Starring You

A recent email from the smarties at MarketingProfs informed me that:

the average user of online video watches more than 16 hours of video a month and YouTube videos are watched over 3 Billion times a day! This is astounding.

Video is rapidly becoming essential to modern marketing and you seriously need to think about how to get on board before the train is so far from the station that you’re feeling impossibly behind the curve.

Before we talk about how, let’s talk about what.

Here are some potential ways to use video for your business:

1. Instead of blogging, vlog. This is running a regular video blog. Perhaps the most famous one is Wine Library TV from Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It.  Gary did 1,000 episodes of this show and became very famous along the way in the internet economy and marketing world.
2. Run a retail store? Create a commercial every week that would be like a one-minute spot on TV. Feature specials, new arrivals, and an employee spotlight. Keep it light and lively so it’s fun to watch.
3. Are you a coach or consultant? Create regular videos that teach your audience.
4. Are you an artist? Shoot videos that show people how you create your art.
5. Are you a caterer? Show videos of certain signature dishes being made with your unique personality thrown in.
6. Are you a speaker? Record your presentations and edit snippets of them for posting on YouTube so you can get hired as a speaker more easily.
7. Add a video to every email newsletter you send out.

And the list goes on. There are many ways to use video to present yourself and your business in a positive way. I’ve been using ideas three, six and seven lately. Here’s an example:

3 Ways to Engage with Email Marketing

If you’re wondering if I’ve gotten business by using video, I absolutely have. I’ve heard a few times people say that they wanted to work with me after watching my videos.

The clients that are using video best to market their businesses are Aaron Parnell and Dave Crimmen, who both got the power of video a long time ago. Robert Brilliant, who shot the video shown above certainly uses video to market his business since he is in the business. David Neuendorff of 1MinuteReel edited the video above and also uses sample videos on his site.

In a future post we’ll talk about how you can create video on your own or with the help of a pro like Robert or David.

If you have questions right now, send me an email or leave a Comment.

For those of you that have business pages set up for your business on Facebook, good things have been happening lately. Facebook is starting to recognize that we too have needs! I truly believe that this trend will continue in the foreseeable future as Facebook certainly has no issues getting personal users. And one key area of growth is business users. In order to keep expanding that group of users they need to offer more features to them.

There are two key developments that have happened fairly recently that are really good for Page owners.
1. Email notifications of Page activity. In the past we had no way of knowing when someone interacted with our Page except to log in and look. Well, now you’re able to get email notifications anytime someone posts on your Wall or Comments on an existing Post. Hurray! It’s really important that you be responsive when interaction with your Page happens and now you can do just that. Take advantage of it by logging on to your Page and responding to any and all interactions.

It’s really important that you respond to all Comments on your Page as quickly as possible to show people you’re there and engaged with your fans. This will then encourage people to continue to Like and Comment on Posts in the future.

2. Ability to visit other Facebook Pages as your Page. This is a major change that helps a Page to not only network on Facebook with other Pages and further expose the business. But it also enables a business owner who wants to stay fairly private on Facebook to do so. Watch this short video to learn how to do this.

Now that you’re aware of how to be your Page on Facebook I recommend you take advantage of this feature regularly. This is a great new way to increase Likes on your Page and especially if you use this feature to comment on Pages that have a lot of Fans that might identify with your Page.

Yelp is a very popular resource for searches for all types of businesses. It can really boost a small business when searches lead to your page. As small business owners we want lots and lots of positive reviews. Sometimes our thoughts turn to ways to game the seemingly simple system.

We think about asking clients and friends to give us positive reviews so we can up our star score. But, Yelp knows about this tactic and regularly filters reviews that look illegitimate. Their filter’s not perfect, but it does catch many fake reviews.

As difficult as it is I must agree with Yelp that you don’t want to try to rig it to make your business look good. This goes completely against the spirit of Yelp. And, according to Yelp, it’s precisely because there are much fewer fake reviews on Yelp that its popularity and usefulness are maintained while other review sites wither. Makes sense. We wouldn’t use Yelp much longer if we saw way too many 5-star reviews for all the businesses listed.

So, switching the angle from manipulative to altruistic, what can YOU do then to help out a friend who owns a business? Simple, give them a Recommendation. Yelp provides this feature exclusively so owners can help out other owners. If you’ll look at my Yelp page you can see that I recommend 3 businesses that I know and trust (look all the way at the bottom left to find them). Yes, I know I need to add more!

In case you’re not sure how to use this feature on Yelp – you do need to be the owner of a business listing – then watch this short video I’ve made to help you.

Now that you know how to use this above board Yelp feature for business owners why not use it? You can start with The Growth Coach if you like.

I’ve invested in having a unified look among my multiple online presences: twitter page, blog, website, and newsletter. I did this because it makes sense. In the real world you work hard to portray yourself and your business consistently. (If you don’t, then you should.)

So, why shouldn’t it be this way online, too? It’s tempting to just go with whatever design template is available at the time when you sign up for an online presence. Twitter, Constant Contact (my newsletter’s provider), WordPress (blogging service), and HostMonster (my web host) all have numerous free templates to choose from. And this is what I did at first – choose whatever seemed kinda green and tan (classic Growth Coach colors) and went forward.

But after doing all this I realized that my various instruments weren’t creating one beautiful melody. That was not powerful, but rather counterproductive. So, I hired Erin as I mentioned in the intro above.

Now I challenge you to look at my blog site, my newsletter (sign up if you haven’t), and twitter page and say that it doesn’t look professional. I’m not trying to brag, I’m trying to make an important point. You should want this for your business. Impressions count. How you come across online is too important in this age and this geography to take lightly.

Contact me if you have any questions about this. I’d be happy to talk with you about the online instruments you’re using and how to make them part of one orchestra.

It’s great to blog as part of your online marketing strategy. Every time you blog you create a new page on your website that gets indexed and is made searchable. It’s a beautiful thing. The more posts you write, the more pages are indexed and generally your site traffic increases.

Is blogging social networking though? Not unless you’re getting comments and responding to those comments. Many blog posts get no comments. This may be because the content’s no good, it’s not being marketed, or is being marketed to the wrong people. I think my content’s all right, but I’m not marketing it well enough to enough of the right people. Yes, the unwelcome truth, blogging is just the first half of the effort. The second half is pushing your post.

Some people just like to do the writing. Others are better at the pushing, i.e., promoting your post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth. To succeed with a blog you need to be good at both, or have someone else do the pushing for you. Otherwise you’re going to have a lonely blog, which might still work for you to get search engine traffic and leads. So, it’s not the worst case scenario to have no comments, but it’s better to have some. Comments add credibility to your site since visitors think you must be saying some good things if you’re getting lots of comments.

One strategy you might pursue to get more comments on your posts is to go to other relevant blogs and comment on the posts there. You sometimes have to give to get. Doing this is a win-win for two reasons: one, you can get exposure elsewhere online when you comment on other blogs (and maybe look smart while you’re at it); and two, you just might get that blogger to mosey on over to your blog and comment on one of your posts. Do this over and over on multiple blogs and you will probably start to see some action. It’s not going to work immediately though. You need to be consistent over the long-haul – say three to six months at least.

Full disclosure: I need to practice more of what I’m preaching here. I did just post a comment on the blog over at Mastering Online Marketing, which is one of my favorite blogs. If you use Disqus on your blog and to comment on other blogs you can be notified when the blog’s author comments on your comment, then you’ve got a nice dialogue going.

I suggest that you choose blogs of varying popularity to get exposure on bigger sites, and get comments back from bloggers running smaller sites. It’s nice to have a little of both going on. And that’s an allegory for marketing in general, have multiple efforts going on simultaneously. Do this and you’re doing what a Guerrilla Marketer does.

Another tactic is to write provocative posts. If your content is not stimulating it doesn’t matter how much traffic you’re getting. Instead of real comments you’ll just get the ‘nice post’ comment, which hardly breeds conversation. Please don’t do this yourself on other blogs. At least follow it up with something else that could open up a conversation.

Okay, now it’s your turn. Do you have a comment or suggestion on how to improve social networking via blogging? Please share it below. I promise to comment back.

If you own a small business like me, then you probably would like to start sending out a monthly newsletter as a way of staying in touch with your customers and interested prospects. Constant Contact is a great way to simplify this process. For my last business I used Microsoft Publisher to create a template, then 1ShoppingCart to send out the newsletter.