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Technology is Changing Marketing

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Marketing Your Business Online – It’s More Important Than Ever

I just bought a new TV recently and I need to start by saying I love it. It’s a bright, shiny new Sony Bravia LED TV that’s incredibly thin, has a brilliant picture and has become a bit of an eye opener for me. Anyone who knows me will quickly pick up on the fact that I am pretty technically inclined (read this as I a a gadget guy), but this new TV caught me completely off guard and it was only this morning that my mind really started to grasp the significance. Especially when it comes to marketing and business!

You see, the last TV I bought was over four years ago and my how things have changed in four short years. This previous TV was near the end of the cycle for that particular technology, so I was able to get a great deal, but this new TV is cutting edge, far superior and for significantly less. It’s already got my mind wandering as to what will be available in four years, but that’s for another post.

Right now, I need to get you up to speed on my revelation. [Read more…]

Is Your Business On YouTube? It Better Be!

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Are You on YouTube?YouTube


Recently I wrote an article about how Facebook has become a force and why it’s important for a company to get their Facebook Fanpage set up. Well, YouTube can be just as valuable to business as Facebook if a well designed marketing plan is created.

If you thought the Facebook Facts were interesting, look at these tidbits about YouTube.

  • Over 2,000,000,000 (yep that’s billion!) video views per day
  • 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute
  • YouTube is the second largest search engine, after Google
  • Video results are showing up more often in Google search results

What exactly does this mean to business? Opportunity! Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are informative how to style videos and this is mostly why YouTube has moved up to second place as a choice for a search engine.

Do you have a business with a product or service that could benefit from being explained via video? Often people want to be shown how something works or how to do a certain task with a product. One area I have found this to be beneficial is when I undertake a home renovation project.

There is no shortage of videos helping homeowners learn the process of repairing toilets, installing electrical devices or even fixing garage doors. More often than not, these videos are provided by people in that particular industry as a “public service”. Really though they are planting their product or service in the mind of consumers as a go to person or company for information, advise and potentially new sales.

Why You Want A Youtube Channel

Could your business benefit from a little extra exposure, a few more calls and some additional sales? I’m pretty sure we both know your answer to this question, otherwise you wouldn’t still be reading, would you?

This is where having your own YouTube channel can help give you an edge over the competition. Much like having a Facebook Fanpage, having a YouTube channel can set you and your business apart and provide you with one additional place to be found by potential customers.

A YouTube channel doesn’t have to be something elaborate and doesn’t have to contain an extensive collection of videos. It can be as simple as one video in your channel like this one,

Plaka Greek Restaurant YouTube Channel

The important aspect is that it is complete with plenty of information about your company, how to contact you and your services. In my example, note how the video contains information about what they offer, where they can be found and how to contact them. This is further reinforced on the channel itself as under their profile explains what they offer “Fine Greek Food”, their web address, their physical address and even a phone number for reservations and take-out orders. It’s simply another billboard out on the internet, which directs people back to your business. Which is really what marketing is really all about.

Now, much like almost everything on the internet, these channels can be highly customized to best position your business. This customization should be taken advantage of to help promote your product or service and to make it easier for potential clients to find out more. Here’s an example of an even more decked out channel with a very clear message.

Organizing Clutter Video Channel

From the channel name to the extensive number of videos it serves to promote the product and cater to people specifically looking for information on organizing and decluttering their home. This has helped to contribute to the success and growth of the channel and as this was written, to having over 500 subscribers and over 5,000 friends of the channel. Hopefully that number is even higher now as it’s my wife’s channel!

So How Can You Leverage YouTube?

Hopefully you understand the benefits of having a YouTube channel, but now it comes down to how you can use it to leverage your business on the internet. Let’s look at some quick ideas that worked for other businesses.

FAQ’s

Does your business have a list of Frequently Asked Questions by your clients? Why not create a series of videos that answer these questions and place them on your channel? This works two fold, the questions may turn up in search results when other people are inquiring about similar products and attract new clients and it may result in new business

What’s In the Box?

Do customers often wonder what all is included with a product you sell or a service you provide? If it’s a product in a box, video tape someone opening the box and explaining each item in the box. This would work incredibly well if you have a product like a video camera that includes additional cables for plugging into TV’s etc. The person explaining the items could explain what the “mystery cables” are used with.

If you are a furnace cleaning service, why not make a video detailing the areas of the furnace you inspect and explain how it benefits the client? What do you believe your clients want to know about your product or service? Tell them the answers in a video!

Compare Products

Do you have multiple products that are similar but have slightly different uses? For a drycleaner, perhaps you explain the difference between your cleaning process and the industry standard cleaning process (if yours is different of course, no fibbing!). If your company provides free onsite service, how does this benefit the client versus what the competition does?

Helping You Market Online

Really, there is no limit to the ideas available to help increase your marketing, for your particular business, the only limit is your creativity. If you are absolutely stymied, send me a quick email with info about your product and I will send you some ideas back.

Now I’m not sure what type of feedback I will get from people. I may have a thousand people read this and only one emails me, or I could have 50 people read this and all 50 can see the value and request some ideas. It’s kind of a shot in the dark, so I’ll start this off by putting an imaginary cap of a maximum of five emails of these a month, but perhaps I can feature them in a post every month or two that will also help provide your product or service with extra exposure. It’s free to you, so what do you have to lose?

So don’t wait, send me an email with your questions! Or just as good, send me an email to tell us how you market your business or service online!

Web Video – How to Market Your Business with Web video

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Ironically, I create web video promotions for other local businesses, but when it comes time for my site, I’m the last person in line. Well, hopefully I can change that over the next week.

I’ve scheduled some time to do some quick videos, so watch for them to appear shortly, along with some other changes for the site as well. In the meantime, I’ll use some of the videos I have recently put together to help explain web video marketing for local businesses a bit better.

If you aren’t aware of some of the recent headlines, more and more people are moving away from regular TV and watching all their shows and movies online. Companies like Apple with iTunes and Netflix with their service are making it easier and easier to accomplish this.

This is all leading to an entire marketing shift, at least for those paying attention. Effectiveness of Yellow Pages ads has dropped drastically (yet prices continue to go up) as people search online rather than leafing through big phone books, commercials on regular television have become costlier, yet less effective and with PVR’s saturating the market the majority get fast forwarded through anyway. Even local radio ads are losing effectiveness as more people switch to satellite radio services.

So how can companies get their products and services in front of consumer’s eyes? One huge area of potential is Facebook. If you are on Facebook, who hasn’t seen a video marketing a product on their wall or an ad down the side of their profile page? Combine this with the explosion of Facebook Fanpages (which ironically even show up at the end of TV commercials that are fast forwarded anyway) and you can understand why  Facebook is poised to become a major player for companies advertising online.

As an example, just last week our Realtor took my wife and I out for lunch to a fabulous little Greek restaurant here in Calgary, Plaka Greek Taverna. We had such a great time there we are looking forward to going back. Now while I was there, I managed to take some pictures, capture a little video and then when I had some time, I put the following video together, and then I added it to my Facebook stream to show to people and help promote Yianni’s business

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After seeing the video, wouldn’t you like to go for lunch there? If you do, tell them you came after seeing the video Bill did!!! This is a simple example of how you can market your business online by using web video.

The important aspects of the video, which are often missed by people creating their own promotional videos, are the following;

  1. The name of the business is listed several times
  2. The phone number and address are included for people to write down
  3. Music adds to the experience
  4. It’s short, but effective

If you are interested in creating some web videos to help promote your business online, be sure to include the above information in them. Alternatively if you would be interested in having me come in and talk about creating some promotional videos for you, I can be reached via email at bill(at)bill.biko.com, just replace the (at) with @, or you can reach me via phone at 403-870-4663.

Internet Marketing in Calgary – Internet Marketing Without a Net Part 8

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OK, I admit it, I have been slacking! I haven’t really done anything in almost two weeks on this project as I was too busy launching another site for a client. It went live last week and I already have more videos and articles out than my granite countertop promotion.

Guess the difference is one I am getting paid for, while the other I may or may not eventually get paid for. My intent was to start a blog as well, but just hasn’t been in the schedule yet. Still the results aren’t bad!

Right now I am sitting as follows;

Granite countertop installers Calgary …..8th spot in Google

Granite countertop companies Calgary …8th spot in Google

Granite installers Calgary …………………9th spot in Google

Granite countertops Calgary………………..12th spot in Google

Granite countertop Calgary…………………..34th spot in Google

The links from other sites are slowly starting to build and it’s really a matter of me adding more videos and/or articles and some time. My deadline to get back to all the granite companies I emailed is coming up fast, so by the end of this week I will email them again to see if there are any takers.

From my perspective, the real value for these companies is the groundwork is already done. At this point I could come into their offices or shops, easily create another ten videos and brand everything with their company information. It could even include pictures or video of some of their best installs.

Over time it would help push them up the rankings even more, provide them with potentially two first page rankings (if it was someone from page one who went with me that is!) and create another steady stream of potential clients. Of course we have to wait and see what happens now won’t we!

Internet Marketing in Calgary – Marketing Without a Net Part 6

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At this point we’ve kind of reached a wall. It’s still fairly early in the process and as of this evening I now have four different videos pushed out there and I submitted one article. In a perfect world we would be sitting around 250 different sources having our little bit of info, but as of earlier this evening we only had two backlinks showing up.

So it will take some time for these articles to start appearing and the videos, which used to rank within hours, have definitely slowed down in the speed of them appearing. Yet they are showing up, so now it’s just a matter of patience and seeing what next week brings.

Internet Marketing in Calgary – Marketing Without a Net Part 5

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Good News and Bad News

OK, perhaps it really isn’t bad news, but it sounded better than good news and OK news! So first the “bad news”, we climbed up a bit higher in the rankings, but only one spot! We have crawled up to lucky 13 spot.

We have two videos out presently and another should go out in the next few days. Since this is sort of  “test” project, I am only donating spare time to it and it is taking off slower than it should. In the perfect campaign world, we would launch four or five videos within the first week to get immediate traction. By submitting less and on a slower pace, we of course are getting results slower.

Now for the good news! For one of the other search terms “granite countertop companies calgary”, one of our videos is showing up on page one already and is sitting in ninth spot! We are also showing up in #32 with a video as well.

We’re still not high enough to get any steady traffic, just a couple hits here and there, but it’s moving forward. I will be making one small change to the main landing page, http://www.granitecountertopscalgary.com. I currently ask for name, email and phone. I’m going to take phone out and just leave it as name and email.

I’d been thinking about this for a few days now and people will tend to be a bit more reluctant about releasing their phone number to get access to the Free granite countertop installer report. So initially this will help draw leads, at least on paper!

Internet Marketing in Calgary – Marketing Without a Net Part 4

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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!

Internet Marketing in Calgary – Marketing Without a Net Part 3

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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!

Internet Marketing in Calgary – Marketing Without a Net Part 2

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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.

Internet Marketing in Calgary – Marketing Without a Net

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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.