News Blog

Blendtec, a virtually unknown household appliance maker till a few years ago, attributes a 700% increase in revenue to its popular “Will it Blend?” webisode series.

Do you want to see how “Chuck Norris” will blend?

Take notice: This company is a prime example of a small but growing group of businesses that have cracked the code to success on the video-centric Internet.

Online video has certainly been the topic du jour this year, as major media companies respond to consumer demand for anytime, anywhere access to their favorite programs. But Internet video’s real potential is not in watching “Lost” or “The Office” online or even downloading those shows to your cell phone or iPod. It’s about giving YOUR consumers what they want in the most engaging medium available.

We are still in the early stages of this shift from static text and graphics to a more dynamic, visually compelling medium, but we are approaching a tipping point. Video is no longer an afterthought or an add-on for Internet-savvy businesses — but the primary content featured on their Internet sites.

Online user expectations have changed dramatically in the past decade, and businesses that don’t evolve their Internet strategies to accommodate this change are about to get a painful wake-up call.

From Radio to Online Video

It’s well-documented that people prefer a visually dynamic medium when it comes to being entertained or getting information. Radio was once the primary source of news, music and other entertainment for a large part of the population. Then came TV, followed by VCRs, TiVo and iPods. Video is having the same dramatic impact on the Internet. The Solutions Research Group predicts that total hours spent with video-based entertainment will average eight hours per day by early 2013 — the equivalent of an entire night’s sleep — and a majority of those hours will belong to online video.

Most fascinating about the emergence of the video-centric Internet is that it is NOT being driven by news and entertainment providers. The vast majority of businesses riding the video wave are non-media organizations, ranging from small neighborhood retailers and restaurants to powerhouse brands like Nike and Apple. These businesses all have an intense desire to deliver a strong brand impression, create an engaging experience, and instill customer loyalty. The Internet is now the primary customer touch point and commerce channel for these organizations, and video delivers the compelling Internet experiences that educate, entertain, and keep customers coming back.

The Video-Centric Enterprise

You can ENGAGE your customers, partners and prospects with product demonstrations, presentations and how-to videos. Apple, being the master marketer, keeps rolling out 30-minute videos, that are part guide, part advertisement to accompany its new iSomething.

Beyond these marketing examples, investors will be able to access corporate data in video form, whether it is an annual meeting, a message from the CEO or a video news release. Internally, video will become a primary form of communication. Think of a broadcast greeting embedded in a personal email or executive video memos — the latter of which is already being done by early video adopters such as British Telecom. Video libraries will usher in a new phase of knowledge sharing and best practices, as employees access huge repositories of education and training videos.

The most sophisticated online video practitioners will become a de facto broadcast network constantly issuing news and information to their customers, partners, distributors, employees, and the public at large too. And why not? The cost of distributing or syndicating your content is already approaching zero to roll your own version of “Will it Blend?”

Isn’t it a relief to know not everything is gloom and doom these days. Looks like the so called green/clean/eco-industries, businesses, and online ventures still receive a lot of venture capital and government funding - and that’s not likely to change after the election, regardless of who wins. With this in mind, let me greet our latest member advertiser, CarbonTicker.com. 

This is what the company says about its business: ”We offer a practical approach that frames environmental issues as a challenge to achieve a new, sustainable global economy, and the highest standard of living. Supported by unbiased information, a free Carbon Savings Account, and numerous other tools through a “one-stop-shop” website, individuals, companies, and organizations will, for the first time, be able to:

* Set up and manage their free Carbon Savings Account?
* Get unbiased information for decision making
* Build networks and beneficial alliances
* Minimize the time and effort to take action, and
* Document their progress for their own, regulatory, and marketing purposes

all in one place on CarbonTicker.com.”

I’m sold. We will sign up with them as soon as they are open for business! 

ezSEO is the first comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) solution for connecting video (and audio) content on your site to the major web search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. EveryZing’s patented technology wraps every piece of video and audio from your site in a rich layer of metadata, including a full text output of the spoken word track. This rich metadata is then pumped into EveryZing’s publishing system to create search engine friendly web pages as part of YOUR site.

What’s more, you can use the metadata, generated for each piece of your content, to create contextual targeting for any ad serving environment, including text, display, and pre/post-roll video.ezSEO works automatically, “behind the scenes” of your web site, making your multimedia content easily discoverable to the search engines. In this way, your online video and audio become part of the multibillion dollar search economy. It accomplishes this feat through:1. Comprehensive metadata production

They automatically extract the keywords, topics, and other information from your web content. This ensures that whenever a consumer searches a term or phrase that relates to any multimedia files on your site, the search results point directly to the relevant audio and video content, as well as text.

2. Deep content analysis

ezSEO automatically and continuously “learns” what your multimedia content is about, enabling it to optimize the new pages published to your site to bring the best qualified traffic from the major search engines.

3. Natural language processing

Once the text output has been generated, it is processed by EveryZing’s proprietary natural language processing technology to identify key terms, concepts, people, places and other valuable entities to create automatic “tags” for your content.

4. Automated publishing

Whenever you add new multimedia content to your web site, ezSEO automatically learns about it, analyzes it, and publishes new, highly “searchable” pages instantaneously so that consumers searching topics related to your content won’t miss a thing.

5. Building and hosting your content collections and associated web pages

EveryZing builds and hosts all of the content collections and associated web pages it generate to your design specifications. These pages can then be accessed via a subdomain on your website. Our turn-key solution means you can be up and running in a matter of weeks with no effort required from your tech teams.

ezSEO is provided as a web service, delivering completely built out templates to your specifications. It continuously processes your content to identify new topics for publishing, all of which you can control via your web management console.

Cool - but NOT cheap. I think you should check it out and wait (if you can afford to) till the competition catches up, for the price to become more affordable.

Here is an often recited quote, attributed to comedian Red Skeleton about the well-attended funeral of Harry Cohn, the tyrant president of Columbia Pictures:

“Give the people what they want to see and they’ll come out for it.”

Now how is this pertinent to your product, service, and marketing — specifically your video ads?It is, as an axiom for most businesses. If you provide a quality product or service that people truly want, and offer it at the right price, success is a much easier fish to catch. The last piece of the success puzzle, of course, is that people need to be made aware of what you offer and have warm fuzzy feelings about it.Unfortunately, when it comes to promoting one’s products, services or brand, Skeleton’s quote is too often forgotten. Marketers tend to play the game of “ I made you look” by placing ads in front of, next to, on top of, and behind the content that users actually want to see.

What if only there were a way to get users to willingly be exposed to your message?

One of the great things about the Internet is that it provides a ready-made way to target pockets of users by interest. Portals, niche publishers, and community sites attract and organically sort audiences for you into similar-minded groups. Technologies that help users share information also make it possible to grow communities around each piece of relevant content.The opportunity now exists for you that, rather than pushing 30-seconds of hard-sell messages to an audience who is probably not be open to it, you can now offer engaging, interesting, entertaining, and relevant content that your potential audience will willingly return to, again and again.

Consider these examples:

1. Car makers can sponsor a 3- to 5-minute series about how to maintain the health of a car or a scripted comedy about a zany group of friends who decide to drive around the world in 80 days.

2. Hotel chains can produce shows about the off-the-beaten-path restaurants and hot spots in the cities they service.

3. Tool and appliance makers can offer video craft workshops or integrate their products into relevant programs.

4. Financial services can sponsor thought-leader interview series about tried-and-true methods to make your small business grow

5. Lifestyle brands can entertain their audiences by sponsoring events that feature talent geared toward the interests of their target markets.

6. Start ____________________________________ filling in here NOW how you could create videos to entertain and help your current and potential customers.

This IS a win-win-win scenario.

You get exposure in front of organically sorted, similar-minded groups and raise goodwill by giving something of value to them. Your audience gets relevant entertainment without being force-fed a commercial. Web publishers increase the stickiness of their site when they supply their users with great content.So as Red Skeleton was saying, if you give the people what they want, (relevant and interesting video content … or a dead studio executive) they will gather to view it. For you, sponsoring or integrating into that show means capturing the eyeballs of an engaged audience.

I have just completed a post here about the awesome power of viral marketing. I have shown three examples of videos that have been watched over 1,000,000 times apiece!! In fact, one video has been viewed over 60,000,000 times on its own! The perfect example of friends telling friends. Mind you, those friends have been told for a very good resaon, as the up skirt shots (sorry girls) are hilarious (and yes I admit, quite sexy), as is the evolution of dance. But that is not the reason for this post.When video first came online it was relatively easy to get your videos on page 1 in Google. Then of course, everyone started to do it and Google changed their algorithm. It then became a lot harder to get your video on page 1 and you had to do a whole heap of other stuff, including probably the hardest of all, namely getting your video popular first, without the aid of a page 1 listing.Then Google bought YouTube. It took a while, but Google looks after Google.

Things have changed my friend — just look at this for evidence:

If you click on the image, the full size image will open in a new window. There you have it. My two videos occupying no. 1 AND no. 2 spot for a lucrative search term. There are many more examples I can show you, but I’m not going to give all my secrets away here.Tell you what I’ll do though, if you sign up for the pre launch list at TellAFriendzy (it’s free), I will tell you the exact steps I took to achieve these spectacular results. Sign up today!!Technorati Tags: tell a friend, tell a friend forms for marketing, tell a friend email, free tell a friend, tell a friend script, viral marketing, viral marketing examples, viral marketing and sports, viral marketing campaign, marketing viral, online viral marketing, viral marketing software, word of mouth marketing, word of mouth  

Source: online viral marketing 

When was the last time you did anything different in your internet marketing life? When did you last think, ‘Hey, let’s try an experiment to see if that idea I thought of last week would actually bring in more sales.’When was the last time you added a different way of advertising to your usual promotional mix?We tend to get stuck in a rut so easily that we barely notice it’s happened until long after the event itself. But staying fresh is half the battle in making sure we can earn the biggest amounts from our internet marketing efforts.The problem isn’t even so much that we get stuck in that rut, it’s that we can’t see that we’ve stopped while everything else is still moving. In short, it’s easy to get left behind… and when we finally realise we’re lingering in other people’s dust, it takes some time to even catch up again, let alone overtake them.

The World Of Internet Marketing

I make a point of spending a few moments every day or so just surfing any interesting sites that are related to my work. I’m probably not much different to you - I subscribe to a few good email newsletters that are related to the world of internet marketing, in the hope that I’ll learn a thing or two every now and again that I can apply to my own business.Make sure you keep that fresh input of ideas and information coming in – it helps to prevent ‘rut’ syndrome and keeps your brain active. That in itself should give you some ideas to experiment with, but always make sure you continue to push the boundaries of what you are doing, and try new methods and ideas of making a little more (or a lot more) cash from your efforts.Even if you can only come up with one new idea every day, and only one of those ideas works each week, that’s fifty two new ideas every year that you can set to work to improve what you’re doing and earn more money from.Sean RasmussenInternet Marketing BlogWealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

Bookmark this:

Source: Internet

First, my heartfelt condolences go to all the families who lost loved ones in China’s biggest earthquake in three decades, killing more than 50,000….

I’m told our new member advertiser, Global Travel Hotspots, will dedicate advertising revenues, earned through placing their truly amazing ad with us, to rebuilding schools in Sichuan province. I ask that you too lend them a helping click now!

Incidentally, this also puts us over the 100,000th pixel mark … which, considering the state of the U.S. and global economy in the last eleven months since we opened, we are very satisfied with.

Certainly looks that way. Our results for November’07 are:

 

* Sales: 7,900 pixels

* ShareASale affilates: 76

* Traffic: 49,540 visits, 932,505 hits

* Alexa Rank: #648,072 - 3 months average;  Change from last month: down 316,013

 

Download the summary report (pdf) here.  

 

As you can well imagine, we are in the process of reassessing the effectiveness of our marketing efforts. Rev-up social bookmarking? Use direct visitor acquisition? Guerilla marketing? Advertise in MediaPost? A contest for affiliates? We’ll evaluate these and other venues this month to find the best mix.

                                                                                                                                                                                              

       As an advertising service based on web video, we can certainly appreciate the fact that the folks at Videomator.com decided to advertise with us. Their site is sort of a mini-portal to all things one might need to become a producer, editor, director, or even a camera jockey. Highly recommended!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Now, Thirdtemple.org, on the other hand, is entirely different:  A foundation dedicated to the creation of the Third Temple in Jerusalem, almost 2,000 years after the Second Temple was destroyed by Roman legions and consumed by fire in 70 AD.  The foundation sponsored the publication of From Love to Triumph, a love story that had made its way to them in the form of a Holocaust diary. They asked us to make a video of it for display as their “ad.” We tried very hard to capture the spirit of the book as faithfully as possible, and succeeded, I think, through the excellent narration they provided.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

I’m proud to present these statistics for October’07:

* Sales: 8,200 pixels

* ShareASale affilates: 67

* Traffic: 66,177 visits, 985,645 hits

* Alexa Rank: #332,059 - 3 months average; Change: up 1,144,731

 

Download the summary report (pdf) here.  

 

New Visitor Counters 

 

Yes, our visitor counters are now fully operational! Remember, that they are updated once every 4 hours. FYI, one of their functions is “to keep us on our toes,” to make sure we do our best to deliver 50,000 - 100,000 visitors a month to start with.

 

Announcing our “Win a Free Ad” Contest WinnerI’m also very pleased to announce that the winner of our contest, which ended October 31, is Mr. Joseph Spinella of The Chestnut & Cedar Stock Report, a financial website. His ad and video, produced by us, is about his new book, “Stocks 4.0.” It is scheduled to hit bookstores at the end of this month and Joe wants to take advantage of the kind of very long and continuous exposure only we can provide. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

If you are an investor or contemplating to become one, you owe it to yourself to visit his site. From free advice to whole chapters of this and other books, there is a lot there for the taking. Congratulations, Joe and thank you for becoming a member advertiser!