A Web 2.0 Buzz Marketing Strategy - How to Get Your Product Known through Interaction

You can work hard to get your product known through what is called "viral marketing" or "buzz marketing", but if you don't know the basics of why social media are that way, you might as well stay home with your knitting.

Recent work and study on social media marketing led me again back to Colin MacDougal and his Constant Conversation. In this, he mentions interviewing Google's Matt Cutts and working out what he calls "Visitor Experience Optimization" - essentially, saying that content is king and is what the search engines are (and everyone else should be) working on ensuring that the visitor has valuable experiences.

Looking for "Matt Cutts Interview" came up with the same thing - a gem here:

"Graph theory vs social networking vs buzz marketing: which of them is most important for a new webmaster to study? What resources would you recommend for learning about each of them?

"I'd study buzz marketing. If you capture the fancy of the web, you won't need to worry about graph theory--you'll get links on your own. Plus, once you know what a clique is in graph theory, you can never go back. Instead of asking "does this link make sense for my users?" you'll be wondering "Am I too close to a clique?" and that's just not healthy. :) Other people could provide better resources than me, but The Tipping Point and Freakonomics are good reads."

Searching for buzz marketing lead me to Ralph Wilson, who limited viral marketing to these principles in his explanation:

"Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others' resources"

However, this falls short, exceedingly. He makes no mention of Malcolm Gladwell ("Tipping Point") or Seth Godin ("Unleashing the IdeaVirus"). Practically, this is a mere explanation of what you see from your end of the elephant. It doesn't tell you how to get the beast in motion, and ignores the fact that "viruses" are interactive - the elephant has as much say as the elephant trainer.

Gladwell pointed out the jobs of "Mavens", "Connectors", and "Salesmen" in spreading viruses to and past the Tipping Point. (And what started this particular post was that recurring term Maven, which is a key to the Review of Maven Matrix Manifesto that I'd recently completed.) Godin added "Sneezers" to the list - and examined the whole necessary structure of the message itself - how "sneezable" it needs to be.

Part of my work in studying this area earlier had lead me to issue the following book as an excerpt of the much larger "An Online Millionaire Plan."

--/ Sponsor /--

Creating The Web 2.0 Buzz: Beyond Search Engine Optimization

You can create a Web 2.0 Buzz which can get you both immediate and long-lasting results beyond "search engine optimization" as currently practiced.

How do you do that?

• Most SEO is built around establishing keywords prominently on your pages.
• Web 2.0 uses all the "New Media" to spread the word for you.
• When you use your keywords in your social bookmarks, your site becomes "viral" - other people spread it for you.
• Using audio, video, and slideshows, people tell others about your stuff.
• And search engines love Web 2.0 more than static pages.
• So use "New Media" to promote your static pages and get top real estate in the search engines.

This book gives you all the theory and examples of how you can create a Web 2.0 buzz and use it to bring paying subscribers to your mailing lists.

---/ Back to our post /---

I wrote and edited extensively on viral marketing based on data in the above book. A sample of applying it shows up in this slidecast:

| View | Upload your own

But back to Dr. Wilson and our disagreements:

There are a lot of factors in creating a buzz, but the key point is participation. People have to want to share your message and contribute to it. In the days before the Internet, viral buzz was created in magazines (Colliers, among others) and newspapers ("yellow journalism" and it's successors today) and books (the "pulps"). Each of these had a method of keeping readers wanting the next edition, the sequel.

And those great stories caused excitement in their readers, who discussed them at length among themselves and kept them alive - in the oral tradition known as "word of mouth".

A great example of this type of writing modernly was Louis Lamour, who had a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter (named for the stunt of having the hero literally hanging off a cliff) - and the only way to put it down was to stop in the middle of each chapter.

The tradition of stories continues. Collier and other great advertising copywriters told continually that the story is what made the ad. And continuing series (such as the classic Volkswagen ads, and Mac serials) just made the message continue on and on and on.

When the Internet evolved and approached its Web 2.0 critical mass, that is really the underlying basic that even Gladwell and Godin missed:

Stories are how people think.

Literally. People are living a story, with themselves as the center focus. They reach out to experience others' stories and compare this with their own. This is how they figure out if they're improving or "de-volving". And so the successful oral traditions on this planet continue into our Internet Age.

With Web 2.0, we then reach the point, as MacDougal says, "In a nutshell, Web 2.0 is simply user-generated content." So everyone is contributing their own story, but at the same time able to contribute to everyone else's.

This is the popularity of "mash-ups" where soundtracks are changed, where different clips are re-edited, re-purposed into completely new output. Plots, characters, meanings are changed. But none of this is particularly destructive - it's all part of creating new content from existing resources. The audience is participatory with the stagehands and the actors, directing as well as viewing. The speed of swap is mind-boggling.

As Matt Cutts related to MacDougal, search engines are engaged in intense search for all this new content. Search engines emulate the human condition. They are tools which try to duplicate the way we think, help us find what we are looking for - even when we don't particularly know. So the visitor experience is key and vital. People are constantly looking for new stories to help them think through their lives.

There has been an intense set of changes with the search engines. They have been gradually shifting over to the Web 2.0 mindset, away from their start with static pages. Now you can "take over" prime search engine real estate literally within minutes if you know how to market it through the social media. For now, since the bulk of the web is still rooted in their static origins, you can hold these positions for some time.

But you can also see, with the Stumbleupon plug-in, you can find who has been there before you, if any of them were by someone you know, and what the basic rating of that page is by that community. You can even search within Stumble-upon, where you get a series of simple user experiences on an "I feel lucky" basis.

But what about our storyline...

When you post to the web now, you need to be able to involve your audience, as well as being willing for that audience to involve you. Nothing is truly static. And you can create intense effects without even creating a static page of your own.

I'd hazard that the bulk of the most influential Web 2.0 sites are where they allow you to post your own creations for free.

Now here is where the "ease" and "smoothness" of the message transfer occurs. Most of these social media sites have incredibly easy interfaces - which can be customized to almost infinite degrees so that you take charge of how you see it and how you look to others.

But the story is king.

Because the story is the stage where the audience and the actors mix. It's an interactive and inter-relational space.

Stories then go beyond the linear scope of fixed plots and linear approach.

Viral and buzz are the words which are interchangeable here. But one doesn't actually start a virus, one invites one to happen. And the originator must, as in any true conversation, be willing to listen - to become the effect of others' cause.

The days of sheer intrusive one-way flow advertising and marketing are over. Now we have ClueTrain conversations with our clients. There are no more customers or consumers. There are only people that you interact with and service - people that you are working with to help them improve their lives.

And all these companies and corporations which are stuck in that one-way marketing flow are losing their "customers" and "consumers" over to those new entities which are interactive with them, willing to shift and change in order to improve the quality of their service. Look around, anything shrinking is still stuck in that old pattern. All that are expanding have established real conversation with their clients - and continue to attract new clients through word-of-mouth, not interruptive advertising.

So how to do Viral/Buzz marketing?

There is no set pattern for this constantly evolving, er, uh, um... -- thing.

I'd say that the greatest ongoing buzz marketing right now is our online gaming communities. Entire economies are being created in these arenas, where people can interact with each other and reinvent themselves as they want. They can enter and leave the space at will.

Online gaming communities approach the ideal marketplace. All participate, any can help others, any can join in commerce or refrain.

Short of that - and not all of us have the intense discipline and willingness to "submerge/emerge" into that type of environment to do our shopping and to get our news and entertainment.

So the next best thing is the Internet.

Here's one preliminary approach to creating a buzz about a product:

• Basic is to tell a story.
• Next from that is to enable interaction.
• Meanwhile, lead your clients over to your product and allow them to tell you about it and help you improve it. You're working to tailor-make your product to that niche you've targeted.

So:

1. Create at least a couple of characters which have a goal and a conflict. (Story)
   While Luke Skywalker had the main decisions in Star Wars, he didn't have all the conflicts. Other characters had their own goals and his friends often conflicted with Luke's progress - or chided him about his lacks. (ref: Joseph Campbell's "Hero With A Thousand Faces")
   
2. Align their goal to your product in some fashion. Either they are looking for your product, or presenting it, or using it to achieve whatever goal they have.
3. Enable audience participation at every - single - step. They must be able to vote it up or down, comment on it, even change the script if this is possible. (Interaction)
   
4. Leave it open for a sequel - and don't be the only writer possible. Star Wars had many, many authorized and unauthorized stories which were prequels to the prequel, sequels to the sequel, and filled the gaps in the story line, as well as creating what-if's far beyond the scope of the movies itself. (Invite the audience to help your product evolve.)
   

How you do this depends on your resources. But in these days, you can actually do it with no major corporate sponsorships and it can even be done without owning a domain name. You don't have to know code, although it's helpful if you can create short videos...

An ideal would be to create a gaming platform, an online community where the participants evolve the rules. But the scope of studies down this line are beyond this post.

Suffice it to say that the Internet already is an online gaming community, where the search engine companies are continuing to change according to the demands and wishes of the users. No one is really in charge of anything, but there are major players who empower other players - the ones who can guess their rules.

It's not just viral, it's more than buzz - I'd say that this strategy would be a ripple-tidal effect.

You want to continue chucking pebbles into that pool until you affect the tides on the rest of the continents on every shoreline you want to affect.

- - - -

Yes, I do have a test case in mind. But you're going to have to find it - or it will find you at some point, depending if I run out of pebbles.

SEO - Finding top keywords using Google Trends and Google Keyword Tool

Funny, but Google can tell you a lot about its own keywords.

The following approach gives you some rough data, but some valuable results:

1. You type the keywords you want to know more about, one (phrase) per line, into Google's Keyword tool.
2. Sort the result by average search volume.
3. Grab the 2 text files you get and put them in a text editor.
4. Take the top 10 or 15 words in each list (regular and "additional keywords to consider")
5. Put these back into the Keyword Tool and check the results.
6. Repeat by taking the top 10 or 15 words from the two lists several times - until you start seeing a pattern show up and the top words quit changing so much.
7. Now, take these 20 or 30 top words and put them five at a time into Google Trends.
8. Eliminate the ones which are separate from the others at the bottom. You want them bunched up if you can - but don't take off the top ones. (If you get "free", or some other oddball word that makes the others all go to the bottom, set it aside and just test the others for now.)

You'll wind up with 5 or 10 words which are searched for all the time - which are "short head" terms. (Different from the "long tail" niches you're looking for.) And you'll start seeing what people are looking for in general - so you can subdivide these into niches.

Differences between Services and Products

Look out for what you get, though.

I did a couple of tests yesterday (and you can/should do your own test of this idea) - one which started out "money, health, power"; the other starting with "free" ( a classic top keyword which outshines even "sex").

The first gave me back an interesting set: "jobs, business, health, power, job" - the second gave me back a different set: "free, games, hotel, dvd, game"

Now, note what you have there. Throw out "free" and you have services in the first one, products in the second. If I'd kept the top ten, I'd probably have "money" back in there, but you can see that we have intangibles in the first set and tangibles in the latter.

And if you look on those keyword trends, you'd see that the top ones are searched consistently through the year and the second are seasonal. Hotels dip in January and peak in September. DVD's peak around Christmas, as does "game" - though not so much.

The SEO guru's I've been listening to about long-tail niche marketing say that your better profits are in the tangibles - the products. People will buy a concrete, actual thing faster than they do an intellectual item. Even though it costs way more.

I'm in the intangibles category, myself, since I deal with personal development and self help books. So I'm interested in what people are looking as benefits for the information products they buy.

So there's two approaches and two sets of results.

They may cross - "free money" would be interesting, but you could never deliver it - and would look like a cheap huckster. "Health DVD" would give you a good line of products you could sell. "Health video" would be a good way to promote that DVD.

Watch for crossover keywords

I went out on left field when I started researching "personal" and "self" - because personal also means "personals" - a classified ad. And what people are looking for in the personal ads section are varied and mostly are all products. So it gave me nothing of worth as I was looking for what benefits people were looking for - not what products. That research dead-ended for me.

The key point is that you start seeing the biggest reasons people are looking for things - be they benefits or products.

With a few such tests, you'll be able to then start finding some very "searched for" niches which are then very under-represented. With those keywords in your text links,

Another oddity - synonyms

I've run into keywords that are so similar that they run tightly in the same range. Consider this Google trend "meat, beef, protein". All run in the same tight trend - except for protein dropping a bit, they show the same consistent demand. (A good thing for farmers.) When you add in "grassfed, organic", you see no real change.

Does this mean that these search terms are basically synonymous? I frankly don't know - there's probably others who have spent more research hours on this.

But my "Competition Finder" (iBizResearch.com) tells me Google has:

• 138M pages for meat,
• 133M pages for protein,
• 72M pages for beef,
• 121M pages for organic, but only
• 73.5K pages for grassfed.

So we can start to see that there aren't many pages for grassfed anything, but about the same demand as meat/beef/protein. Google Trends won't help us break this down, as it's below their radar currently.

The next tool would be to plug those key phrases back into Google Keyword Tool so we can get an estimate of what traffic is there. And you'll get more related words as additional ideas - as well as being able to "theme" your pages.

But as you have pages on "meat", you'll have a similar demand for "beef", and "protein". From the above, you can see that chasing up long tail niches for "beef" would probably be the most profitable niche to start with. Once you have your pagerank going, then expanding over to "meat" and "protein" would be simple. ("Cooking natural beef recipes" would go over to "cooking natural meat recipes" quite easily - you could almost copy/paste the pages to another mini-web...)

- - - -

There's a lot more to do in this area - but as I was toying around with some interesting research last night, I thought to give you a heads-up on this area.

Sponsor:


Sign up for An Online Millionaire Plan Newsletter

Making your own personal fortune online while working from home has never been easier. But the trick is to find out how. There are so many books on how to do marketing online that you need a guide to find your way. That is what this Online Millionaire Plan series does.

Research into online book marketing uncovered eight major ways to market - all of which can be interlocked to result in major improvement on each individual approach. This book series was published in sections so that you can study each of these ways in turn. Each section was published in a logical sequence to build on the basics of the section before.

Written in a modern, easy-to-read style, these sections are also being converted into MP3 versions along with a study guide. Additional products (programs, ebooks, etc.) are linked to each individual section where appropriate.

Making a living through your search for greater personal development also drives this research. Wealth is everyone's birthright. However, most people are poorly trained in how to acquire or hold onto any wealth they create. A first section of this book series takes on that exact point - and why the goal of discovering and educating the person who wants to become a millionaire was chosen.

Here's to your online millions!

Sign up for An Online Millionaire Plan Newsletter

Tags and Keywords determine YouTube video findability - SEO strategies

On some sign-up in the last few days, I got a free pdf from Jeremy Burns, entitled ViralYouTubeTraffic. (If I knew where I'd got it from, I'd link it... and bless it's soul, it's all over Google.)

Here's a boil-down of what I see as vital (italics are direct quotes):

1. How do you gauge a video's popularity?

The popularity of a video can be gauged by looking at the views count and it is important to see that there are two ways that videos results are returned: By the title of the video and the ‘tags’ used to describe the video. By all appearances, the ‘tags’ are the most important keyword reference to optimize... In fact, these are probably the 2 most important optimization tools (other than making a great video) that you can use to get your video viewed many, many times. Fortunately, most YouTube users are not experts at keyword optimization and only tag their videos with a few related keywords. With a little thought and brainstorming, you can make your videos ‘findable’.

Means that keywords, like the rest of the Internet, are only used by the savvy - and that is where the money/viewers/leads are.

2. Channels, Groups, Playlists

Search Tools:
Channels: Basically, channels allow you to search for videos uploaded by a specific user. You can create your own channel
Groups: This feature allows you to search by groups using a keyword. This is important for advanced search because groups attract passionate people.
Playlists: This feature allows you to find playlists or groups of videos organized by a common theme.

...

After you’ve created a YouTube account and uploaded some videos, take the time to create a custom profile and your own custom channel information. You should also create at least one group, and you may want to create a playlist if you have more than 1 video.

This will give you a big advantage when people sort for ‘Channels’, ‘Groups’, and ‘Playlists’.

If YouTube users are so unsophisticated now that they can barely pick more than 2 or 3 decent keywords to tag their videos with, there is little doubt that few to none are actually taking the time to make customized channels, play lists and groups.

Idea here is the same as keywords. You want to make your video findable. These three are social networking tools within YouTube that facilitate people finding your video when it is associated with words they are looking for. That is really all keywords do - search shortcuts people use within search engines. (If you want a good cross-section of Internet culture, just look at Google's hot trends...) People use common terms to find stuff - and you just have to find what those terms are, plus tag your video and include those terms in your title and descriptions.

3. Characteristics of successful videos

Well, I have found that there are certain characteristics that can help make a video successful, and I’ve listed them below... Funny, Weird, Gross, Shocking, Interesting, Sexy, Inspiring, Demonstrates, Instructional, Personal

For the use of someone trying to develop a trusting relationship with a public that will opt-in to a mailing list and then continue to buy, let's narrow down to these few:

Funny, Interesting, Inspiring, Demonstrates, Instructional, Personal

Anything else is a flash in the pan. What you want is a classic that will be around (and searched for, referred) over and over.

5. Case Studies - Burns does four very clear case studies showing why each was a success as marketing tools. (Get the PDF, which has links to these videos.)

His summary says it all:

4 Important Observations About The Videos In The Case Studies

1. A video does not have to get very many views to be an absolutely amazing financial success. In the case of high-ticket items like real estate, a very simple and amateur video which got only a few hundred hits sold a house. The return on investment was awesome.

2. Video length is very important to note of. Keep in mind that people on the internet have extremely short attention spans, and there maybe much better videos waiting for them to view if your video is boring for even 5 or 10 seconds. Unless you have a very strong professionally produced, or extremely funny or engaging video, there isn’t much reason the video has to be over 2 minutes. Videos as short as 20 seconds that take 10 minutes to produce may be as powerful a professionally created video that is 5 minutes long and cost $5,000 to produce.

3. We also learn that even the most basic demonstrations of a product using YouTube can help to sell a product (unless you are showing a competitor’s product in a bad light). Keep in mind that even if a demonstrational video that doesn’t get many views from people searching YouTube, it can still be a useful marketing device --Just embed the demonstrational video in your website to help convert visitors into buyers. ...

4. If possible, put people in the videos...those people will show their friends those videos and those friends may show other friends and so on. Just be sure that if an actors release is required ... that you have one.

Length, as sales page writers have found, has more to do with maintaining interest than attention span. Trailers are short in movie theaters to take advantage of that short, emotional attention span. Marketers are saying, "Plug this into your subconscious right now and REMEMBER IT." When the video gets longer, you are engaging their analytical side as well.

For real marketing, you can't practically emotionalize trust without also delivering some goods for the Analyzer in us all. Emotional appeal only lasts so long - ask any President's PR person. While approval ratings usually go up after they left office, they are mostly in the gutter when they left (I think Truman still beats Bush at this point...). Approval ratings go up when they only have their fond memories left (and the press quits bashing them every day, on the hour, half-hour, and in-between.)

You want a viral affect that lasts. So length is optimal against how good your copy is and how well your production carries the viewer.

6. Movie Quality

Burns goes into a great deal about how to make videos. Suffice to say, the tools are cheap, plentiful, and have short learning curves. I made my first one in an afternoon when I installed the program.

But there are these recommendations:

What's the best format to upload for high quality? YouTube recommends the following settings: * MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format * 320x240 resolution * MP3 audio * 30 frames per second

Movie Length And File Size: Movies must be under 10 minutes, under 100 megabytes in file size. This should not be a problem, as most effective promotional videos are short.

When uploading your videos, it is important to remember that this is the time to optimize your video profile to get the most visitors from YouTube searchers. Here are some screen-shots to explain the basic functions of uploading your videos. After you have created your free YouTube Account, login and go to your account page and find the button that says ‘Upload New Video’.

This step is the most important step so take your time and make sure you get this right.
In the title box, put your best keyword, and make your title exciting if possible. Something that generates curiosity will help. You may also consider putting your website URL in the title (but not absolutely necessary).

In the description box, describe your video and BE SURE to put your website URL! You may want to put some keywords in the description.

The ‘Tags’ box is critical. Here is where you want to put all of the best keywords that you found from your research. These are the keywords that will help YouTube surfers find your videos.

Another key point he covers is to have your web address visible at all times. Like a banner behind your video action if you are recording, part of your template if you are working from a PowerPoint presentation, or as a watermark if some combination of things. The idea is that you get the person to see your web address so they can go there for more information.

As well, make sure you have a final page to that video which has your address - and is the last (and probably also the first) thing they see. "As sponsored by gothunkyourself.com" or something.

7. List Building

Now we'll see how this then ties into what we've already covered in List Building through An Online Millionaire Plan:

How To Build Your List By Offering Free Videos:

List building is a very important part of doing business online. There are a few ways you can build your list using YouTube. The first is to put up videos, and at the end of the video, instruct the users to visit your website. At your website, be sure to have an email sign up form to collect as many subscribers as you can to market to them over an over again. You may also want to use videos as incentives for people to sign up.

For example, in exchange for a name and email address, you can send your subscribers a link to 2 sample videos which offer a sample of your product or some type of demonstration. This is especially effective if you have an information product and you can show one or two techniques to pique the prospects interest. Be sure to describe the videos and the benefits they’ll receive from watching them and you’ll likely increase your email list.

Trust Building: If you have an email list already, you may want to create a few videos of yourself and your product to help build a personal relationship with your subscribers. This may not be appropriate for all types of businesses, but there is always some way you can increase trust with video that shows your subscribers more about what you can offer them.

Educational Videos Educational videos also fall under the category of trust building. Educational videos can be useful if they tell potential buyers more about your product or service. For example, if you were selling a series of cooking videos on DVD, you might find it useful to do a short series of YouTube videos demonstrating a few recipes and then direct watchers to your website where they could purchase complete DVDs. You might also have the educational videos embedded in your website to help show what you do to people who find your site in the search engines.

It helps to build trust when people see a sample and see that what you are offering is good.

Here's where the rubber meets the road. If you are going to generate leads/traffic from videos, you have to generate trust. So sexy, gross (or sexy and gross) videos won't do - unless you are selling porn, but these usually get banned from YouTube quickly.

Simple educational videos, as Burns mentions, will build trust.

As well, the idea that you give away something for people who give you their email address is standard for this industry.

With videos, this can be simply an address to a page with a video that's not commonly available - or a .zip file they can download where that video is embedded into a web page as a Flash file. Or you could simply give away a PDF ebook which has video links in it. (I haven't yet worked with embedding video into PDF's, although I'm sure some one has - stay tuned...)

8. Where to from here...

Now that you have them on your list, realize that this is a visual-oriented, Web 2.0-savvy subscriber. They may not be satisfied with simple emails and PDF ebooks. So you should make special list-only videos from time to time and embed them on your blog.

And of course, all these videos you make can then build into your own funnel products, since videos make great course material. Particularly if you are making educational and how-to videos from the beginning.

Courses built with audio and video, in addition to PDF's, will give a lot greater value than a simple text or HTML-based course. Of course, you want them to buy your hardcopy version that comes with a CD or DVD.

Lulu and others enable you to create CD's and DVD's that the person can buy directly (or you could burn and print them yourself, for a little investment of personal time and money).

You can make access to these projects "direct access only", such that unless you give out the exact address, they would never be able to find it on their own. Perfect for special offers (like the pre-release paperback version of a book - or that link above on List Building where you can get a section of a larger book for a fraction of what the final book costs. But only where the author gives you the exact address - and none of the others can be searched for, since they are all given exact numbers, which are impossible to get sequentially and guess...

And... there is great crossover potential. I've mentioned embedding these in blogs. They also embed well in sales pages (though KISS still applies) and also can be linked from your articles - which will boost your credibility enormously. They also can be enabled through your RSS feed, meaning people should be able to "podcatch" them if you set it up right (More on this later as I research it).

- - - -

As a review, Jeremy Burns gives great value in this PDF, and has made it available for many to either sell or give away (as you can see on Google).

It's a great start.

But as I've been blogging lately, this is the way our modern Internet culture is heading. Burns points out that, as usual, really optimizing your videos (as people still don't do with their web pages) is how you can generate quite a bit of traffic and credibility for yourself.

- - - -

Sponsor link:

Brought to you by An Online Millionaire Plan - the book.

Gettting new ideas about top business solutions - the video

Taking the acid test myself (informally known as eating the dogfood you manufacture), I had a burning idea from that intuitive angel of mine.

I had just published a book, which was a compilation of essays on Genius. But I was nowhere near getting around to marketing it - as I've got a lot of other stuff backlogged, while I continue to research this video stuff.

Now, I'm going to give away a few secrets here, so stay tuned...

There are only a few steps to this. And they are simple ones:

1. Do your keyword research carefully. Find out what you are trying to market and then find out how you should remind the world that you are there. A lot of this is already done through your product research, so you then just have to double-check this, or find new applications for that data - as we'll cover below.

My product is basically that I've figured out how to enable anyone to access their genius abilities. That is the crux of that book. The market I'm going after is business execs and entrepreneurs, though I can also market it to other niches as well - who doesn't want to become a genius, or learn to live with it?

So the keyword research revolved around "business, ideas, genius, solutions, situations, analysis, etc." Interestingly, "business solutions" and "business ideas" seemed at first glance to be possible keyword niches I could get into.

Then I looked up the competition (one tool for this is Niche Watch, a plug-in for Firefox, but there is also SerpScope from iBizResearch - which has a better tool called Competition Finder). And there was tons for these. Not that I couldn't get into the top ten on these with some proper page optimization...

A real weird scene is happening on the Internet - people are changing their tastes for things. All things business have been downtrending slowly over the last few years. And of all things, "video" is higher and has surpassed "sex" (which is itself downtrending) - but still not as high-ranked as "free". "Business" itself is still a very high-ranked individual term, according to Google Trends.

Now plug that into the above and you'll see that business solution video, top business video, genius business video, anything with "video" in it has a high search hit number, but low or non-existent anchor and title competition. They are so upside down, it's ridiculous.

Example: "business ideas" has almost 37 mill hits, with 6 mill in anchor, 184K in title and 170K in both anchor/title.

BUT - "business idea video" has 26 mill hits, but only 5 in anchor, 1600 in title and 3 in both. That is a wide open niche. Strategy then would be to take a good business book (like a PLR version you already have or can cobble together) and then make a dozen or so videos about it. Make a website where you post these to take advantage of all the various "business video" niches which are sitting there. You'll be there first with all the goodies people are looking for. And meanwhile, you post all the videos over to YouTube (or short versions of them) and then sign up everyone who visits your sites for your mail list and offer then an online video course with the full videos, PDF's, MP3's - the whole shooting match.

And - you then take all this rich data and research those keywords on YouTube as a cross-check.

2. Ok, now you are all excited - you make the video.

I found another fascinating way to make videos - Picassa. This free program from Google will take a series of images and then make an AVI out of them, with any compression you want. Then you take Camtasia and edit these together with a soundtrack and some slides with text on them - and you're away.

Missing a nifty tune with a nice backbeat for your soundtrack? Visit Archive.org, which has been helping people upload their Creative Commons works for years. Just give credit where credit is due at the end of your video (with a nice caption function in Camtasia). And don't try to resell this audio - but using it for free advertising is just fine...

Ensure you include the link to where you want them to go at the end of the video - or as a watermark which shows up all the way through. And also put that link in your video description.

(There are lots of good tutorials on video, and as many ways to do this as there are lemmings in spring. No need to go into them here.)

3. Now we get back to the nitty-gritty of web-building.

Set up a new folder and then build your opt-in page first - everything except the code.

Go to your autoresponder and set up another project - with that code in hand, you plug it into your opt-in page.

Now, fire up your web-page builder (like the free Nvu, or the paid SEO Website Builder from Dr. Andy Williams - a very neat tool, indeed.)

You only have to build the opt-in page. But it would be smart to build some other pages which you can then link in - like author bio, catalog, etc. While I initially started out to build a mini-web (and I may still do so) I only had to create that opt-in page to start with. Saves time.

4. Upload your video and use the same keywords as tags and description - make sure you also include your link in that description box. When it's up and running, come back and update your landing page with that video.

5. The follow up? Check your position on Google later in the day, and your server stats - as well as hits on YouTube.

Then go ahead and set up another niche video and link these pages over into your existing pages. If you do a video a week, plus another mini-web for each , you'll have probably 50 videos, with 150 pages of a mini-net by the end of the year. And all the credibility of being a complete authority on whatever you are making videos about - like "new business ideas", for one...

- - - -

And here's that new business ideas video: