Adding a promotional video production to your online marketing mix will bring immediate impact by driving traffic to your website and ranking highly (we are talking page one here) on the search engines, often within hours.

There are some important points however that you need to take into consideration before you run off and start making your videos.

The Video will rank highly if you are aiming at a low competition keyword phrase rather than a generic market term like Restaurant or Hotel. You can be more precise and do what we keep banging on about and add locality to the phrase, so it can be restaurant in London or hotel in london, even that though will be difficult to rank for so we need to add more, how about Italian restaurant in London or Italian restaurant in Piccadilly London …now we are talking!

Online video production is not for everyone, it takes a little patience, if you want music you might need to play with the editing and timing of the music to the images and if you want speech then you need to either do that yourself or hire a voice over artist.

The good news is however that it is not expensive to get a promotional video production created for you. In fact if you want to keep costs down its best to write some text, and a few pictures and ask a online video production team to make it into a video with some music in the back ground.

Typical costs for this type of online video production are not high, we do it here for a reasonable cost for the video creation but it still needs to be distributed with keyword optimised descriptions and headings,  and this is the crucial part, the choice of how you distribute and where will depend on the success that you can expect, lets examine what i am talking about.

There are numerous video sites out there, in fact there are over 60 that we distribute to (depending on suitability for the content of the video to the site) and it can be time consuming. Yes, there are software programs to help automate this but they do take time setting up and when something is automated and has to deliver a video that has a generic description for every video site it starts getting spammy and we are now getting into the old duplicate content issues.

…That’s another post for another day, some believe fervently that Google penalises duplicate content while others disagree. My view, is do it but not to much…certainly not 60 times for a video…perhaps 3 or 4 might rank, therefore change keywords and descriptions every 4 videos. I dont believe google penalise but neither do i believe they rank all of it.

I just ran off and googled Matt Cutts (from Google) and duplicate content and here is what i found direct from his blog (great site by the way, loads of great content i need to explore when i get time:)…

Here is what Matt Cutts from Google has to say about duplicate content in regards to what we are doing. “My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.”

Online video distribution should be done with a real person getting into each and every site and customizing the description and tweaking the settings according to each site.  To me its a no brainer. If you want to spend money to create several videos you are best to give them as much chance as possible to rank and drive traffic to your main site. That measn promoting them properly and broadly for keywords that fit the content of the video.

The costs for distribution are reasonable again per video and per site with a real human submitting them and who is trained to do it properly and make sure the tags are varied and accurate, and also that the descriptions are varied to avoid duplicate content, as well as the  heading,  supplementary keywords and other more site specific tweaks.

You do not need all 50-60 sites hand submitted either, some rank better than others which should be hand submitted. Others that tend not to rank quite as highly but still have a good page rank can be submitted through an automatic distribution software and left there for the viewers and members of that site and to give some link juice back to your main site. Again, still with varied descriptions but with only 5 or 6 being done at a time, then load and change content and do another group of 6 for example.

The cost for that comes right down  per video for each site…but remember that there is still the need to go in and create accounts in each site and that takes a human to sit there and make sure it is done correctly, that you are put into the right section and there are some settings that are needed about the user.

NOTE*

If you want to know more about having promotional video production done with keyword research and with optimised descriptions and headings, along with proper online video distribution, hand submitted and semi automated then we offer a great introductory package from $500.

You can rank highly very quickly if done properly, feel free to contact us for  more information.

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I was looking at costs for lead generation in various forms recently and i was struck by the simplicity and yet rather elaborate attempts to charge reasonably high fees.

In my own experience i had a telephone lead generation company who didnt do any lead generation at all, in fact they gave me leads with schedule to call and when i did callk the leads i had been told were waiting for my call had left 3 years earlier.

Another one of the better examples is a company using salesforce.com as a CRM system and using a video and sending it out by email. Not bad and by all accounts a fairly successful system as far as they are getting customers. The cost at approximately $5000 per month really got me thinking at what that would buy in online marketing.

Both examples above are at different ends of the spectrum, there is the rip off merchant and then there is the very expensive email marketing program with an email thrown in and salesforce.com software too.

Lets take a look at what $5000 would buy in online marketing.

Infusionsoft CRM system for example would cost $500 per month for the premium version with all bells and whistles, you can see there is a massive difference in what is offered compared to salesforce.com http://www.infusionsoft.com/competition

So we still have $4,500 left, now to create a 30 second video would cost $140.00 (my prices) and to send it by email ???

i must be missing something.

We distribute it to over 50 sites (if suitable) and that costs a further $150 with optimised content description.

To create sales messages and if unopened it resend 3 times with different heading.

Ok, so lets look at using email lead capture system other wise known as autoresponder, i often get blank stares when i say autoresponder. The cost to set up from us and with a wordpress SEO optimised blog. (RSS set up, Ping to over 20 sites, structured properly, email marketing system in place and working, custome made theme with logo) ..Zero for the site, we charge a $150 – $450 set up fee and a monthly charge depending on who creates the content. If you create the content you pay only for the management and scheduling as well as the hosting…$310 lets say in case you like sending emails often and we need to load them often for you and if i charge $15.00 a time to set it up.

Where do they get the leads from?…i need to look into that but i am certainly missing something.

So where would we get leads…well our video is getting hundreds of hits if optimized properly, that is creating high PR backlinks to the site as well as driving highly targeted traffic.

We would still have around $4000

Enough to do a major firepower blast

Say we create 10 optimized articles for keywords we can rank in top ten easily and with good search volumes, and distribute them to over 400 directories each   -  at $200 each article that still leaves $2000

Press releases x 2 and distribute to 50 sites $1000 left

Social bookmark everything and build backlinks and maybe some forum posting and blog commenting for the rest of the $1000….and dont forget that infusionsoft totally rocks as a CRM system in comparison to salesforce.

You know for that we would also guaranteed multiple top ten Google listings in their local marketplace for at least 2 but probably 3 keywords that are of value.

What am i missing?

$5000 buys you a hell of a lot more than a video and email marketing system!

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I wanted to start doing a regular useful resource feature on the blog and yesterday briefly discussed that kindle is available as an app for an iphone.

I wondered out loud on twitter how anyone could read a book on iphone, i got a reply that it is easily done if you turn the phone to landscape and tweak the font and settings a bit.

Until i try it i still cant imagine it. I did go off to try and get more info just out of curiosity and as usual i found myself looking at something quite different (a typical online marketers lack of attention and easy distraction i guess)

Anyway, i am glad i did (as so often i am:) when i found the firefox plugin Read-It-Later.

The Plug In can also be installed as an app for an iphone and you can store things there that you want to read later, after that you can either read it on or offline, and you can send it through twitter or facebook in one click too.

Pretty cool!

Watch the short video, its only 1 minute and a half and it describes it better than i could.

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I bet most business owners who are online have also been wondering about mobile marketing.

I came across this short video on youtube and decided it is worth posting, the content is really something that small businesses should be thinking about.

Is there really first mover advantage in mobile marketing?

Will local search keep growing at the rate it is now on mobiles?

Can mobile marketing be used for more than broadcast SMS sales messages?

Can you give out coupons and receive payments with mobile marketing?

Watch the video and see for yourself, he makes a great case for mobile marketing and its hard to disagree.

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Hospitality establishments, Retailers, in fact anyone with regular walk in customers have some great opportunities within online marketing.

I think we can all agree that the current goal of any business is to get through the current economic downturn with as little discomfort as possible, without having to lay off their staff and yet with the challenge to develop a leaner, flexible, and more efficient operation. The secondary goal is to grow the business even during this current economic situation.

I know that whether you are a restaurant, hotel, cafe, dentist, retailer or any type of small business, that you already possess assets that can make an immediate impact to your hospitality business, and I am not talking about cash, real estate or property assets, but I am talking about assets that you could use differently that you already have access to, and you are in touch with each and every day and that these assets if used properly will bring in new customers, looking to spend money and more importantly they will be looking for you and wanting to spend money with you!

It's Time to Get Online and Using the Opportunities Properly, you are leaving significant revenue on the table otherwise!

I truly believe that at least 90% of Hospitality establishments and other small businesses (especially retailers) are leaving a serious amount of money on the table by not using assets that they already have.  It would cost very little to start using these assets properly by implementing some very basic changes to their marketing approach and take a serious look at how much money is being wasted on old marketing that is not as effective as before, and to divert part of that budget to using online methods…some of which I will highlight here. I believe that it could increase revenues by as much as 30 percent in the average hospitality establishment.

What are these assets?

The answer is Your Current Customers.

Are you creating campaigns to bring them back into your restaurant? Are you communicating with them through email, through providing great content on your blog? Do you have a blog to provide great content for them, do you tell customers that you have an online presence when they are in your restaurant?

These are really simple things to introduce.

Our system shows you exactly how to get email addresses in a number of creative ways which we will highlight in further posts from the Evolution ebook series. I feel very strongly that the whole business community will one day take it as common practice that you have to provide a great online experience for your customers and prospects as well as when they are in your restaurant or establishment.

Knowing what content will cause them to look forward to receiving regularly is the key.

We will cover that in part 2 from the evolution ebook series of posts.

Have a great day!

This is Part 1 from the Small Business Recipe for success series, this series of posts will be taking some of the concepts and information from our free ebooks. We will start with taking some concepts from the first evolution marketing ebook (part 1) which highlights strategies for being successful online and gives a view on how to utilise attraction marketing and expand on the ideas. Feel free to post questions and get involved in the conversation. You can download parts 1 and 2 right now if you like by clicking here Evolution- The Online Marketing System for Small Business. Its Free…Complimentary, its got good info and its only 31 pages. Its a good insight into what your online marketing should look like and there are marketers out there charging a lot of money for that kind of information.

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