Everyone is trying to jump on the band wagon of Video Marketing. Each thinking wouldn’t it be great if their company became the next sensation. Or, the one topic everyone couldn’t stop talking about around the water cooler. It actually could happen if the marketing strategy and the message is right.
Video has begun to change the world in countless different ways, and web video has only made the revolution stronger. Sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Metacafe can transform an individual, or a company, from an unknown entity to the next sensation in the world. The power of viral video is well known, and many marketing professionals are busy trying to help their companies become the next big star. The trouble with most strategies that are being used by most of the marketing professionals is that they are missing the bigger picture. Your videos do not need to become the newest overnight sensation in order to reap the important benefits they provide.
Video Lets Your Voice be Heard
Words on a page are a dime a dozen, but video speaks volumes. We have all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words – the good news is that a video can be worth far more. With a well made video you can take the time to tell your potential customers your story and have them share your vision.
Videos Can Provide Long Lasting Results
A 30 second spot on television or radio is gone in a flash, but web videos can be kept virtually forever. Whether it is next week, next month, next year or years down the road your company’s voice will still be out there.
Videos Show Your Company in a Positive Light
Consumers want to build a relationship with the companies they buy from, and companies like Apple have made a fortune trading on their corporate culture as well as their products. Web videos are a great way to introduce your potential customers to your own corporate culture.
Video Provides an Important New Outlet for Your Marketing Talents
Marketing is as much an art as it is a science, and it is important to show off your artistry in a number of different ways. Modern technology provides companies with a myriad of ways to get the word out, from articles in trade journals and webinars at trade shows to blogs and articles on the internet. Web video provides another powerful outlet for company marketing.
Producing Quality Video is Not as Challenging as You Might Think
These days chances are good your five year old niece has a cell phone with a video camera – and chances are also good that she knows how to use it. If a five year old has the talent and know how to create a video so do you. Many people are intimidated by video production jargon, but in the end if you have a camera and something compelling to say viewers will take notice.
Web video can provide many great benefits for your company, even if the videos you produce do not become the next internet sensation. Being the must see clip on one of the many video hosting sites would certainly be a bonus, but you do not have to go viral to go big.
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
For those just diving into the realm of social media, social networks are sites that allow you to create an online presence for yourself. If managed properly, this presence can be a very powerful tool and enables clients and prospective clients to find you and get to know you and your business. Typically, these networks allow you to share information within the community of the site. In the beginning we had MySpace and Facebook, social networking sites have now expanded to the worlds of Linkedin, Twitter, Digg and Stumble Upon just to name a few.
So, what about WordPress? Isn’t it a social network too? No…at least not yet!
WordPress MU (multi-user), is releasing a new platform, Buddypress, that will have built in features similar to existing social networks, giving WordPress the "appearance" of being your latest social networking site. If you don’t use WordPress MU, which requires dedicated hosting, don’t worry because WordPress offers many social networking plugins to their users.
There is one other main difference between WordPress and all the social networking sites. On WordPress and other blogging platforms, individuals come online to their own specific location. With the popular social networks, while users have their own "page" or presence online, it is not really their own as it is just an extension of the social network that is hosting the user’s presence.
How do you implement the features of social networking while using a blogging platform?
The key is plugins, and WordPress has many free and user-friendly plugins available. Many of the networking plugins provide one-click access for your readers to other popular social networks where you have a presence. Most blog owners utilize either an icon or a form of drop-down menu appearing at the bottom of single posts or on their blog’s sidebar. Popular plugins include About Me, Social Links, Social Bookmarks, Social Dropdown, SocioFluid, and Tweet My Blog, just to name a few.
Some examples of WP plugins that help spread your online social presence.
- Socialite – This one publishes your WordPress posts to sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.
- Twitter Updater – Just what it appears to be, Twitter Updater is a plug that notifies Twitter of your new blog posts. WordPress even offers a widget form of this plugin that will display your Twitter feed in your blog sidebar.
- Lifestream – Possibly the most complex, this plugin logs all your online social activity on other networks and provides a live stream for your blog readers to follow you socially online.
The key to successful social networking with WordPress is not just enabling your readers to follow you through your other connections, but engaging them to stay invested with your blog.
WordPress also offers several plugins to facilitate engaging your readers.
- WP-Polls allow you to build online polls you can then add to your blog post or your sidebar. Readers are able to interact with you and leave comments.
- FV Community News allows readers to publish news items to your sidebar.
- How about providing a space on your sidebar for top or recent comments? Top Commenters plugin facilitates this function.
As the Internet and the growing number of online communities continue to grow, you need to be ready to help plant your social networking seed and offer your readers their own presence on your site too and WordPress can help you do just that with the simple addition of a multitude of readily available plugins.
This video ROCKS and helps you understand the phenomenon surrounding Social Media!
Are you wondering whether to hire a Virtual Assistant to help you with your Social Media Marketing? Entrepreneur.com has published a great article on the benefits of outsourcing to a VA. Enjoy! Should You Outsource Your Online Presence? - Social Media Marketing - Entrepreneur.com
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Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more.
What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will find that site interesting.
Take your audience's emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.
When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site's general theme.
Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.
The basics of setting a goal is an open secret known by top-caliber athletes, successful businessmen and businesswomen and all types of achievers in many different fields. The basics of setting goals give you short-term and long-term motivation and focus. They help you set focus on the acquisition of required knowledge and help you to plan and organize your resources and your time so that you can get the best out of your life.
Setting clearly defined short term and long term goals will enable you to measure your progress and achieve personal satisfaction once you have successfully met your goals. Charting your progress will also enable you to actually see the stages of completion leading to the actual realization of your goals. This eliminates the feeling of a long and pointless grind towards achieving your goal. Your self-confidence and level of competence will also improve as you will be more aware of your capabilities as you complete or achieve your goals.
The basics of goal settings will involve deciding what you really want to do with your personal life and what short term and long term goals you need to achieve it. Then you have to break down goals into the smaller and manageable targets that you must complete in your way to achieving your lifetime targets. Once you have your list waste no time in tackling your goals.
A good way to have a manageable list is to have a daily and weekly set of goals. By doing this you will be always in the position of going towards you life plan goals. Everyday will give you the opportunity to fulfill a certain goal giving you the feeling of accomplishment.
Here are some pointers that should be taken into consideration in setting goals and achieving them.
Attitude plays a very big role in setting and achieving your goals. You must ask yourself if any part of you or your mind holding you back towards completing your simplest goals? If there are any part of your behavior that is being a hindrance or puts your plans into disarray? If you do have problems in these areas then the immediate thing to do is to address this problem. Solutions may include a visit to a doctor or psychiatrist to control your emotions.
Careers are made by good time management practice. Failing in a career is often attributed to bad time management. Careers require a lot from an individual which often makes the career the life of the individual. Plan how far do you want to go into your career.
Education is key in achieving your goals. If your goals require you to have a certain kind of degree or require a certain specialization or demand a certain skill to be developed, make plans in getting the appropriate education.
Your family should never be left out of your plans. If you are just starting out then you have to decide if you want to be a parent or when you want to be a parent. You also have to know if you really would be a good parent and how well would you relate to extended family members
Personal financial situations also play a major role in achieving your goals. Have a realistic goal on how much you really want to earn. You also must be able to create plans or stages by which you will be able to reach your earning potential.
Physically gifted individuals may be able to achieve sports related goals like being in the National Basketball association or National Football League. Determining your physical capabilities should be one of your priorities. Physical limitations could however be conquered with proper planning.
As the saying goes -'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy', or something to that effect, is by all means true down to the last letter. Giving yourself a little pleasure: should always be included into your plans.
To start achieving your lifetime goals, set a quarter of a century plan, then break it down to 5 year plans then break it down again to 1 year plans, then 6 month plans then monthly plans, then weekly, then daily.
Then create a things-to-do list for the day.
Always review your plans and prepare for contingencies.
The basics of goal settings should not be so difficult once you get to be familiar with them.
A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.
1) Navigation purposes
A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
2) Conveying your site's theme
When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time.
3) Site optimization purposes
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.
4) Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.
From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for everyone.
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minuet detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.
Like anything else, you’ll get out of Google Adsense what you put into it. The following optimization tips can help you grow your Google Adsense dollars:
Write interesting content and write every day.
Have more than one site. The more sites you have, the more ads have the potential
to get clicked.
Set up channels and monitor your statistics across all sites. If one site is performing poorly, consider changing the content or the ad layout. Experiment!
Change the ad layout and notice which layout works the best for you. There are
many different layout options and there’s no way you can know going in which
one will perform the best.
If you’re blogging, writingup.com has a list of profitable topics. They state that
you don’t have to write on those topics but you might give it a try or at least plug
some of them in to the search engines.
Google different key words and phrases and notice how much and what kinds of content and ads you see.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
