Archive for the ‘Internet Tips’ Category

I just got back from meeting with a prospective client that was very interested in using YouTube as a marketing strategy. It seems like everything online is going toward video, and he wanted to know how to capitalize on this trend.

We’ve been using YouTube for a little over two years now for one of our own businesses, and it’s been hugely successful. In fact, it’s our primary way of driving traffic to the targeted site. Our videos have almost 2.5 million views, and we are even a YouTube partner, sharing in YouTube’s ad revenue. Here’s why it works very well in this particular instance:

• We sell a global product, so it doesn’t matter if the person watching our video lives half way across the world. We still have something to sell them.
• Our niche is one that lends itself to “How To” videos, so it’s easy to make many short, 2 1/2 minute clips that are of value to the viewer.
• There is an offer and a specific call to action edited in to the end of each video, “Visit www.oursite.com and sign up for our free Blueprint.”
• We then follow up with those leads using a targeted autoresponder sequence coupled with weekly broadcast email messages.

So, how do you use YouTube if you’re a local small business that doesn’t offer a national or global product?

Well, YouTube still offers some great benefits. Here are just a few:

• Greatly helps with search. YouTube videos rank very well in a general Google search, so if you are carefully choosing your video’s title, description and keywords, there is a good chance that your video will rank very high when someone searches for you online.
• If you’re a little bit creative, you could think of a supplemental product or service to sell to a larger market.
• It’s a great way to be able to easily add video to your website. Once your video is uploaded to YouTube, you can simply copy and paste the code they provide into your own web page.

As you can see, there is great potential in using video marketing, no matter how big a geographical market you are selling to. If you’d like to learn more about video marketing, please use the form on our contact page, and if you have any questions or comments, please leave them below.

The answer to almost any question is literally at your fingertips. Type the right words into Google’s search bar and within seconds thousands, often hundreds of thousands, of answers are spit back at you. The question is: What are those right words?”

I always took searching for granted, and it wasn’t until I recently spent some time with friends and family that aren’t on the computer as much as I am, that I realized there were some simple tips that might be helpful.

1. Ask exactly what you want - be as specific as possible.
2. Use a lot of words - even a sentence. If you only use one or two generic terms, you aren’t going to get the exact information you’re looking for.
3. If you’re asking a technical question, there’s a good chance Google will give you some results with links to forums. These are great places to find answers. There is always a really good chance that someone else is experiencing the same problems you are, and the wonderful people that contribute to the forums have provided a solution.
4. Take a quick peek at the website address before clicking on the results. After a little practice, you’ll begin to recognize sites that are selling products and may not have much information. If you’re looking to buy, then that’s a different story.
5. If you are in the market to make a purchase, don’t forget about the links on the right (the paid ones). The merchants advertising there have put a lot of research into the keywords they have chosen, so there is a very good chance that those ads will bring you to just what you are looking for.
6. If you are looking for something specific, use quotations around the words that should be grouped together. Google will look for webpages that have those specific words, in that specific order for you.
7. If Google isn’t returning helpful results, try the other search engines: Ask.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com.
8. If you are looking for specific “How To” information, try going directly to an article directory. They have thousands of articles on almost any topic you can think of. Some good ones to try are EzineArticles.com and eHow.com.

These are some of the basic principles that I use when I am looking for information online, and I hope they provide a good start to help you learn to search more effectively. If you have any other tips to add, please leave a comment!