Okay, the title is a little cheesy (watch the video at the link to see why I chose that wording) , but I just watched the outrageous marketing video at Make My Logo Bigger.  I almost fell out of my chair.  This is a great example of outrageous advertising.

All kidding aside, video marketing has been growing for years on the net.  Primarily due to the increased bandwidth available to the average user.  And rightly so, video marking should be a component of most internet marketing projects.  People have a very short attention span and hitting them with a compelling video and grabbing them quick is necessary if you want to share more detailed stuff.   A number of folks with a lot of experience in online video marketing however are realizing that it takes more than video to help a small business.

Just today I saw a fairly well known internet video marketer who is not only promoting his video skills, but is adding a few other goodies to the mix…. Google Maps, Wordpress and email opt-ins.  I suspect this is because he also realizes that it takes more than video to improve traffic and conversions on a site.   The Google Maps, Wordpress and opt-ins are nothing new to internet marketers however.  They are pretty basic items that are only a small part of a bigger arsenal available.

Don’t get me wrong, they are all very valuable things to have, and depending on your competition they may be enough to make a difference.  In more competitive markets however, you will need the skills and expertise of a “full service” internet marketer.  You will need someone who can do heavy duty page optimization, link building, copywriting, social media marketing IN ADDITION to good old site building (using Wordpress), video marketing, email marketing and google maps.

One size doesn’t fit all and as you grow you need a bigger shoe

I have a resources link for tools that I use in my consulting business, but I wanted to create a special post about this tool. Every once in awhile you see something that is so simple on the surface that you think, “It can’t be that simple”. Well, this is one of those tools. I call this the modern day egg timer.

As a consultant, I’m often juggling many tasks, along with the non work commitments that are part of being a husband and father. The paper planners don’t work well for me…. I’ve used the popular ones and they all can work, but they just didn’t fit my style.

Since a lot of my time is spent in front or near my laptop, I needed a system that worked well in that environment. There are a lot of software solutions that integrate with your email, but most of them are expensive and have too many bells and whistles that I would never use.

In walks the KISS (Keep it short simple) solution. I’ve actually started to use a digital egg timer to help me stay on task. That works, but I have to remember to carry it with me if I’m not in my office and unless I write down the time I spent on a task, I loose any audit of my time. A colleague of mine told me about a simple piece of software called “Action Machine Pro” and recommended that I check it out.

I did and I think this may just be the thing that sticks. I like it’s simple architecture and it solves the problem of keeping an audit of where you spent your time. Nothing like looking back on a week and seeing if you really worked in the areas that were important to your business or personal goals.

Enough said…. you can check it out Action Machine Pro if it sounds like it might help solve your time management or time focus problems.

** Action Machine Pro Review Update – After using the product for the last 3 days,  I’m happy to report that it really is helping me get more focused on what I need to be doing.  This is partially due to the fact that you setup an action (what you will be spending time on) and then assign a amount of time you need to spend on that action.  You then see all the important actions at the beginning of the day that you need to tackle.

This action alone is beneficial to a lot of people.  The act of having to either select or create a new action get’s your brain focused on what is important for the day.

I also really like the reporting feature.  I can see myself saving off a copy of this report at the end of each week and using it to go back and see how much time I actually spent on client work vs. marketing my business vs. other non business tasks.  Where am I actually spending my time !

On one hand she was feeling the pain of some of her clients who spent thousands of dollars on a website that was not really helping their businesses in the least. I hear stories every day myself about this, and I agree that this is a problem. However, we disagree on the solution.

Here is my reply to her post :

“A big part of the problem stems from website developers building sites for businesses when the developer doesn’t understand much if anything about internet marketing. The victim in this is the small business owner…. he or she get’s a ‘Pretty Site’ with little consideration for organic search results, traffic generation and conversion.

The small business owner may understand the importance of having an online presence, but they need a professional to help them setup an overall online marketing plan and make sure that is integrated with any offline marketing they are doing.

If all you want is a “Sign” on the internet and your fine with having your main traffic source being the URL printed on offline advertising or word of mouth…then go full out with a $10 solution. If however you want to get real traffic and position your biz to take advantage of the indisputable trends in customer searching, then you should consider getting someone who wants to partner with you and not just a “cookie cutter” or “high end graphics designer” website developer.

Why do so many people think it’s okay to pay hundreds and usually thousands of dollars on offline advertising (that has a short exposure), but balk at spending thousands to build a website (CMS platform) that can reap new customers for years to come and can also be used as a vehicle for keeping your existing customers engaged.”

- Here are a few more comments that I didn’t add in the original reply :
Not every small business needs a sophisticated website. Some may simply need a few pages that are keyword optimized for one or two local search terms, lead capture mechanism and a call to action. Depending on your market and location, this may be pretty simple from an seo /organic search standpoint.

Other businesses however are dealing with a more competitive market and the actions needed to get you organically ranked and the traffic converting are more complex, time consuming and subsequently more expensive.

Another aspect that is often missed is the lifetime value of a new customer when analyzing the cost of implementing an overall online marketing plan (website is one piece of this plan). If the average lifetime value of a customer to a small biz is $5,000, then it’s not hard to justify spending $8,000 on a site and associated marketing. It would only take 2 customers to be in the black. The converse is also true, however. If your proposing a site for the local $1 store, whose average lifetime customer value may only be $100 and the site costs $5000, then this site would have to generate a lot more customers before the ROI would make sense.

It’s all about having a knowledgeable internet marketer (not just web developer) who understands how to talk business with a prospective business owner.

BTW…before I forget…. here is the original trends report I referred to : The Great Divide

I’m giving away some of my secrets here, but I’m of the old school that believes if you help enough other people succeed, you will succeed. So here goes….take a watch of this great video about some very basic things to help your site.

*** If you like this video, please leave a comment ***

There are some great take aways from this video.

1. This is great news if you are trying to break into a very competitive market.

By focusing some of your marketing efforts on building good content (targeted towards the long tail)  you have a chance to grab some of the 75% of the search volume that the “big boys” are ignoring.  As a side benefit, you eventually start to rank for those ultra competitive keywords as a side effect.

Your challenge :  Determine what those long tale phrases might be and get content on your site for those.

2.  Don’t base all your marketing decisions on existing high traffic keywords.

3. As search engines continue to integrate other multimedia sources in their organic search results, don’t forget about video.

Google recently released a tool that exposes some of the search data for YouTube.  This was part of the new YouTube paid advertising program, similar to their traditional AdWords program.  Since a lot of businesses are still very slow to adopt video marketing as a integral part of their marketing efforts, this could be an opportunity to rank (within YouTube) for long tail keywords.

Your Challenge : Make video marketing a strategic piece of your game plan and pay close attention to the video title/description (they are vitally important).

In order to take advantage of this long tail strategy, you need someone on your team or working for your team that understands how to address these challenges.   If you have questions about this strategy and how it applies to your business, contact me and let’s talk.

SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a website by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.   There are two types of search results that are returned, Organic (Free) and Paid.  SEO is primarily concerned with organic search results.  The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.  SEO is the combination of research, art, creative writing and detailed analysis.  When done properly, it places your website at a place where you can expect your business to improve.

A professional SEO consultant should first take the time to understand your business and help you define the most important keywords for your website.  Keywords are simply those words or phrases that you type into Google, or other search engines to find results.  For example, if you owned a dental practice in a town named Flowery Branch and SEO consultant should help you optimize your site for keywords such as “Flowery Branch Dentist” and NOT keywords such as “Dentist”.  The keyword “Dentist” is not the phrase that a potential client to this business would be typing in when they are looking for a new dentist to visit.  This is a very simple example, but hopefully it helps you to understand the importance of having a seasoned SEO consultant that knows how to do keyword research.

Search engines operate with algorithms and specialized software,  sometimes called “crawlers” or “spiders”–that read the source code and page content of websites to determine what they’re about.  Search engine spiders like websites that are easy to get around , contain relevant content and are linked to by other good sites, so it would seem like  a fairly simple equation.   In reality SEO can be quite complex and the search engines are constantly changing and new competition for your keywords can appear overnight.

I break down SEO into two categories, On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.  On-Page SEO relates to the actual website content.  Off-Page SEO consists of building links back to your website and using other types of Internet Marketing to point the search engines back to your site and increase the authority of your site in the eyes of the search engines.

In summary, SEO is important because most people on the Internet find what they are looking for using search, whether it is a search portal like Google or Yahoo or the onsite search within YouTube or MySpace.  This means that making content findable by search is important to the success of that content.  SEO is important because if your web pages are not targeting the right keywords to draw the attention of the top search engines the likelihood of potential traffic to your site will never grow.  When your pages are SEO friendly some of the obvious advantages to expect can be, increased traffic, and more traffic means more sales and publicity.

We at Marketing Hunters are committed to providing the best SEO solutions to small businesses.  By doing this we help improve sales and profits and reduce advertising expenses.

There is a bunch of good info that is directly applicable to small biz marketing.

Enjoy…

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – How to Get Re-Tweeted from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Another good source of user data is eMarketer, and they also recently reported that U.S. online video viewers will grow to 188 million by the end of 2013 and more than half of the U.S. population will view videos online in the same year.

Now get this, in the month of July 2009, there were a total of over 21 Billion (Yes, the billion with a B) videos viewed around the world.  Wow !

They broke the videos down by categorizing them as either coming from Google, Viacom Digital or Microsoft sites.  Of those 3 sites, guess who took the TOP DOG share of the views?  Yep, you probably guessed it…. Google.  Google accounted for 42 percent of all videos viewed online and within that group, YouTube captured over 99% of that traffic.  As a whole, Google accounted for almost 9 Billion viewed
videos.

So if you think that video isn’t important, you might want to think again…. Before your competition decides to try it and starts grabbing customers away from your biz.

The good news is, YOU ARE NOT TOO LATE ! Now is the perfect time to jump on this bandwagon.  Other studies confirm the continued growth of online videos, including video’s viewed on mobile devices.  That is a whole other subject for later.  I’ll follow up with a post later where I’ll show you that you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to get a video posted that will help turn internet visitors into walk-in customers.

overload and the vast list of good business opportunities and projects.

Power to Create Profits – Yanik Silver