Monthly Archives: February 2010

Video Marketing

Brands and businesses are embracing Video Marketing as a component of their Social Media Marketing, cross promoting video marketing with a presence on Facebook and Twitter accounts, linking out to videos using URL shorting services like Bit.LY.

Video Marketing is exploding on YouTube and other platforms, as web viewers tastes for video increases, coupled with high bandwidth availability for PC and Smart Phones. According to YouTube, almost 20 hours of videos are uploaded to the site every minute, the site served over 12 Billion views in November 2009, reflecting 137% growth from the prior year.

Okay, we know Video Marketing is exploding in growth; but, how do you get your videos to standout from the pack? It’s challenging like any other search marketing process but if you follow our outline your videos should generate marketing results:

1) First and foremost, a great video that isn’t distributed and optimized isn’t going to generate good Video Marketing ROI - there are lots of sites other than YouTube to distribute your video; top tier sites include: Vimeo, Meta Cafe, Viddler, Blip.TV and a large number of other sites. Most of these sites are free.

2)  There’s no need to host your videos on your site or create a custom player, host them on YouTube or other sites and just link out to them to save your bandwidth usage.

3)  It can take a lot of time to upload your videos to a large number of sites; one of the market leaders in video distribution is TubeMogul - they have a free distribution service coupled with powerful analytics - enabling you to generate high impact Video Marketing.

4) Many videos are uploaded to YouTube, few are “found” as they aren’t optimized using good Video Marketing techniques. You want to use a clear and concise Title, Description and Keywords that accurately describe your video and use Tags that are consistent with each other, reinforcing what your video is about.

Nothing wrong with adding a link back to your site in the Description (at the start), if your videos aren’t annotated with your URL:  or, you may want to drive people to your other social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook.

5)  Your Settings are important on YouTube (and the other sites) - based on our analysis,  the Community Aspects of YouTube are important in terms of how YouTube ranks your videos (this is not documented though) and certainly help you build visibility. Like any Social Media Platform, Engage with your Community, turn on Comments, connect with others and build a following just like Twitter or Facebook.

6) Using the right Keywords in your Account Setting is critical to effective Video Marketing. Many don’t know that YouTube offers it’s own Video Keyword Research Capability for Advertisers that can give you valuable insight about Keyword Searches done. Use it to find the right keywords; but, again, don’t get out of bounds, use keywords that match your content.

8) Your goal is of course search engine rankings for your videos coupled with views on all sites. A new way to add more text (which search engines recognize, giving you more SEO traction) to your Video Marketing is using YouTube’s new Automatic Caption Insertion - another benefit helping hearing impaired to understand what your video is about. Be aware, this is a machine driven process and you may need to tweak these manually.

9) A cool new Video Marketing service is from Speaker Text - they have pushed the mashup of text and video further and adds some SEO sizzle by enabling you to use their Free (for now & as long as you have your own transcript) service to find, read and share what is being said inside of a video, driving some real SEO benefits.

9) Some brands/companies may want to derive more search engine ranking benefits via Video Marketing by making sure their videos are found and indexed by search engines when set up on their own sites - a Video Sitemap will help to ensure your videos are found and Google offers this as a free service.

10) Last but not least, we assume you have Google Analytics installed for web site traffic tracking and analysis but it can be beneficial to utilize YouTube’s Insight Definition (and others) to get a much more in-depth understanding of how effective your Video Marketing is, who is watching your videos, how they were discovered (search, external links, etc.) and much more.

11) Like any Social Media Marketing method, Video Marketing is much more effective when you link to your videos from other sites; these can include Social Media sites (Digg, Reddit, etc.) or via Hub Pages or Squidoo or any other “authority site” the higher the page rank the better.

So, to summarize Video Marketing best practices:  Do it, Distribute it, Text it, Optimize it and Analyze it - see you on Twitter @LinkedMedia.

Video Marketing

Effective Online Marketing for Realtors

1) Define your personal or business brand uniquely; what make your or your agency different from your direct competitors in your market - consumers are fickle, as you well know. Effective online marketing for realtors means building a consistent message across all marketing initiatives; i.e. Social Media, Web Site, EMail, Newsletter, Pay Per Click and Press Relations.

2) Couldn’t emphasize this enough, your web site is ground zero for any online marketing campaign for you as a realtor - core strategy for effective online marketing for realtors.  The vast majority of your customers are going to look hard at your web site - you have 8-12 seconds to garner their attention - their fickle to say the least.

Your web site navigation (menus) has to work well, contact forms should be short (name, phone number, email with more information as an option), your site search has to be easy to access and work flawlessly, you need to have a good overview of your Agency, its core services/specialization, thumbnail sketches of your Agents, Brokers and even Operations Staff.

3) For IDX Feed Technology we’d recommend IHome Finder’s IDX Services; their IDX Feed Technology and related services are low cost and high value, work extremely well, are nicely integrated with Google’s Maps and let your visitors save searches and easily contact you.

4) You want to have a clearly defined Social Media Strategy for your Brokerage and agents that fits the size of your agency and one that dovetails with your other online marketing activities, assuming this also fits the organizational structure of the master franchiser (if any) that you work with

5) Social Media Marketing is certainly garnering a tremendous amount of press as the “go to” online marketing medium. We recommend dipping your toes in the online marketing process by starting out with a Blog on a WordPress platform and possibly coupling this with Twitter and Facebook accounts. You may also want to set up a Flickr account (photo sharing), depending on your budget and time - Social media marketing is very effective online marketing for realtors.

6) Blogging can be a wonderful thing for your online presence if done correctly; we see so many blogs that tarnish the client’s brand. They need to be done right to be effective; meaning: insightful content with data that drives brand credibility, good keyword research as an outline for the blog,  the right plug ins to drive traffic and visibility, Feedburner (now part of Google’s services)  integration so people can subscribe to your Blog via email or Newsreader.

7) There are a ton of listing syndication services out there; with Google Base being one of the best free services, requiring Google Account.  But, one of your challenge is the marketing for listing syndication is always evolving - save yourself time and money by using ListHub Listing Syndication services.

ListHub  has free and low cost monthly service, with options for Brokers and Agents. Their comprehensive services have grown very fast the last three years we have been working with them and they now have 30-40 sites and vendors for the listing syndication services they provide.

8) YouTube is emerging quickly as a viable and very effective online marketing for realtors. Like other social media marketing processes, it needs to be done properly if you want to succeed. Be sure to build the right presence on YouTube by correctly annotating your account (bio) and individual videos with keywords in the description, build a channel, etc.

9) Video is a very low cost way to get strong and immediate search engine rankings too, as Google “likes” well annotated videos. No need for expensive equipment, buy a Flip Camera - it includes all the basic editing online that you need (titles, inserts, stop/start, etc.) and uploads directly to YouTube. You won’t have “James Cameron” special effects capability, but you’ll have enough firepower with a Flip to get the job done.

10) Public relations marketing should be part of your online marketing for - it’s great for generating critical back links to your site, building immediate visibility with local and national media contacts for interviews, underscores your brand as the market leader and much more. Hire an agency that understands search engine optimization for PR; many generic PR firms don’t and will waste your advertising dollars.

We have years of experience helping realtors successfully generate leads and a high impact market presence online - please contact us if you’d like to learn more about our effective online marketing for realtors services. Twitter/LinkedMedia.

Effective Online Marketing for Realtor