Why use Video for online marketing? The reason is…

“Videos have a 41% higher click through rate than their plain text versions in universal search results“

Videos are all the rage over the internet. The stats and survey results published by Nielsen shows that video search and watching is rapidly becoming a popular over the internet. There has been significant rise in online video viewership over the past few years. The recent Nielsen report points the emerging trend of video watching -

“The new trend among our TV and Internet homes shows the lightest traditional television users streaming significantly more Internet video via their computers, and the heaviest streamers under-indexing for traditional TV viewership. This behavior is led by those ages 18-34.”

The number of unique viewers is a whopping 143 Million in the middle of the year 2011. From January to June, 2011 online video watching time has grown to 44.5% which is 4 hours 39 minutes per user with an “increase of 4 percent from May” this year.

YouTube, as expected, holds the top position with 8.5 billion video streams and unique 112,764 viewers in the first quarter of 2011. The statistics nothing but reinforces the fact that videos are becoming more and more important in the sphere of digital marketing. If we dig deeper into the facts the largest audience of internet video is the adult lot (age group 35-49 yrs) while growing interest in mobile videos is evident among today’s youth (age between 24 and 35 yrs). High-end mobile phones with increasing display size further indicate that the trend of online video watching is not to die down soon.

So, this is something small businesses can capitalize on.

When you search with ‘soccer training’ it’s a list of videos that appears in the search result page along with website pages.

The search engine is smart enough to know when to include the video in the result page for a particular search term even if there is no mention of the word ‘video’. Or in other words, it knows when a topical video will be of more interest to the searcher and displays results accordingly.

For example a video on “how to train your dog” is much more effective than its plain text counterpart that may not appeal to the searcher at all with boring textual instructions and paragraphs to read.

Secondly, if we become more specific with video search such as ‘dog training videos’ the result is an assortment of related YouTube videos as well as video content from relevant websites.

So, incorporating video in your online marketing campaign can prove beneficial if it is optimized properly.

Now, the question is how to best optimize your videos for search engines?  

There are two ways you can optimize your videos. One is utilizing the video sharing platforms like YouTube and the other is posting video content in your own website.  You can upload video content exclusively on your website and then share it via social networks.

If you are a ‘dog trainer’ or organizing ‘soccer training camps’ or selling products like vacuum cleaner it’s wise that you create a video content for your website as well as YouTube as it is the most popularly accessed video platform.

Google Plus, the recent craze over the Internet, lets you share your video content within your Circle. Therefore, it is important how you optimize your video content for your website promotion.

Here is what you can do to get the best ROI with your video content:

• Upload your videos to prominent sharing platforms.
• Use popular keywords in the video title and add keywords rich description to it with your website address embedded in it.
• Don’t forget to tag your videos using some targeted keywords.
• Post video content regularly in social media and other networking sites if you want consistent viewership.
• For on-site videos create and use a video sitemap if you have a considerable number of videos on the site.
• Use informational keywords that focus solely on the topic, service or the products. Long tail keywords including phrases like “how to”, “why”, “what is” have better prospect when it comes to video optimization.
• Avoid transactional keywords that is, phrase including words like “buy”, “sale”, “free”, “cheap” etc. Studies found that use of transactional keywords in video optimization causes adverse effect.
• It is often noticed that videos ranking well on the universal SERPs also ranks high on its own platform. Conclusion is, if your video tops the ranking on YouTube chances are high that it will perform well on universal SERPs as well.
• Do make your videos easily sharable.

And last but not the least is to make real good videos that are relevant to your service/product and at the same time useful for the viewers. Good videos often shared over the social media by common users. And that’s the most rewarding part of video optimization.

Currently, there are thousands of promotional web pages and business user profiles already exist on Facebook. Even though they come up with games or other applications to promote their service/products, unfortunately several of those social media marketing campaigns are flop. Why? Where do they go wrong?

The reason is that marketers often forget that -

1. It (social media) is a place for making friends, not customers.
2. It is such a virtual world where people like to meet real people, not dealing with fake profiles.
3. It is about sharing your friends’ problems and providing solutions, if possible, not advertising your stuffs.
4. It is a place to care for friends (who are your target audience, in terms of marketing) and not being selfish to talk about one’s self/business only.
5. It is about building relationships and not marketing (in its literal sense).

Once you succeed in building a long term and active relation with your ‘target audience’ on social media your job is half done. It is the strong bond of friendship that will make people in your network speak for you (your service/products) and recommend you in their network. And it is the power of recommendation and recognition that will help you build your brand online and offline.

Location Sharing and Social Media Marketing

Recently Twitter has launched location sharing feature, Twitter Places , which enables users share their physical location in their tweets as soon as they activate this feature. As you turn on this feature your geographic coordinates are shown via Google Map.  While Twitter is all set with this new attribute Facebook has kept location sharing (Facebook Places) limited for iPhone users as of now.  As you check-in to different places on Facebook it gets listed on the News Feed and on your friends’ home pages.

But are users ready to accept this exposure? It is learnt that many Twitter users are against going overtly public with personal informaton sharing. Well, it is still an optional feature. Even though people are apprehensive regarding misuse of location information many are glad to share their whareabouts with frinds and acquintances.

Shifting focus from personal view point if we concentrate on the commercial aspect we’ll see that location sharing can add new dimension to social media marketing. Just as search engine marketiners are turning to geo-targeted or Local SEO with the help of Google Places, social media marketers can make use of this new features on Twitter and Facebook  for their campaigns. It can be a great tool to catch up with the potential local customers in their network. The target customers can easily find them out as they search for tweets from their locality. It will be easier for companies to advertise about their local offices, events and meetings and create their brand awareness locally through social media. Thus location sharing online may drive off-line sale as well.

May be Facebook and Twitter’s location sharing feature is primarily designed for personal user accounts but with these two social networking behemoths competing each other we wouldn’t have to wait too long to see what’s more in store for business entreprenuers.

Article Marketing or Video Marketing?

Article marketing and video marketing are two aspects of online business promotion which are very common and very popular as well. The reason is that both are free and both are capable of pulling in visitors if properly targeted with related keywords. However, video marketing is relatively newer to article marketing, which is there from the very beginning of online business and web promotion.

Article marketing – an overused strategy?

Initially article marketing was doing well. Many search engine marketers have made money by creating one article, stuffed with keywords and links back to main site’s landing pages and submitting it to several article directories. But increasing competition, innovation of automated article writing software and spreading of viral articles degraded the quality of content inevitably. Moreover, Google got busy in improving its search algorithms almost everyday. So, the things got tougher and an alternative was required to stay ahead in the competition.

Video Marketing as an effective alternative

With the growing popularity of social media as internet marketing platform video marketing came as an alternative. Multimedia attracts people more than a plain article. A video with sound and moving images can instantly impact viewers mind. There is no denying that video has a larger target market. So, interesting videos were created and distributed across various social networking sites and video sharing platforms for branding and marketing. With time creating, viewing and downloading high resolution videos have become a lot easier. And it has been proved that like human users search engines also love videos provided you upload them with relevant keyword or key phrases.

Which one to choose?

And there arises the question, which one to focus – video marketing or article marketing? Well, from experts’ point of view, both are important. Both are capable of boosting your website’s rank on SERPs if targeted properly. Video may have a wider spectrum but articles are still valued as good resource. Google values contextual links as more authentic and natural way to earn backlinks these days. And in addition to article directories, blogging and guest posting on related blogs have opened up a new horizon for article marketing. However, good quality of the text content is a high priority. So, the best possible way is to combine these two strategies – article marketing and video marketing in your web marketing campaign to get the best result.

When you do SEO, you have to understand your client’s website. Few basic things you have to do before starting SEO for a client:

• Understand their target audience and country
• Understand their objectives – traffic, conversion or clicks on ads
• Understand the business – special features, how are they different
• Study the market; watch the competitors and their online behavior
• Start keyword research – consider client’s input and use your own knowledge to decide on the keywords
• Think of article topics that can create a buzz for the client
• Think of niche-specific online platforms where you can promote your client
• Find out web spaces where you can place banner ads to have a strong online presence
• Decide which social media channels can be good for the client
• Find target audience on Social Media and reach to them

With no understanding on how your client does business, you can do a lot of article submission and directory submissions, but you cannot think out of the box. To stand above the average you have to go that extra mile, do your own homework and prepare yourself to take up the project. And while preparing the marketing plan, apply your understanding in it. Unless you know the terminologies and industry-specific terms, you cannot write an acceptable Meta tag even!

And when it comes to Social Media Marketing or community building, this domain knowledge becomes more important. Without a fair understanding about the market, the product and the service, you cannot engage the customers in a conversation.

Stand out of the crowd, study your client’s business properly, know about the product, do some basic research and then start working on it.

The activities done to market a product or a service over the internet can be called the Elements of Internet Marketing. Here is the list:

• Email Marketing
• Banner Ad
• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay Per Click
• Affiliate Marketing
• Social Media Marketing

All these methods of internet marketing can be effective and can fetch satisfactory return. However, Search Engine Optimization seems to be the most popular and influential way of promoting a website on the internet.

Millions of people use search engines every day. If your website gets a higher rank in the search engines, chances are high that it will be visible to millions of people who are looking for similar product, service or information you provide.

SEO service providers can actually help website owners rank high in the search engines by addressing the technical problems of the website so that search engines can easily crawl the website. At the same time, they ensure that the website conform to the guidelines specified by the search engines. That is what we call Ethical SEO!

It may take some time for a newly launched website to get visibility in the search engines; but old domains can get satisfactory result within one or two months. See how a lot of business owners have been benefited by applying ethical SEO techniques on their websites.

If you want to increase your online profit, get your website reviewed by the experts.

The search engine ranking of a website largely depends on the traffic it gets. In this age of Internet Marketing SEO is an important factor. To get more traffic and increase conversion rate good SEO work is needed for any website. Hence there is a good demand for professional SEO instructors on the block. Today you will find several SEO web design services that require trained SEO professionals for providing the best of services to their clients.

What’s the Job

There are mainly two aspects of SEO services – on-page and off-page SEO. On-page SEO includes the following tasks:

• Creating/optimizing Meta Data for targeted keywords
• Creating optimized Image Alt tags
• Generating on-page sitemap
• Preparing Google sitemap
• Creating 404 Error page
• Preparing Robots.txt
• Writing Search engine optimized content

Off-page SEO relates to link building. The more you generate back links from other relevant and authentic websites the more your page counts on Google Search engine. Another way to promote your website through off-page SEO is submitting links to various web directories.

Who Are Eligible

Any one who is genuinely interested in learning the nitty-gritty of Internet Marketing and SEO are welcome to this arena. From professional point of view, web designers and copy writers can enhance their knowledge and expertise with professional SEO training.