Category Archives: Online Marketing

Creating more webtraffic with Video Marketing

Introduction to Video Marketing
Without going about the usual blabber, I’m just going to ask you a simple question and that is … have you ever heard of YouTube? If your answer is yes, then you have already experienced the effects of video marketing and if you honestly answered no to that question, then I have to honestly tell you that you’ve been living under a rock all this while. I’m dead serious.

Because you see … out of the millions and millions of webpages and websites out there, YouTube is ranked #2 in terms of the volumes of traffic that they experience. What does this tell you? It tells you that video is extremely engaging and addictive which brings us to our main point and that is “How can I bring truckloads of targeted traffic to my website?”.

Easy on me now as I do my best to explain step by step and give you countless tips as to how you can go about riding on the coattails of sites like YouTube and the like and get lots of traffic. Oh, did I mention also that the traffic is FREE and viral?

Before I show you how you can create your own videos, let me show you the pointers to making Video Marketing work:

1) Keep Your Video Short … People in this day and age are busy and easily distracted so unless there is real value and the video is really engaging, they will MOVE ON. By keeping your videos short, they are more easily persuaded to check out your video and also grasp the point of your video much more quickly. As a general guideline, anything from 1 min 30 secs right up to 10 mins would be good.

2) Give Quality Information and Great Value … Surfers like to pick up new things and find out great information all the time. By giving them great value, you also make your videos viral because they are then persuaded to share the videos with their friends thereby increasing your visibility.

3) Title Your Video Appropriately and Attractively … If your video is about your great tips on fishing, title it something like “Watch Me Catch 20 Kgs of Fish In Just 74 Mins”. Compare that to “Great Tips On Fishing”, which do you think works better at getting their attention? Remember, you want to appear unique and interesting. One very important point to note … make sure your keywords are in there also. We must never forget SEO or search engine optimization. You want your videos ranked highly on search engines, dont you?

4) Submit Your Videos To Multiple Video Sites … You need to leverage as much as possible every single video you create. Why submit to one site when you can submit to 20 others? Why 20 when you can do 40? After all, your whole point of video marketing was to gain traffic (which hopefully turns into a positive cashflow). What follows is a list of the best 8 video sites that you can submit your videos to:

YouTube – Biggest One Of Them All (Lots of junk here though)
DailyMotion – Gotten lots of views with this
MetaCafe – Same goes for MetaCafe
Revver – Pretty strict with copyrighted stuff

LiveVideo – Good clean interface
Break.com – More fun than serious (Good for viral videos)
Google Video – Lots of YouTube videos here as well
Yahoo Video – Just updated with a new interface

5) Display Your Site URL Clearly … There are 2 main places to display your url so that your audience know where to look for you. You need to put your link somewhere on your video (more on that in point #6). The other place you should have your URL / site link is where the description of the video is (see screenshot). Some sites make it clickable (like YouTube) so that’s to your advantage.

6) Display URL on the Video … There are 2 main styles of displaying your URL on the video. One is to pad the video at the beginning and at the end of it. The other is to show the URL at the bottom of the video throughout the video. Decide what’s best for you.

7) Mass Submitting Your Video … Coming back to point #4, if you’ve decided that you or you would like Kelsey Media Productions to put up your videos on multiple sites, it’s best then to use some tool to achieve that so that you save your time (i.e leverage). You don’t really wanna log in to each and every single video site and upload your video one at a time, do you?

8.)Be passionate and enthusiastic – This is a KILLER TIP! If you can convey a sense of enthusiasm and passion shows up clearly in your videos, you have a very high chance of your audience wanting to find out more about your products and services. Ask the top salespeople around. They’ll attest to this.

9) Be focused – Be focused on the objective of your video so that your audience know what is going on. Confusion is not going to work well in your favor.

10) Provide a call to action – At the end of your video, provide a call to action such as “Head over to http://… right now” or “Want A Free Report?”, etc

11) Submit Your Video To Social Bookmarking Sites – Yes, you can submit your videos to social bookmarking sites as well like StumbleUpon, Digg, etc … No better way to get even more viewers!

Video Marketing in Conclusion

I hear people say a lot of times why they don’t want to do any video marketing and I’ll like to address some possible objections here:

1) I can’t speak well enough – Hey, if you can speak to the average person on the street in your own language, there’s no reason why you can’t do videos. Contrary to the myth that you need perfect english, a casual tone would work much better than the “perfect professor’s english” (if you know what I mean).

2) I’m too ugly for video – Sheesh … you don’t have to appear on video if you don’t want to. And if there’s a real need for a real person’s face to present some product or service, photo stills can work or you can always outsource it, can’t you?

3) It’s too time consuming – Well, it depends on the niche and how complicated you want the video to be.

So you see … there’s really no reason for you not to give video marketing a shot. If you like to get in touch with us, feel free to contact Kelsey Media Productions 781.365.4800 and have fun with your video marketing! =)

Top Ten Ways to Use Twitter for Marketing

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks you a basic question, “What are you doing?” It allows anyone with an account to write up to 140 characters in a text field as a means to update, comment, promote or communicate to others who are “following” you. When people follow you, they see what you’ve recently contributed when they login. They see your “tweets”, which are the messages you leave. And of course you can follow others who tweet about the things that interest you. As an Internet marketer you may want to follow other Internet marketers, for example.

Like anything, and this is especially true of working with social media, the more you give, the more you get. In other words, the more often you tweet the more activity you’ll generate. Some suggest that you tweet a few times a day, every day. Not every tweet needs to be profound. But they should all be useful.

It’s important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services or affiliate links. Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only once in a while should you try to use Twitter to promote something. Otherwise you’ll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.

Imagine if you had a large number of people following your tweets? Some people have tens of thousands following them. If you had something to promote and you had a large following, you could quickly and efficiently alert a lot of people of your promotion. It acts sort of like an opt-in mass emailing blast to your house email list, but it’s a heck of a lot easier and faster. This is the power of Twitter.

One thing that I’ve noticed with Twitter is that it can seem overwhelming at times. The sheer information on Twitter, the ‘how-to’s’, tutorials and all the other ubiquitous advice on how to use and take advantage of it can seem hard to understand and implement. So here’s an easy-to-understand list of the top ten ways in which you can use Twitter to market yourself, your business and your website.

The Top 10 Ways To Use Twitter for Marketing:

1. Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)

2. Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you’ll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.

3. Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in your product or service. There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets?

• You’ll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they’re selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets?

• Since every link has ‘http’ in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.

4. Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your opt-in house email list. Invite these people to join.

5. Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.

6. Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.

7. Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

8. Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you’re at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you’re doing and invite people to visit you in person.

9. Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.

10. Use it as an instant messaging system to keep you and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

You should note that this top 10 list is not in order of importance or in any particular order. I suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven’t already. See if you can apply a few of these techniques and tactics to help you take advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.

And one more important thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet in marketing. You should always be trying and implementing numerous tactics when marketing your business. Don’t only rely on Twitter or any other one thing. Instead, use Twitter (or any other Web 2.0 site) as simply one more tool in your entire social media and marketing toolbox.

Which HD video Web service is the best?

by Josh Lowensohn

Around this time last year we put together a comparison of various video sites to determine which ones had the best overall quality and user experience. Since then, high-definition-capable digital cameras and camcorders have taken off, and several major video hosts have rolled out official support for wide-screen, super high-quality Flash video in response. So we think the time has come to take another look at what these sites are offering now and crown a new leader in the realm of HD video.

The six sites we’re putting head to head are: YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, DailyMotion, SmugMug andBlip.tv.

What’s being tested

Quality. For our tests, we looked at detail on two levels–both still and in motion. For the still, we used a shot of our corner Italian restaurant. From our test footage you should be able to read everything on the front awning.

For the motion element, there were plenty of cars and pedestrians outside our offices that would have made good test subjects. In this case, we went with a bicycle since it falls somewhere in between the two.

In last year’s tests, we were able to do a neat mouseover trick to show you each site’s original quality from the same part of a clip. We’ve done that again this time, but since the videos are too wide for this page, we’re only doing it with a portion of the clip. While the player size on each service was different, we viewed each video at the maximum full-screen resolution (1280 pixels wide), in order to preserve the original quality.

Value. Some of these services aren’t free. So what we wanted to find out is: for those that cost money, is the charge worth it?

What’s NOT being tested

Unlike the last time we did this, we’re not taking upload times into account, since everyone’s connection is a little different. Likewise, we’re not quantifying processing times, since the clip you’re uploading at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday night will probably get processed faster than the same clip at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning. We have, however, noted the respective size limits at each site, which can be incredibly important. HD video files are big, even if you’re talking about a relatively short clip.

All the services we used processed our videos within about 10 minutes. The one exception was Vimeo, which took nearly three hours from the time it finished uploading to show up live on the site. This could have just been a bad time to upload, and keep in mind that paying users of Vimeo’s Plus service get their videos sent to the front of the queue.

About the test footage

Click to play the sample video

To get a decent test shot, we went with a consumer-friendly, pocket-sized capture device. In this case it’s the recently releasedFlip Mino HD (CNET review). It captures really good-looking video in 1280×720 resolution at 30 frames per second. It doesn’t shoot in 1900×1080, also known as “full HD,” but we’re assuming that most folks are going to be using devices that shoot 720p anyway.

The footage is just a hair over three minutes long, which is about the standard for Web video, and has not been changed from its original camera formatting. It encompasses fast motion (the cars whizzing by), fine detail (local restaurant signage), and plenty of ambient sound.

Blip.tv

Blip is a newcomer to this year’s contest. Blip takes nearly anything you can throw at it, including HD videos. What makes Blip particularly neat is that it can play your content almost immediately, since it supports playback of the native file. You can also tweak the player to automatically play your video in a certain format. For instance, the H.264 clip I uploaded could be played back in a Flash player, or in a QuickTime player.

As for the results, Blip remained fairly sharp but a little washed out from the compression. Colors that popped in YouTube and SmugMug were just a little less vibrant. Some of the text from the awning was also a little choppier. This became much more apparent in the motion test, where Blip fared the worst of any of the services tested.

DailyMotion

DailyMotion was also not included in the original comparison. It launched its high-quality video service back in February of last year, the same month we did the first round of testing. As a user, you cannot actually upload anything that’s HD or above 150MB in size before becoming a “MotionMaker,” which is just a fancy way of saying you’re promising to not upload a bunch of copyrighted material. It’s an extra step on top of user registration, and your video must then undergo a quick review by DailyMotion staff before going live.

Most are unlikely to want this many hoops to jump through, but once you’re a part of the program, uploading your videos is a cinch and the quality is great. Our only quibble is that it’s the one service that sticks pre-roll ads in front of your videos. For some this might not be a big issue, but if you can get similar results elsewhere without them (and without the extra registration step) it’s kind of a turn-off.

Facebook

Facebook rolled out HD video rather quietly in late 2008. It has some of the loosest requirements of any video service, letting videos go up to 20 minutes in length and up to 1GB in size. In comparison, YouTube only lets you have 10 minutes. HD video on Facebook is gorgeous when viewed in the service’s built-in player, but it does not scale well at all when viewed in full screen. Many details are lost in this transition, including the outdoor signage in our clip, which bordered on becoming unreadable. Likewise, the sharpness seen in SmugMug , Dailymotion and YouTube for the bike test was lost when viewed in Facebook.

The big, big plus side of Facebook is that you can tag people who are in the video if they’re Facebook users. This makes it a far more compelling place to upload something if you’re intending to share it with friends.

SmugMug

SmugMug is the only service on this list that wasn’t originally intended for video sharing. It’s also one of the best we used. SmugMug added its video hosting in response to more cameras, both point and shoot, as well as DSLR cameras like Nikon’s D90 and the Canon 5D Mark II shooting in HD. The one big thing that SmugMug does that the others don’t is support 1080p video–the kind that comes out of the 5D Mark II and future high-end DSLRs.

Video on SmugMug was some of the best of the bunch. It was crystal clear, loaded fast, and had one of the slickest players. Our only caveat was that it’s pricey. To upload and host HD video on SmugMug you have to pay $149 a year, which comes out to $12.50 a month. Of course if you’re a semi-serious photographer you’re not just paying for the video hosting. The service is, hands down, one of the best photo-hosting services around. It boasts an impressive slideshow tool and a built-in storefront that lets you price and sell each shot. If you’re just thinking about shooting video however, Vimeo’s Plus service is less than half the cost.

Vimeo
Vimeo won last year’s competition (alongside Veoh) for standard definition. At that time it was already ready, willing, and able to host HD clips (though we only tested its standard-def features). Vimeo has tightened its belt a bit since last year, introducing a new premium “Plus” service that gives users unlimited uploads. At the same time, it limited how many HD videos you could upload to just one per week, as well as restricting how many HD views you can get when it’s embedded elsewhere.

Vimeo did a great job both on both tests. What sets it apart from the other services being compared is that it lets you turn scaling on and off. This lets you watch videos in their native size as long as you’re watching them in full-screen mode. That means if you’ve got a display that’s as big or bigger than 1280×720 pixels, you can view the original video in a 1:1 pixel ratio.

YouTube
YouTube was the runt of the litter last year, and one of the main reasons we put together the initial comparison. Its video was some of the grainiest around. But that has since been remedied with both a higher-quality stream and the capability to display HD clips in a buttery-smooth 16:9 player.

Our test footage in YouTube came out gorgeous. Motion was clear, the sound was excellent, and it started playing right away. YouTube scored the highest marks–right up there with SmugMug and Dailymotion, in both the motion and still tests. Not a bad comeback compared to last year.

Stat sheet

The victor: YouTube
This time around, we feel really comfortable giving YouTube the quality crown. Its HD encoding is really nice, and you can’t beat the price (free). One thing that really separates it from the others is that you can do so many things with your clip once it’s up there. You can replace the music, as well as add subtitles and annotations. Community members can also respond to it, adding in-line video replies.

Runners up: Vimeo and SmugMug
Only one of these services will really cost you money (SmugMug), but both give you really great-looking HD Web video. A nod must be given to Vimeo for blazing the trail here. It’s been doing HD video for a while now, and it is one of the most colorful and beautiful sites around. Likewise, SmugMug’s player and interface are top notch, although it’s not as social, and the $150 price tag might be a turn-off to casual users who don’t intend to use its photo-hosting features.

Update: It was inevitable that we’d leave someone out of this by accident. In this case one of the first to let us know was Motionbox, which launched its HD support in early 2008. While it’s too late to include it in the comparison, it’s worth giving a plug here.

Motionbox’s $30 a year service lets you upload files of any size and length. Founder Chris O’Brien also wanted to note that his team has been trying to get all versions of the AVCHD format (found on most hand-held camcorders) working. You can see a demo of how the video looks here.

Think we got it wrong? Sound off in the comments.

Newspaper Websites Pull In 70 Million Visitors In June

By Mike Sachoff – Fri, 08/07/2009 – 06:31
Reach 36% of Internet users

Newspaper websites attracted more than 70.3 million unique visitors in June, reaching 35.9 percent of all Internet users, according to a custom report by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.

News paper website visitors viewed 3.5 billion page views during the month, spending 2.7 billion minutes browsing the sites in more than 597 million sessions.

“The newspaper audience continues to expand as publishers aggressively capitalize on their investments in digital properties, adding robust features and launching new products to attract a highly valuable consumer audience,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm.

Click Image to Enlarge
“Advertisers who want to reach consumers ready to make purchasing decisions continue to use the trusted newspaper brand to ensure their messages are heard through the crowd.”

The Nielsen numbers come as early data from a MORI Research survey of 3,000 adults, indicates that newspaper advertising remains the leading medium cite by consumers in planning, shopping and making purchasing decisions. More than half (59%) report newspaper advertising helps them plan purchasing decisions.

The majority (82%) of newspaper readers took some action as a result of a print newspaper ad in the past 30 days: 61 percent clipped a coupon, 50 percent bought something advertised and 52 visited a store.

While the number are impressive, it’s no secret the newspaper industry as a whole continues to struggle. In March the Hearst Corporation announced it was ending the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and going to an online-only publication. In February, E.W. Scripps announced it was shuttering the entire 150 year-old Rocky Mountain News.

More Companies Firing People Over Social Media (Mis)use

By Doug Caverly – Mon, 08/10/2009 – 14:46
Proprietary info not meant for Facebook

Employees should be more careful than ever about what sort of work-related information they post online. A new report indicates that companies are growing increasingly aware of inappropriate sharing, with many incidents resulting in someone getting fired.

Proofpoint found that businesses have definitely become wary about blogs. An official statement claimed that, during the past year, “17 percent disciplined an employee for violating blog or message board policies, while nearly nine percent reported terminating an employee for such a violation (both increases from 2008, 11 percent and six percent, respectively).”

It seems that firms are aware of YouTube and Facebook, as well. The report indicated that eight percent of corporations (each) got rid of people for violating policies pertaining to multimedia sites and social networks.

Finally, if employees figured they were safe using the relative newcomer, Twitter, they should think again. Proofpoint reported that 13 percent of U.S. companies investigated “exposure incidents” involving Twitter and Twitter-like services.

You might interpret this as evidence that people should learn to keep their mouths shut (and/or fingers still). A more charitable view is that perhaps social media sites should make their privacy notices and options more visible. Regardless, it looks like social media is starting to have a significant impact in the workplace.

New Mobile Marketing Guidelines

Open for Public Review
By Chris Crum – Fri, 08/07/2009 – 14:12
To Be Published in September

Mobile marketing is going to become increasingly hard for businesses to ignore. Just look at how much mobile advertising is already going on.

The key of course (which could really be said of other kinds of marketing), is to not be annoying about it. WebProNews recently interviewed former Yahoo executive and current Chief Revenue Officer of mobile marketing firm Crisp Wireless, Tom Foran, about this.

There are some new guidelines for mobile marketing in the works from none other than the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), whom I like to think of as kind of like the Interactive Advertising Bureau for mobile marketing. The MMA consists of agencies, advertisers, hand-held device manufacturers, carriers and operators, retailers, software providers and service providers, and other companies focused on marketing with mobile devices.

The MMA has opened up a public review period for the guidelines, which runs through the end of the month. They new guidelines will be published in September. News updates and additions to the guidelines include:

– The MMA’s new Universal Mobile Advertising Package (UMAP), which provides industry-standard ad units.

– The Mobile Application section has been expanded from North America only to worldwide.

– An expanded MMS section, including new ad units and guidelines.

– An expanded Mobile Video & TV section with new ad units and guidelines.

– An expanded Mobile Applications section with new ad units and guidelines

“The MMA’s Global Mobile Advertising Guidelines are designed to provide the timely, actionable guidance and insights necessary to continue mobile advertising’s phenomenal growth,” said Mike Wehrs, MMA president and CEO. “By making each new version of the Global Mobile Advertising Guidelines available for public review, the MMA ensures that this resource meets the needs of the entire mobile advertising ecosystem.”

eMarketer estimates that there will be 280.8 million mobile phone subscribers by the end of the year, while comScore says there will be 29 million smartphone users. Meanwhile, AdMob is getting ready to serve its 100 billionth mobil

Sidenote: See our interview with MMA President and CEO Mike Wehrs below:




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