Internet Marketing ABC

Do you create online videos for your online marketing efforts?

Do you enhance the quality of your videos with music?

If so – is it royalty-free music or do you just use the newest Eminem track that you like?

You could get yourself into serious trouble if you use music that someone has a copyright for and you don’t have written permission to use it. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but Daliah Saper is, and one that specializes in international copyright law, and she just did a quick interview about it with the guys from REELSe0.

Check out her interview about using music for your online videos.

YouTube now allows you to insert your own ads in your own videos. You can display ads in your videos, and people can click on these ads and you can bring them to any website you want – not just within youtube. And you don’t even have to pay for it!

This feature is currently still only available in the USA.

Very powerful.

Are you a wordpress blogger? If so, you want to make sure you got a great theme that represents you professionally. Thesis is the theme I recommend to every new blogger out there. Yes, it costs money, but then it saves you so much time and hustle down the road that if you are serious about blogging, you want to get your hands on this.

Bill Myers recently shared a nice trick for people who have not yet gotten around to use a little YouTube SEO magic.

What’s holding most people back from putting videos up on YouTube?

• I don’t want my face on camera.
• I don’t want to do a screen recording (because I don’t want to buy Camtasia, or screencasts don’t work for my market)
• It’s taking to much time.
• I don’t have the technical abilities.
• I don’t know how to/want to/have the ___ [insert objective here] because ____ [insert excuse here]

Well, whatever it is – scratch that.

You can download PhotoStory for free and that piece of software (from microsoft) will automatically turn your pictures into a video for you, you can enter your own URL and add royalty free music and load it up.

It took Bill Myers 15 minutes to do a video (about as long as it takes to write an article I guess), but I really think that once you have done it five times, you can do it faster.

When you create videos to upload on YouTube (and other video sharing sites) you want to get eyeballs. More views for your videos means higher placement in the search engine results and more traffic to your website. All good stuff.

I already talked about how you want to emulate successful videos, but this tactic helps you to piggyback on already successful videos. It’s the “Video Response”.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Search for popular videos related to your market
2. create a video response by clicking on the video response button below
   
3. use either
   • a similar title or
   • a title that would make people who watch the original video curious and interested to click on your video response
4. You can either record a video with your webcam, or chose one of your existing videos or upload a new video. It’s up to you which one you think is best.
   • If you chose an existing video as video response and that video is already used as a video response for another video, it will be disabled as video response for the other video. Each of your videos can only once be used as a video response.

And always make sure that you add your URL in the video description field first!

If you are uploading videos to YouTube, your endgoal should always be: TRAFFIC! You want to get traffic to your website or your affiliate link.  (The only exception where traffic doesn’t matter is if you want to create buzz and get a message or idea out there. But even then, in most cases you get more out of it if you direct traffic to your website).

Too many people miss this. The most important element aside from your title is the first line of the description. Because if you put a link in the first line, it will be a clickable link that will always be there next to your YouTube video. If you insert that address at the bottom of the description, people will have to click on the tiny “more info” link first (very few people do) and you miss out on lots of potential traffic.

Video marketing is extremely important for your online business. Yes, you can make lots of money without it, but why wouldn’t you use one of the most powerful tools of online marketing?

So, the question then is: how to create great videos that people watch and talk about? Videos that are effective for your marketing?

Well, just search for videos on youtube that are related to your market and see which ones are the most popular. Analyze why they were so popular and emulate that for your own videos.

(It’s the old: see what works and copy it method).

As a marketer, you pay half your rent by just doing effective research. Google is probably the greatest research tool out there, but there are lots of other, great, spezialized research tools too, like video search engines. One of them that I like to use is Pixsy. Pixsy is nice because it delivers really fresh results.

More video search engines:

• Blinkx
• Yahoo video search (specially interesting: the popular video searches function)
• fooooo (despite that extremely stupid 5-0 name)
  
• Truveo
• VideoSurf
• Yidio

And if that’s not enough for you, check out Wikipedia’s list of video search engines.

Plus, ReelSEO has published an impressive list of the biggest video search engines (status: January 2009).

When it comes to videos, lots of people care only about optimizing it for the search engines.

While it IS true that YouTube videos rank great in the search engines, most video views actually come from within YouTube itself. Via the “Related videos” function mainly.

So when you create your videos, make sure that you not only optimize them for the search engines, but you optimize them for SHARING – and if you optimize them for sharing, that ultimately means that you optimize them for the users. So what does it come back to? It comes back to CQC… Creating Quality Content!

Another thing many people still haven’t looked into is the YouTube Partner Program.

When you upload videos to YouTube you can actually get a share of the revenues that are being created – everytime someone clicks on one of your ads, you can get a percentage of the clickprice. It’s kind of like Google AdSense for your videos.

What’s nice about the YouTube Partner Program is that you keep all the rights to your video and can do with it what you want – you can also spread it over other video sharing sites.

If you check out some of the YouTube partners (these are all guys and gals that are currently getting money for the advertising revenue created from the clicks) you can very well “swipe” some ideas from them. (Probably most annoying of all of them is this guy – but he’s probably making good money with it – he’s getting MILLIONS of views for his videos, tens of thousands of comments and has almost ONE MILLION SUBSCRIBERS). So, watch and learn.

Further Reading:

• what ShoeMoney wrote about the YouTube Partner Program. (April 17, 2008)
• New York Times, December 10, 2008: YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money
• Interview with YouTube on Partner Program (by SearchEngineWatch.com, May 17, 2007)

Now there are literally hundreds of video sharing sites. Depending upon your time and budget, it makes sense to only submit to some of them – specially the ones that will get you the most traffic. So, which are the most effective video sharing sites for online marketers?

1. YouTube
2. Blip.TV
3. Google Video
4. BrightCove
5. PhotoBucket
6. DailyMotion
7. iFilm
8. MySpace
9. Vimeo
10. BuzzNet
11. Flixya
12. GoFish
13. Kwego
14. Lulu
15. MyHeavy
16. PutFile
17. StupidVideos
18. ZippyVideos
19. CastPost
20. Doty
21. Famster
22. MeraVideo
23. Porkolt
24. VideoWebTown
25. Vidmax
26. ClipChef.com
27. ClipMoon.com
28. CritterBytes.com
29. GrindTV.com
30. MotorSportMad.com
31. MySpaceTV.com
32. StupidVideos.com
33. ThatsHow.com
34. Tubetorial.com
35. UberLounge.com
36. Video Production Tips.com

If that still isn’t enough for you, check out this list of video sharing sites & this one too.