Hi,

I just shared some tips with a friend and I thought it only right that I shared them with you too.

They’re for effectively using Youtube:

One of the most common is Tube Mogul, which let’s you upload one video and it will get distributed to a batch of the top video sharing sites. http://www.tubemogul.com/

I have at least 3 accounts on at least 20 different video sharing sites.

With Youtube specifically, there are some basic things for effective marketing which include:

1 – Ensuring that you include the full url that you want people to be able to go to in the description section (so that it appears as a clickable link next to the video.

2 – Youtube allows you to add annotations after you’ve uploaded a video, these are good for call outs at particular points in the video, and also for enabling adding a clickable text link on the video itself (usually at the beginning and/or end of the video when you want people to be able to take your prefer action). It’s worth testing these to see which get the best conversions.

3 – Youtube provide analytics for the video which are worth checking regularly as they show how much and which parts of the video get viewed most. (obviously those are the parts you would tend to focus on having a strong message or a call to action)

4 – Youtube allow ‘tags’, effective use of the tags ensure the video gets found more often and more easily.

5 – linking to specific parts of the video. – If you look at the end of a Youtube url you will often see something like “#t=31m08s” on the end of the url? That link will take you 31 minutes and 8 seconds into that video, so if you’re referring a person that you want to see a particular piece of the video, this is a good way to do it.

6 – The video title you upload with is just about the biggest influencing factor for the number of views it gets.

7 – Thumbnails - Once your video’s been processed, three representative video thumbnails will be generated automatically by the system. Once these thumbnails have been generated, you can select one of the them as your video thumbnail. I have seen a pattern in how far into the video the thumbnails are taken from and considered testing having certain content at those points, but not sure if that’s too far to go. However, the thumbnail is something people often look at, so worth picking the most suitable one, and testing others. There are tools that will let you pick your thumbnails, so that might be better since different video sites do this differently.

I hope you find these tips useful - post your comments below if you like them / don’t like them - or want more.

Andy

A multi-millionaire friend of mine layed out these rules which I wanted to share with you:

1 - Do The Right Thing.

Never take the easy way out. Character is doing the right thing even when no-one is looking.

2 - Act Quickly.

When problem solving, early action is better than analyzing the situation to death.

3 - Fail Fast.

“Fail Fast” and change your course quickly in light of new data.

4 - Customers First.

Customers, and the needs of the people who serve them, always come first.

5 - Everyone Sells.

Participate in the selling process directly or indirectly, and establish relationships with customers and those who interact with them.

6 - Make Informed Decisions.

Listen to the ‘experts’ but then don’t be afraid to make your own decisions.

7 - Be Flexible.

Be willing to dive into the deep end.

8 - Hold Yourself Accountable.

Hold yourself accountable for your actions.

9 - Know The Business.

Know the details of your business inside and out.

10 - Develop A Plan

Do not wait for someone else to tell you what to do.

11 - Ready Doesn’t Mean Done.

Follow your actions through to the end.

As you can see, these are pretty much common sense tips, but common sense is rare these days and many businesses struggle due to the lack of some simple systems or actions.

Andy

You’ve heard about Online Marketing as a way to make a nice chunk
of change, but you don’t have any programming skills and wouldn’t
know an html code if it bit you. Can you still become successful
and make money Marketing Online?

Yes. You can.

There are a number of ways to make money online without a
website. We’ll discuss how you can blog your way to big bucks.

Blogging is a website (don’t worry no website skills needed) that
you update every few days with posts about your chosen subject.
Visitors can comment on your posts for others to see. You can
place advertising on your blog - provided automatically by
Google - and get paid whenever anyone clicks on one of those ads.

You can also use a blog to sell products as an affiliate.
Affiliates get a commission, determined by the product owner, for
each sale that is generated as a result of one of your visitors
buying the product. Clickbank is used
by thousands of product owners as a payment processor and as a
method to pay affiliates. It is free for affiliates to sign up
and find products they would like to promote.

LiveJournal, blogger.com, and wordpress.com, are just a few of
the free sites where you can quickly and easily set up your blog.

Pick a market niche you’re familiar with as the topic for your
blog. Every few days post on your blog. Of course that’s not all
you need to do. You have to get people to your blog to read it
and hopefully click on your paid ads, or on the products you’re
promoting as an affiliate.

Most of the blog sites are searchable by keywords. Search on the
same words you’ve used for your site to find other blogs. Then
leave a comment on the relevant blogs and include your link to
your own blog. If you don’t have time you can hire people to
comment for you. The cost runs between 10 cents and a $1.00 per
comment posted.

You can submit your blog’s url to search engines so if someone
wants information on ‘how to raise guppies’ and that’s the
subject of your blog, your blog shows up for visitors to find.

You can also write articles on ‘how to raise guppies’ and
distribute those articles to directories. Ezinearticles.com and
GoArticles are two directories which are favored by Google. Again
if someone is searching for ‘how to raise guppies’ your article
will show up. They click on the article and then click on your
blog.

With a little bit of research and time you can become successful
and increase your bank account with Online Marketing just by
blogging.

Andy Henry

The best type of advertising has three characteristics. It is
free, impactful and viral. What kind of advertising fulfills all
three characteristics? Word of mouth! It is free because it is
spontaneous, unsolicited and natural. It is impactful because
the persons spreading it were impacted and they spread the news
out of their own impacted emotions. And it is extremely viral
because it spreads exponentially. Imagine if your blog posts
could be passed around this way.

What kind of blog post can achieve such a viral nature? A viral
blog can be one of several kinds:

1. A HOW TO blog post

The HOW TO blog post shows the reader how to do something that
many people want to know. If you know how to do something that
most people do not, you could post a step-by-step guide on how to
do it to your blog. Once the right people discover your blog
post, they will naturally and spontaneously spread your blog post
to others. You could write about how to speak in public, how to
write HTML, how to play the piano by ear, how to take great
photos etc. There are literally thousands of ‘how to’ things you
could post about.

2. A UNIQUE TWIST blog post

This type of blog post is closely related to the first HOW TO
type. This is where you blog about something that is common
knowledge but you put your own unique twist to it, something that
most people have never thought of. It may well be totally
contrary to conventional practice. One example is article
marketing. The conventional practice in article marketing is
where you write articles and submit them to article directories.
But if you have a better and more effective way of article
marketing, post about it in your blog. For example, instead of
submitting articles to directories, you could offer your articles
to blog owners or newsletter owners in your niche. Tell them
they can make your article available to their readers for free as
long as no changes are made to any of the content. This way you
get much more targeted readers reading your article and more
powerful link juice back to your blog because it comes from
another blog that is related to your own instead of from a
general article directory.

3. A HOT REVIEW blog post

This type of post follows the principle of the early bird
catching the worm. This is where you blog about the latest hot
topic in your niche and give an honest appraisal of what is good
and what is bad about whatever is happening. Since the topic is
new, virtually no one has much knowledge, much less a view about
it. This works tremendously well for political blogs. But the
review can also be about the hottest gadget or the latest book or
the newest trend in your niche. One great place where you can
find out the latest happenings is Google Trends. If you are the
first to blog about whatever is happening, you can capture the
initial interest of the public and people will start passing your
blog post around like wildfire. When that wave dies down, simply
find the next sizzling development and review it and the process
repeats itself.

These are just three ways you can make your blog viral.
Obviously, you will not succeed every time, but if you keep at
it, you will hit the jackpot sooner or later. And as a result,
the readership of your blog experiences an exponential spurt of
growth.

Andy Henry

One of the hottest sites to come out of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is
Squidoo. If you are not building sites to Squidoo, you are
missing one of the quickest and easiest ways to build free
traffic for your website or blog.

Squidoo is a cross between a blog, a mini site, and a My Space
page. Squidoo calls the sites “lenses” and the people who produce
the sites are called “lensmasters.”

Squidoo lenses are very easy to make, even if you have not ever
built a website or blog before. You can have a lens up and
running in as little as 15 minutes.

Squidoo lenses are made up of “modules”. Squidoo has dozens of
modules to choose from. There are modules for making lists. There
are modules for You Tube videos. There are modules for Amazon and
Ebay auctions. With a little knowledge of the module system, you
can have your lens built in no time.

Squidoo also offers you a chance to make money from your lens.
Squidoo makes its money from affiliate advertising with Google
AdSense, Amazon, Ebay and several other sites. They keep track of
the earnings of each module and split the profits with you 50-50.
You can also donate your profits of your module to charity if you
wish.

Squidoo is very lenient about allowing you to use third party
advertising on your lens. You can promote your own website if you
wish or promote your favorite affiliate product. Savvy network
marketers often use Squidoo lenses to promote their products and
recruit new reps.

Squidoo lenses often rank very high on Google, so it’s a great
chance to build some backlinks to your primary company website.

One of the best ways to use Squidoo to build traffic to your
primary blog is by using the RSS feed module. You simply load the
RSS feed from your blog and the Squidoo lens will update
automatically as you update your blog.

The Amazon module is also very easy to use for people that are
new at Squidoo. For the case of Amazon products, you simply enter
the ISBN number of the Amazon product and Squidoo will pull it
directly off the Amazon website, complete with the photo and the
price. You can also have the module pull directly from keywords
if you don’t want to take the time to find ISBN numbers on
Amazon.

Another great Squidoo module is the Ebay module. With the Ebay
module, you can select products by keyword or by seller. If you
sell a lot of products yourself on Ebay, this is a great way to
get free traffic to your auctions.

As you can tell, Squidoo is a great free and easy way to build
traffic and make money online. So get Squidooing!

Andy Henry

First of all, what is a blog trackback? A trackback is a type of
blog feature that is used to associate blog posts on different
blogs - or a way to notify a website or another blog that you
have published an entry that references it. The result of this
is that two or more different blogs are able to share readers.

The description above is a little hard to fathom so here is an
example. Say you just posted an article to your blog about Pit
Bull dog training. Now, as you are surfing the internet, you run
across a similar or related post on another blog. So, you could
use the trackback feature to notify the person who posted the
other post about Pit Bulls that there is a similar post on your
blog.

When your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, appears
on the other blog’s post, that blog’s readers find out that you
have something to say about Pit Bulls and may even pay your blog
a visit to find out more.

In order to create a trackback, you have to get the trackback URL
from the post where you want to send your trackback notification.
It will be shown on the blog as a Trackback URL or possibly a
Permalink. Once you have found it, copy the URL into the correct
place in your blog’s post. Your blog software will have some
notation like Trackback URL identified for where the Trackback
URL would go.

Once you have done this, save and republish your blog. Your blog
software will automatically send the Trackback ping to the target
blog’s post. So now your trackback, which is the permalink to
your post, will be listed on the other blog’s post after that
blog owner has approved it.

The trackback feature works by actually sending a ping from your
blog to the blog you are trackbacking to notify them of your
post. This also causes your post to be listed on the other blog,
after it has been approved of course.

Trackbacks should be used to elaborate on or add to a related
post. So if your post is on Pit Bulls, your trackback on another
blog should also be about that related subject and not one like
pet care in general or something like that. Blog comments can be
used for posting non specific comments on blogs where trackbacks
are topic related specific posts.

You may have noticed that by trackbacking you are essentially
placing your link (permalink) on another blog, which creates a
backlink to your blog. For this reason, when you set up your
blog, modify the permalink structure to be more search engine
friendly. This can be done a few different ways, but you want a
structure that ends up having keywords in it as opposed to having
more dynamic looking links.

By having the backlinks to your blog and by having them relevant
to the content of your blog, you now have the ability of
improving your blog’s page rank. Those backlinks will strengthen
both your link popularity and your link relevancy which will
bring your blog more organic search engine traffic.

It should be noted that trackbacks should be used with care and
not used as methods for spamming other people’s blogs.

I understand that some of this stuff might seem like it’s more than a person can remember - but I’m writing these posts off the top of my head, so it’s definitely not, it’s just that new material needs to ’soak in’ before you can stop consciously thinking about it.

I was wondering whether to keep posting to this thread or to start a new one for different additional aspects of this and given the way that these threads disappear so quickly I thought I keep this one going so that there’s only one to find

So, on to the next element - Pre-suppositions.

If you’re not familiar with this term it’s basically describing a sentence or phrase which pre-supposes that some other piece of information or action has or will take place.

For example, if I were to say - “How long will it take me to write an article?”, this is only a valid question if I’ve already decided that writing an article is possible and that I can do it.

Here’s another example: “When you find that you’re blown away by how quickly and easily you increased the depth of your knowledge of article writing, you might want to press the ‘thanks’ button down to the right of this post - that’s ok, you can do it now”.

Obviously in that case I’m presupposing that you’re going to read the post and enjoy it and I’ve also inserted into your thinking the idea of pressing the ‘thanks’ button. The use of the word ‘when’ at the start implies that it’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of when.

Hopefully you are starting to see that presuppositions can be a really useful element for getting people to take your desired action.

I want to keep this stuff simple and gradually build on it so that I don’t repeat my initial mistake of making it seem complicated when it’s actually like second nature once you’ve integrated it into your thinking.

This applies to more than just article marketing too - but we can discuss that later .

Andy