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.

Creating the Web 2.0 buzz - Is Slideshare better than YouTube video?

Recently I uploaded what I found to be a very difficult video to reproduce.

Reason was technical - I wanted to show web pages. Because of the text size, these images are compressed during video reprocessing and aren't easy to see. While the original was 720 x 480 and plays nicely on my computer, I always get nervous when someone has to reprocess it to meet their specs.

Sure enought the video is fuzzy and you can't always read words on the pages, even when blown up to full-screen.

Here's the video as YouTube Presented it:

---

---

But earlier I had been playing with SlideShare as this has some interesting Buzz factor of showing up on Google quite rapidly. All they want it a MS PowerPoint, OpenOffice Impress, or a PDF. They process the thing and post it for you.

And they also have another feature - SlideCast. This needs an MP3 audio posted somewhere online. Give them the URL and then you can match up the existing slides to our soundtrack.

But what is really nice (and I don't know how they do this) is that you can go full screen with their project and read every single word on that screenshot you used to create the slideshow and video with.

Check it out here:

---

| View | Upload your own

---

If you cross-compare the two, you'll see a marked difference in quality.

(And you'll also see differences in what was produced - I added more slides when I was creating the video. You see, I was already up into the wee hours and still had to be up and feeding livestock just a few hours later - and I didn't want to go back and re-edit that Slideshare peace to make them sync. My hoarse soundtrack is the same, though...)

The question becomes: Is You Tube outmoded? My argument is that for full-motion video - not yet. Bandwidth improving may change this, however.

But, since most of the videos I've watched are composed of photos or still images with a soundtrack, I'd say that SlideShare will be pulling a great deal of traffic away from YouTube.

Your comments?

- - - -

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.

Sign up for An Online Millionaire Plan Newsletter!

A marketing conversation is an action verb - you have to do it...

This from a recent email I got from the folks at Constant Conversations (link below):

I worked this over when I posted Creating a Web 2.0 buzz - on "2008 presidential candidate election" with its video and so on.

But then I got to thinking. Life isn't being a one-shot wonder. After the event is over and the autograph signers have left, when they're sweeping up the confetti and tickertape - you have to go on.

One-shot wonders are just that. Bands will have a single hit. They don't go anywhere - the band like Beatles and Rolling Stones continually turn out new songs, all riding their earlier "buzz".

That's what you are working at in marketing - creating a continual buzz about your product. You are making continual conversation with your various publics and asking them what they think. Read ClueTrain Manifesto. Marketing is a conversation. Not just shouting,"BUY BEANOS -- THEY'RE REALLY GOOD FOR YOU... REALLY."

Is Google Listening to Your Conversations?


If You Don't Start It, There Will Be No Conversation

Can you imagine going to a cocktail party, business conference or networking event where you stand in the corner and not make eye contact even once and still walk out of the room with new clients?

Of course you can't.  You know that being proactive, enthusiastic  and willing to share some useful information with others is the only way to work a room successfully.

The same is true on the internet.

You've got to get your name out there -- i.e. be visible in lots of places on a regular basis -- and be the one to initiate a discussion worth participating in.

As you know from the "Starting The Conversation" section of our book, the best way to get people into a back and forth dialogue is to ask a profound question.  By that we mean one that is profound to the people you're trying to attract to your business.

Make it specific and a bit controversial and folks will be flocking  to comment. If they disagree with you or each other so much the better as it provides another opportunity to continue talking while you also establish yourself as the expert in your field.




And here's my video take on all this:



What's your take? Leave a comment...

Blogged with Flock

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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New points on top rankings with through Google keywords

Some notes on the new ideas I've been having on the business of search engine optimization.

I've been messing around with videos, as I've told you earlier. And here is my latest, an overview of all my books I've been writing/editing/publishing lately.



Now, that wasn't too bad, was it? (Ok, then leave a comment...)

These videos continue to improve as I go, which is usual as you practice and study anything.

- - - -

Now, what I've discovered lately is the international aspect of keywords. (No, Duh?) But we in the U.S. are all too tied up in our own ethno-centricities (or eccentricities) and often forget that our sales can be better in niches "overseas" than here. Looking up my server logs showed that one site was more popular in Europe, another in Africa.

So I saw discrepancies when looking up "personal development, self improvement, self-help" on Google Trends. When I ran those up on Google Keyword External, the rankings didn't add up. While the world has a higher and longer use for "personal development", we in the US prefer self-help or self improvement - and the rest of the world doesn't. So I looked around on the page and found that my results were English-US only. When I searched for English in all pages, I came back with much different choices - and much wider ones.

While Google Keyword Tool gave "life coaching" as top position, this was as it ranks by advertising competition by default. Clicking on average searches gave me new top terms - which are closer to what people are actually looking for, as opposed to what people are making money at. "Book, business, dating, health, love" were top terms. Plugging these into Google Trends again gave me a new comparison for these terms, since how people search for them isn't necessarily what advertisers are looking at.

Just out of that, you could see that a "book about business health" should get a lot of hits. No, it's such a niche that Google trends doesn't even have it. But business book is number one in India and Singapore. "Love book" takes over in the U.S. and other leading countries. And "business book" is the only thing that shows up (out of "business book, health book, love book, fitness book, dating book" - the top 5 out of 8 terms from that first above search) in news search.

So press releases on just about anything with "business book _____" would give a substantial ranking.

And you can see that books about the other top items are also high in demand.

The point here is that this gives you additional tools. I started out looking for the broad field of personal development and found that there are five popular items which would be created and marketed as niches within that field. But the buyers would vary according to the product. "Love books" would sell better in the U.S. and "business books" would do better in India, Singapore, etc. A little more searching would show how to sell your "fitness books, health books, and dating books" to whom and on what continent - all from online research.

Just ensure you don't rely on your own fixed ideas when you are marketing. Niches are all over the place - remember, there are as many or more buyers on the Long Tail than there are at the Short Head.

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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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...

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And here's that new business ideas video: