realwebmktg

by John Eberhard

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Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Wordpress.com has started doing something that I consider idiotic. They are taking down any blog on their system if they discover you have been (gasp!) linking to commercial web sites in your blog posts. Another example of the misguided "anti marketing" attitudes you see around in various places on the Internet and in the IT world.

They have taken down my blog on there and several that we made for clients. So I am going around them. I am creating sub-folders on one of my domains and creating Wordpress blogs for clients there.

I remember running into this "anti Marketing" attitude when I worked at Executive Software and at Panda Software. I wonder if those people would have pause to consider where their paychecks come from and the fact that marketing to a large extent makes it possible for commerce to take place and for them to earn a living.

Here is exactly what they said in response to an email:

“You agreed to the WordPress.com Terms of Service when you signed up.

”WordPress.com does not allow blogs that are created for the purpose of directing traffic or creating backlinks to commercial web sites, affiliate/ptc programs or multi-level marketing campaigns. Your site has been suspended and will not be returned to you.”

It's amazing how many of these sites are like this. HubPages.com has a very similar anti marketing policy. You can have one link on each page you make and not any more.

My plan is to not use Wordpress.com any more.

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by John Eberhard

At this time of year, going back for several years, I usually do an article about what we can expect from Internet marketing in the coming year.

a. Pay Per Click Advertising: PPC is still a very dominant force and very effective, though its use is pretty much limited to high ticket items because of its cost. PPC is an excellent way to drive traffic to your site on an immediate basis, and due to the excellent statistical and monitoring tools, in skilled hands it can be very effective. It’s just not viable for selling books and CDs.

b. Social Media: Social media will continue to be an important avenue in online marketing, with Facebook being the big player, then YouTube, then Twitter, then LinkedIn. I think social media is a great vehicle for marketing small businesses with limited budgets and for low cost items. A little over a year ago Facebook made changes allowing you to customize the look of your fan pages, with one screen that visitors would see before they “liked” you and a different one afterwards. MySpace really crashed in the last year in terms of usage, and was sold for peanuts, after having been the biggest thing in social media just a few years ago. With Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the key is to get lots of friends/followers/connections, so that whatever communications you send out get seen by lots of people. Google+ is Google’s entry into the social media universe (similar to Facebook), and will start to become more popular in the coming year.

c. SEO: Search Engine Optimization has always been a vital part of website marketing and that will not change in the coming year. The term refers to doing research to find the best keywords to use, then inputting those keywords into specific places on your website, then building up links to your site from other sites around the web.

The major techniques Real Web Marketing Inc. has used for link building for the past few years have been:

1. Submitting articles to article directories
2. Writing press releases and submitting these to online PR sites
3. Creating multiple blogs and posting articles and releases to these, including links back to the client’s main site

Google came out with a new algorithm update in February 2011 called “Panda,” and has come out with minor updates every couple of weeks since then. The major purpose of the update appears to be to stop people from building up links to their sites via article directories. We are still doing link building using the techniques listed above, and I am closely watching the statistics for these clients to see if Panda is defeating our efforts. The above program is still working fine as measured by statistics. But we can probably figure that sometime in the next year, the effectiveness of article marketing will diminish, and we will have to come up with another method of developing links.

d. Local SEO: I should explain that there are two significantly different approaches to SEO. It depends on whether your company is local, i.e. only delivering products or services to a specific geographical area, or regional or national. This distinction has become much more important in the last year.

For local companies, it is much more important to go for local oriented keywords, i.e. keywords that mention the city or cities where the company does business. In other words, a dentist would not try to target or rank for general keywords like “dentist” or “root canals,” because he would be competing with basically every other dentist on the face of the earth. Instead he would target keywords like “dentist Glendale” or “dentist Pasadena,” or “root canal Glendale.” You still have to do keyword research to find keywords that have traffic coming to them, because it doesn’t do any good to target a keyword and rank number one for it when nobody searches for it. If you’re in a major metro area like Los Angeles it is smart to include research on keywords relating to names of suburbs or neighborhoods.

Once you find local oriented keywords that have search traffic, you put those keywords into your site the same way as you do for national SEO. Another technique is to select the largest traffic keywords on your list and register some domain names that contain those keywords in the name. Then put up a micro-site on those domains, i.e. a small site. Make sure you don’t make that site identical to your main site as Google frowns on multiple identical sites.

Once you complete keyword research, input those keywords into your main site, and put up one or more microsites, then you still have to do link building, to get your site ranking for those keywords.

e. Local Marketing: This has been the biggest change in the last year. Google has completely changed the search landscape with the introduction of Google Maps/Places. When someone enters a search that Google determines is local in nature, they put up a map in the right hand column showing businesses near you. And then you will see listings in the left hand column related to the red dots on that map. Google keeps changing the way the listings are displayed. Right now there is a special section in the left hand column with all the Google Maps listings. Both Yahoo and Bing have introduced a similar feature.

The first thing to do is to make sure there is a listing on Google Maps/Places for your business. Google gas created thousands of listings for businesses, but not all of course. So you have to see if you have a listing and if so, claim it. If not put one up.

Then in order to get your listing to appear at or near the top, you have to put up listings (called “citations” in Google parlance) on other local listings sites, and ensure you get online reviews from your customers. So this is an ongoing action and is very important, especially in competitive industries, because getting your Google Maps/Places listing on page one of the results will drive a lot of traffic to you.

f. Email Marketing: The most effective use of email marketing today is to build up a large in-house email list by offering an email newsletter or offering other items such as white papers or special reports, then sending newsletters and other offerings to that list. Many companies neglect this completely and are leaving money on the table. Just make sure you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

g. Blogs: I have written extensively about the effectiveness of blogs. They are one of the best things you can do, and it’s free. I have several blogs and for the last several years they have been the biggest source of traffic to my main site. But once you start a blog you have to post to it regularly for it to do any good.

h. Video: Video is a great way to effectively communicate the benefits of your products or services, and posting on YouTube and other video sharing sites can give you lots of exposure.

Best wishes for 2012 and may it be your most prosperous year ever. There is no question that the economy is affecting us all, but with smart and effective marketing we can overcome it and be successful.

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by John Eberhard

SEO stands for search engine optimization. The purpose of SEO is to get your web site to rank well for certain specific keywords on search engines, so that you get more traffic to the site from those search engines.

It used to be that SEO meant taking actions to the site itself to make it more likely to rank for your keywords, which is called “on-page optimization.” It still means that, but now the term has taken on the additional meaning of actions you take to build up links to your site, which is called “off-page optimization.”

Local or National?

The first thing to do when considering embarking on search engine optimization is to determine whether your business is local or national in nature. Do you sell products or services to people only in one local area, or nationally or internationally?

If yours is a local company, then your efforts should be directed towards ranking well on Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing Local, as well as doing SEO specifically for local oriented keywords, i.e. keywords that contain the name of the cities or towns where you do business. See my recent articles on local businesses and Google Maps.

National

If you have a national business like mine (I do business with companies all across the U.S.) then you need to do regular SEO. This consists of:

1. Keyword Research: This means to come up with a list of possible keywords and then finding out the amount of traffic they are getting (how many people are searching for them), and the number of sites that are competing for them. You want to find keywords that have a low number of sites competing for them, because if the number is too high, you just won’t be able to compete for those keywords, at least not in the short term. I consider the number of competing sites to be more important than the traffic per keyword, and I sort the keywords and group them by the number of competing sites. Most single word keywords are too competitive.

1. On-Page Optimization: Isn’t that a fancy word? That’s at least a $10 word I think. Anyway, this means to take the keywords that you select, and to put them into the various pages of your site. You have to write titles and descriptions for each individual page of your site, then put those into the meta-tags, or invisible code of your web page. Those titles and descriptions are then what appears on Google or other search engines when your listing comes up. Usually it works best to select 3 primary keywords for each page, that are most relevant to that particular page, then write titles and descriptions using those keywords. You can also put keywords into what are called “alt tags,” which are tags associated with pictures on your page.

1. Link Building: Next it is important to build up links to your web site coming from other web sites. Google has said for years that they consider the number of links to your site to be the most important criteria in determining how well it ranks for any given keyword. I have been engaged in link building in various forms for about 7 years. Here are the most effective forms of link building that I have found:

1.  
   1. Press Releases: Write press releases about your company and then submit these to online PR sites, and post them to your blog or blogs. When you post them to a blog, include text links in the blog post that point to pages on your main site.
   2. Blogs: Post items regularly to your blog or blogs, and include text links linking to various pages on your main web site.
   3. Article Marketing: Write articles about your company topic and post these to article directories.

SEO people used to do what is called reciprocal linking, contacting other web site owners and offering to link to them if they’ll link to you. Google took steps to discount these types of links several year ago, so it is typically not done anymore, though I occasionally see companies still offering this or software being offered that is geared to this.

Panda

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Google’s algorithm update called “Panda,” which began in February, and there have been regular additions to it every couple weeks since then.

It appears that the intention of Panda is to make it so web site owners can’t do anything to improve their search engine rankings, and specifically to target article marketing, where you submit the same article to multiple article directories.

I have been silent on Panda up until now, other than discussing it with colleagues. First of all I will say that I don’t agree with the overall apparent intention to make it so web site owners can’t improve their rankings. I think this objective is something that is good for Google or makes things easier for them, but is bad for web site owners. Thus I will condemn it here in the strongest terms.

Second I’ll discuss whether this affects link building. I think it will affect link building in the coming year. But since I am doing link building for a number of clients using the actions listed above, I have closely monitored the effects, in terms of the only statistics that matter, namely number of links, keyword rankings and web site traffic.

For the clients that I am monitoring, I am seeing no adverse effects due to Panda, in terms of links, rankings and traffic. The above link building program is still working well and getting good results. Will we have to change it eventually? Yes probably. When the statistics indicate it. But in my opinion we have not reached that point yet.

With an overwhelming market share in terms of online searches, I believe Google has too much power. They hate people finding ways to “game” their system as they put it. But from my perspective, if, as a small business owner, you can’t find a way to be proactive or “cause” over your rankings situation, then you just have to sit there as total “effect.” Their philosophy seems to benefit entities that are already well established and known, but small companies that are just now starting to do SEO are just out of luck.

I don’t agree with that, and will continue to find the best ways for companies to be able to improve their rankings and be “cause” over their situations.

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by John Eberhard

I was talking to a friend recently who is a salesman for a company similar to mine, and he told me that he is running into more people lately who have a negative reaction when he brings up pay per click advertising (PPC) on Google AdWords or MSN Ad Center.

I have been giving this some thought as to why this would be, and whether many people have given up on PPC. My theory on this is that PPC has been getting more and more competitive over the last few years, in that there are more people using it and that drives bids higher. So it makes PPC more difficult to do, especially if you’re managing it yourself or if you have a company “managing” it who only looks at your account every couple months.

What Companies Are a Good Fit?

There is also the factor of whether your company and product are a good fit for PPC advertising in the first place.

I have said in past articles that PPC works best for high ticket items, and let’s arbitrarily set that at say, $200 or more. If you are selling a book or a CD or some other similar low ticket item, pay per click advertising is not right for you. The reason for this is driven by the bid levels. Bids are driven by how many companies are competing for any given keyword.

Let’s say that the bid level for a keyword that you want is $1.00. That’s not unusual today. That means that every time someone clicks on one of your ads, you will get charged $1.00. The days when you could get a competitive keyword for 15 or 20 cents are long gone. I saw a book recently claiming to give the real skinny on how to do pay per click management and throughout it was talking about getting people to click on your ads for 5 to 10 cents. That just doesn’t exist any more so it really threw the whole “system” this guy was selling out the window.

From my experience managing many accounts over the last few years, PPC works extremely well for companies like home improvement, for example, where the average sale is in the thousands, and especially in cases where the product is something you really need and not a luxury item. It works well in health care, but there you really have to know what you’re doing because there is so much competition.

Conversions

The purpose of setting up a PPC advertising account is to drive in a steady flow of leads or sales to a business. In PPC terminology we call this a “conversion,” which is defined as someone who calls in from the campaign or fills out a form on the web site asking for more information, an appointment, etc.

It is vital with both Google AdWords and MSN Ad Center to set up what is called “conversion code” and put that on certain pages on your site. This allows the Google or MSN interface to track the number of conversions you are getting, and you can see which campaign, which ads, and which keywords your conversions are coming from. This also allows you to see what your cost per conversion is.

It is also a good idea to set up phone call tracking, so that you can know how many phone call conversions you are getting. There are a number of companies that do this, where a new toll free or local number is set up, that bounces to your phone number, and you put that number on your PPC landing pages. If you have multiple campaigns you can set up multiple numbers to track them all. Most of these companies can also record all the calls so you can review them later if desired.

Managing

The first task of managing a pay per click account once it is set up, is to get it to the point where it is producing a steady and viable flow of leads or sales. You have to select a budget for your account, and this has to be adequate to produce enough people clicking on your ad and coming to your landing page, so that a percentage will fill out the form or call and become a conversion.

If your average cost per click is $1.00, and your monthly budget is $100, that’s not going to produce very many conversions. I read somewhere that the average nationally for conversions for lead generation campaigns is 3%. So in the above scenario, with a monthly budget of $100, you are only going to get 3 conversions per month. So you have to select a budget that is enough to produce enough leads to make it worth doing.

With online sales, Ed Dale says that the average conversion percentage is 0.5%. So with 200 people clicking through to your landing page, you would get one sale.

With many keywords, the average bid, or cost per clickthrough, is much higher than $1.00. It depends on the industry.

Here are some general fixes for specific problems:

Low Impressions: Add more keywords

Good Impressions but Low Clickthrough Rates: Write new text ads and test them against your current ads. This is called an A-B test when you test multiple ads or landing pages against each other.

Good Clickthrough Rates but Poor Conversions: Look at your landing pages. If the conversions are poor your landing page is to blame. Write new copy, or come up with a new offer. Then put up one or more new landing pages.

High Cost per Conversion: Adjust your bids. Look for expensive keywords where you are getting high clickthroughs and spending a lot of money but getting no conversions. Pause those keywords.

Still Relevant?

So in answer to the question in the title of this article, is pay per click advertising still relevant today? The answer is – absolutely. As long as it is a good fit for your product or industry, PPC can produce a steady flow of leads or sales for your business.

But if you are managing it yourself and not getting any joy, before throwing your hands up in despair and turning your account off, have a professional PPC manager work on your account. And make sure he will actually manage your account weekly. I have recently run into people who had PPC managers who seemed to be asleep at the wheel and were not tracking what was happening with the accounts. One allowed the cost per conversion to double over the course of a year. Another was only looking at the account every other month.

A professional PPC manager can get the best possible results out of your account.

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Here is a new video I just completed introducing Real Web Marketing Inc.

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by John Eberhard

The marketing of a local business, one that just sells products or services within a limited geographical area, such as a restaurant, a health care practice, or a home improvement company, is a special issue and has to be treated differently from a business that can sell its products or services nationally or internationally.

What’s More Important for a Local Business

Google Maps: Google has completely changed the search landscape with the introduction of Google Maps. When someone enters a search that Google determines is local in nature, they put up a map in the right hand column showing businesses near you. And then you will see listings in the left hand column related to the red dots on that map. Google keeps changing the way the listings are displayed. Right now there is a special section in the left hand column with all the Google Maps listings. See below for a screen shot of a search for pizza.

When I first started doing work on Google Maps I thought you could just throw up a listing on Google Maps and you were done. But I soon found out that with some particularly competitive industries, such as dentists for instance, that you had to continue to work it month to month by adding more and more listings on other sites (called “citations” in Google parlance, and Google sees these and it helps push your listing toward the top). Also it is important to work to get more reviews from customers.

But if you get onto the first page of Google results via Google Maps, you will see good traffic from that.

Google AdWords: Pay per click advertising through Google AdWords is very important for the local business, but only for relatively high ticket items, i.e. products or services that sell for say $200 or more. That is because of the large number of businesses that now advertise on Google AdWords, which pushes the bid prices up. So this works very well for say, a home improvement company that sells services starting at $5,000, but not so well for a company that sells something for $50.

But if it is appropriate for your type of business, pay per click is a great way to generate leads or sales, quickly, and on an ongoing basis. And you can select the exact geographical area where your ads will appear, so you don’t waste your money on people outside your service area.

Email Marketing: Marketing to people via email, specifically by creating a growing an “in-house” list of customers and prospects, is vital for the local business. I have observed that renting email lists, which was a huge deal back in the early 2000s, is now pretty much dead, because of the proliferation of spam. But if people are already aware of you, then email newsletters and other reminders about you and your services are vital today.

This means you have to have things on your web site for what we call “capturing identities.” This means to have a “contact us” form, but also to offer things that will appeal to your prospects and especially appeal to people who would be your prospect but are not ready to buy right now. So it is a good idea to offer an email newsletter, as well as free information products such as free reports on topics related to your business. Basically these are things to build up your email list.

Video: Having videos on YouTube and on various places on your site has become more important over the last few years. This is an excellent way to differentiate your company from the pack and show the public what you do. See my recent articles on video marketing (1, 2).

Blogging: Having a blog and posting regular articles to it is an excellent way to drive traffic to a web site, although you can’t be guaranteed that everyone will be a local area resident. The key with blogging is to post things regularly, and to send a notice called a “ping” to blog search engines each time (this is done automatically in Wordpress).

What’s Less Important

SEO for General Keywords: If you are a dentist in Glendale, it is not very important for you to try to rank for the keyword “dentist.” Remember you will be competing with every dentist in the entire world. Similarly if you have a pizza restaurant in Pasadena, you should not try to do actions to rank for “pizza.” You’ll be competing with thousands of other restaurants and with corporate company sites like Pizza Hut and Dominoes.

What IS important for a local business these days is getting your web site to rank for local oriented keywords, like “dentist Glendale” or “pizza Pasadena.”

But I will add a big caution on this. I’ve seen companies similar to mine going around selling local businesses on services to get them to rank for local keywords like this. And the thing is that it will do you NO good whatsoever unless those keywords have some decent traffic coming to them. In other words, you can rank #1 for a keyword, but if no one is searching for it, so what? I have seen cases where someone was sold a package to get them ranking for local keywords and most or all of them had no value. So you have to do some research and see what kind of traffic the keywords have first before embarking on something like that. It depends on what industry you’re in and what location you’re in.

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Company Offers Shooting of Live Video, Editing, and Uploading to Video Sharing Sites

LOS ANGELES: Real Web Marketing Inc. (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company based in Southern California, is now offering live action video shooting and editing services. The company recently completed its first live action video editing project for Aero & Marine Tax Professionals, a tax consulting company located in northern California that helps people avoid paying sales tax on the purchase of aircraft.

Real Web Marketing’s video project for Aero & Marine Tax Professionals involved flying to Medford, Oregon to videotape the company’s seminar presented to aircraft owners. The completed video can be seen here:

John Eberhard, President of Real Web Marketing Inc., stated, “A while back we started doing video production, but we were limited to simple Powerpoint style slide show videos. Now we have upgraded our systems and software and are offering live action video. A recent study by Doubleclick found that people are 4-7 times more likely to respond to dynamic audio visual content than static content. This fits with my experience over the last few years in managing pay per click advertising, where I have found that we always got higher response when we put audio clips or video on our landing pages. A Forester study found that email clickthrough rates were 2-3 times higher with video, i.e. when you link in the email to a video. Marketing Sherpa found that viewers spend 8 times more time on video (1.5 minutes) than on static emails (10 seconds). The obvious conclusion is that adding video to any type of online campaign is important today and will improve results. That’s why we wanted to get into this.”

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for a wide variety of businesses for 22 years. RealWebMarketing.net was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area, and has clients all over the U.S, in a wide variety of fields such as health care, consulting, construction, home improvement, skin care, debt counseling, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, pool remodeling, tree nurseries, landscaping and many others. The services offered by RealWebMarketing.net include website design, blog design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization, link building, article syndication, optimized press releases, RSS feeds, and video production.

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Site to Offer Affordable Marketing Programs Including Web Design, Pay Per Click, and Google Maps for Doctors

LOS ANGELES: Real Web Marketing Inc. (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company based in Southern California, has just launched a new web site called HealthCareTraffic.com (http://www.healthcaretraffic.com) offering online marketing services specifically for health care practices.

The web site’s initial offering is specifically for dentists, and includes three different Dentist Traffic Programs, with different costs based on the amount of services offered. Each of the three programs includes a search engine optimized and conversion optimized web site and blog, set up on social media sites, pay per click advertising, email marketing, local marketing through Google Maps and other similar sites, call tracking and autoresponder marketing.

John Eberhard, President of Real Web Marketing Inc., stated, “The economy is making it harder for all health care practices to get new patients. The concept behind this web site and these new marketing programs for dentists is to create a really comprehensive marketing program but bring the costs down and make it affordable for practice owners. Within a few months we will start to release similar programs for other health care professionals.”

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for a wide variety of businesses for 22 years. RealWebMarketing.net was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area, and has clients all over the U.S, in a wide variety of fields such as health care, consulting, construction, home improvement, skin care, debt counseling, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, pool remodeling, tree nurseries, landscaping and many others. The services offered by RealWebMarketing.net include website design, blog design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization, link building, article syndication, optimized press releases, RSS feeds, and video production.

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by John Eberhard

In my last article I talked about video marketing and various statistics that indicate that video marketing is an important tool in marketing your business online today. I also listed out 6 different types of videos that a business could create today to market itself.

Recently I found market share figures from AimClear showing that in Google search results, YouTube results were returned 84% of the time. Not surprising, since Google owns YouTube. Dailymotion.com results were returned 3% of the time and Metacafe.com results were returned 2% of the time. So YouTube is truly the main place to be for your videos.

Getting Your Video to Rank

Google and other search engines are now doing what is called “universal search,” which means that they add other types of results to the search results, such as news, videos, images, or local results from Google Maps.

This means that if you have a video that has been uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing sites, that you want it to show up in searches on Google and other search engines related to your topic or business.

AimClear says that in nearly 100% of cases where a video was shown in search results on a search engine, that the video ranked on the first page of search results on its native platform, meaning on YouTube, MetaCafe, etc. That means that in order for your video to come up in search results for a given keyword, that it has to rank well, or come up high in search results on YouTube or other video sharing sites.

Google typically will show videos in universal search results in what are called “two-pack,” “three-pack,” and “four-pack” formations, where they show 2, 3, or 4 videos in one line going across. According to AimClear, 58% of the videos returned in search results were in the two-pack formation.

Keyword Intent

A recent article on Reelseo.com indicated that the intent of the keywords you use, in the text description that you upload with your video, affects how well your video will rank on the video sharing site.

Transactional Keywords, like “buy,” “cheap,” “free,” or “sale” may appeal to viewers, but they will not help with getting your video to rank well on YouTube or other sharing sites. Only 12% of videos that showed up in universal search results contained these transactional type keywords in the descriptions.

Navigational Keywords, containing the website address, brand names, and brand descriptions, did poorly also. Only 18% of videos that showed up in universal search results contained these navigational type keywords in the descriptions.

So what did do well?

Informational Keywords, like phrases that are comparative (this versus that), instructional (“how to” or “learn”), and educational (“what is” or “history of”), did very well. 84% of videos that showed up in universal search results contained these informational type keywords in the descriptions.

So when giving your video a title when uploading, and in writing your description text and tags, include informational keywords and steer clear of transactional keywords.

And as the article referenced above also states, “Make great videos – this is not from AimClear’s study, but still seems like good advice to me. With universal SERP (search engine results pages) real estate being so valuable, I doubt Google or Bing are going to let it become infected with poor quality video anytime soon.”

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by John Eberhard

Since I started doing live action videos (shooting and editing into final form), I’ve been doing research lately on video marketing. Here are some initial results.

A recent study by Doubleclick found that people are 4-7 times more likely to respond to dynamic audio visual content than static content. This fits with my experience over the last few years in managing pay per click advertising, where I have found that we always got higher response when we put audio clips or video on our landing pages.

A Forester study found that email clickthrough rates were 2-3 times higher with video, i.e. when you link in the email to a video.

Marketing Sherpa found that viewers spend 8 times more time on video (1.5 minutes) than on static emails (10 seconds). And I’ll add that we’re talking about a link in the email to a video, as there is no reliable way to have a video actually play in the email itself.

Flimp.com reported that for their email campaigns involving video, the clickthrough rate was 32%.

Videos have 41% higher clickthrough rate than plain text in search results.

So I think we’ve established that adding video to your web site and into your marketing campaigns is a positive thing.

6 Types of Video

This is an excerpt from an article “The 6 ways your company should be using video” by Shana Fulle on Ragan.com.

“FAQ. Creating a frequently asked questions video will allow clients and customers to have easy access to their questions. A great FAQ can be the determining factor whether you are chosen over a competitor.

“Social media. Creating video blogs (vlogs) or including other useful and relevant video to your social media channels will not only enhance your brand image, but will also increase search engine optimization (SEO)—and your chances of being found over a competitor.

”Interviews. Interviewing your C-suite executives (top level execs, CEO, CFO, etc.) on camera is a great way to communicate the company's message. These videos are also perfect for establishing your brand as a thought leader in the industry.

”Video Tour. Online virtual tours have allowed people to see all aspects of an environment without having to be present. In 2010, 108 million Internet users viewed a Web-based tour. Creating a video tour is an inexpensive way to show potentially millions of people what you are offering, like a house or car for example.

”Testimonials. Drive your sales by boosting customer confidence with video testimonials. Posting your testimonial videos via multiple platforms will also increase your visibility and likelihood of appearing in search results. If that's not enough, these videos are also inexpensive and hold a long shelf life.

”Promotional. Along the same lines as a testimonial video, a promotional video can be taken even further. Create an animated video for your brand, an infomercial to showcase products, or develop a concept to promote an upcoming event.”

Video can be in a couple of different formats, including a very simple Powerpoint style slide show video, with narration and music, photos, but no live action video. The pictures can move or zoom, but there is no actual live video in it. Then there is, of course, the live action video, which can have various degrees of complexity.

Getting Your Video to Show Up in Search

Google and other search engines are now doing what is called “universal search,” which means that they add other types of results to the search results, such as news, videos, images, or local results from Google Maps.

This means that if you have a video that has been uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing sites, that you want it to show up in searches on Google and other search engines related to your topic or business.

AimClear says that in nearly 100% of cases where a video was shown in search results on a search engine, that the video ranked on the first page of search results on its native platform, meaning on YouTube, MetaCafe, etc. In my next article I’ll cover how to get your article ranking well on the video sharing sites.

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