DIY SEO: Video Marketing

If you have business videos to share with the world, either product-related or purely promotional, here's a great way to get them good visibility for relatively little effort.

Note: When embarking on this process, I urge you to choose your video title and description VERY carefully. This technique flings your video (along with your chosen title/description) far and wide and it's time consuming to change anything once it's flung.

Here it is, step by step:
1) Go to HeySpread.com and open accounts at all of the sites they service (about 17 or so). Kind of a pain, but it really doesn't take that long. Just fill in enough info to get an account name and password. Keep track of the credentials for each - username/e-mail and password.

2) Once you have all the accounts, go to HeySpread.com and upload the video you want to promote (do you have it on your computer?). You'll have to buy some credits. It's one credit ($.01) for each site submission. For one video, $.17 (seventeen cents) cover it. Then submit the video to be submitted automatically to each account that you opened.

3) Embed the YouTube version of your video into your blog or website.

3) HeySpread will send you an e-mail with all the links of the video. Now, you need to spread the news by "social bookmarking" each link. There's an easy way to do that, too:
a) Open a Firefox browser (it might work with IE, too, but I haven't messed with it enough so stick with FF for now)
b) Go to socialmarker.com.
c) Under "How To Use It", click and drag the little icon up to the bookmark bar in the FF browser.

4) Still using your FF browser, go back to the list of links e-mailed from HeySpread and visit each page. While on a page, highlight some description text and click your SocialMarker bookmark button, which will open up a SocialMarker submission form. Complete the brief form and submit. Do this step for every link, including your own blog or website.

Voila! You're done. For better or worse, your video will be seen by many!

More on Color

Color associations can play a huge role in the success of your website. Here are some examples:

• Trust: blue and white
• Dependability, High Quality: blue and black
• Speed: red
• Danger: red and black
• Cheapness: yellow and orange
• Fun: yellow, red, orange, and purple

Get a complete education in color psychology from Joe Hallock's Color Assignment Study. He lays out the whys and wherefores behind color preferences, including references to a particular color receiving bad marks because it might be "out of style" at the moment.

I was surprised at the consistency of color preference across gender lines and age lines. Although there are differences, the same persisted as "favorite" or "least favorite" but with different intensities.

DIY SEO: Page Titles

A web page’s title plays an important role in search engine optimization. The search engines put quite a bit of weight on the page title, perhaps because it’s visible to users and hopefully gives a true indication of what the page it about. Pay special attention to creating a different title for each page on your site, since the search engines can rank each page individually. Here are some ideas to help.

What is a title “tag?”
The title is the group of words that appear between the tags on your website.
This is what your title looks like in code:

This is how your title appears within a web browser:Most importantly, this is how your title appears in a search engine results list:


Your title may determine whether or not a visitor clicks through to your site from the search results. Just like a headline in a newspaper, the title must grab the visitor’s attention and convince them they’re going to find what they’re looking for at your site.

Keep in mind that words from the search query will be highlighted in your Title and Description. A huge bonus if you choose the right phrases.

Let’s get down to the nitty gritty of crafting a good page title.

Mechanics:
1) Include your most important keyword phrase in both your title and description tags. If possible, work in additional phrases, but ONLY if it reads well and stays brief. Ideally, keep the title
2) Your title tag should be around 8-10 words long, or shorter (Maximum of 75 characters, including spaces).
3) The title and description should read easily and just roll off your tongue. Read all of your content, including titles and descriptions, out loud. If you stumble over words, so will your audience; rewrite them.

4) Brand your Titles with your company name/website name at the beginning or end. Keep your branding as short as possible to make more room for your key phrase(s).

5) Use a divider (>, , :) to separate your brand from the actual title.


Do’s
1) Determine your most important keyword phrases. Review your competitors' titles and descriptions. How do yours compare? Make sure your titles and descriptions are more compelling and designed to grab the visitors' attention immediately. Get other opinions on this, as your opinion may be too biased.
2) Your title and description should be considered an "ad campaign" for your Web site. Your page may be #4 in the rankings, but if you've taken time to create captivating title and description tags, you may have just as many click throughs as the #1 or #2 spots who haven't done their homework.
3) Consider working "discounts" into your title to attract more response.

Examples:
Movie rentals - Rent 7 movies for 7 days at one low price!
Movie rentals - Save 20% on all classic movies

4) Consider turning some of your titles into questions. It’s a great attention getter because it makes the reader think.

Examples:
-Where on earth would you go if you had your pilot license?
-What would you do if your career was terminated?
-When should you submit your web pages?

5) Try moving a testimonial into the Title. Hard-driving results with visibility create action.

Examples:
-Download your programs 84% FASTER with Download Magic
-Improve your memory by 200% with flash cards
-Sharp ways to find more new customers than ever before!


6) Consider offering "numbers" in your title to indicate breadth of choice.

Example:
Shower curtains - Over 88 different designs just arrived!
Bathroom shower curtains - Over 12 different Warner Brothers themes.

7) Repeating the Title as the H1 header of the page creates a good user experience, both for keyword targeting and usability. When the visitor immediately sees the same header on the page that they saw when they clicked through, they know they're in the right place and finding what they were looking for.


Don’ts
1) Don't capitalize the first letter of every word in the title or description, unless they're proper nouns. The title and description should be very easy to read and just roll off your tongue.
2) Don’t stuff the Title and Description with keywords. How boring! Think headline, attention grabbing.
3) Don’t use the same Title on every page. Create each page title individually to promote each page most effectively.
4) Don’t create a page title that has nothing to do with the content of the page. That’s deceptive and confusing and ends up being a waste of time for everyone.

Bottom line: Write a unique, relevant, attention-grabbing title for each page which incorporate keyword phrases specifically related to that page.. Enjoy increased traffic and conversions as a result. Not a bad investment of time.

DIY: Basic Internet Marketing

Now that you have your beautiful website, what are you going to do to get people to visit it? I guarantee that the Field of Dreams promise "If you build it, they will come" is NOT true.

I've put together a brief list of techniques you can do yourself, for free, to spread the word about your site and help get people to visit it.

NOTE: None of these techniques should be used for SPAMming. When visiting forums and communities online, be sure to add something valuable and useful to the discussion, not just your website as a "resource" and leave.

1) E-mail Signature - Everyone uses e-mail. You probably send way more e-mail than you know. But what you may not have thought about is creating an e-mail signature line, which automatically gets attached to every e-mail you send. You might put your name or a catchy quote there. You can also put links to your website! Perhaps you've never mentioned your business to the guy down the street, but you send him an e-mail about poker night with your business website link. He clicks through, has a need that you can fill, and calls you up about. The e-mail signature line is a totally non-threatening, no pressure way to spread the word about your business.

2) Forums - Search online for forums related to your business, particularly ones where potential customers or users of the product or service you offer congregate to find out about serviced rendered or how to find someone to render them. Perhaps offer suggestions about how to choose the "right" provider, how to recognize a faulty product, or where to find what they need in their area. Every answer you leave does not necessarily result in a sale, but people will recognize your contribution and seek you out when they're read to make the purchase.

3) Yahoo Answers - Somewhat similar to forums, but with shorter threads, Yahoo Answers offers a forum in which anyone can ask a question about anything. Search Yahoo Answers for your keyword phrases and see what questions you see come up. Can you offer useful answers to the questions? If appropriate, leave a website address, e-mail address, or phone number for further communication. The same rules for useful contributions apply.

4) Social Networking Sites - Everyone has heard of MySpace. Others include FaceBook, Friendster, Bebo, and LinkedIn. These sites typically allow you fill out a profile indicating your interests. They also allow you to create a mini-website customized to contain profile information, pictures, and comments from friends. They provide a default page if you don't wish to customize your own. You can explore these communities searching for people with shared interests or shared experiences. As you make friends, they tell their friends, and word gets around.

5) Blogging - You can set up your own blog online for free - see blogger.com or wordpress.com - and start telling your story to the world. The blog might be a separate entity from your website, or it might be tightly integrated and hosted on the same webserver - you decide. (Hosting it with your website is slightly more technical to set up.) Since by the nature of blogging, you add fresh content regularly, the search engines will (hopefully) visit regularly to find out what you're doing.

That's it for now. These are basic, do-it-yourself ways to start bringing traffic to your site and spreading the word about your business online. There's are many other techniques as well, but this is enough to get you started. Happy marketing!

Color Sells! What's your color?

There's no doubt that color sells. From cars to air fresheners, manufacturers put careful consideration into which colors sell best. After all, it impacts their bottom line.

Are you considering color in the design of your website? How would you like your website to impact your visitors' senses? Colors can help create that impact for you.

Has it been awhile since you created your website and it's overdue for an update? Consider the "in" colors for your new design. How can the "in" colors be incorporated with your company and logo colors?

Check out the Color Management Group's forecast on the hottest colors for 2008.

How can you take advantage of the impact of those colors on your site today?

DIY: E-mail Marketing (Part 1)

Now that you have a professional looking website, where are all your visitors/customers?
First, you have to get the word out about your website. This DIY (Do It Yourself) series will cover several ways to get the word out about your website.

First up, E-mail Marketing.
E-mail marketing has the best ROI in the marketing industry because it's inexpensive, immediate, and effective.

With an effective e-mail marketing campaign, you can:

• Maintain contact with existing customers to build customer loyalty
• Acquire new customers
• Educate an audience on services/products
• Expose your company/products/services to new potential customers/clients
• Increase sales

Things to Consider When Marketing Via E-mail

1. Personalize your message. Use the information you already have about existing customers.
2. Don’t push products but concentrate on useful, timely, educational information that they can use.
3. Include links to products and contact info.
4. Solicit feedback on their last transaction, asking questions which indicate sincere care and concern for your customer.
5. After an initial response, send up-sells/cross-sells as helpful suggestions.
6. Use transactional and service reminder messages as a helpful service to your customers, not as a sales push.

Since e-mail marketing is, after all, just an e-mail, why not just send e-mails about your products/services from your regular e-mail client to a distribution list? While that method would certainly work, here are a few obstacles you might encounter:

1. You would have to pay someone to create and install the subscription code on your website. This code would have to interact directly with your webserver, which may or may not be set up well for e-mail distribution lists.
2. You would also have to devise a method to unsubscribe from your list.
3. You would have no feedback from the e-mail campaign, other than getting bad e-mail addresses bounced back. You would never know how many of your e-mails were actually opened, how many deleted without a glance, how many marked as spam, etc.
4. You would have to handle bounced back e-mails and maintain your contact list. Easy enough with a very small list, but rather time-consuming when dealing with longer distribution lists (as your business grows).

Instead of rolling your own e-mail marketing system, several companies have already done a good job of it and, for a reasonable monthly fee, they take care of the headaches and give you feedback on your campaign. Here are some of the benefits you get from a typical e-mail marketing service:

1. Tools for online subscription – through your website or an e-mail
2. Tools for creating bulk e-mails
3. Tools for maintaining your contact list
4. Statistics to give you feedback about your e-mail campaign

I believe the most important benefit of an e-mail marketing service is the statistics feature. What good is marketing/advertising if you have no way to measure its effectiveness?

Ok, so now you know that an e-mail marketing service would be a good investment to get your e-mail campaign off to a good solid start. But how do you find a good service? I cover that in Part 2.

Office Humor

Anyone who is working or has worked in an office will appreciate these creative quips:


Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace (and elsewhere)

1. BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
2. SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.
3. ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.
4. SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.
5. CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles.
6. PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.
7. MOUSE POTATO: The online, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.
8. SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.
9. STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.
10. SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.
11. XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.
12. IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying, but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.
13. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again. I often feel like doing this to my computer.
14. ADMINISPHERE : The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.
15. 404: Someone who is clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested site could not be located.
16. GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls and subdivisions.
17. OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an e-mail by mistake.)
18. WOOFS : Well-Off Older Folks.
    

Author: Unknown

Online in 2008

Is this the year you're finally going to get your business out on the internet? Increase your exposure and educate your visitors with a professional website. But, how do you go about doing that?

To get a presence on line, you just need a few things:

1) A domain name - typical cost: $9.95 online
2) Hosting - typical cost: $5-10/month (hosting only)
3) HTML files - this is your actual website - typical cost: $1000 - $2000 (for a professional presence)
4) Seeing your business online: Priceless ;)

Domain Name

Typical places online to get a domain name are Yahoo Small Business or GoDaddy. Just search for your desired domain name and buy one that you like. You might try different TLD's (.net, .org, .info, .name, .us, .tv, etc.) if you don't find your desired name in .com. Depending on your business, another TLD might work just as well.

The most important thing you'll do with your domain registrar is to change the nameservers after you set up your hosting. If you host with the same place as your domain name (which is not necessary), you won't need to change them.

Hosting

Hosting is like renting an apartment for your website. Your website files will be uploaded to your hosting webserver. You'll need to pay a monthly fee for space on this webserver so that your website will have access to the internet. You will probably have access to free e-mail addresses with your hosting account. You will be able to set up e-mail accounts within your hosting account like sales@yourdomain.com. Before signing up for hosting, check to see how you'll access your hosting account information, how much control you'll have over your files, and what applications you can install easily. You hosting needs will depend on your business needs.

HTML Files

You have various options to create the HTML files for your website. Here are a few:
1) Create them yourself by learning HTML, JavaScript, and a basic awareness of PHP or other web development language. Because of the obvious time commitment, this method is not recommended if you don't already have a technical background.
2) Website Builder - Many hosting companies offer a website building program which will help you build a website based on a selection from predefined templates. Although you may be able to get a working website through this process, it most likely take a large time commitment and will not be what you were hoping for.
3) Professional Website Design Firm - For a professional internet presence, this is the best way to go. The big question then becomes how to find the right company charging the right price which understands your business well enough to create the website you need.