Posts tagged online marketing
Video Marketing With YouTube: Your Competition is Already Doing it!
Dec 14th
If you have a blog where you want to reach more people and share your ideas, or an online business where you want more customers; (and who doesn’t want that?) you need to create videos for your business and get them online for your customers to see!
If you aren’t doing this and your competitors are, then they are taking customers from you that don’t even know you exist. If they aren’t producing video for YouTube or their own sites then you need to make sure you get those customers they are missing.
Compete.com shows YouTube as having 85 million unique visitors July 2009! Imagine for a moment what sort of traffic you would get from a viral video with 100,000 views… 200,000 views…. 1 million views! A certain percentage of those people would visit your site and a percentage of those would sign up for your newsletter or buy something from you.
Now if my math is right, and you get 1 million views for a video and only 3% of those viewers visit your site that is 30 thousand visitors! If 3% of those signed up or bought something, that is 900 signups or sales! Sound good to you?
I know it’s very difficult to get a video with 1 million views, but take a look at YouTube and see what videos are that popular. Why are they so popular? What is so good about them? It’s not the production value, it’s not because they have celebrities or cost a large amount of money to create.
These videos are crazy popular because they are extremely funny, or cool, or amazing for some reason. The videos can be planned out, but wildly popular vidoes are not outwardly selling anything, there is no pitch. If you want a video to have a chance at going viral, you can’t be selling in the video; you must let the video sell for you!
In door-to-door sales years ago we had a saying that you should “sell the sizzle, not the steak”. What does this mean to you? If I want to sell plant food, do I talk about the chemical composition and the different nutrients that are in it? NO! I don’t want to sell the customer on the fertilizer, I sell them on the end result my product gives them: BIG tomatoes, and that’s the sizzle!
Give the viewer something in your videos for free. We are a camera repair shop and can’t make videos about how to repair every camera, but your customers are looking for something regarding your business, so find out what it is and give it to them!
Teach them something, give them information they are looking for, entertain them. [If you become an authority on your subject your customers will happily tell others about you].
You don’t need professional quality videos, but you do need to make them viewable and understandable.
- You don’t have to have an HD quality camcorder, but make sure that it is good quality and you have plenty of light!
- Make sure to have a good quality microphone. Poor audio will drive away most viewers, guaranteed.
- Use a solid backdrop, don’t show your cluttered basement or office or bedroom unless this is part of your presentation
- Write a script or at least notes regarding what you want to say
- Practice and view your results before publishing it. Ask others for opinions and feedback!
- Everyone hates the sound of their own voice; but that is how we hear you so don’t worry, you sound fine.
Keep going, things will keep getting better along the way!
Now I’m off to try and figure out what my customers are looking for regarding camera repair for their Sony, Canon and Nikon cameras and then just give it to them.
Getting Started In Internet Marketing
Nov 21st
When you hear the term “internet marketing“, what do you think of?
For many, that term conjures thoughts of websites or spamming or search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. For others, it’s all about graphical design, writing fancy code or even affiliate programs. All of those answers correct, but the essence of internet marketing is much simpler.
At its core, internet marketing is about these things:
* Understanding the target market to which the product/service/cause you’re marketing will appeal
* Determining exactly how your target market interacts with the internet
* Positioning your content on the internet to attract the attention of your target market
* Collecting information about your target market (also known as “leads”) for follow-up and conversion into sales
* Design of offers or incentives to induce the desired actions from your leads
Since there is insufficient space in this article to give all of these topics adequate attention, let’s focus on just one specific topic with the realm of internet marketing: Email Marketing.
My best payoff has always come by focusing on permission-based email marketing. Permission-based email marketing refers to the practice of collecting information (including email addresses) from website visitors and communicating with them via e-mail with their direct consent. The “permission” aspect of permission-based email marketing is what separates legitimate email marketers from the spammers that everyone despises.
My love of email marketing is strong for one reason: It works very well. Email marketing has been much like a never-ending goldmine: It enables us to produce income on demand simply by sending a good offer to our list. When you have thousands of loyal subscribers – as we do – and you put a strong and compatible offer in front of them, income becomes nearly automatic.
However, the key to successful email marketing is the development of a legitimate trust relationship with your subscribers. If you opt to send your subscribers a request for purchases every single day, they will likely tire of your badgering and cease reading your emails altogether.
Alternatively, if you take the time to provide good content to your readers on a regular and frequent basis, you’ll discover that your readers take all of your emails far more seriously, and as a result your emails will be opened, read and acted upon with greater frequency. Essentially, email marketing is really an exercise in trust.
Even though there are more sides to internet marketing than just email marketing (permission based), email has been the foundation that our business sits on.
If you’re looking for a great provider for email list management try Aweber. I’ve known the owner, Tom Kulzer, since he started the company. He’s not only a great guy, but he knows email. Check it out.
