JD

A: What if I told you that there was a surefire way to make your website standout and POP . . . would that be of interest to you? And what if I further told you that this method is inexpensive, easily accomplished, and even so, has a 50 times greater chance of landing you on a Page 1 search result?

I thought that would grab your attention.

What is the secret ingredient, that magic potion, you ask? The answer is – video.

It turns out that of all the things you can do on your website to engage viewers, create more page views, and get higher search engine rankings, adding video just may be the best. As I said, Forrester Research did a test and found that when search results are blended (that is, they include text, video, images, news, etc.) videos that are search engine optimized (more on that in a moment) give you a 50 times greater chance of ending up on the all-important first page of a search result.

Now that is what I call standing out from the crowd.

But here’s the catch: You can’t just add a video to your site and expect a great search engine result for that page. The video must be search engine optimized, that is, it must contain key words in the file names, captions, and so on. That same Forrester blog indicated that less than 20% of all online marketers search engine optimize their video.

That offers a tremendous opportunity for you.

So I spoke with Benjamin Wayne, the CEO of the great video website Fliqz. Fliqz offers affordable, branded video solutions – everything from video hosting, and SEO tools to search engine submission. He explained that offering video content on your small business site actually serves three functions:

1. It helps attract new customers by virtue of the SEO factor
2. It engages them, and
3. It helps convert them into paying customers

But again, just adding video to your site is insufficient. According to Wayne, if you want your video to be picked up and analyzed properly by Google and the other search engines, you must not only add SEO keywords to it, but you must actually “submit the video to Google using XML tools.” Fliqz helps with that too, giving you an easy way to submit your video’s URL.

Maybe you are thinking that it is enough to put your video on YouTube and embed the YouTube player and URL into your site. According to Mr. Wayne, that too is insufficient. “The traffic and the rankings will be applied to YouTube and not your site,” he says. So the best practice is to add your video to your site and submit your URL and keywords to the search engines.

And don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have to create an expensive video for this to work. In this YouTube era, people are used to watching videos that are less than perfect. Of course yours must be professional and add to your brand, but that does not mean they must cost a fortune or take forever to create.

The second advantage of video is that it engages your audience. When you have video on your homepage, 50% to 80% of your visitors will click that first. So video becomes a very effective tool for reducing your “bounce rate” – the amount of people who come to your site, take a quick look, decide it’s not what they are looking for, and surf on.

And the final thing video can do for you is to help increase your conversion rate – that is, the number of people who visit and then end up buying something. According to Benjamin Wayne, by using video instead of just text as part of your call to action, your conversion rate can be increased multi-fold.

He gave me the example of a rental property website that decided to vastly increase its use of video: It offered guided tours of each of their properties, and then near the end of each video, up would pop a link that said “Rent me now!” As a result, both the site’s traffic and conversion rates increased dramatically.

Web 2.0: It’s not just for the big boys any more.

Today’s Tip: Another very good business book that I recently received and read is The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Strategies for Managing Your Business and Your Life by Gehse Roach. Roach explains how his years as a Buddhist monk and the principles he learned helped him build a multi-million dollar diamond business. It is a compelling book – for not only how to be an ethical and highly successful entrepreneur, but how those principles can change your life, your business, and the world.

Shop.org, the National Retail Federation’s digital division, is offering the best of the basic tactics, by addressing topics like social networking tools, online retail video and multi-channel success.

Speakers include Stephan Spencer, founder and president of natural search engine marketing firm Netconcepts. Bring laptops if possible to his hands-on workshop, “90 Minutes of Pure ROI,” to see firsthand which simple SEO tactics have the most impact.

Spencer’s clients include the Home Shopping Network, America Online and the Discovery Channel. Other featured experts represent BestBuy.com, Lane Bryant, and Drugstore.com.

For more information about the Online Marketing Workshop, May 4-6 in Scottsdale, Ariz., call 202-626-8192 or visit the event’s Web site. Registration by May 1 required.

He’s also got clips on link building and paid search. Enjoy!

**Remember this as a great example of thinking outside the box as well. This guy’s getting a lot of buzz for doing something different…yeah it’s a little cheesy and high school presentation-y but it’s got people talking…and that’s the key.

There’s no question anymore as to whether or not blogging is beneficial to businesses–it IS. Wait. Allow me to rephrase…GOOD blogging is beneficial to businesses. If you run your blog poorly, it becomes a waste of your time as well as the time of your readers (dare I say customers ?) and no one likes to be inconvenienced, especially not consumers. I know, I know…nothing you don’t already know.

Well, if you have decided not to pursue blogging due to time, money and/or resource constraints then I suppose you needn’t read on. But if you do run a company blog and are looking to make it worth your while, by all means, check out these 10 completely free guides to building a better blog courtesy chrisg.com :

1. The Blogger’s Guide to SEO – Written by Aaron Wall of SEOBook, learn how to optimize your blog.

2. Remarkablogger’s How to Start A Business Blog – 12 Step Business Blogging eBook

3. "Attention Age" – Web 2.0 Marketing by Rich Schefren

4. Forget Everything You Know About Making Money Online – Brian Clark’s free ebook shows you how to forget everything you know about making money … and start making some.

5. Blog Profits Blueprint – ebook about how to make money with a blog.

6. SEO Benefits of Press Releases – optimizing your web page with good content.

7. Authority Black Book – Social Media Marketing ebook.

8. Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging – Chitika’s ebook…also links to the BlogBash ebook.

9. Keyword Research for Bloggers – the title says it all!

10. The 4 Phases of Internet Marketing – This report provides you an overview of all the tactics you should be looking at building into your internet marketing strategy.

Do you find these helpful? Let me know so I can either keep trying to find similar resources or move on to different ones. Also feel free too add your suggestions to the list!

But, hey, it’s not just the big companies that are benefiting from creating viral videos. Scores of startups and low-budget companies are successfully filming and posting their own videos – hoping to see 100,000 or more hits. So, don’t let a small budget get in the way of striking gold with a viral video. Here’s how you can do it all on your own:

Step 1: The idea – This may well take the most time of the entire process. A viral video is meant to stand out and evoke some sort of emotion – that may be fear, shock, anger, laughter, etc. If you want your video to go viral, you can’t settle for mediocre or average, it needs to be over the top.

Step 2: The filming – Depending on the idea, you may be able to do the filming in-house; however if you are looking for special effects or editing services, you would be wise to hire a professional. Here are the keys to a successful viral video:

* Make it short, ideally only 15-30 seconds in length.
* The video itself shouldn’t be an advertisement; but it should relate in some way to your company.
* Make it believable; don’t expect something that was scrapped together in two hours to go viral. Practice the skit until it’s done right and reshoot until it’s exactly what you’re going for. Remember, your company’s reputation is on the line.

Step 3: The marketing – Posting it on YouTube and then sitting back and waiting for everyone to find your ingenious video is not the way to turn a video viral. It takes hard work, and lots of it. Here are some of the best ways to get your video seen:

* Ask or pay bloggers to post your videos.
* Post your video on as many forums as you can.
* Email your video to as many people as possible, asking them to pass it on too.
* Add your video to Myspace users’ web pages in the comments section.
* Share your video with your Facebook friends.
* Bookmark your video on Stumbleupon and tag it with popular relevant keywords.

Sure, filming a video and hoping it goes viral is a bit like gambling, but making one doesn’t have to cost a bundle and if you use the above strategies, you’ll be increasing your chances of success. Good luck!

Shelly

A: No, blogging is not going away anytime soon.

And I can’t say I’m not surprised, because I am. When blogging first made its way into our consciousness a few years ago, I was as skeptical as they come. Was I really heard to remark, "It’s the CB radio of our time!" Yes, I was.

But, halleluiah! I see the light! I’ve become a convert. How much so? Yes, I have just launched my own blog, Business as UNusual.

What I get now about blogging is that it is a way to communicate with the world in ways that were unheard of only a few years ago. It is a chance to loosen the ‘ol tie and create a more personal, interactive, human communication with your customers, vendors, employees, and other people.

Prior to blogging, there were really very few ways to create that personal bond, especially with customers, both actual and potential. If you did not meet them one-on-one or speak with them on the phone, the only way they heard about you, typically, would be through your advertising and marketing.

But those are inherently impersonal vehicles.

The Internet generally, and a blog specifically, gives you an opportunity to show who you and your business are in a much more up close and personal way. This, in turn, allows you to you to create more of a bond, and thus more of a relationship, and that should create more loyalty.

So, to answer your question, there really are numerous benefits to creating a blog for your business:

* Blogs build a sense of community: By sharing your expertise in a blog, you connect with a lot more people. And as they respond to your posts, a community is created.
* They allow you to plug products and services: But importantly, you are not doing so in an abrasive way. Using the conversational style that is the hallmark of a good blog allows you to share business products in a friendly way.
* They boost your search engine optimization (SEO): By their very nature, blogs incorporate the hallmarks of good SEO: Keywords and links. And, as people respond to your blog, more keywords show up.
* Blogs help make you an authority: I can tell you that being published, even if it’s only your own blog, gives you gravitas.
* Blogs give you valuable feedback: By seeing what customers say about your posts, your blog offers valuable feedback.

So the benefits are numerous. If you want to make the most of your blog, here are a few tips:

Be frank: People read blogs to get an insight they would not normally have. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s blog does this well.

Be conversational: People like reading blogs to get a less formal view of the writer or business. The folks over at Duct Tape Marketing are good at this.

Be insightful: Try and give the people some information they would not otherwise have. Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends is good at this.

So, blog or get blogged down. The choice is yours!

Today’s Tip: What is the very first form of human community? Why, the tribe of course. That’s why the book Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization is such a great business book.

As the authors explain, tribes are natural occurrences, even in business. The trick then is to create or identify your most valuable tribe members (employees, customers, professionals, etc.) and work with them to build your business. What you can do together is greater than what you can do alone. Steve says check it out!

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<title>Enter the Title here</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Enter the keywords here”>
<meta name=”description” content=”Enter the description here”>
</HEAD>
<BODY>Enter the page’s body text here

There are literally dozens of SEO tips and tricks – ranging from anyone-can-do-it simple to need-a-graduate-degree-from-MIT difficult. Here are some of the most important SEO tools that thankfully fall into the first range:

<title> Tag – The text within this tag will be displayed in the bar at the top of the internet browser window. The title should describe your business, products or services. Search engines place a lot of importance on title tag words so it’s important that you:

* Use the most targeted keywords and keyword phrases
* Use your business name
* Try to keep each title tag under 60 characters, because anything longer will get cut off in search engine results.

An example title tag might be “ShoeWarehouse.com – Buy Women’s Shoes, Men’s Shoes, and Kid’s Shoes”

META tags – These basically consist of 1) the description and 2) the keywords.

Description – The text in your description will appear in search engine listings to describe and summarize your website to those who are searching. The description tag should give a brief description of your website, and should be approximately 25-30 words in length. Be sure to use targeted keywords in your text.

Keywords – This tag will help to categorize your site on search engines, allowing people to find your website quicker. Although search engines are not placing as much importance on meta keywords as they used to, it doesn’t hurt to have them to improve the keyword density of your pages. Keywords and keyword phrases should be separated by commas and listed in order of importance. Here are some additional keyword tag tips:

* Use twenty or less keywords, as most search engines limit how many meta
keywords are seen.
* Don’t repeat a word more than three times within a keyword tag.
* Don’t include keywords that aren’t relevant to your website.

<Body> Tag – This is the text that will appear on the pages of your website. Generally, you should have at least 500-700 words of content on each page. By repeating your most important keywords and keyword phrases 2-3 times, search engines will consider those words important and relevant to your site. Be sure the content on each of your pages is new and high quality (no keyword stuffing) – that will help to raise your site’s ranking on search engines.

Once your site is in tip-top SEO shape, you’ll be ready to submit it to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN). Instead of using an automated submission tool to submit your website, do each one manually. The reason why is that some search engines see the automated submissions as spam and your site won’t end up being listed. It can sometimes take several months before your site will be seen in the natural listings, so be patient – but it’s worth the wait once you see your SEO tips have paid off!

This is not a good idea. If you want immediate results it’s likely you’ll have to ‘trick’ the search engines into thinking your website is the best (which it very well may be) but let me let you in on a little secret….search engines don’t take to kindly to being fooled. The result can be banishment from the search engine which will effectively crush your online dreams.

So here are 6 tactics that search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN regard as ’shady’ and will penalize you for using (courtesy MarketingProfs.com ).

1. Link Farms – There’s general consensus that one of the strongest influences on search rankings is the number and quality of inbound links to a Web page. A link farm is a group of Web sites created for the primary purpose of creating a high number of links to a given Web site. These links are not "real" (in terms of signaling the quality of the site they link to), and so they are trying distort search engine results.

2. Automated Content/Duplication – Search engines like content. They particularly like frequently updated content. Unfortunately, creating unique content takes time and energy. To try to trigger search engine spiders to index more pages from a Web site, and do so more frequently, some may try to auto-generate content or scrape Web content from other sites and republish it.

This technique often goes hand in hand with link farms (because if you’re creating thousands of sites, you need some content to put on them in order to get the search engines to index them and for the links to matter).

Google has gotten very good at determining what is "natural" content vs. content that is computer-generated gibberish with no value. As for duplicating content on other Web sites without permission, this is often in violation of copyright laws, and it’s unethical.

3. Keyword Stuffing – This involves over-populating certain portions of a Web page with repeated occurrences of a given keyword in the hopes of influencing search engine results. Search engines caught on to this trick many years ago, yet it remains popular for some reason.

4. Cloaking – This practice involves delivering different Web site content to the search engine spiders than is delivered to human users. The usual motivation for this is to send the search engine crawlers content for ranking on a certain term—but to send different content to real users. It’s pretty easy for the search engines to detect this. If you’re suspected of using cloaking, it’s easy for someone (like a Google employee) to simply visit your Web site as a human and check whether you’re cloaking. This technique, when discovered, is one of the most reliable ways to get a site banned.

5. Hidden Text – This technique "hides" text on the Web page that search spiders will index (for ranking purposes), but is invisible to a human. The simplest example is some variation of white text on a white background.

Based on how sophisticated you want to get, it could be based on something as simple as tags in the HTML, CSS stylings or Javascript that changes the page dynamically. Regardless of how sophisticated the approach, it is still going to be detected at some point.

6. Doorway/Gateway Pages – This practice is similar to the cloaking technique. Instead of dynamically delivering different content to spiders, a doorway page involves getting a given page (the "doorway page") to rank well in the search engines, but then redirecting human users to a different page. Clearly, this is not in the interests of end-users as they don’t get the content they would have expected.

For more information on the right way to build links please read "Link Building Tips for Beginners "

First, the word content conjures up a myriad of responses. However, content for the purposes of a content management system is any information that is digital. Content does not necessarily mean exclusively text; it could be graphics, video, sound, documents, etc. In essence, anything that would be created and managed electronically.

Next, content management is a process by which content is managed such as through workflows, where the electronic storage of the content is considered managed rather than
unmanaged. The system part of the CM system is literally a tool that helps to efficiently and effectively produce information with the managed content.

Combining the three aspects of a CMS, the result is a tool that allows the end-user to create, edit, and manage information while using a set of rules, processes and workflows to establish the desired output of published information in different formats such as text, graphics, documents, etc.

There are different types of content management systems as well, such as for asset management, document management and web content. When deciding upon the system for your business, ensure that it contains the components you will need to effectively and efficiently contain your content.

The CMS tool is a necessity for anyone with a website to use, since the system will help the business to be better organized and perform more efficiently. Another important tip is to purchase a system that is easy to use, not rigid and hard to figure out.

Forward thinking in your planning, such as changing trends, web technology, future growth of your business, etc. will save you money in the end by purchasing a system that allows for growth and updates.

Below are some sites that offer easy-to-use and affordable content management systems. Again, there are several different types out there as well as price ranges. Keeping in mind future growth and the ever-changing trends and technology is a good strategic business decision.

Interactivetools.com – Offers several different CMS’s, depending on what kind of content you want to publish (articles, real estate listings, automotive listings, or a custom CMS builder).

Easy Publisher – has an easy WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) platform, plus it’s FREE.

Ektron cms400.net – manages all types of web content and documents, and also has social networking and web 2.0 components.

Make your articles reader and search engine friendly – With article marketing, the hope is to get your articles in front of as many people, by having it appear in the natural listings of search engines. Of course, you also want your articles to be reader friendly and highly informative so people are enticed to read it. Here are some basic guidelines for online articles:

* Write between 400 and 900 words per article – Too short of an article is just a blurb that is easily overlooked, and too long of an article is an intimidating epic that is sure to be a turn off to those unfamiliar with your pen name.

* Use hyperlinks – Try to use one to three hyperlinks within the body of each of your articles. Ideally, you should make the most important keywords hyperlinks and have them direct readers to a related section of your website. This serves to increase your website’s traffic and to improve its ranking on search engines for those keywords.

* Add a boilerplate – Take advantage of the area below your article to sell yourself (and your company too). Add your name, along with your e-mail address, website address and a one-line description of your company.

* Use original content – Search engines love new content and reward you by giving your site higher rankings. So, never copy the text from your website or from Wikipedia or any other source and paste it into your articles.

* Don’t sell – As tempting as it might be to talk about how great your business is in your articles – don’t. Your articles should give readers useful information, not a sales pitch.

* Publish your articles online – There’s no sense in writing an article just to have it sit on your computer – get it out there! Here are a few ways to get your articles off your computer and in front of potential customers:

* On your website – Add a "News" or "Resources" section to your website and start adding your articles regularly. The fresh content will help to increase your ranking in natural listings and bring in more traffic.

* In Article directories – There are countless websites that will publish your articles on the web – giving people, as well as other websites, access to your writings. Here are a few sites to get you started: Buzzle, Idea Marketers, Ebooks n Bytes, Article Central, EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com.

* On your blog – A blog is yet another place to post articles, though they can certainly be written in a more casual tone, and even a bit cheeky at times! To be effective, they should still follow the same rules for articles, as mentioned above. You may even consider writing a short post that relates to an article you’ve published elsewhere on your site, and then link to that article from the post for more information.

When you think of how effective articles can be in capturing your target audience’s attention and directing them to your website, it’s no wonder why more and more business owners are writing them!