Building Mailing Lists, List Building, Social Media, Niche Marketing

Here is a basic summary of tips and tricks to create a web video by Jay Allyson. If you are at all serious about creating web videos or video marketing, I would HIGHLY recommend the following …

- Web Video University (Dave Kaminski)
- Video BOSS (Andy Jenkins) (currently sold out but you can get on a waiting list)

I have, and am using these and honestly think they were worth EVERY PENNY …

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By Jay Allyson

Nearly all internet marketing professionals use video as one of the core methods for marketing their business. These ten tips aim to help you get started creating short, attractive, effective videos based on solid keywords that convert and that stand the test of time.

Video grabs people’s attention far more quickly and effectively than text, audio or photographs. Making a short video can capture a thousand words and pictures and helps to get across your personal brand and lifestyle.

It’s important to stand out in the crowd on video channels and search engines. Aim your headlines at capturing the imagination regarding your topic. So don’t be dull – test out curiosity, shock or fun tactics for getting those download clícks.

First of all, get set up.

When you’re starting out, it’s ok to just use your webcam. It will give you the chance to practice while you’re honing your presentation skills before you fork out for a camcorder. When you’re ready, you can purchase an inexpensive digital video recorder, like say the Flip and a tripod.

Make sure you take your videos in well-lit conditions. Inside your office you’ll need decent lighting, or you can whip out your camera when you’re out and about. It makes for a much more interesting back drop.

OK. So now let’s go through each of my TOP 10 TIPS for creating and using videos to market your business.

#1: Keep Your Videos Short

Whether you’re loading videos on YouTube or just putting them up on your website or blog, it’s really important to keep to just 5 or 6 minutes.

If needed, you can of course break longer topics up into a series of smaller videos, which you could market as a series (see tip 10).

#2: Post Videos on Your Sales Pages

You can use video on your sales page to introduce the main benefits of your product or business opportuníty. How about placing a video on your sales page or sign up pages.

This helps to orientate visitors and to highlight the main points of your regular, written sales letter.

#3: Choose Your Keywords Carefully

This is really an important tip, because it will affect how your video gets picked up by the search engines and other internet ‘bots’ that seek out content.

Research your top keyword phrases. Pick keywords that will attract the right kind of traffic and leads – research like crazy to find out what your prospects are looking for – and be sure to include your keywords in headings and tags and description boxes.

Doing this research and tracking clíck thrus (CTR) and conversions will help you secure your most cost-effective keywords and keyword phrases.

#4: Have a Clear Purpose & Structure

Your keywords will help make sure you target your video on the right purpose before you start. Does your video answer the questions your visitors have in their heads when they’re searching for solutions. Make things crystal clear.

Stay on topic and give added value – unique value if possible – and your videos will convert much better for you. Write down a structure – a set of headings – for what you’re going to cover. Have a script if necessary.

You can mention any links that you have to another video specifically on that related topic.

#5: Look at the Camera

The aim here is to connect with your audience, both in the topic you choose and the content as well as in your communication style. Remember you are talking to people – real live people. What are their needs and wants, hopes and fears.

With regards to presentation, stick your líst of headings right next to the camera so you stay looking in the camera at all times, rather than looking away at a screen or down at your notes.

An authentic and honest video is far more valuable than a glossy TV like broadcast. So don’t worry if you’re not up to TV presenter standards. Just be yourself and enjoy the opportuníty to reach out to people in a different way than using text copy.

#6: Create a Clear Call to Action

You should create one very clear service and call to action. It’s very important that people know exactly what to do as a result of watching your video.

What is your most wanted response (MWR)? Don’t confuse visitors with lots of options and different offers. Focus on the single most wanted response.

Alternatively, you can put your video up next to a sign up box – linked to your emaíl marketing – and clearly ask them to opt ín, more than once. Provide an incentive, such as a free report or further video coaching resources.

#7: Encourage Comments on Your Video

One of the best things about video is that it’s a very personal, social medium. The more people that are talking about your video and passing it on, the more buzz you’ll create.

Visitors may return to your page to see who has commented since their last comment. There may accumulate a whole líst of tips that have been created by your niche community, prompted by your initial video post.

About The Author
Jay Allyson escaped the job rat race. She is Mum to two wonderful children and has run a business from home since 2004. She is an Internet marketing coach and wealth consultant, teaching people to make significant revenue in 12 months, part-time or full-time. Find out more at: http://www.JayAllyson.com and http://GetRichLifestyle.com

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Starting this weekend, YouTube will be dipping its toe into the waters of paid content.

This behavior follows a trend we’ve noted in traditional media outlets. First, media mogul Rupert Murdoch said no more freebies for search engines, then the New York Times hinted (and today confirmed) that users would have to start paying for a certain amount of access to articles. Now, YouTube is partnering with the Sundance Film Festival and filmmakers to charge users around $5 to view a range of movies from the 2009 and 2010 festivals. It’s still cheaper than a movie ticket – but is this a direction users will follow?

Five Sundance films have been selected for this venture. It’s what we’d consider a test run to see how users will respond to paid content on the site, and whether this could be a new revenue stream for the web video giant, which has historically struggled with profitability.

The films include The Cove, an underwater adventure about dolphin capturing in Japan; Bass Ackwards, which chronicles an improvised road trip; Children of Invention, about two Bostonian orphans; One Too Many Mornings, a “coming of age comedy about two guys who are too old to be coming of age”; and Homewrecker, a comedy about a locksmith. The filmmakers will determine the exact asking price for viewing each movie, but all will be in the range of $5.

YouTube execs told USA Today the move is helping independent filmmakers find distribution avenues for their films. The movies will be shown without ads, which would be an aesthetic disaster for any director who chose to put his creation online.

What do you think: Would you pay $5 to watch an indie flick on YouTube? What other revenue models should YouTube be considering? Let us know in the comments.

For more on paid content, including movies, see today’s Open Thread at ReadWriteWeb: There’s No Such Thing As Free Content.

See also:
YouTube and Vimeo Begin Offering HTML 5 Video
YouTube starts experimenting with Flash-free HTML video player
YouTube rolls out nicer new video player and a cleaner viewing page.

About The Author:
Jolie O’Dell is ReadWriteWeb’s Community Manager and a daily writer. In the past, O’Dell has worked on newspapers, on magazines, for book publishers, for serial entrepreneurs, on startup teams, at advertising and marketing agencies, and for enterprise blogs and websites. O’Dell has a B.A. in Media Studies from Shenandoah University. You can contact Jolie at jolie@readwriteweb.com.

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If your business website doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.

This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.

Before I explain how you can do this to help your website, let me first give some background on how search engines work, Google in particular.

When it comes to optimizing your website (or blog for that matter) for search engines you must always keep in mind two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the elements of a Web page that better optimize it to be found and ranked well in the search engines. These elements can include on-page content such as the actual sentences and paragraphs on the page, the headlines (or headers or Hx tags), the links, the links’ text, the title tag and much more.

Off-page optimization means the things that are done on sites besides your site, namely link-building. Off-page optimization is the process of creating links (or causing others to create links) on other websites that point to your site. Inbound links as these are often called have a major impact on how well you rank in search engines. Generally speaking, the more inbound links, the better. But the quality of the sites with these inbound links, or the way the search engines perceive the sites, is even more important.

To rank on the first couple of pages on the search engines requires work on both on-page and off-page optimization.

Two additional and important pieces of information that you’ll need to understand are related to site content and internal links.

Search engines also very much love new, original and quality content, and they like to see your website regularly adding this kind of new content. You don’t need to add pages every day, just add pages at the same rate over time. So if you add a page a week to your site, keep it at around that same pace, or increase or decrease gradually.

A website can be considered a living entity in a sense. It certainly shouldn’t be static. It should grow over time. And the fantastic thing about content is that the more of it there is on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in the search engines.

The idea that inbound links help your search engine rankings that I explained above can be extended to your internal pages as well. In other words, the more links to a particular page coming from other pages within the same site will boost that page’s rank as well.

Think of it this way. If you had a ten page site, including a product page and every page on the site contained a link to your product page and, if all other things were equal, your product page would rank higher than the rest of your site’s pages (besides the home page which is given a little extra weíght).

Now let’s consider what would happen if there were only you and your competitor in your industry (if only that could be true!) and your site still had those ten pages while your competitor’s site contained one hundred pages. Furthermore, your competitor set it up the same way as you where he added a link to every page on his site that pointed to his product page. If all other things were equal, his product page would outrank your product page every time. Why? Because he had 100 internal links pointing to his product page and you only had 10.

If you put all these pieces together now, on-page optimization, off-page optimization or link building, content creation and internal linking, can you begin to see why a blog may be a good thing? A blog helps with all of these.

A blog that is regularly updated is providing a mechanism for adding fresh content on a regular basis. Plus, it’s so easy to use a blog that anyone can use them, so even if you or your employees don’t know a thing about Web pages and HTML, you’ll still be able to add new content to your site.

Consider this. If you add fresh, quality content to your blog on a regular basis by writing posts, something the search engines love, and within each post you link to an important page within your site, let’s say your product page for instance, you’re now building links to help your rankings using your blog. With this additional link your product page gets that much more boost in the search engines.

Remember how I explained that links from within your site help your rankings? Adding links within your blog posts pointing back to your other important pages that you want to rank well is a great way to help your rankings.

And every time you publish a new post, you’re giving the search engines one more entry point into your site. Your site will quickly get bigger, and with each new page your site gets more visible.

Keep in mind that the links you make within your blog posts should be relevant. Only link to your product page from a post that has to do with your products. And also, blog posts ought to be useful to your site visitors. The less you talk about your products and instead offer useful, free information that people can use, the more traffíc and repeat visitors you’ll get.

Remember that people really don’t care about you, your website or your products, they only care about how you can help them. If you sell furniture, a blog post about how to find the best deals on furniture would be far better than a post about how your chairs are the best in the world.

One important thing to remember is that if you plan on creating a new blog for your business as a way to augment your website be sure you put the blog on your actual domain. This means that you would not use a remote service like Blogger.com. Instead, you must have the blog on your business website’s address (or domain). For example, if your website address is http://www.yoursite.com/ then your blog should be located at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or http://blog.yoursite.com/

By adding a blog to your business website you are creating a way to get additional traffic. You’ll get direct traffic from your posts, which get indexed by the search engines and drive traffic to your site from searches. And, you’ll get indirect traffic from your other site’s pages ranking well in the search engines because they have links pointing to them from your blog posts.

You’ll be regularly adding fresh content to your site, which search engines love, thereby creating more ways to be found in the search engines at the same time. And each post provides a new chance to create a link or two to other pages and blog posts on your site, thereby boosting those pages’ rankings.

Like I suggested at the beginning, if your business website doesn’t have a blog, go get one.

About The Author
Jason O’Connor is a Web business and marketing professional who produces The Net Gazette, a free online Web business and marketing periodical. The Net Gazette covers topics that range from blogging for business to Twitter. Read the September edition or visit the main website at: www.thenetgazette.net

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Video from SPNVideos

Short 5 minute video from SPNVideos on how to bookmark your site effectively …

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SEO is a race. And in any race learning from your competitors makes you a better runner. Even when you’re running first it’s sometimes good to look back and check the runner-ups. And if you’re not the yellow jersey guy, you absolutely should examine the leaders: their gear, their training, their strategy. In SEO the most interesting thing about your competition are their links.

Whether you like it or not SEO is still pretty much about links. Good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.

So let’s go through some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition’s link profile granting you access to the restricted areas: their locker room, dirty laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.

Let’s Talk Competitive Link Research

Finding out where your competitors’ links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site.

Yahoo’s much better in that respect as it tends to give more extensive and accurate data. The problem here is that there’s a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence. Here’re some tips to break through to the other side.

Note: If you’re lazy like me skip to the end of the article where I’ll share a tool that does it all much quicker.

Trick 1: Search for Links to Particular Web Pages of a Competing Site

Alongside with link:www.your-competitor.com search for

link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html or
link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html

and so on.

Trick 2: Exclude Internal Links

You may examine the internal linking structure of your competition if you want to gain some insight on their navigation and marketing steps. But as we want to find more external links, let’s exclude the internal ones.

You can do this by adding -site:site.com operator to your search query. Type in:

link:http://www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com

and you’ll get a list of external backlinks only.

There’s a dropdown option in Yahoo! site explorer that does the same.

Trick 3: Exclude Links Coming from Certain Domains

The -site: modifier lets you exclude links coming from specific sites. So, whenever you see a large chunk of links coming from the same domain add -site:thisdomain.com modifier to your query and the links from this site will get replaced with new ones.

You can add -site: multiple times in one query so that you have something like this:

link:http://www.cnn.com -site:cnn.com -site:en.wikipedia.org

Trick 4: Check Links Coming from Certain TLDs

This is a little known trick. The site: modifier actually lets you get a list of links coming from domains with certain TLDs: .com, .org, .edu, .co.uk and so on. Just type in

link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.gov or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com site:.gov

and you’ll get a list of .gov sites linking to your rival.

Note: Do this in Yahoo! regular search, not site explorer

Trick 5: Exclude Links Coming from Certain TLDs

This is an even lesser known trick. You can exclude certain TLDs from the results with the -site:.tld modifier. Usually the biggest chunk of links comes from .com’s so add a -site.com modifier and you’ll get lots of new link data.

Trick 6: Use Different Combinations of the First 5 Tricks

Try link:http://www.your-competitor.com/page.html -site:your-competitor.com -site:.com
Or link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.org -site:wikipedia.org

Give it a thought and I’m sure you’ll come up with lots of your own. Feel free to share your findings in the comments.

Trick 7: Use the Above 6 Tricks in Different Search Engines
Don’t limit your searches to Yahoo! and Google, go to AltaVista, Alexa, (Bing doesn’t give you link data, so forget about it) but then there’re Exalead, Excite and tons of regional search engines. Search them, remove the duplicates and you’ll have a goooooooooooooooogol of competitor’s links to study.

Note: Some search engines have a different set of operators so you’ll need to type domain: instead of link:.

Getting It All Done Fast

This sure seems like a lot of work and it is. Moreover, getting the links list is only the beginning and the easy part of competitive link research. Once you get the list you need to analyze each link, weed out poor quality sites and only leave the ones you can get a link from. Now THAT’s a lot of work.

I’m too lazy to do this all by hand, besides I value my time too much to waste it on such kind of work. That’s why I use SEO SpyGlass an advanced link analysis tool that employs all the tricks described in this article (plus some more advanced ones I don’t even know) to get up to 25,000 links per domain, which is much, much more than any other tool can get.

SEO SpyGlass also finds all the data I need to analyze the links:

    • Google PR of the domain and linking page
    • The URL and title of the linking page
    • The anchor text and description
    • Whether the link is still on the page (sometimes the link gets removed but search engines will
       think it’s there till they reindex the page).
    • Whether the link is no-follow or dofollow
    • How many other links are on the page
    • How much link value the link passes
    • And some other data like TLDs, domain age, country, etc.

If you want to do competitive link research seriously, I’d strongly recommend trying SEO SpyGlass out. And of course you can always use my tricks whenever you want to run a quick background check on that new guy on your block.

Note: This article first appeared on Site-Reference.com

About The Author
Get more link building advice and SEO software to help you implement it. Richard Gilmore is an Internet marketer, freelance SEO, author and addicted guitar player.

 
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Google: Cross-Domain Canonical Tag This Year

Duplicate content is a common occurrence on the web and in many cases can hurt search engine rankings. While the search engines may not always technically penalize webmasters for duplicate content, there are still a lot of ways it can hurt.

WebProNews is covering the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East in New York, where representatives from the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) discussed how their respective web properties handle duplicate content issues. Following are some takeaways from each.

Duplicate Content in Google

The way Google handles duplicate content has been discussed a lot in recent memory. This is largely due to a video Google’s Greg Grothaus uploaded, in which he discusses at length, the way Google handles a variety of different elements of the duplicate content conversation.

Joachim Kupke, Sr. Software Engineer of Google’s Indexing Team reiterated much of what Grothaus said. He also said that Google has a ton of infrastructure for content duplication elimination:

- redirects
- detection of recurrent URL patterns (the ability to ‘learn’ recurrent url patterns to find duplicated content)
- actual contents
- most recently crawled version
- earlier content
- contents minus things that don’t change on a site

Kupke said to avoid dynamic URLs when possible (although Google is “rather good” at eliminating dupes). If all else fails, use the canonical link element. Kupke calls this a “Swiss Army Knife” for duplicate content issues.

Google says the canonical link element has been tremendously successful. It didn’t even exist a year ago, and is has grown exponentially. It has had a huge impact on Google’s canonicalization decisions, and 2 out of 3 times, the canonical tag actually alters the organic decision in Google.

Google says a common mistake is designating a 404 as canonical, and this is typically caused by unnecessary relative links. So, avoid changing rel=”canonical” designations, and avoid designating permanent redirects as canonical.

Also, do not disallow directives in robots.txt to annotate duplicate content. It makes it harder to detect dupes, and disallowed 404s are a nuisance. There is an exception however, and that is that interstitial login pages may be a good candidate to “robot out,” according to Kupke.

Kupke says that canonical works, but indexing takes time. “Be patient and we WILL use your designated canonicals.” Cleaning up an existing part of the index takes even longer, and this may leave dupes serving for a while despite rel=canonical, Kupke adds.

At SMX, Google announced that cross domain rel=canonical is coming within this year. So for example, if the Chicago Tribune has an article on the New York Times, and the rel=canonical points to the Chicago Tribune then Google will only credit the Chicago Tribune with the content.

Duplicate Content in Bing

As far as how Bing views duplicate content, intention is key. If your intent is to manipulate the search engine, you will be penalized.

Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager of Bing says to consolidate all versions of a page under one URL. “Less is more, in terms of duplicate content.” If possible, use only one URL per piece of content.

Bing isn’t supporting the canonical link element (as a ranking factor) yet, but it is coming. They do say to use it, but it’s just not really a ranking factor in Bing yet. Bing says that there has been an increase in the usage of canonical tags in the past 6 months, but adoption issues still exist. According to Parthasarathy, 30% of canonical tags point to the same domain (which is fine), and 9% use it to point to other domains. This could be a mistake or it could be manipulative. Bing says they will look for other factors to try and determine which it is.

Bing says canonical tags are hints and not directives. “Use it with caution,” and not as an alternative to good web design.

With regards to www vs non-www, just pick one and stick with it consistently. Remove default filenames at the end of your URLs. Bing also says 301 redirects are your best friend for redirecting, use rel=”nofollow” on useless pages, and use robots.txt to keep content you don’t want crawled out.

Duplicate Content in Yahoo

If everything goes according to plan, you’re going to need to worry about how Bing handles duplicate content if you’re worried about how Yahoo handles it, but Yahoo’s Cris Pierry, Sr. Director of Search, offered a few additional tips.

Pierry says descriptive URLs should be easily readable, and it’s not a good idea to change URLs every year. In addition, use canonical, avoid case sensitivity, and avoid session IDs and parameters.

Pierry also says to use sitemaps, and submit them to Yahoo Site Explorer. Improve indexing by proper robots.txt usage, and use Site Explorer to delete URLs that you dont’ want Yahoo to index. Finally, provide feeds to Yahoo Site Explorer, and report spam sites linking to you in Site Explorer.

Yahoo says metadata and SearchMonkey are enhancing presentation.

WebProNews reporter Mike McDonald contributed to this article from SMX East.

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237

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To Sum it Up, They Ignore it

Google does not use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking. Google’s Matt Cutts explains this in a Webmaster Central video. This is not breaking news, by any means, but there are a lot of people out there that still put a lot of stock into this.

In fact, Cutts mentions that people have sued each other for meta tag keyword theft, when really this is just a waste of everybody’s time, because they don’t even play a role in the ranking of sites on Google. Have you been under the impression that the keywords meta tag was important to ranking in Google? Comment here.

“About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page,” says Cutts. “In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.”

Just because Google ignores the “keywords” meta tag, that doesn’t mean it ignores all meta tags. In fact, there are several that the search engine definitely uses. For one, Google sometimes uses the “description” meta tag as the text for search results snippets. But even in then, the “description” meta tag isn’t used to influence ranking.

Google also recognizes the “google,” “robots,” “verify-v1,” “content type,” and “refresh” meta tags. Information about how Google understands these can be found at this page in the Webmaster Tools help center.

“It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely,” Cutts says of the “keywords” meta tag. “Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.”

So the moral of the story is, if a competitor is jacking your keywords, and using them in their own “keywords” meta tag, this will have no effect whatsoever in how they rank in Google when compared to your site. Cutts says other search engines might use the information, but Google doesn’t.

Google does note that its enterprise Search Appliance has the ability to match meta tags, but this is of course separate from Google web search.

As I have said before, these videos and other tips Google frequently gives out are worth paying attention to for any webmaster looking to rank well. Whether they’re talking about duplicate content, meta tags, or paid links, they’re all aimed at telling webmasters how it is, and clarifying any misconceptions to the contrary. Whether you agree with Google’s methods in all cases or not, the tips are for your benefit.

Like it or not, Google controls what people find on the web when they search. The company’s huge market share is just something that is. There is always the possibility that could change in the future, but at this point, it looks like webmasters are not going to be able to ignore Google for a long time, if they hope to be found on the web by searchers.

We realize (and Google surely does too) that many well-seasoned marketers already know that Google ignores the “keywords” meta tag, but webmasters are born everyday, and not all of them have been so heavily seasoned to this point, and that’s why Google puts this information out there. There is always misinformation (particularly when it comes to search), and sometimes the record just has to be set straight. Who better to do that than Google itself?

Do you find Google’s Webmaster Central videos useful or do you think they’re mostly just retreads of things you already know? Share your thoughts with WebProNews.

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237

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Best Practices for Freehosts

Google has made some recommendations for “best practices” for sites that allow users to create their own sites. They give the examples of their own Google Sites and Blogger. So in other words, if you run some type of site that allows users to make their own pages, you may want to pay attention.

1. Make sure your users can verify their website in website management suites (like Webmaster Tools).
2. Choose a unique directory or hostname for each user.
3. Set useful and descriptive page titles.
4. Allow the addition of tags to a page.
5. Allow your users to use third-party analytics packages
6. Help your users move around
7. Help search engines find the good content from your users.
 

When Google says, “help your users move around,” they mean let your users access their data. This is a concept that Google has become very big on. As you may have read, Google has started a group called the Data Liberation Front to address data portability, and has created a site dedicated to instructing users on how to move their data to and from the company’s various products. Basically, Google is suggesting you follow suit.

When Google talks about helping search engines find you users’ content, they mean help the crawlers. “Help us find users’ content using XML Sitemaps,” says Greg Grothaus, Staff Software Engineer on Google’s Search Quality Team. “Help us to steer clear of duplicate versions of the same content so we can find more of the good stuff your users are creating by creating only one URL for each piece of content when possible, and by specifying your canonical URLs when not.”

These may not seem like issues that a lot of people would have to worry about, but you may be (or maybe not) surprised at how often start-ups come and go, which have sites that allow users to create content. Perhaps following these guidelines would cater to an increased chance for a successful platform. More information on the guidelines can be found here.

 
About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237

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Now you can learn about the power of marketing with online videos.

The secret to online distribution is sending your content to as many video, social media, social bookmarking, social networking, pod cast and pod casting directories, sites and blogs as possible. Done correctly you’ll domainate search engines and own your product niche when people search for your products and services. The problem is TIME!

Traffic Geyser automates the entire submission process saving you time and money. Upload your video or videos, fill out keywords about your business, products or services and Traffic Geyser then distributes and syndicates your content to the most popular social media sites in minutes!

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Knowing how to drive traffic to your website and actually “driving the traffic” can at times be very different. I’ll admit, I have built sites for myself and others where I did everything I was told or read to do, only to ask “Where’s the traffic?”. I feel like I’m striving for the allusive prize in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” beating bloody coconuts together and getting nowhere fast… Or dare I mention the French Taunters … “Ni”

From what I’ve seen in the last five years when it comes to the Internet, no website can remain an island. Web sites must become “connected or webbed together” with others that are simular and/or stronger than itself. This way both spiders and surfers can be attracted by numerious sources which makes your material or services more easily found.

Personally I believe that tags still have their use (Yahoo!, MSN, …), blogs seem to contain ‘stickyness’ which is important to drawing readers and potential customers (WordPress appears to be one of the better choices expecially when your hosting it yourself), the term “content is king” at times tends to be a joke. Example, what about sites that get indexed in the top 30 when the webmaster hasn’t even uploaded any pages yet (doesn’t that just tick you off). And as far as Google’s natural search results go, well Google is Google! What works today …

If you are looking for an outside source for information, one that I think is worthy of mention is SitePro News. It often has good tips on how to better your site and it’s ranking in the SE’s.

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