Sales and Marketing

Podcast Marketing � How to Promote Your Biz Using Podcasts

SBOCTeam — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:48:00 GMT

by ZekeLL

Podcasting is blogging with audio instead of text. Essentially, you post an MP3 file instead of an article.

5 Reasons Why Podcasts Are Great

An increasing number of people are downloading new podcasts every day.
Unlike TV, podcast can be played whenever the listener wants.
People can listen to them in their cars on their way to work or when they go for a run. You will get their full attention.
There is a lot less competition in the podcast market than there is in the article market.
Podcasting is a lot easier and less time-consuming than blogging and getting your articles published.

5 Steps to Producing a Podcast

Download Audacity at#### http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/#### or any other audio editing tool.
Get a good microphone.
Write the script (so the podcast doesn't sound improvised and amateurish).
Record it in a noise-free environment.
Apply the noise-reduction filter in your audio editing software and save the podcast file.

Where You Can Submit Your Podcast
PodOMatic - http://www.podomatic.com/
Podcast Alley - http://www.podcastalley.com/index.php
iTunes - http://www.itunes.com/
Yahoo Podcasts - http://podcasts.yahoo.com/
Digg Podcasts - http://digg.com/podcasts
Podcast Directory - http://www.podcastdirectory.com/
Podcast Pickle - http://www.podcastpickle.com/
PodFeed - http://www.podfeed.net/
Odeo - http://www.odeo.com/
Digital Podcast - http://www.digitalpodcast.com/
Podcast.net - http://www.podcast.net/
Singing Fish - http://search.singingfish.com/sfw/home.jsp
Blog Universe - http://www.bloguniverse.com/
All Podcasts - http://www.allpodcasts.com/
Big Contact - http://www.bigcontact.com/
Collectik - http://collectik.net/collectik/
PodNova - http://www.podnova.com/
PodTech - http://www.podtech.net/home/

How to Save a Lot of Time When You Submit Your Podcast

I absolutely love these two tools because they submit your podcasts to the major podcast directories for free and they save you a lot of time.

PodPusher - http://www.podpusher.com/
Pod Submitter - http://www.podsubmitter.com/submit

Zeke Camusio is a serial entrepreneur. The Outsourcing Company, his 6th endeavor, is a creative web design and Internet marketing agency with offices in Aspen, CO and New York.

Zeke writes Let's Do It!, one of the most prestigious and popular entrepreneurship and Internet marketing blog. Check it out: www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog.

Video Marketing � How to Promote Your Business Using Videos

SBOCTeam — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:20:00 GMT

by ZekeLL

Video marketing is a fairly new term. It means producing videos and posting them to several video sharing websites to boost your website traffic and get your name out there.

5 Reasons Why Video Marketing Is Great

Google is showing more and more videos in the search results.
Producing a video is very inexpensive and posting it is free.
Most video sharing services such as YouTube have several tools to help people spread the word. Think about it. People actually market your videos for you.
Millions of people promote their websites using articles, but just a small percentage of them use videos. The competition is a lot less fierce.
Video communities are a lot more active than article communities. It is not uncommon to post a video on YouTube and get 1,000 comments in a month!

5 Steps to Producing a Video

Decide what kind of video you want to record (talking head, based on a PowerPoint presentation, from your computer screen, interview, etc.)
Get a good microphone and a camera. It doesn't have to be a professional camera. Sometimes a simple digital camera is enough.
Write the script or prepare the content. Do a practice run first.
Record it.
Do some minor editing using free software such as Windows Movie Maker. You will probably need to trim out the end and the beginning, and add a watermark with the URL of your website.

Where You Can Submit Your Video
YouTube - http://www.YouTube.com
Google Video - http://video.google.com/
Yahoo Video - http://video.yahoo.com/
FlickLife - http://www.veoh.com/
Blip - http://blip.tv/
Crackle - http://crackle.com/
Flurl - http://www.flurl.com/
BoFunk - http://www.bofunk.com/
Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/
Flixya - http://www.flixya.com/

A Case Study
In case you are still not 100% convinced that video marketing is an amazing tool to drive massive traffic to your website, listen to this. Last month we recorded four videos for a client and distributed them to the services mentioned above.

We used some tricks, picked the right keywords, and created some backlinks to them. Then we social bookmarked them, submitted their RSSs to some RSS search engines, and we finally pinged all the pages that we created. All this took us 4 hours. In 6 days, our client's videos had 150,000 views! Do you realize what that means? 150,000 people discovered our client's company in less than 6 days. He got 1,746 visits and $11,235 in revenues from that campaign. His investment was $215. Are you a video marketing believer now?

Zeke Camusio is a serial entrepreneur. The Outsourcing Company, his 6th endeavor, is a creative web design and Internet marketing agency with offices in Aspen, CO and New York.

Zeke writes Let's Do It!, one of the most prestigious and popular entrepreneurship and Internet marketing blog. Check it out: http://www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog.

Internet Advertising

SBOCTeam — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:21:00 GMT

When does it make sense for small businesses?

By Christopher Freeburn

The Internet has been a great leveling technology, evening the playing field between small and large businesses by giving small companies easy and cheap access to a worldwide marketplace. The Internet has also provided unprecedented advertising opportunities for small business, permitting not only access to a global marketplace, but the ability to target and alert potential customers on a local, regional, national, or global scale for a fraction of what traditional marketing programs would cost.

The Growing Online Ad Market
Internet advertising totaled over $21 billion in 2007, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), putting it far behind television, close to magazines, and ahead of radio as an advertising medium, based on ad revenues. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 32 million Americans have made an online purchase after clicking on an online advertisement. Social networking web sites, which boast more than 86 million users are almost exclusively run on advertising revenue.

In testimony before Congress in June, Randall Rothenberg, president of the IAB, noted that Internet advertising is particularly advantageous for small businesses. "Online advertising has created regional markets out of local markets, and national markets out of regional markets. Items once sold in local garage sales and pawn shops are now available nationally and internationally via advertised interactive auctions, in which some 40 million Americans participate annually," he said. "Importantly, the online networks not only enable small businesses to communicate to niche communities through small sites; they allow large brand marketers to reach narrow communities as well, contributing to an unprecedented democratization of the media landscape."

So, how do you get your company's ads on the web?

Advertising options
Before selecting a particular type of online ad, you must determine what works best for your business and suits your level of online capabilities.

Search Engine Advertisements
These ads are posted on search engines' web sites. Since most people begin their Internet browsing with a visit to a search engine, advertising on these sites is often a logical place for a small business to place its ads. The two largest search engines, Google and Yahoo, have created advertising programs tailored for small businesses that want to advertise on their sites. The ads usually appear as links to your business, highlighted and set apart from the other links generated by the search. The ads appear whenever a user searches for specific keywords or phrases in the search engine. These keywords or phrases will be related to the sort of product or service your business offers. So, for instance, if you run a business providing surfboards, you ads would appear whenever someone searches for information on surfing. Other search engines offer similar programs.

The cost of these advertisements varies and is often dependent on how many people actually click on the ad and visit the advertisers web site. Each time a potential customer clicks with their mouse on the ad and visits the advertiser's web site, the advertiser must pay a "click fee" to the search engine. Such fees are usually pennies per click, depending on the search engine hosting the ads.

Search Engine Optimization
Search engine use is so popular, and the traffic generated by search engines so considerable, that in addition to posting "pay-per-click" ads on search engine web sites, many businesses seek to "optimize" where their web site will appear during a keyword search. Search engines scan millions of web sites every day, tagging them according to key words and phrases that appear on the web site. When a user searches for a word or phrase, the search engine lists web sites whose content has been tagged with that word or phrase.

In order to improve the number of hits your website receives from search engine queries, a number of online media firms will "optimize" your web site's content. These services start by examining the type of customers who comprise the market for your products or services and will adjust your web sites content and language so that the programs that scan and tag web sites will be more likely to list your web site near the top of lists generated for a given keyword or phrase. Fees for this service vary among search engine optimization firms.

Banner Ads
Usually appearing as rectangular patches or horizontal bars containing text, pictures, animation, or company logos at the top or bottom of web sites, banner ads date back almost to the beginning of commercial Internet use. Internet users who are interested by the ad will be directed to your company web site when they click on it. Most banner ads use simple HTML code to convey text or pictures, but more complicated ads can be created using popular multimedia applications like Java and Flash. The latter, while more eye-catching, are considered somewhat risky since many browsers do not come with Java or Flash software built in, and consumers are not likely to wait to download and install such software just to view your ad.

Banner ads are deployed on other web sites either by direct agreement with that web site for a specific consideration (you pay another web site owner to host your advertisement, or agree to host his or her banner ad in exchange), or by paying a banner network company (such as DirectClick or Flycast) that will post your banner ad on a number of web sites for a specific fee.

Pop-Up Ads
A Pop-Up ad is a paid advertisement that automatically causes a user's browser to open a new window when visiting a particular web site. The new window, which is
generally small and opens in front of the page the user intended to open, contains the advertisement. Unfortunately, while eye-catching, numerous surveys of Internet users indicate that most people find them highly irritating, and many browsers now come with features to disable pop-up windows. Thus, pop-ups have declined significantly in popularity and are now considered a poor advertising choice.