Notes on keywords, niches, and real life.

Just some notes and updates on keywords, niches, and how it really all fits together.

Been going through several trainings lately. They all have their points.

But they each have some confusion on where keywords work and why. I've earlier pointed out about some keywords are "natural". Means keywords that people use are simply ordinary to them. That turns out to be the basis of all search - find out what people are talking about and the words they use to describe them. When a lot of people use the same terms consistently, these have been named "keywords".

The trick is that these also tell a lot about where peoples' attention is at - and where they continue to look for things in certain areas, these are known as niches. Some have more activity than others - and this is known as "competition".

Now, the way search engines have looked for keywords and evaluated sites has changed dramatically over the years. This is because there has been some artificial importance to the top few sites which search engines turn up. Because Google shows up only a certain few web locations for each particular set of words. And some have gone for the short-term profit of trying to grab and hold onto these "top sites".

Meanwhile, a whole 'nother section of the web developed, called social media. These are what was formerly known as "communities" and they still are - it's just that social aspects have been high-lighted with new technology and people have de-centralized and more loosely-connected themselves.

While search engines have always simply tried to group and serve up what is really important to the Internet - they are now looking to the social media to point their way. This is seemingly a very good rating system which is almost impossible to spam - so you get routinely great content. So these are now what the search engines serve up as tops.

This comes back to keywords, because - again - real keyword use is natural and organic to the traffic that uses them.

Now, where this goes off the rails is people thinking that keywords and niches are the same things. True, niches have words and a keyword phrase might also be a niche.

But there are differences - niches really can't be "dominated". They are constantly moving targets. (I really dislike that word - almost as bad a "manifesto" - they both have some negative emotive content...)

Ok, so you can hit that moving target here and there, but you can't ride it like a bull, even for 8 seconds. It just moves too fast.

Buuut - you can keep pages in top search engine positions for "long-tail" keywords. Those are like Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" of marketing - where very precise mini-niches have almost vertical markets and change very little.

Jack Humphrey has built most of his work on this exact point - becoming an authority in these niches and then monetizing from that vantage.

You essentially create a volume of work which is all great content and develop trust with all these niche denizens. And they start looking to you as a dependable resource and trust your data. As you do, they will also click through on what you offer. And that's where you get your funding - because you either then provide them good content or get paid a commission for having a link on your site where people who trust you will click through and by their products.

OK?

Now, here is the simple point that people get waaay wrong: Niches aren't keywords. No, duh?

Niches have lots of competing pages for the same basic terms. Because a lot of people are talking about the same stuff and search engines have difficulty discerning which one is more important than others. Search engines are basically linear.

In social media, you don't have that problem, because all your content is referred by your "friends" (people you trust as authorities) and you don't really have to search for much. And meanwhile, most of these social media sites acquire some sort of search capacity as they grow. Primitive search, but it's useful.

But search engines are necessary part of life right now. They allow you to bridge between niches. You can keep track of related niches this way - or find out about something which is of interest to you, but isn't perhaps all that popular in the niches you are interested in.

So - in marketing (working at getting paid for offering solutions to people you don't particularly know) we want some tools to enable us to get our pages up on search engines and keep your pages up in the prime categories and so people can find your stuff - and then pay you for your work.

All long-tail keywords aren't the same.

Niches are high volume traffic. Plenty of demand, plenty of supply.

Long-tail niches have much less demand, much more focused supply.

What you are after is to optimize your pages for the search engines - so that they will see your pages and say they are important.

Right now (and things are constantly changing) all you need are

1. you keyword phrase in your page title
2. your keyword phrase in your headings
3. that keyword phrase in your incoming links
4. and the data on your page defines what you are talking about - your topic theme. (If you want more data on this last, look up LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing)
   

Other than that, you want fresh original content - which the social media discover and talk about. (I could go on at length about inspiration and how to improve on this - but see my other sites and blogs for this, as least for now...)

Here's the main point I wanted to talk to you about today:

How do you figure out what keywords to use to put in those headers and so forth?

You can't go by any "magic number" per se. There isn't a certain number which is big enough to go after, or competition which is small enough.

You can look in Google for certain keywords and find how many pages have that keyword phrase (put the entire phrase in "quotes") compared to how many pages have all those words - or most of them - on that page somewhere. This gives you a rough idea of your actual competition, different as the wheat from the chaff that surrounds it while it grows. You are harvesting here.

And if you have those four points in above, this will usually do the trick.

But what about those main niches - you'd think there would be more marketing possible when there are a lot more traffic?!

True enough. The trick is in what we've already covered: lots of disoriented traffic. Search engines have a hard time with their millions of pages in serving up the right ones.

Here's two tools you can use:

1. Go small first, and then build your foundation so that you can reach the sky. And it's about that much work as well. Grab a sub-niche by providing good content and optimizing it for search engines (called SEO, btw). Then grab the niche next to that. [Ex: border collie training videos, miniature collie training videos, miniature collie training DVDs, border collie training DVDs, etc.]

That's going to take some regular work, but practically, it is one of the best ways to start.

2. Find areas where there is high demand, low supply. One author (Sumantra Roy - http://www.1stSearchRanking.com) figured out a formula for comparing the numbers of requests for data against the number of actual pages across different search engines (they all use different algorithms and get different numbers of pages for the same terms). He called this "KEI" or Keyword Efficiency Index (or something like that - I'm writing faster than I can research right now...)

Some paid services such as Wordtracker are built specifically on this one feature - although they've expanded their offerings as they've been successful.

And this was what through me off this area for a long time, since I didn't know that a person could "roll your own" KEI. You can do this if you get a tool which will tell you the amount searches and the amount of pages on various search engines. One tool I found to do this is called "Niche Keyword Buzz". (And this company makes a lot of other free and useful little tools as well...)

This tool actually uses the free Wordtracker keyword service and gets the words you are interested in, then goes to Google, Yahoo, and MSN to tell you what the competition is.

You probably already know about Google's Adword KeywordExternalTool - which can give you a set of words which are related to the words you are searching for. And you can save that list of words as a text list.

Take that keyword list and plug it into Niche Keyword Buzz (or similar tool) and then run the results. Now, export this to a CSV and open it in OpenOffice (or Excel) and then add a column which does the calculations I laid out above.

Once you get the results (you may need to multiply that result by 1000 to get it out of decimal-land), then you can see that certain of these long-tail keywords have high demand, but relatively few pages. (Obviously, this needs some work - and your mileage may vary...)

But that's the point. You spend your time on niches that have a lot of traffic, but are under-served. You don't spend hours on content that gets buried by the search engines - or nobody is looking for. That is your main key to success in this area. Figure out your own KEI or hire WordTracker to do it for you. And there are other services out there.

And there you have it - my two cents. I'll keep working on this as I can and let you know, but I haven't posted here for awhile and thought you deserved it. ;)

- - - -
update (some hours later)

Above tool isn't heavy duty. It times out and has connection errors if you push it too hard. Nice start, though.

And found this definition for KEI:
The Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) is the square of the popularity of a keyword multiplied by 1000 and divided by the number of sites which appear in search engines for that keyword. It is invented to measure which keywords are worth optimizing your site for and used by Search Engine Optimizers (SEO). The higher the KEI, better the keyword.
In this case we took the Overture popularity count of a keyword and the number of sites which appear in Google for that keyword. Other counts and other search engines will give another outcome.

Note that Overture isn't even able to be accessed these days (and was nearly a couple years out of date), so the above tool on that site returns nothing every time. WordTracker and others have developed workarounds.

Wish I could have one site with all this data, rather than having to scrape it...

- - - -

Further, a discussion about using WordTracker from http://www.buildwebsite4u.com/building/keywords.shtml
"Write down the most profitable keywords (KEI > 10) along with their attributes, click the link at the bottom of the page to try again, clear the basket and type in your next keyword. You may repeat it as many times as you need to analyze all related keywords.

Note:

• WordTracker assigns high KEI to words with low Count and very low (or zero) Competing. Don't target these keywords. What good would it do for you to rank high for these words if no one ever searches for them? Select words with high Count (not less than 100)."

- - - -
And a discussion of KEI and its pitfalls is here.

- - - -
Found a free (47Mb download) tool called Rank Checker, which seems like it's set to do the job I need (and then some). Still evaluating - get it at http://www.link-assistant.com

Now a point I may not have made clear in the above:

You are looking for popular phrases. Simply. But you don't start and end with good KEI keywords. It's probably more the start of what you do, then more research, and then the end of that research.

You want to get a smart niche where there is high demand, low supply. But then you check into that niche fully to make sure you can generate content for it and that you can actually monetize it and get something from it. Lots of traffic, but no buyers - well, that's a poorly-run non-profit site that can't even keep itself afloat.

Once you know your niche is something that you're interested in, something you can generate tons of content for, and an area which has buyers and does exchange money - at that point you can then start finding the keywords you need to use to generate that content.

Now, here's the interesting point: as you set up these keywords, and optimize each page, you'll find yourself ranking for other keywords that you didn't even particularly target. Remember that "in quotes" tool above? That tells you what your actual competition is. But as search engines aren't all that specific, they are also awarding you top spots for keywords you didn't really target. So, as long as you keep optimizing your pages you will actually take on the competition in areas you weren't even targeting.

Like "dog training". Too much competition. But - you can make lots of contents for "training chiuhuahua dogs", "training boxer dogs", "training collie dogs", etc. As you keep building up all these sets of pages, videos, and podcasts for longer-tail keyword phrases, you site actually moves you up the rankings on "dog training" and also "dog" and "training".

Nice to know.

- - - -
Update: 1/10
This from adyacker.com:

Try to choose words with a KEI score above 3 whenever possible, and also make sure that term has a decent amount of daily searches. Even if the term only has 400 daily searches, you’ll be able to drive much more traffic with a KEI score of 3, than a phrase with 1000 searches and a KEI score of .18.

Now I took another version of the "Buzz" tool above (called Matt's Free Keyword Tool) and used it to query wordtracker and get the data. It got down to about 88 keywords out of 100 before it "lost connection" (meaning that tool was done for the day as Google and the other SE's had called it quits for that logon - so I can run this once every 24 hours?).

I cut out all the data which was missing slots (like nothing from Google, for ex.) and save the data to CSV format.

Opening this up in Open Office, I then entered the KEI formula above into an empty column and got some fascinating results. You just don't see this stuff by looking casually at the numbers of competition and searches. And you can't get this data unless you have a program which will query the searches and match them up with the competition - and then you can calculate their actual worth.

My problem was being stuck in a keyword "Self Help" which I knew to have lots of traffic. But variations of this didn't get me anywhere, since most programs only give you another word tacked on. The KEI of these variations got me nowhere. Now, when I started using various synonyms for the benefits people got out of self help, I started getting amazing results.

Look up health, success, wealth, happiness, achievement - just for starters. Lots of traffic, tons of long-tail niches, many with decent daily searches, but few competing pages.

I took success for one such search through the "Buzz/Matt's" tool and got 33 usable high-traffic (30 or better daily hits) and a KEI over 3. Some were fairly tight niches, where off-hand I could only write maybe one article without some research - but when I see that "key success factors for hotel web sites" has 119 searches daily and a KEI of over 54,000 - you know I could set some time aside for that!

Now, I'd then take these hot KEI-proven keywords and then run them in some sort of competition checker, or just look them up on Google and use my SEO Firefox plug-in to see the data right off. (all in title, all in link, etc.) And I could then study up these guys to see what they are talking about and how they are presenting themselves to see how I would set up my pages and presentation to out-create them.

Social media just with those keywords would take over top spots, but I'd also then set the back up pages so that there is something for them to post to.

Previously, I said to make mini-webs and have your social media posts point to them. Here's the new "social media full court press":

1. Write articles - six versions of the same thing - with the same keywords. Post the best one to your blog and the others to the top 5 article directories.
   
2. Podcast the best version and post it to archive.org
3. Create a powerpoint and post to Slideshare.com
4. Link the podcast to the powerpoint and create a slidecast on Slideshare.com
5. Create a video from this same data and submit it via TubeMogul.com
6. Create a Squidoo lens when these articles go live and link everything through that lens.
7. Social post everything through OnlyWire as you create it (don't try to post all of these the same day - you could get your account pulled for spamming.)
8. Everything points to your original blog post - but now create a mini-blog summary and put it on Blogger and/or other free blog.
9. Update your original blog post with links to this other data.

And sure, this is a lot of work. But you are getting most of the above-the-fold positions in Google. So you should also be able to monetize this traffic meanwhile.

Now, back to Campbell, who got me started on this (and I only put it aside until I solved a non-Wordtracker solution, as outlined above) - he said to then find an affiliate product which you can sell which matches those keywords. So you then create the sales page first and all this promo would run straight to that sales page - if you are only doing "bum marketing".

But... his later stuff says to have this sales page simply linked to your blog page - in a key position so people can find it easily. (Top left...) And meanwhile, create an autoresponder series which supports this keyword and also a giveaway (ethical bribe) so people will opt in for your data.

That's the long and short way of monetizing right off the bat. And since we are in this to survive, you have to have some sort of way to monetize as you go. Every link on a page needs to monetize in some fashion - either as a (cloaked) affiliate link or to a direct product you sell. (Or simply have a donate page.)

Putting these links on a blog page builds your trust with them until they are willing to clickthrough on one of your links (or simply give you money in appreciation).

- - - -

Now, let's review our keyword data:

1. Paid route is through WordTracker to find popular keywords which have low competition.
2. You want niches which have decent traffic and but are poorly served, or the pages which do serve them are poorly optimized (most are). KEY POINT and PURPOSE.
   
3. Unpaid route is getting a tool like Rank Tracker to find your keywords and do the KEI on them. Alternates are the "Buzz/Matt's" tools above, and then doing your own KEI through a spreadsheet (if you have lots of time spread over short periods daily). (But I would recommend you download one of these and try out what I just outlined above to get your hands really dirty in what makes KEI so important.)
4. Get your niches and then do your full research on these to see what the supply has been offering and how you can create better stuff.
5. Find some products you can sell to that niche.
6. Pick the most likely niche and start marketing to it via social media submissions (this assumes you have a WordPress or similar blog on your own site - so they can arrive there).
7. Set up your backend to be able to deliver to this traffic as it starts converting.
8. Meanwhile, keep promoting to that niche until you have several blog posts and lots of videos, etc. about that particular keyword phrase - essentially when you've taken the bulk of the top search engine spots.
9. Then take your next niche keyword phrase - which is another variation of the shorter niche keyword phrase you want to really want to take over.
10. As you start controlling more and more of these longer phrases, you will start showing up for the shorter phrase.

That 10 point step (although the research phase is many steps all in itself) really summarizes and boils down the data I've been studying from this over-paid and free training I've been taking lately.

One more lesson tomorrow and then I'm done with all this and straight onto real work.

Once I do get thoroughly on the way to my Online Millions, then I'll let you take my course.

- - - -
Update: 10/2/08

Cute trick with that KEI tool - Rank Tracker. Unless you buy their pro version ($98) you can't save your work. And you can't copy/paste the results. So you're going to have to hand copy your data. And start over every time. Cute. Wish I had a thumbs down right now... But the program is great otherwise (and it's Java-inherent slowness).

Postgrad SEO - using Web 2.0 instead of article marketing to promote your book

Just too good an idea to pass up.

Health keeps coming up as some outrageously searched-for keyword. Helps that 'Boomers are getting older (and Europe/Japan have worse problems than ours) and so they are all interested in extending their health and lives.

Check out this Google Trend search for "health, life, nutrition, diet, fitness". See what I mean? The things that would save their health and improve their lives (good food and exercise) are lower ranked than the goals themselves - which makes sense once you think about it. (But if you want to check for a sheep mentality, look up "life insurance" or "health insurance" - which are completely solutions for the after-the-fact-problem of losing your health or losing your life.) Health and Life are re-active scenes - the people who are proactive are more the minority.

But - searching various keyword programs for "life health" gives low response. Few people search for this combination.

So you wouldn't use that combination as anything on your pages or link text. (I can think of some catchy book titles with these two, however...)

However, your mini-web could use various versions of these above in the page titles in order to capture those niche Google-search positions...

And I have a ton of PLR articles which are useless for article marketing, but prime for ebooks.

Of course, this is all old-hat stuff.

Enter Web 2.0

The test is if videos can replace articles. Now, I don't have a great deal of video sites like YouTube. Frankly, like my tests in article marketing, it doesn't much pay to submit to very many to get the key effects you want, which is people finding and buying your book.

Now, the recent research (and it worked for me, too) is that videos and social bookmarking, as well as blogging, get to the top of Google faster.

With TTS, and these short PLR articles, I could conceivably produce a video a day, based on the content of that ebook. You'd then become some sort of expert on health-related stuff. Sort of. Just like article marketing - on steroids.

Sequence is to create the ebook first - post to Lulu. (My clickbank is bugged, this would be preferable, since you could sell the book via affiliates and increase your sales.)

Take the text articles, add audio headers and footers - create the TTS audio (save in own directory).

Build your master mini-web, using your main keyword phrase you selected. This promotes the book. FTP that up and getting running.

Take time here and set up your opt-in page for that subject. Plug in some articles to your autoresponder sequence.

For each MP3 audio, make a video using clipart and stock photos. (Camtasia...)

Post the videos on YouTube and the MP3's on Internet Archives.

As you post each video, create a new mini-web which links to the first one (and gives it all the pagerank). Each media file links to your Lulu product, but has individual keyword niches (where most of your geek time will be spent, other than making the videos.) Each mini-web also invites people to opt-in for more information on the subject.

Social bookmark each video and MP3 and mini-web index page as you post them.

Blog each video and link to the MP3 and mini-web. Social bookmark that blog-entry.

What you are doing is creating a buzz for each of these inter-related keyword niches. You rise to the top in each of these niches - which in turn give their pagerank over to your main mini-web, which promotes the book (as do all the sub-webs on your mini-net).

And all that should add up to a nice set of Google Page Rank which plops viewers to your main mini-net page and sells books. Plus it should give you a number of subscribers to your list, where you can interest them in other related products.

Just to add frosting to the cake, sign up with some affiliate programs which pay you per lead for insurance policies. Put these links prominently on your site and rake in some extra income.

Test of video's and article marketing

This is a test to see if you can get faster response than the months it takes to get some volume out of article marketing. Certainly you wind up at the top of Google faster - but does it translate to sales? Sure, there are lots of factors present. And TTS is a cheesy way (perhaps) of making soundtracks for videos.

But it would be an interesting concept. Definately worth a test drive...

- - - -

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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.

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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).

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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.

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