Video Marketing

The A to Z of using short promotional videos as the spearhead of a wider but basic (manageable) Social Media Marketing Campaign.

Is your sales funnel in place?
Are you clear what the purpose/goal of the campaign is?
Have you got the whole campaign planned?
How many videos will there be in the series or is it a one off promotion?

Setting Up a Basic Campaign

There are thousands of sites that you can target for your marketing campaigns. Select a few to start with and concentrate on them - add more later.

Any plan worth its salt has to be manageable.

The value of your own hosted blog

Quality content will attract comments and start conversations with your readership.

You can present all your content be it text, images or videos in one place to pass your traffic onto your offers.

In a short time you can create the essential element of "trust". The one ingredient that will dictate the success or failure of your Internet business.

Thoughts on Social Media Profiles

Be very careful how you present yourself on social networks. Before you start, visit as many sites as possible and look to see how other marketers are presenting themselves. There are basically three strategies:

1. Your main profile

Use your own name for your main area of expertise

Use your best content

Keep active - update frequently with text, audio or videos

Use comments, forums etc to boost exposure

2. Subprofiles

Noms de plumes

Perfectly legitimate way to make friends/contacts in other important areas of your strategies. Authors have used this method for ever.

Just update regularly

3. Throwaways

For quick promotions of, for example, affiliate products on the Blog and Social Network platforms.

Example Promotion - Prepare:

Title

Banner ad for the product

One post - 500 words

One or two anchor text links to a squidoo lens or xanga page

Once the promo is finished - forget and just bank the commission cheques

How To Leverage Your Campaign Using The Social Media Networks

• Video Sharing Sites
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Blog and RSS Directories
• Social Networking Sites

If you have the content

Photo Sharing Sites
Podcast and Videocast Directories

Strategic Tips

Find where your potential customers are
Spend some time in the Forums and Groups
Put your content in front of them
Leave comments
Be original, controversial and humorous to raise your profile
Think - KEYWORDS - TAGS - ANCHOR TEXT LINKS
Get as much quality content on as many platforms as possible
Use submission software to increase distribution and save time

10 Sites You Should Visit

1. ePrompter
ePrompter will check up to 16 of your password protected email accounts automatically as well as reply to, compose and even forward messages. Depending how many accounts you have, and how often you check them, this little tool could easily save you hours a day.

2. Vista Print
A lot of people already know about this site, but it's certainly worth mentioning again, just in case. I don't know how they can afford to do it, but Vista Print will give you 250 free, color business cards.

3. Click Tracker
This web site offers a free link and click tracking services, and even the pro version is ridiculously cheap. I especially like the fact that their software allows you to have your own domain in tracking URLs instead of the link tracker's URL.

4. PageSucker.com
This product will "suck" an entire webpage on to your hard drive so you can read it off-line. It's great for people who use dial-up connections, and best of all it's totally free.

5. RefDesk.com
This site will help you find anything from people, to your local weather, to just about any other random fact that you could find the answer to anywhere else. Check it out if you need to do some product research.

6. FILExt
How many times have you downloaded something only to have your computer tell you that it didn't recognize the file type? You then try to open it using the "Open As" feature, but even you don't know what the file extension stands for. That's where a site like FILExt comes in hand. FILExt has just about every software extension listed so you can easily do a search on your "mystery file".

7. MailWasher
Block spam for ever.

8. Ezine Ad Auction
Ezine advertising is one of the cheapest and quickest ways to get the word out about a product or service. This site allows you to bid for ultra-cheap ad rates in a wide assortment of newsletters.

9. Site Viewer
Sites created for one browser type can very often look horrible when viewed through other browsers. This site allows you to avoid such embarrassment by "viewing your own site as your visitors do." I'd make it a point of testing out your website using this tool before launching any new sites.

10. WebAssist
Give your ecommerce site PayPal functionality without having to touch a line of code. PayPal is one of the most popular payment processors online so by including them as a method of payment could very well increase your sales in and of itself.

Go viral with Twitter ReTweets

Retweet or RT is when someone takes your Twitter message and tweets that same message to all followers in their own Twitter network. Getting readers to retweet your content allows the power of your network to take over and spread your message in the Twittersphere.
In other words: viral marketing.

Word of mouth or viral marketing is when your content is spread from person to person. Retweeting is the most powerful factor in something going viral on Twitter. It helps spread your message from one community to the next and has the ability to spread messages much faster than any other viral marketing tool.

It is free advertising and bloggers and business owners should do anything they can to encourage readers to retweet their content. Following steps can be taken to get more readers to tweet your content.

Announce your latest content
Always make sure to announce your latest content in a tweet, as that will make it easy for someone to “retweet” your message to their own network.

Make it easy for your readers to share
Remind your readers about Twitter on your site and make it easy for them to share your content on Twitter. You can use retweet plugin like TwitThis for this or you can create a simple link yourself. Use the following HTML link on your sitet:
http://twitter.com/home?status=
Put your tweet text after the equals sign. Remember to replace each space with “%20″.
When a reader clicks on this link, it will forward him/her to the Twitter home page
with the “What are you doing?” text box pre-filled with your message.

Start a Twitter competition
Two top-bloggers Shoemoney and John Chow have recently started Twitter competitions, where in order to enter a chance to win some prizes, you must retweet a message they have chosen. Looking at my own Twitter stream and searching the Twittersphere, it seems to be a very efficient way to spread your message and your link.

Be active on Twitter
Spend time on Twitter. The more active you are and the more followers you have, the more exposure your tweets will get and there will be a higher chance that someone will retweet your content.

Build relationships
You will never go wrong by talking to your target audience, other bloggers, and other power users on Twitter. By building relationships with people interested in your subject, you stand a better chance of getting your messages retweeted.

Write quality content
When someone retweets your tweet or your content it shows a high degree of content approval. Your tweet and your content was of such great quality and was so valuable to the person, that they decided to share it with their own Twitter network.
You must have useful, original and quality content. It is impossible to attract people to read your articles, if your articles are not useful. The same way, it is hard to get anyone to spread your link and retweet your message, if they do not enjoy and find your content valuable.

How do I track my retweets?
Simple! Use Twitter Search and search for the URL you have tweeted in your original tweet. This will show you all the retweets that used the same URL. Look at the number of followers for each person that has retweeted your link to get the number of the total exposure.