22
Jul
Written by Susan on July 22nd, 2009
You don’t have to surf the web for long before you begin to notice a hot trend on people’s websites - videos. They’re fun, they’re eye-catching, they’re attention grabbing. A short, well-made video is a hypnotically good technique for gathering a crowd of people around your product or service and showing them just what it is you’ll be offering them if they spend their money with you. A savvy marketer is going to want to integrate this technique into their strategy with no further delay.
If you don’t have an easy means of creating a video - the software to do a professional, polished video can run to hundreds of dollars, after all - never fear. Animoto.com is one of the coolest sites I’ve ever come across, and I recommend it with immense enthusiasm! Even if all you have is a handful of pictures (royalty free, of course!), you can be 5 minutes away from having an incredibly slick, wholly unique video that you can download, marketing whatever you want. (To show you how easy it is, click here to see my very first video with Animoto.) It’s even free, up to 30 seconds! For a whole year’s worth of all the videos you can make, it’s only $30. They provide the cool graphics, the music (if you don’t have any of your own that you’d prefer) and will even upload your video to YouTube for you. Run, don’t walk, and sign up now.
Once you have a video ready to go, you’ll want to know where to upload it. Most major search engines have a video search option, which makes it easy for people to find videos on whatever topic they’re interested in. This is good news for marketers. By knowing which are the top video sites, you can make the most of them for getting traffic to your site.
Google certainly needs no introduction. As one of the biggest search engines around, it offers a powerful video search option allowing seekers to find a video on almost any keyword imaginable.
Yahoo! too. Like Google, it has keyword, image and search functions making it a great spot to upload a video and attract buyer attention.
BlinkX is a video search engine that is arguably the best choice for making the most of your video marketing strategy. It uses a revolutionary technique of searching for videos by using voice recognition as well a visual analysis of each video to ensure that it is being classified properly. Other search methods use metadata to index their video files, but relies on the honesty of the person uploading the files. How many times have you searched for a video, only to see something completely irrelevant and off-topic pop up? The chances of that happening on BlinkX is greatly reduced.
YouTube - everybody’s favorite time-sucker - is a wonderful directory for getting your video indexed and viewed by millions of people all over the world. They offer helpful tips on how to market your video to optimize eyeball count and targeted traffic.
There are many, many more video upload sites that can be useful, but rather than list them here, I’m going to suggest you nip over to TubeMogul.com and join up. TubeMogul is a free service that lets you upload your video once, and they distribute it to dozens of video directories automatically - including social networking sites - and they even track all the relevant statistics so you know who’s watching your videos, as well as when, where, and how often.
There’s no longer any question about the necessity of adding videos to your marketing arsenal. With free and affordable tools like Animotoand TubeMogul, you can have your singing, dancing presence on the web, bringing in traffic in numbers that may astonish you.
2
Jul
Written by Susan on July 2nd, 2009
Remember the days of yore - the ones before there was an Internet? No, you’re not dating yourself - it really wasn’t that long ago. But the advent of the ‘net has changed how business is done pretty drastically in that short space of time, and if you want to squeeze a living from that massive online marketplace, you need to know something about how the rules have changed.
Pre-web, you could crack open a newspaper, check the business opportunities section and find ads galore, all promising to teach you how to make money from home. You’d pony up with a $10 check, they’d mail you back a package teaching you how to sell their package. That self-serving formula hasn’t changed much; you’ll still find plenty of those online, but they aren’t charging you $10 for it anymore, that’s for sure.
But there’s another kind of teacher that you can find online that isn’t trying to sell you on selling them. They really want to teach you how to make money, and aren’t trying to fleece you out of what money you have. But they often have one problem: they promote their way of making a success on the Internet as the only true, genuine, workable way to succeed, and proclaim everybody else’s methods to be useless at best, and a scam at worst. They take what works for them as a universal truth, and really, they’re not wrong, exactly. They just suffer from tunnel vision. You’ve probably heard the parable about the blind men and the elephant - each one felt a different part of the beast and made their separate (and incomplete) conclusions about it based only the part they came into contact with. That’s what a lot of these online gurus are doing.
If you’re trying to learn what “really works” when it comes to making money on the Internet, you are no doubt completely confused by what your research has brought up so far. Let’s dispel some of these myths.
Theory One
In these days of blogs and social media, you need to prove your authority for your site to succeed. Build your traffic and your authority first, then monetize later.
Theory One Shot Down
While this method can certainly work, it doesn’t take into account what your personal style of blogging might be. Perhaps you don’t feel yourself to be an authority on a topic you want to turn into a business. If you prefer to write posts that come across like an online diary - if you have your smiling picture up on your “About” page - then the relationships you’re forming with the visitors to your blog is a friendly, cozy, interactive one. Once you have a lot of traffic and want to monetize your blog, you’ll find yourself in the uncomfortable position of trying to solicit money from people who have become your “friends.” You can either establish yourself from day one as an authoritative source of information, or you can be a blogging buddy. You can’t really do both.
Theory Two
You can’t be anonymous. People don’t respond to a gravator…they need to see a face.
Theory Two Shot Down
Have you ever heard of lolcats? The icanhascheezburger.com site launched in January, 2007. By June, they were getting half a million hits per day. Nobody knew who ran the site. In July, the two founders were interviewed by Time Magazine, and told their interviewer that they preferred to remain anonymous. It wasn’t until they sold their little hobby site for $2 million dollars that we learned their names: Kari Unebasami and Eric Nakagawa. Anonymity didn’t seem to hurt them any, eh?
Theory Three
If you have a blog, you must post often or you’ll lose traffic.
Theory Three Shot Down
Ask Frank Warren. His postscret.com blog gets update once on Sundays, and he landed a multi book contract with a major publisher not long after it swept the web. It’s also in the top 100 site online.
Theory Four
The fastest way to build a list is to give away freebies.
Theory Four Shot Down
Well, this can work, but you could also be laboring to build a list of freebie hounds that never, ever end up buying anything from you. It’s a crapshoot.
Theory Five
Your website, blog posts, or mailing list should be about whatever you’re selling.
Theory Five Shot Down
On the surface of it, this makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Problem is, it doesn’t necessarily reflect reality. You have a brand of socks that you think are the bee’s knees, but do you really want to read a newsletter about them? You wanna join a mailing list and hang out in forums and get updated blog posts about your favorite nose hair trimmers? Ask a few gurus what they’d do about trying to sell a product that nobody really wants to read about, and most of them will tell you not to bother trying to sell it. But people do sell these things online, and make a very nice living for themselves doing it. How do you manage that when you can’t stay “topical” or “targeted”? Well, find a way to promote an idea that’s related to what you’re selling. If you’re trying to sell socks, consider talking about the fashion industry in your posts. If you’re selling nose hair trimmers, you could write about hygiene, or personal grooming in general. If you are selling your services, for instance home renovation, roofing, decks, etc., how about creating a site with barbeque recipes and kids crafts, with testimonials from your clients telling about how they loved their new deck and that the kids are crazy about their new playroom. People will love your cool articles and fun stuff, and return to your site to buy what you’re selling them. Just talk about what people want to hear and they’ll remember the connection.
Theory Six
Do what you love, and the money will follow. It won’t even seem like work.
Theory Six Shot Down
Again, another idea that makes sense on first viewing. What better way to spend your life than getting paid for doing something you love? But think about it. What was a leisure pursuit, a way to relax, a way to express yourself, will soon become a full time job, with pressures, deadlines, expectations, and endless compromise as you cater to each new “boss” that pays you to give them what they want. How long do you think it will take before you have no desire to look another doll, or sewing machine, or kit car, or pile of PC parts in the face again? There’s nothing wrong with making your hobby into a business, if that’s what you really want. But considering the downside, it’s also perfectly possible and often desirable to go into something else altogether, keeping your hobbies and business completely unrelated.
Theory Seven
You can’t succeed in a field you know nothing about.
Theory Seven Shot Down
It’s not tough to see how having a lot of knowledge in a particular field can help you achieve great success in it. And sometimes it’s even a prerequisite: you probably wouldn’t take flying lessons from someone who’d never flown a plane.
But do you suppose that every successful marketer, website designer or ghostwriter is an expert in every field they’re asked to apply their expertise to? Of course not. So what did they do? They found out what they needed to know. If you know how to properly research an industry, you can sell anything to anyone in any field and make a success of it.
So don’t take what someone trying to sell you their “Make Millions Online” program says as gospel truth. They may not be trying to mislead you, but they may have a fatally narrow focus and a “can’t do” attitude that won’t reassure you that there really is an infinite number of ways to make money online. If you keep an open mind about the possibilities, you really can make the dream work for you.
