Website Promotion Blog

Have you taken the plunge into video marketing yet? If not, don't feel bad. Most people realize the importance of adding video to their marketing strategy but it's a very different medium and not one that a lot of people are comfortable with. Most of us enjoy the anonymity of working away in the office or at home, hiding out from the rest of the world behind a pen name or an avatar. And most of us are not what you would call movie director material by any means.

 

But the fact remains, people coming to the internet for information are looking for instant gratification. If not, they'd use the Yellow pages and their local newspapers or books and magazines to find what they were looking for. And research has shown that we have mere seconds to grab and hold the attention of the visitors who come to our site. If they don't see what they're looking for in those few seconds they can easily click away and go find it somewhere else.

 

As more and more sites pop up on the web, then, it becomes crucial that we find a way to keep these visitors on the page, on our sites, for more than 2 or 3 seconds.  They don't want to have to read an article to find what they're looking for. They really don't even want to scan simple bullet points anymore. What they're looking for now is instant information that they don't have to work for and video is the best solution.

 

Use Video to Introduce Yourself

 

Marketing with video is a great way for you to connect with your visitors. People will often remember a face before they will a name so you're making a much longer lasting impression. And even though you can't see them, they can see you – more specifically, they can see your eyes. This has a huge psychological effect on people. The importance of making eye contact is the first thing you learn in any marketing course.

 

And while most visitors will just skip over the parts of your sales page that tell about your own personal experiences, they're going to stay on the page longer when you have a video and this will give you more opportunity to sell yourself.

 

One of the problems with using strictly text on your squeeze pages and sales pages is that your reader can't hear your sincerity so it's difficult for him to trust you. Your goal on any sales page or squeeze page is to overcome any objections your visitor might have to responding to your call to action. In most cases, the largest obstacle is lack of trust. Marketing with video helps you overcome this obstacle by allowing your visitor to see your face and hear the sincerity in your voice – it enables him to get over that last obstacle and trust you.

 

Use Video to Increase Your Opt-ins and Sales

 

Use a video on your squeeze page as a way to introduce yourself to your visitor – NOT as a way to sell your product. Your squeeze page is simply the first step in the selling process. It's the page where you get the visitor's attention and let him know who you are and that you understand his problem. 

 

Use your video to briefly tell people who you are, why you think you can help them, and then include a call to action. Whether you're offering a free mini-guide or a subscription to your newsletter – people will be much more willing to opt-in now because the feel a connection with you now that they've actually seen you.
 

Use Video to Increase Your and Sales

 

Until recently it was thought that the longer your sales page was the better it would convert and the more you could charge for your product. If you could keep someone on your page long enough to read the whole thing, all the way to the end, then that person was probably going to buy whatever it was you were selling.

 

However, in this age of instant gratification, we're finding that people don't want to read those long sales pages anymore.  If you have something to say, they want you to say it.   And they'd much rather you said it with a video so they wouldn't even have to bother reading it.

 

You Don't Have to be Scorsese

 

You don't have to be a big name director to create a video for your website. Even a simple video made on your Windows Media Player with images and text will attract more attention than your standard text sales page. You'll get much better results though if you create a video with you as the star. People will be able to put a face with the voice and they'll feel more connected to you. 

 

Your video doesn't have to be so long that it requires an intermission in the middle either. 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 3 minutes, whatever it takes to get your message across is all you need to do.

 

What to Include in Your Video

 

Always identify yourself, of course, and your website. And don't forget a call to action at the end. TELL your visitor – Click this link and I will....or For More information, click here...Let them hear you say it and it will make more of an impression. Sort of like your mother telling you to pick up your room. You can't NOT do it!

 

Hosting Your Video

 

Most people host their videos at YouTube but wherever you choose to host it, remember:

 

 

Instead of hosting your video at YouTube though, host it at a video networking site like TubeMogul.com. TubeMogul.com is a video networking site that allows you to upload your video once, just like you'd upload it to YouTube, but it's distributed to over 24 different video hosting sites – inlcuding YouTube, Yahoo Videos, Metacafe, and many others. The basic free service offers you up to 100 video deployments per month and you only have to upload your video one time. 

 

Users of TubeMogul's universal upload system report up to three times more views per video using this service and one user I spoke with told me that he was getting his videos indexed in as little as 15 minutes. 

 

Being a little bit intimidated by video marketing is only natural and you're not alone. But it only seems complicated because you're thinking of it in terms of movies that you see at the theater or on TV. The programs and software that we use to create videos for out websites are nothing like that at all and they're made to be user friendly. 

 

If you think about it, you probably didn't know how to set up a website when you first got started either. And you were more than likely a little bit intimidated when you set up that first one, but look how far you've come. You probably said, “Now why didn't I do that sooner?” Well, you'll be saying the same thing about video once you get the first one or two under your belt.  

 

So go ahead and give video a try and let's try something new here. Once you get your first video up, leave us a comment here on the blog so we can all come and check it out. 

 

When you hear the term “Internet Marketing Strategy” the first thing that comes to mind is probably something like Niche Blogging or Affiliate Marketing or Adsense Sites. But those aren't marketing strategies – those are marketing methods. To define the difference between the two, compare it to a General trying to overtake a hill in enemy territory. The method he's going to use to gain that piece of ground is to burn down all the trees and flush the enemy out into the open so he can capture them and claim the hill. His strategy though is his plan for how he's going to sneak his own men onto the hill so they can set the fire. Without a good strategy in place, his method of attack will fail.

 

You need a good, solid plan of attack if you expect to succeed at the Internet Marketing Method you've chosen to pursue. You may have decided you want to set up Adsense websites and that's a perfectly legitimate marketing method. Your method of Internet Marketing then is to set up websites with strict adherence to all SEO procedures, with special attention to keywords. But you can have the tightest Adsense website on the internet and not see a penny for your efforts. You need to have a marketing strategy in place to support your efforts.

 

Now I'm sure you're aware of several different strategies for getting traffic to your site – pay-per-click advertising, article marketing, social bookmarking, social networking, backlinking, blog commenting, and the list goes on and on. However, there are two fundamental facets of every good marketing strategy that most Internet Marketers tend to overlook. Money and discipline.

 

How Much Money Do You Need To Make Every Day?

 

When you get down to the bare bones of any marketing strategy, regardless of what you're marketing or how you're marketing it, the very first thing at the top of your list should always be the word “Money”. After all, that's why you're in this business. Your goal with any campaign should be defined in dollars – not traffic. If you want to achieve any goal you have to keep it clearly in sight and too often we forget that our goal here is to make money. And if you have a specific dollar amount in mind you'll be more focused on achieving that goal.

 

If you've quit your job and you're working full-time online maybe you've forgotten what payday was like. You knew exactly how much money you needed, every week, to meet your financial obligations. And you worked to achieve that goal every week. If that specific dollar amount wasn't in your paycheck, then you knew you were going to have to work extra hours the following week, or maybe even find a higher paying job. But you had that dollar amount set in your mind and you worked every week to achieve it.

 

Think of what you could accomplish if you were to apply that same concentration and focus to your online business. Let's say that in reality your household budget requires that you make £500 per week. Some weeks you've made £300 and some you've made £700...and more often than not, you've made no money at all. Yet day after day you sit down at your computer and keep doing the same thing you've been doing for the past few months. Or worse yet, you do nothing at all. Yet every day you hope that £500 will magically appear in your Paypal account and if it does you go merrily on your way. But if it doesn't, what do you do next?

 

What you need to do is start every day with £500 in the front of your mind. Then analyze your business to see what's been successful and what hasn't. Look at each of your websites and see where the money is coming from. Determine exactly how many widgets do you need to sell this week to put £500 in your pocket. And then determine exactly how you're going to sell that many widgets.

 

One thing you'll learn from this exercise is whether or not your expectations are realistic. If you've never sold more than 10 widgets in any given week but you need to sell 100 in order to get your £500 then you know you're either selling the wrong product, you need to do something to increase your sales, or you need to add more products.

 

Are You Taking Care Of Those Tedious Tasks Or Are You Putting Them Off Until Tomorrow?

 

Starting to work each morning with a specific financial goal in mind takes a little discipline which is something else that a lot of Internet Marketers are lacking in their strategy. You may have the best plan in the world for success but if you don't have the discipline to see it through to the end you'll never achieve all of your goals. Seeing you plans through to the end means disciplining yourself to complete those tedious tasks like writing articles and bookmarking your blog posts that you tend to put off til tomorrow. Eventually, tomorrow never comes, even though you know that those tedious little tasks will help improve your business.

 

If you're having problems focusing on your goals and disciplining yourself to take care of all those little chores you need to do in order to be successful, don't worry, you're not alone. It happens to the best of us. Most internet marketers have never had experience running a business before they started working online. You start out with the best intentions but then you get so caught up in learning all the technical things you need to learn that good business practices soon fall by the wayside.

 

Researchers have shown that it only takes 21 days of repetition to develop for something to become an habit. Try adding one new tedious little task back into your daily list of things to do every 3 weeks and soon you'll have developed an entire list of healthy business habits. And, as you start repeating these chores on a regular basis they'll also become easier to do. 

 

Develop A New Habit

 

I've found a neat little contest online to help you with your first new habit. The folks at Ezine Articles are getting ready to start their 4^th Hundred Articles In A Hundred Days Challenge. To participate, all you need to do is get a free account at Ezine. Once you've logged onto your account, over in the left sidebar you'll see a link for the 4^th HAHD Challenge. Just click that link and register to participate.

 

Then, beginning on May 1, all you have to do is submit one article to Ezine every day for 100 days. In order to quality, your articles have to be accepted for publication. And Ezine has some guidelines that they you have to follow before they'll publish your articles. For example:

 

·         Your articles must be unique and not published anywhere else on the internet.

·         Your articles must be in your own words and not copied from somewhere else on the web.

·         The best suggested length is a minimum of 450 words.

·         Your articles may not be promotional.

·         Your articles must be informative.

·         You may include one non-promotional link in the body of the article.

·         You may include 2 promotional links to your website in the resource box.

·         The author name and the name in the resource box must be the same.

 

Now if the idea of writing 450 or 500 words a day seems a little daunting, consider this. First of all, by the time you finish reading this article you will have read nearly 1400 words. Secondly, you probably speak a lot more than 500 words when you're gossiping on the telephone every day. 500 words is only about 5 to 7 paragraphs and if you write about something you're passionate about you probably won't even have to spend any time on research.

 

What are the benefits of taking up this HAHD Challenge? By the time you have 100 articles published at the end of the challenge, you may also qualify to be a Platinum Author at Ezine. Plus, Ezine will be issuing prizes for everyone who qualifies at the end of the Challenge. But the best benefit is all those backlinks you're going to be creating for your website.  More than that, you'll have developed a very healthy business habit and shown yourself that it's possible to develop even more.