Video gives an added dimension to your marketing
Video, together with the increasing use of social media such as blogs, social networking and podcasts in marketing, has been winning new fans because of the extra dimension that it can give to our marketing activities. Using video not only helps to differentiate you from your competitors, it also allows you to convey your message in a different way.
The use of video has had a huge rise in popularity over recent years, with steeply rising user numbers. YouTube, with its estimated 64 million visitors every month leads the way, but its success has given rise to hundreds of other video sharing sites, led by Metacafe and Google Video. These larger sites all attract millions of users a month and have the potential to drive traffic to your blog, help you add another string to your social media bow and build on your SEO activities if you use them correctly.
But it isn’t just about tapping into this existing flow of visitors to video sharing sites – you should also be using videos on your own blog. By embedding videos in individual posts, you are creating an additional resource for your visitors and a point of focus which you can link back to. If you have ones which generate high levels of interest then this can attract new visitors and additional links – both very beneficial of course! Having it on your own blog also makes it possible for you to distribute it (and syndicate it) through your RSS feed. Ah, so many opportunities!!
How to help your Video help you
However, there are some elements that you’ll want to consider, particularly if you want to get the best out of a video you are planning to create and use:
i) Creating your video
This is not a technical guide to creating your video but rather some pointers to start you thinking in the right direction. Nevertheless, as a rule of thumb, you’ll want to ensure that the Video gives the best impression possible, so spend as much time and money as it warrants to do so.
- It is always best to keep it “short and snappy”, ideally under 5 minutes no matter what the subject matter. If you have something which merits longer then divide it up – if the content appeals then they will come back for the rest of the series.
- Unsurprisingly, content is all important: there is little point in just uploading anything and everything to video. The type of content can vary enormously though – it might be informative (“how to” guides are usually well received), quirky, funny or any number of variations. What it must be is interesting and something that will appeal to the market you are targeting.
- For instructional videos, don’t forget that software which allows you to carry out screen capture will record you walking through a process easily and clearly – ideal business content.
- Don’t forget to include references to your business in the opening or closing elements of the video – let’s remember that the video is there to help us create additional awareness of our website and get people to visit it.
- In addition, make sure you get a branding message into it – at least a logo – but don’t let it become the be all and end all of the video. Like blogs, videos are not a tool suited to a hard sell – if they try to, they will quickly get turned off.
ii) Video Optimisation on your own website
When you embed a video in a blog post, remember to support it using the same optimisation methods that you might use on any other page … along with one or two additional elements too.
- On the page that hosts the video, make sure that the page still has suitably targeted title tag, metatags and all of the onpage SEO elements that you would expect to use elsewhere on your blog.
- And don’t forget the text! Create a post which talks about the same subject matter and which will complement what you are showing on the video. The text supports the video and vice versa.
- In addition, consider including a transcript of the video in the post itself – this again will ensure that you have a lot of relevant content for the Search Engines to digest.
- Of course, if you wish to take it a step further, then why not consider including a video, a podcast and text covering the same topic. Great for Search Engines and great for your visitors who can choose the medium they prefer to digest your information in.
iii) Video Optimisation on Video Sharing Sites
When you are using websites such as YouTube, you need to work with what they offer you and then make sure it is turned to your advantage.
- The title of the video serves a similar purpose to the Title Tag on a web page and is used by both Search Engines and users. So make sure that the title contains a keyword phrase relating to your company or services and where possible also make it catchy enough to catch the attention of users.
- You need to give the Search Engines information about the video itself – you can do this by using tags for your video and make sure that they follow the keyword terms that you are targeting. Just like an individual webpage, make the tags specific to each video rather than just adding a standard set for all of them.
- If you have a number of videos then it’s likely that you will also have a profile – on your profile you will normally get the opportunity to embed your own keyword phrases so use these to support your video content
As an additional element, develop a programme for your videos where you employ social media methods to help build inbound links by using bookmarking sites such as Digg and del.icio.us, social networking sites and forums – they are just as relevant when it comes to video promotion as they are for articles and pages.
Are Videos for you?
Not everyone has designs to be a director but you can be certain that the use of videos is here to stay and will continue to grow, so they need to be considered as part of your promotion plans. Check out what’s attracting hits on YouTube in your market area to get some ideas and, to make best use of them, optimise your videos by focusing on who will be viewing them and what they want to get from them. You can then use both general SEO techniques and those specifically relevant to video optimisation.
Above all, consider the use of social media marketing methods to harness the word of mouth and viral possibilities which will ensure that your videos get as wide a distribution as possible. Who knows, if your video reaches the right computer screen, it might even open up opportunities above and beyond great SEO for your business!
Generating ideas for your Business Blog
One of the key concerns I get asked about by people writing their business blog is what they can do when they are looking for topics to write about. Don’t worry! I can guarantee that this will really not be a problem unless you let it be one. You know your subject inside out (or else you wouldn’t be writing about it) and you have a huge resource of information that will be useful to them – it’s really a question of picking the right topics for your readers.
For me, there are two main sources of ideas: you and everyone else.
Blog Post Ideas
- You’ll want to make sure that you don’t forget any of the ideas that come to you during the day and personally I use a nice and easy solution for this: quite simply, I keep a notebook with me at all times. Why? So I can jot down ideas that occur to me – and, let’s face it, they can come at the weirdest moments. Anything could trigger them – something I see which sparks a connection or perhaps a comment that somebody makes to me. I note down the idea and any other thoughts that crop up at the time which I can go back to, review and use as and when I need to.
Blog Post Ideas – Everyone Else
When it comes to “everyone else”, the best people to take ideas from are your customers, your prospects and your partners – these are all the sorts of people who are likely to ask those questions which others would benefit from as well, so can be a great source of inspiration.
So, make a note of the main ones and make a point of talking about them on your blog. Treat it in the same way as you would when you take questions from the audience during a presentation – that’s to say, repeat the question that has been asked so that the rest of the audience can hear and then go ahead and answer it.
Do the same in your blog – you will be providing information which will answer relevant and real questions that should help your customers use your product better and help your prospects to understand its potential better.
So that you have this resource developing on an ongoing basis, I suggest that:
- you keep a folder in your email system and make a copy of both the question you receive and the response you send back – this will in itself form the basis of your business blog post;
- after meetings with clients, prospects or suppliers, note down some of the key questions that they asked and which were clearly on interest to them;
- at Conferences and Exhibitions, keep a record of the questions or the areas that visitors to your stand keep asking about and are showing most interest in.
You’ll soon find that you have topics for your posts planned out well in advance and as you write the posts, you will hopefully also start to receive comments which will start to take the discussions and questions in other directions as well.
In the meantime, here are some of the ones that I tend to use.
Write about current events
Something that you probably do on an ongoing basis is keeping an eye on what is being written about your industry, perhaps through various news media and ideally with the help of RSS feeds which of course saves you a load of time and gets you the news in double quick time. So just choose an event or piece of information which is of interest to you and your readers and give your comments on it and perhaps its implications. Don’t forget to reference the article and the site where appropriate though.
Read other blogs
Keep an eye on other blogs and what they are talking about – you will probably find subjects that you wish to develop further, ones that you wish to comment on in your own blog (don’t forget to use a trackback!) or ones that simply spark new ideas that you can write about. Other blogs are great sources of current thinking and new potential ideas.
Write a Series
Select a topic and write a set of posts around the theme you have selected. Try to plan the series out in advance (at least the titles) and then write them as you need them. Alternatively, once you get into the series, you may find that you write a number of them all at once. That’s great! But don’t get carried away and post them all together, instead postdate them (in Wordpress, just change the “Post Timestamp”) so that they publish automatically a few days apart.
Revisit old posts you have written
Check back over some of your old posts and see if there are ones that could be developed more fully. You may feel that there are now updates or new information that you would like to add to them, so do so in a new post which references back to the original one and develops the ideas further.
Answer Questions from Comments on Posts
Use contacts from people who have asked for information or have asked questions which have developed on your original post and opened up in turn new areas or topics. Take these questions or the points that they raise and develop the answers into new posts.
Get a guest blogger in
You do not need to write all of the posts yourself, many Business Blogs will in fact have two or even more people working on them. However, if you don’t have people who post regularly, you can still have a “guest blogger” who might come in to post on a particular subject where they have a specialist knowledge.
There is of course a final option – simply take a break from posting for a few days. There’s no issue with that – just let your readers know and they’ll be waiting for your return with bated breath.
Want a Successful Business Blog? Follow the 5 R’s
When it comes to Business Blogging, there are 5 ‘R’s which we should focus our attention on if we want to create a successful and sustainable small business or corporate blog. Our aim should be to put all the necessary elements in place on our Blog to allow these 5 ‘R’s to happen as smoothly and automatically as possible. When we manage this, we’ll have created a Blog which fulfils both our readers’ requirements and our own business needs.
These 5 R’s are:
Read - Reply - Return - Recommend - RSS
Simply put, we need to create and maintain a Blog which in the first instance will attract readers and then encourage them to participate by commenting on our posts or contacting us directly. We then need to make sure that it provides sufficient value or creates enough interest to make them return and become regular readers as well as recommend our Blog to others. The 5th ‘R’ of RSS underpins all of the others by supporting the distribution and the promotion of the blog.
If we want people to read our blog, then logically the quality of what we write in the posts will be important. However, we first have to attract readers to our blog – if they don’t know about us or can’t find us then we are going to fall at the first hurdle, no matter how good our content or services are!
So promoting the blog is always going to be a critical phase in getting our posts read and it’s important that we make use of all the methods at our disposal to achieve the best results possible – ideally this will combine offline marketing as well as online and blog specific marketing methods.
As part of this, we need to consider the Search Engine aspects when we write. It’s essential to focus on making the content interesting and useful to your readers but it also has to be written in such a way that it is appealing to Search Engines – they are a key way to attract readers so we need to write with one eye on ensuring our search engine ranking is as good as possible.
In addition, to make all of our other efforts as effective as possible, everything about the blog should be attractive and easy to use, from the general design to the layout of the blog and the positioning and display of our own marketing elements.
The first step in engaging properly with your readers is to have them reply to one of your posts and allow them to voice their opinions, thoughts, ideas and concerns. This creates the interaction, conversations and ultimately the connections that business blogs need to develop and thrive.
However, we cannot sit back and just rely on the comments simply appearing – instead, we need to be actively encouraging them, either by the way in which we write the posts or by asking open questions as part of the text or even by specifically asking for them.
Having encouraged people to want to reply, try to avoid putting barriers in their way – getting people to fill in a form in order to leave a comment is never going to get good results! It’s also important to listen and respond to the comments which are left, hence developing the conversation and working towards establishing and then building on a connection with the reader.
Effectively, we need to get to love comments and make sure that we respond to as many as possible that we receive. We should ensure that we respond to any negative comments which arrive – negative comments can often be the most important type!
As a last thought, you might even consider adding a list of recent comments as part of your blog to highlight those who have made the effort to leave a comment and to encourage them further.
If people are interested in what you are writing about and find value in it then the likelihood is that they will return to read more. By maintaining the quality of your posts and demonstrating your expertise on a consistent basis, you will be giving yourself the best chance of this happening.
In the process, you will develop not only a loyal readership but you will also be developing a growing level of trust between yourself and those reading your Blog. Make your blog THE place to go to find information on your specialist subject area.
Once readers return to your blog, make sure that they can explore all your posts as fully as possible – let ALL of your content shine through. To help this, make sure that the navigation around the blog is as clear as possible, that you highlight your key articles (the Foundation articles) and that you include links to related articles at the end of each post.
As a final point, try to keep an uncluttered look and feel – make it easy on the readers’ eyes again so that they want to return. No-one will come back simply because it looks nice but you want to avoid people deciding to stay away because it doesn’t.
This might have been called “Refer” but I prefer the concept of recommending which has a more positive connotation – and when someone recommends your Blog, that is a very positive thing!
How do you recommend a blog? Well, clearly, you can tell people about it directly! Word of mouth (WOM) is the most widely used form of recommendation there is so use it to your advantage. When people are considering books to read, films to see or hotels to stay in, arguably the most important element in the decision making process will usually be recommendations from friends. The online world works in the same way and blogs really are the online equivalent of W.O.M.
There are other online and blog specific ways which are just as important. The most frequent one is to simply reference a post or article from your a post on your own blog, as well as including a trackback. Another option is to include someone in your Blogroll, which is where bloggers highlight the blogs they recommend to their readers – high praise indeed. When this does happen, then just like the replies to your posts, follow up and thank the person for the link and hence the recommendation.
Don’t forget that you also make it easy for people to tell a friend about it using an “email a friend” type of function or links to social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Del.icio.us which will automatically add the post to then be shared online.
Lots of ways to be recommended so encourage them all!
Communication and dissemination of information is key to achieving a successful blog and the RSS functionality is the way to achieve that. So the 5th ‘R’ included here is RSS.
When someone subscribes to your RSS Feed, it means that they have shown a commitment to continuing the interaction – they are interested in receiving more information and with RSS you can provide them with immediate updates from your blog, cleanly and instantly. With so many benefits on offer for all parties, make sure that the RSS feeds are prominent on your blog to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find them.
To cover all options, you should also give people the opportunity to subscribe to RSS by email – 3rd party services such as Feedblitz or Feedburner make this straightforward. In any case, as RSS is still an unknown quantity in many quarters, it may equally be wise to provide a link to a page which explains what RSS is and what RSS Readers are available.
Once you have your RSS in place, use it to your benefit. Try to differentiate yourself in your feed and include branding elements such as your logo – tools such as Feedburner can really help you to do this simply enough. RSS will also allow you to syndicate your content on a number of different sites immediately and, as a final comment, don’t forget that you can create any number of individual RSS feeds to cover individual topics.
But whether you work from a single RSS feed or develop multiple feeds, it is important that you make RSS a central part of your blog promotion and reader retention program. It is something which underpins the other elements and allows the Business Blog to reach its full potential by making the information we produce as widely available as possible.
Summary
If we can achieve each of these 5Rs successfully in our Business Blogging, then we are well on the way to creating a Business Blog which will achieve the goals that we set for it, whether they are focused on creating a network, improving our reputation or positioning, developing a solid base of subscribers, increasing our Search Engine Rankings or “simply” generating new business.
RSS – a short business introduction
The internet has opened up a vast information resource which is constantly being updated and added to – it has also revolutionised the way in which we find and share that information. The difficulty, from a business perspective, is find out how to keep up to date with all the information which being produced so that we can stay one step ahead of the competition – from a social media perspective, it’s also imperative that we know when people are talking about us and our products so that we can respond.
So, as a busy person running a small business or department, what would be a better solution? How about having all the latest news and information from the sources you want to hear from delivered directly to you? This would save a huge amount of time as you wouldn’t need to keep revisiting all the websites that interest you to see what new information they’ve added.
This is where RSS comes in. RSS offers a simple way of gathering and sharing information without all of that time consuming activity involved in actually going to look for it. All the latest news comes to you rather than you having to go looking for it.
So what is RSS, again?
RSS means different things to different people, and I don’t just mean what the acronym stands for – that’s Really Simple Syndication in case you were wondering.
You and I are looking for an easy (and preferably anonymous) way of keeping up to date with all the latest information from sites we’re interested in – a way to skim through it in our own time, reading items which are of interest and passing over the rest. With RSS, we can get it all in one place and be safe in the knowledge that all this comes without us having to part with our email address and that nagging concern that we might have just opened ourselves up to yet more offers of “enhancements” and “ebay security checks” .
For publishers of websites and blogs, they just want a way to distribute and share their latest news and information with individuals, sites and directories who have requested it. The fact that this happens automatically without running the gauntlet of touchy spam filters is great and the fact that people feel comfortable about subscribing because it is anonymous is even better.
Looks like a Win-Win situation to me.
How do I use RSS?
Ok, sounds good but what do I need if I want to use RSS?
Well, remembering that RSS is really just a way of distributing or collecting information, we need two things to use it: some information that we want to subscribe to (an RSS Feed) and then something to use to collect it and read it (an RSS reader).
Let’s look at RSS readers first – RSS readers can either sit on your PC or can be part of a website online. (Think of it a bit like your email programs: Outlook is a program on your PC, whereas Hotmail is a website online.) Recently, the most popular ones have been online so we’ll concentrate on those – Google Reader and Bloglines lead the way and now you also have the option of using readers which come as part of the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers too.
To start, I’d probably recommend that you pop along to Google Reader – you’ll need a Google Account if you don’t already have one but it’s quick and easy to set up and then you’ll soon be ready to start selecting what information you want to receive. You do that by adding RSS Feeds.
How to find RSS feeds?
This is getting easier and easier for us, partly because the browsers that we use have started to highlight the fact that they are there. Basically, you want to be on the look out for some of the symbols below, all of which do the same thing – they let you know that there is an RSS feed waiting for you!
Just click on the image – if you see a page of text then copy the URL (the address of the page) and then go to your RSS Reader, click on “Add Subscription” or “Add Feed” and paste it in. That’s all you have to do. If you see a more friendly page of images and some text, then it’s even easier – just follow the instructions there!
What’s next?
Well, in terms of anything technical, that’s it. Once you’ve subscribed to the RSS feed, or rather the information from the site, you just sit back and let it do all the chasing and collecting for you, delivering the new stuff from that site to you – and the website will never know it’s you. Safe secure and instant. If you want it to stop, then that’s a simple click of the mouse, deleting the feed in your RSS reader.
Using RSS really is a massive time saver – you get the information delivered to you, saving all the hassle of having to revisit your sites in case there’s some thing new. All you have to do is decide what you want to read and delete the rest. And for publishers, you get to deliver your news securely to people who really want to receive it, but remember that the onus is on you to keep the quality high because, if not, they’re gone!
Questions?
I hope that has helped but if you’ve still got questions then leave a comment or drop me a line and I’ll try to help.