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July 19th, I sent my first batch of videos out. By mid afternoon I already climbed up to 14th. Frankly I am a bit disappointed, but when you are doing this live, sometimes it doesn’t work as fast as you hope. I had hoped the video would transport us to page 1, but alas, no.
If you want to take a try, go to www.google.ca and type in “granite countertops calgary” you should find me near the top of page 2! In the meantime, I am working on video # 2 and possibly 3 tonight!
Just to reset the time line, we are now officially nine days in from when I started on July 9th. Of course by starting, that really was starting the second stage. I had already prepared the reports I was giving away, I already had the domain I was directing people towards and it was just sitting there.
It was July 9th, I sent the email out to the various Calgary granite countertop installers I found on the first page of Google introducing myself and explaining what I was doing. To date, not one of them has contacted me, although it appears most if not all have looked at the site. Here is the report I have so far.
Everything prior to July 8th (and most likely a couple views on the 8th) were me or people I asked to take a look at the site. Now I posted my first article about this on the 10th, so I may have tainted my own results by doing this, but I posted near the end of the day and by late morning I already had four views that day. Not many people are reading this (come on it’s a new site right now!), so perhaps it was only a minor tainting.
Friday the 9th was a half day for many people in Calgary due to the Stampede Parade, but still four people viewed the page, then another four on the tenth which was the Saturday (one being me!) and then Monday morning another five appeared. So I sent it out to 12 email addresses in total and it appears at least 13 views occurred. I know the 14th was another person I sent directly there and the one today was me.
So starting and inclusive of the 9th, 19 total views. Now I am going out on a limb, but I have to assume the majority of these were directly from the email as there were no links to the site, and it shouldn’t have appeared anywhere until after I posted on the 10th. It was on the 10th I put the first backlink in place via these posts! I can account for five of the visits, but that still left 14 hopefully via the initial email.
You have to remember, Google didn’t get it’s first first hint the page was actually out there yet, until I put a post out on the 10th with a link to the site. After this, it wasn’t until around the 16th that I noticed I was already ranking 17th with just a single backlink.
Since then there have been a couple more subtle links throw out directing people to the page, but nothing major until this morning, when I finally did the first initial push and submitted a video and info out to around 40 sites.
Once again, we will sit back and see what happens over the next couple of days and I will then submit the next piece. Check back in to see where it goes!
OK, here we are five days later and I really haven’t had a chance to start marketing this project with some slide show videos yet. I have one already prepared, but the initial time to set up the necessary profiles has escaped me due to the sudden overload of work coming in.
So if somehow an excess of work can be seen as a bad thing, I wish it was bad more often! So now for the good part. Based on just a couple inbound links my granite countertops Calgary page had already jumped up into 17th position on Google earlier this week.
As I mentioned I’ve been a tad busy and hadn’t made time to post about it until now. So the relevance of this in case you are missing this is that the page is ranking due to a few factors right off the bat.
First a very strategically chosen keyword phrase that is matching the domain name. Just to recap, the full domain is http://www.granitecountertopscalgary.com and granite countertops Calgary is the main phrase I am targeting.
Second, the page itself is highly SEO optimized with some nice keyword density and proper tagging to help it rank effectively.
Third, I already have a few simple backlinks coming to it to help build relevance. As I find more time to move forward with more backlinks, start to release the videos out into the various video platforms and actually spend time working on it, we should start seeing it gain some real traction.
At this point I am pretty confident high rankings on page one shouldn’t be very hard to achieve.
I’m running an Internet Marketing experiment here in Calgary revolving around a web video marketing campaign that involves a lead capture page and a free report. On July 7th, I sent out an email to ten companies in Calgary that deal in installing granite countertops. The email was my version of marketing without a net.
You see I had approached these ten companies (actually it ended up being eleven, I had intended on ten, but I grabbed a bonus company!), with an offer to provide my services to help obtain leads for them. I had chosen this particular type of company due to the product and the profits involved.
A granite countertop install is reasonably expensive, and due to this, there is some nice profit involved as well. Since there is profit involved, there is also a lot of competition and marketing done by these companies to get the business. In other words, they have no problems spending money to make even more money.
Initially my objective was to create a lead capture page, build a report that I would give away in trade for contact info (or more accurately leads) and also create a series of three to five videos that I would distribute out to various video sites. The goal of these videos was to create traffic that would be driven to my site where I would capture the lead in exchange for the report. Then once I had a stream of traffic and some leads coming in, at that point I would then go out and approach the various granite installers in Calgary with proof of what I could do.
Somehow though, I thought of a slightly more interesting angle, which brings us back to the first paragraph where I took a shortcut an emailed eleven granite installers about my page before I started sending out videos. I included a link to the page itself , which can be found at http:/www.granitecountertopscalgary.com and made an offer to them. I sent the same email to all of them and explained I was sending it out to the top ten listed granite installers in Calgary. In the email I offered to work with one of them at a reduced rate if they contacted me and we could come to an agreement to work together on the web campaign.
I also said if no one contacted me, I would begin my campaign and get back to them within about 45 to 60 days with updated search results. I am confident by that time I will be able to exhibit some reasonably strong results.
Well sadly to me, not one of them replied back. I know several of them received the email as I did receive a spike in people accessing the site and since there were no actual links out there directing anyone to it, the only way they could find it was via my invitation and the direct link.
It was the first day of the Calgary Stampede and many people had today off due to the parade this morning, so perhaps I will hear something on Monday. My goal at this time is to prepare at least one video for early next week to send off to start gaining some traction for the site. Additionally I will start creating some backlinks as well and hopefully by the end of the week my site should start showing some traction.
So this is part one of my Marketing Without a Net experiment, stay tuned for updates on how it goes.
Why should you use video on the web to help promote your local business? The best answer is because it works, but that isn’t enough for everyone to line up and start working with me.
For those of you who haven’t lined up yet, how about this, YouTube is now the second biggest search engine on the web. People search within YouTube more than they use Bing, more than they use Yahoo and more than any other of the search engines with the exception of Google. Who just happened to have bought YouTube in 2006 as they recognized even back then that video on the web was growing at a phenomenal pace.
How people find businesses is evolving and the fastest way this evolution is occurring is how businesses are being found these days. People simply don’t go look up a local plumbing company or the closest five star steak house in the yellow pages anymore, they look it up on the internet using a search engine like Google. In fact, we recycled our yellow pages this year as they simply took up space!
With more and more people using the internet to search for information, it only makes sense for businesses to be found there.The Holy Grail for most businesses then, is to be one of the first results when people search for their type of business, whether it’s a local plumber, or whether it’s a local dentist.
The problem that occurs is it’s an unfair playing field out there. People can buy their way to the top by paying for what are called sponsored links, other people spend thousands of dollars to create fancy websites with cutting edge optimization techniques that work for a while and then get outdated quickly and drop them out of the search rankings as new techniques come up. So where does this leave you?
Currently and from recent projections, the answer is web video campaigns. Specific campaigns designed to get you and your company out in front of your competitors and ranked in the searches. The bonus of using video and pushing it out onto the internet is that video results are achieving some of the top results for searches these days.
Video results are skyrocketing to the top of searches and this is actually able to even the playing field, or in our case tip it to your advantage. Would having an unfair advantage that could lead to a steady stream of clients for your business interest you?
