I was at Podcamp San Antonio 3.0, an un-conference, this past Saturday. It was great to meet many other people in the Social Media space here in San Antonio. With the open format, people who had ideas about what to talk about were able to propose an idea. I led a session about online videos, and how anyone can make videos, even people without a video camera. I also addressed the why part of online videos and YouTube, as in “why would I want to make YouTube videos.” The simple part of that answer is to gain more visibility and targeted traffic.

I’ll outline the main points here for those of you who were not at the conference, and list some links & other resources at the end for those who want to put this idea into action!

Why You Should Use Online Videos As Part of Your Internet Marketing?

You will extend your reach to more prospects by using online videos. A good strategy for content producers is to deploy their content in many formats. Similar to the local media empire (newspaper, television, & radio station), even small content producers should leverage their content across many formats like print (as a blog post, article on directory sites, online press releases), video (online video), and an audio only production (like a podcast, or embedded audio file in a web page). The main reason for doing this is that with your content deployed in just one place your prospects have just one piece of content to find. If the same (or similar) content is deployed to 5 places in a variety of formats, the prospects would now know have 5 ways to find the content, and get your message. Increase ways for people to find your content, and you will increase your targeted visitors.

Video SEO (search engine optimization) is a new area where marketers have discovered ways to get their videos indexed and ranked in the organic search results of Google and Yahoo. Videos that effectively use keywords in titles, descriptions, and file names, can rank high in organic search results on both the video tab, and even the web tab. Google and Yahoo both are taking some videos and showing them as web results, in some cases nearly instantly after posting the video up on sites like YouTube. Video SEO represents an easier way for many firms to get first page organic results in competitive keywords than if they were to try and get their company website those high organic results. For non competitive keywords its super easy to get first page results with videos. All of this means that you can gain more visibility online, and get more targeted visitors, with some good video SEO techniques employed.

Pillar Content vs Feeder (or teaser) Content

For purposes of categorizing content, lets just consider content in just these two categories. Pillar content is the deep, detailed-rich content that your prospects are looking for. Examples could be good blog posts, a how-to or tutorial, a white paper or case study available for download, or a review of a popular product or service. You could make pillar content videos, but they are more complicated to make because they are going to be longer, and more involved than Feeder (or teaser) Content would be. Feeder content can be used to promote your pillar content, and feeder content is much smaller and easier to produce than pillar content. So instead of having to make a long video that repackages your pillar content to video, you can just make a short and sweet 30 second video that will promote your pillar content. This video can be promoted with a headline in the same way a pillar content would be, and the feeder content video will attract your prospects similarly to how pillar content would. Either video, long and complicated, or short and sweet, can equally attract visitors. The point of discussing Pillar vs. Feeder Content in the context of online videos is that videos do not have to be long and complicated, you can get several benefits from short & simple videos that are easy to make.

Videos Are Another Way To Promote Your Website

Any type of content can be repackaged to a video! Consider something as basic as marketing a Dentist office online. The Dentist may have a print ad, brochures, or even videos from vendors available to re-purpose into other types of content to be used online.

How-to videos, product or service reviews, and teaser (feeder) content to promote other content on your website or blog are all very popular formats for online videos. Of course some people will use video as their core way to deliver their pillar content, like a celebrity news video blog or online TV show. In that case just flip around what content feeds the other. They would use blogs, article marketing and other content formats as feeder content to deliver to their videos. Most businesses will use online videos as feeder content to promote their pillar content on their website, blog, or podcast.

How Anyone Can Make YouTube Videos Without A Camera

There are a few popular ways to make video files without a video camera, or editing experience. Two main formats are available to make pretty professional videos without using a camera. One way is to use screen capture software to record a video file of your computer’s screen, with audio narration added these make great how-to or training videos. The next type of videos you can make without a camera are the slide-show like videos which also usually have audio narration added to them.

You can build a slide-show or powerpoint like video using Windows Movie Maker (which comes with XP & Vista), iMovie (which is on most Macs), or by using VideoMach. You simply thread together a series of still images (that you can make in photoshop or another graphics program) that will each display for a few seconds each (you set the time for each image). Next, add an audio track to your slide-show which includes narration, then finally output your work as a video file.

I recommend you use Audacity (a free audio editing software) to record and clean up narration tracks, and to use opening & closing bumps with music to make your videos sound even more professional. Many times I write a script, and get the audio done first, then I build the slide-show to sync along with the audio file, that way your transitions from one image to the next flow along with your narration.

For screen capture software there are a few options, several of which are based on camstudio.org which is a free open source video screen capture software you can download. Camtasia Studio is a full featured screen capture editing suite that runs about $299, Jing and Animoto are new screen capture services that are relatively turn key but not as fully customizable as others, and ScreenFlick works on Macs.

After you have made your first video, be sure to consider the SEO benefits and be careful naming the video with good keywords that will help you attract the maximum amount of targeted visitors. If you have any questions about which video sites, in addition to YouTube, you should be submitting to, and if you have any questions about how to optimize your videos for SEO benefits, get in touch with me through the comments below or shoot me an @ message on Twitter.

• 20 Comments

After enjoying a couple months on Twitter, I wanted to build a website powered by the Twitter API. That lead me to build the TwitrContest.com site which is a platform to host Twitter Contests. I wanted this to be a turn key option for people down the road who want to promote a viral contest on Twitter.

So once I built the Twitter Contest website I wanted to get a contest up on it ASAP to demonstrate it and work out the kinks! I quickly threw a contest together to promote this blog, and my Twitter account. I decided to give away a couple hundred bucks worth of goodies; an iPod Nano, and 2 iTunes Gift Cards, this way I had three prizes and 3 winners.

I started the contest and began promoting it with tweets on Twitter, and a post on this blog. A couple weeks into it, when it was almost done, I remembered about FaceBook CPC ads, and how I had been dying to test them out. Here I go, with less than a week to go, I race out this following simple FaceBook ad campaign.

The Ad Unit

My ad was probably not the greatest, I did the graphic part in photoshop nice & quick but the graphic part of the ad is not great. The headline and body copy was also done in a flash & not A/B tested over time to optimize. It was a rush job, remember! Here are the details of the Facebook ad unit:

Ad Title (Headline) 25 Characters
Ad Image 110×80 pixels
Ad Body 135 Characters

So after looking at the ad I deployed, and how it was untested copy, you already know about the ugly part of my campaign…my ad was not as good as it could have been.

Campaign Results

This 4 day long campaign turned out doing the following:

1.96 million Impressions
591 Clicks (0.03 % CTR)
$0.04 Avg CPC
$0.01 Avg CPM
$23.02 TOTAL SPENT
Detailed results of this campaign.

Now the obvious things that pop out here are the near free impressions I got. Because virtually no one clicked on my ad (note the .03 % click thru rate), and at Facebook you only pay for clicks or visitors, you get all those impressions free. In just 4 days my ad was displayed nearly 2 million times at a CPM of a penny! That’s beyond good, and way cheaper than most big brand sites will give a small ad buyer. What this means is that anyone who needs to do branding, or other campaigns that benefit from cheap impressions should consider FaceBook ads.

I got an extra 591 people over to the contest site for just $23 so overall it was a successful campaign. I haven’t been able to get good four cent targeted traffic since 1999, so on a per click basis I was happy with what we paid. I certainly want to try another campaign as these CPC rates are well below top search engine CPC rates.

Segmentation Details

Here are the detailed results of this campaign. When you see this you will see the breakdown across different segmentation groups. I ran ads in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, and Sweden. As you can see in the details though, the vast majority of my impressions and clicks came from non-USA ads (over 1.5 million of the 1.9 million impressions came from just Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand). This is probably due to Facebook displaying ads in an auction format, and my bids were too low for some countries, and high enough in other countries. If you bid adequately your ads will display a lot, and if you underbid you hardly get any ad impressions.

With a couple days of results to look at I upped my bids in the US, UK, and Canada, ultimately I would see it was still not enough to make a difference. I must have been underbidding too much, it would be good if Facebook told you what you would have to bid to get more traffic (similar to how the search engines encourage you to spend more by sharing data).

Its too bad that the performance of an ad is not real time. Results in Facebook ad campaigns are very slow to update, and so improving a campaign takes longer than it would if real time reports were available. Even after my first update and upping of my CPC bids, hardly any ads got displayed in the USA, UK, and Canada. The campaign was not active long enough for me to see how much I would have had to pay to get good impressions on the US site. I am curious as to what CPC you need to pay in the US to get your ads in heavy rotation here, if anyone knows from their own campaigns please share with us in the comments.

Facebook allows ad targeting by segmenting their audience for you. I selected a handful of big countries in addition to the US. I then further refined down the total audience to older people, over 27, to get more mature people who are likely to read blogs on Internet Marketing. We did not do any male/female selects, or further segmentation that is available because our offer was for the wide audience.

Targeting on Facebook represents a real opportunity to the niche advertiser. You can select USA>San Antonio, Texas>Women Only>Over 27 years old (for example) and drill down to your optimal demographic. Of course this gets you less visibility than you would get with the wider audience, but it focuses your ad spend on extremely qualified prospects you get to define.

Motivation of FaceBook Users

I was not surprised to have a low CTR with this campaign, I mean I don’t ever click on FB ads so it isn’t that much a shock that no one else does, compared with search engine PPC campaigns. The CTR was lower than I expected, but it could be improved with tested copy and better graphics for sure.

The thing that did surprise me though was how poorly my FaceBook visitors converted to contest entrants (a 2 form-field form to enter). Here is a demo version of the contest landing page. I thought the ad unit adequately prepped (or qualified) a visitor for what was to come, but the conversion rates of that traffic on the contest page was lower when compared with visitors from other sources.

In general, our Twitter based traffic at the Twitter Contest site converted (by entering the contest) several times better than FaceBook based traffic. Granted this topic is a little less scientific, and with a small data sample, but it was also obvious. We had days with 100+ Facebook visitors to the contest site where not one entered the contest! Our Twitter based traffic was converting at just over 20%.

So in this case, my FaceBook based traffic converted much worse than our Twitter based traffic. I really want to test this again soon in another campaign to further look at this discrepancy. I’d like to also throw in a Google PPC campaign on my next try, and compare the conversion rates of all 3 groups of users (Google PPC, Twitter, and Facebook). So far though I found the FaceBook visitors to be highly unmotivated to convert, other things equal.

Overall Summary

The cheap impressions and visitors were great, but my own rush to get the campaign out, and the slow speed for data to come back from Facebook prevented me from ever optimizing the campaign to get the most out of it. I am sure a well planned campaign that runs longer would be able to do much better, and I plan on doing another one soon that I will be more careful with.

Facebook’s super low CPM rate makes it appealing for anyone with a branding campaign. Their big international audience is also easily within reach for the small advertiser. Their targeting or segmenting options appear to be really powerful too.

I am overall impressed with Facebook ads and eager to try out my next couple campaigns. Help me out in the comments if you have any tips, feedback, or if you want to share about your Facebook advertising experience.

• 13 Comments

Video is huge now on the Internet, about 80% of people watch videos on their computers. That figure is growing fast too as bandwidth and content quality increase making videos more fun to watch online. Everyone knows about YouTube, but there are many other video sites too, some with decent traffic. Online video can be valuable for you in any of several ways, lets look at some of the ways you can get value by using online videos to promote your blog or website. First, lets just clear up something about ‘Online videos’.

What Do We Mean by Online Video?

No need to be a movie director to get some traffic from Online videos, anyone, even people without a video camera can make videos. How can that be you ask? Simple, a computer knows a video to be a video file, meaning the computer where you upload videos to doesn’t know whether your video is good or it stinks. In fact, the video doesnt need to be made from a video camera. I have made several videos that are really something like a powerpoint like slide show with an audio voice over added to it. Combine your audio with your slide show in a cheap software package like VideoMach and you output to a movie or video file type. You now have a video that can get your point across, and still be professional, even without a video camera. Of course you can use video cameras, and edit video with more professional tools, but the point is anyone can benefit from videos, even people with limited resources.

Video SEO

Videos are right now a sneaky way you can get good visibility in the search engines. If you have been online for several years you will remember a few years ago that blogs enjoyed a real preference in Google’s search, and eventually it was a real “low hanging fruit” area where keyword visibility was pretty easy to achieve with a blog post carefully using your keywords. Today this is true for videos. At Google, Yahoo, and MSN (the biggest search engines) there are video tabs as an alternate to a web search or an image search. SEO is competitive because you and all your competitors are competing on the web tab to try and get web pages ranked high at top search engines. The Video tab is usually still not competitive at all, even for many valuable keywords. If this is true, a video that is named with some of your keywords will get 1st page search results for you nearly instantly after uploading the video. For a while most of your competition does not know about videos, and they are not competing in this area of SEO, I still think this is a “low hanging fruit” area that can be exploited by anyone who wants high search rankings for their blog or website!

What To Do on a Video? How to Convert with Videos?

Many people will go about their Online Video marketing in different ways. Some will use video as their primary distribution vehicle to get their content out to the masses. Some people are doing talk show type videos, where the video is their content product. Others use video as almost ads or teasers to pull traffic back to your traditional place where you distribute your information or product, like your website or blog. Some make them like TV ads that can even push leads to a phone number, or the website. The possibilities are endless! Most Internet Marketers are using videos in a similar way to how they use article directories. Each video uploaded to a top video site can be compared to an article submitted to a top article directory, both are a little piece of content you make & distribute that can result in targeted traffic coming back to your site.

More Reading:

How One Guy Is Making a Living from his YouTube Videos!

• 17 Comments

Wow, this has been a quick cycle from idea to reality. As you know from reading the blog I have been enjoying myself on Twitter lately, and I have been taken back by the size of the community. I think Twitter will grow to be a lot bigger than it is now, but its already huge!!

Twitter allows people access to their data, and the Twitter site, through the Twitter API. After being on Twitter a while I decided I wanted to host a contest, to give away a free iPod Nano & iTunes Gift Cards to my new tweeps on Twitter. When I went looking for someone to manage my contest for me I didn’t find anything available, I had to build a custom application to plug into the Twitter API to make my Twitter contest work.

Of course I saw an opportunity here, if I needed to go through all this trouble to manage a Twitter contest, I figured others would face the same challenge. I built a website to host, manage, and promote Twitter Contests sponsored by a variety of people. We just opened the site up to a soft launch, meaning there is just 1 contest up on the site, and it has not been promoted yet online or in the media.

Before the end of March we will officially launch the site with multiple live contests, and an online and offline media promotion campaign. If you have a blog or if you are on Twitter, please help us out by spreading the word!

Here is the link to the Twitter Contest website TwitrContest.com. Be sure to enter our contest too, we are giving away a iPod Nano and two iTunes Gift Cards, three people will win, it could be you! Good luck, and if you aren’t there already, get on Twitter! We have a link to them on the contest site if you need to get started.

• 10 Comments

Here is my quick & dirty opinion on Packet8’s VOIP business level phone service. I used Vonage for a while and got rid of it because it is really only a one line home solution, with no real business functionality. By that I mean you cant have 3-5 lines coming in and be able to transfer a call between extensions for example. With Packet8 you can do advanced things like have someone answer your phone for you and patch it out on another extension to your cell phone.

I did a bunch of research before I settled on Packet8 and I am happy with the decision. It’s about $50 a month per line or extension, but that includes unlimited long distance to the US and dirt cheap prices to other countries. With Packet8 they sell you business level phones when you get started, and then they sell you monthly service. You can port your number to them, so you don’t have to lose the number you currently have. That new usb phone line solution is comparable to Vonaga, but the usb phone does not have number porting yet which is a big let down.

Setup is pretty easy. When you get your phones you also get little VOIP boxes that look like cable modems or network hubs. You plug an ethernet cable from your network into the VOIP box, and then that box has a phone wire that connects to the phone extension. Each extension needs a phone, and the VOIP box connected to the Internet. The phones are nice, the picture above is mine. They have all the features you would expect on a business level phone system that costs thousands of dollars including digital voice mail.

Quality of the calls is excellent and Packet8’s support is also pretty professional. In this era where we come to expect the foreign call center support, Packet8’s staff stands out as doing a great job. They have a deep understanding of their product, and offer to walk people through their first use of the system over the phone. I didn’t need this level of hand holding because the phone system and website are so turn-key. I did however need to setup some custom settings to the phones, and the ring order of calls that got me talking with their support team. They did a good job, and they knew their product well.

I am happy with Packet8, I still will likely expand my phone system beyond the two extensions I have now. Once my business grows I plan on adding another line. The cool part about Packet8 and small business is that the VOIP phone system lets each extension sit anywhere in the world, but yet all phones all act like they are in the same office, and all work on the local US number you set it up with.

• 7 Comments