Subscribe To Our RSS Feed
Online video has grown in recent years to become one of the most popular methods of self expression and business promotion online. The result has been that a huge network of video sharing sites has emerged where users can create and share videos with one another. By far the most popular of these sites is Youtube which was purchased by Google back in October of 2006 for a whopping $1.65 billion.
Internet marketers have recognized the popularity of videos and regularly use video as a means of promoting their business and capturing more sales. What many Internet marketers don't know is that video sharing sites like Youtube are a very good way to perform market research.
The search function on Youtube is very similar to the search function contained within a normal search engine. However, the search feature used by Youtube is much less sophisticated than the complex algorithms used by the search engines. This is really great news for video marketers because it means you can easily dominate the Youtube search results.
Before you submit your video you'll need to do a little keyword research like you would if you were optimizing a page for the search engines. Once you have selected some keywords that you would like to target add some of the keywords to your video's tags and title.
If you have done everything right, your video should be able to pull in some really nice traffic to you website. But the feedback you get from channel viewers can actually be just as important as getting traffic. Market feedback is a classic direct marketing technique that is achieved in real life by using costly things like polls and surveys.
Your videos actually give you the chance to pull in tons of market feedback without spending a dime on polls or surveys. Market feedback allows to get a more precise glimpse of exactly what is that your target market wants and how much they are willing to pay for it. This information is priceless.
You will frequently receive video comments that tell you whether or not your video was interesting or helpful. Many times you will receive negative comments that will tell what you did wrong. Except for the comment spam that you will inevitable receive, almost all of the comments you receive will be useful to you.
The most ideal comments are those that request additional videos. These comments are your target market telling you exactly what they want! Offline businesses pay a small fortune for this kind of information. Youtube users readily offer up this kind of information to Internet marketers at no charge.
Online videos are a truly fantastic way to promote your business and get more traffic without spending a great deal of money. But remember that your video submissions can actually help you improve your existing marketing strategy and develop new product ideas.
Filed under Video Marketing by 
Squidoo is a remarkable resource for Internet marketers. It's what's considered a web 2.0 site that allows users to create "lenses," which are individual pages situated on the Squidoo.com domain that promote a specific topic.
You may be wondering what's so great about that, when thousands of other sites allow you to do the same thing. But Squidoo is unique. Not only do they make it incredibly easy to create a web page, ripe with graphics, content, and interactivity, but they allow – and even encourage you – to use the page to make money (very different from the marketing ban you face on MySpace).
A few other web 2.0 sites allow a minimal amount of marketing to take place, such as HubPages. But they're far stricter about the number of outgoing links you can have, and they have other rules, which make it harder to use the site for your own personal profiting potential.
Squidoo is actually far more conducive to making real money than any other site that has come into popularity in recent years. This is the biggest reason Squidoo has risen to fame so rapidly and why Tiffany Dow penned the eBook Social Networking on Squidoo, which was endorsed by an endless supply of guru marketers thanks to its step-by-step instructions on how to market the right way on Squidoo.
Squidoo has finally created a site that can be used for commercial purposes in addition to being a valued consumer resource and wealth of free information. Thousands of smart marketers have flooded to the site to take advantage of the free tools available to them.
Of course, with the influx of honest marketers, a wave of spammers came to try to take over. This caused Squidoo to temporarily experience a sharp decline in the search engine rankings of its pages at Google, and a sharp drop in traffic to boot – known as Google's Squidoo Slap.
Squidoo was quick to take action, removing some of the tools (such as iFrames) that made it easy for spammers to abuse the system. They also banned four major spam topics from the site. This was frustrating to a lot of honest marketers, but it made it harder for spammers to abuse the site.
They also instituted some policies with regards to quality of lenses, requiring a more substantial amount of content to be published before the lens would show up in searches on the Squidoo site itself. This also helped deter spammers who would put up a lens with just a paragraph or two of keyword-rich spam text and then a bunch of outbound links.
Squidoo can be used in many ways. You can promote services, products, or affiliate items through your lens. You can have multiple accounts and on each free account, you can have an endless supply of lenses.
You can cross-promote your lenses. Build one master topic lens, and then branch out to build a number of more targeted lenses. Squidoo helps anyone be an expert on any subject, and Google love to Squidoo is once again rampant, helping lenses acquire page 1 rankings in the SERPs for many competitive keywords and phrases.
People who sell on eBay also love to promote their eBay stores or auctions through Squidoo, using built in eBay modules (building blocks) that Squidoo offers. Some modules give the lensmaster a share of co-op earnings through AdSense and some module profits. But you can also use text and image links to funnel traffic directly through to your own domain.
Filed under Social Marketing by
AdWords can be a very difficult thing to master. A lot of people have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars before they learn to make a profit. Some people are never able to become profitable, and give up after losing a considerable amount of money.
Filed under Advertising and Promotion by
