Until you start bringing in substantial amounts of organic/non-paid traffic, you can use a pay per click campaign to build awareness.

I typically recommend clients in such positions to start with conservative budgets and increase in accordance with ad and sales/lead performance. Eventually, a formula will be worked out so a precise amount of ad spend yields as much profit as possible, which may not necessarily mean having the ads appear in the top position. Again, it’s working out cost versus profit, and if you’re a business looking to start your own pay per click campaign and don’t have much experience with such endeavors, I highly recommend consulting a professional. The investment into such a service will definitely yield much more profit when compared with inexperienced administration on such a platform.

As usual, please contact us if you need help with any of your pay per click marketing needs.

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