So is there any way that any business with a website can take advantage of this to grow their customer base, increase frequency of purchase, grow loyalty and basically add to the bottom line? You bet!

There are some very big benefits of using video as part of the marketing, communication and advertising strategy of your business. Some of the benefits are obvious, but there are a few benefits that can deliver the biggest impact for your business, but are not known or understood by many.

Let’s press on and explain the benefits of video promotion.

First, the obvious benefits. Video commands attention, as it affects both our visual and aural senses. Have you ever walked into a room where a TV is playing? If you are like most people your attention is immediately drawn to what is playing on the screen. Video will attract the attention of your customers, particularly if you can showcase your product or service and communicate your value proposition in a clear and simple manner.

Video also provides a quick and effective communication channel. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million words. Rather than reading through reams of documentation or a 30 page sales letter, one can communicate the essence of the offering succinctly and clearly. Your customers who are just as time poor, with limited attention span, will thank you for it.

Video promotion marketing can also provide a personal touch. Think about it. Unless your customers know you personally, you are just a name behind a web site. It requires a lot of trust for people to buy from an unknown person. This can hurt conversions. On the other hand, with video if you are the owner or employee in the business and are on the screen, your customers can begin to relate to you.

Think about it. As the saying goes “people don’t buy from businesses or website; they buy from people”. Internet video is a great way to have a one to one, person to person connection.

This can also lead to better conversion rates for you. Because after they have watched the video, if they click on a link to visit your web site, they are a more qualified, hot prospect.

Videos can also help you stand out against your competitors online. It provides you with differentiation. You do not need your video to be slick and professional. In fact, with the popularity of “reality television”, it is probably better if your video looks more natural and real.

Instead of looking like every other web site out there, you can stand out by employing video to brand your business and communicate what you stand for, more effectively.

Now for that hidden benefit, that provides the biggest impact.

If you have a web site, you probably realize how hard it is to rank well in the search engines for the competitive key word terms in your industry. On the Internet, key words are very important, as most users type in keywords into the search engines to find the product, service, brands or businesses they are looking for.

One of the big benefits of using video currently is that if you use Internet video and then use the correct keywords, describe your video using keywords and then upload them to multiple free video hosting services, this could in many instances help boost your rankings in the search engines.

I’ve created several videos using Camtasia for our own projects as well as for our clients and I was able to get first page rankings on Goolge in less than 48 hours. My friend, video marketing dude, Mike Koenigs, showed me how to do achieve these top rankings. Here’s his secret recipe for dominating markets online.

Visit Traffic Geyser.

Mike shows you how to create an online campaign that dominates search engines and generates massive traffic and leads fast, easy and cheap. You’ll be able to turn any prospect into a buyer without coming across like a salesperson. It’s so brilliant simple you will get it immediately.

In fact, when Mike revealed it at a recent marketing conference, he got THREE standing ovations. Did I mention I got it for you for FREE?

Take a look at Traffic Geyser.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: video marketing, how to use videos, promotional videos, get traffic, video marketing secrets

But there’s more to it than just being too busy. It’s about commitment. If you’re not committed to to do something, it probably won’t get done. Simple as that. So I say “make your pledge” to accomplish whatever it is you want to do and stick to it. I know it’s easier said than done but without it you don’t have a chance.

So what triggered the inspiration to start up again? First, I’ve been reading the Sedona Method and it’s helped me get in a more positive frame of mind. Second, I came across a post on MyBlogLog, which by the way is a great blog community, from someone wondering what happened to this blog. It just reminded me of this project and the importance of sharing information and helping others.

That said, I’d like to share a very cool Wordpress plugin called the Ninja Affiliate by MaxBlogPress which automatically converts keywords on your blog into money making affiliate links. You can also manage, track, cloak and shorten an unlimited number of affiliate links from one central location.

Go ahead and mouseover and click on the above links and you’ll see it action. I highly recommend this tool for all your blog marketing and promoting affiliate programs within your blog. This plugin is easy to install and implement.

I will leave it up to Dane to write more about what we’ve been doing for the last several months (besides not keeping up with this project!). He’s a much better storyteller. I just like to get to the point.

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliate links, blog community, online business

1. Do you have a business plan or a marketing plan? If you have a marketing plan, how would you augment it and refine it with a variety of public relations strategies and tactics; including media relations, customer relations, vendor relations, strategic alliances, and others? If you don’t have a marketing plan, get one.

2. Have you conducted any formal market research to help identify your place in the market, customer insights/preferences/awareness/actions, opportunities, threats, etc…?

3. Who is your target market? How else can you segment that audience? Single, married, by country, by city, by lifestyle preferences, etc…

4. What charities do your prospective customers support?

5. Who is your top competitor and why? What is their appeal and market niche? Why is your product line or service superior/preferable?

6. What publications/mediums are your competitors using the most to market their products or services?

7. If you were to model your business and product strategy after another company (same or another industry), who would it be and why?

8. Sales so far have come from who and where? Have you had repeat buyers? Are you surveying past and future buyers?

9. Of your customers to date, what do they have in common? (geographic, demographic, psychograhics, etc…)

10. What products or services do you expect to be your top sellers?

11. Define your potential revenue streams – wholesale, retail, Internet, affiliates, etc… What percentage of total sales do you expect to come from each revenue stream?

12. In your business are there any human interest stories about the people who are involved with the products and services? Personal experiences, the jobs created, environmental benefits, etc…

13. Is there a seasonality to your product or service? Is there a time of year that it slows drastically?

14. What are the industry trends that you should understand?

15. Do you have any business plans/activities that are newsworthy?

16. Where is your hometown? Where did you go to college? Are you a member of social or professional organizations?

17. Define success? Where do you want to be in one year?

18. You just opened the New York Times or some business magazine and you see a story in there about your company and products. What is the headline?

Technorati Tags: business strategy, strategic business survey, marketing survey, online business survey, business plan, survey tool

Everything takes so much time! OK, I’m not giving up. It’s just going to take a little longer than I expected. And I haven’t been motivated to learn Joomla inside and out. I may have to outsource some of this stuff.

In the meantime, I’ve compiled a list of marketplaces for buying and selling web sites…

http://www.Sitepoint.com
http://www.forums.digitalpoint.com
http://www.Sedo.com
http://www.DealaSite.com
http://www.WebsiteBroker.com
http://www.VotanWeb.com
http://www.SitesIndeed.com
http://www.WebsiteLot.com
http://www.BuySellWebsites.com
http://www.DaniWeb.com/forums
http://www.YoungEntrepreneur.com/forum
http://www.MidasCode.co.uk
http://www.IBuyWebsite.com

I personally like Sitepoint and I’ve heard good things about Digitalpoint and SitesIndeed. How’s your site flipping going?

Technorati Tags: site flipping, site flip, buy websites, sell websites, site marketplaces, buying and selling web sites, Joomla

I don’t know what it is about stylesheets. I know they are eminently logical. I suppose if I just knew all the ins and outs I would find them to be child’s play. But as it is (and I’ve been working with stylesheets for years) I just find trying to bend CSS to my will to be excruciatingly frustrating! Now with PHP, I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do–at least nothing that I can think of. I build all kinds of cool applications in PHP. But the minute I try to do stylesheets, I slow to a crawl.

I know what I need to do. I just need to outsource this kind of stuff. I did it just the other day for a little Flash animation I needed. Cost me $15 and it was as painless as could be. So why don’t I just do it?

1. I get caught up in the challenge. Doing web development is kind of like doing puzzles. Your brain gets a little endorphin hit whenever you get the website to do what you want. I start in on it because I enjoy the creative activity. But then, with stylesheets, I start hitting the wall. It’s like going into withdrawal. It isn’t as much fun, but by that point, I’m just determined to make it do what I want.
2. I’ve had bad experiences with contracting out work before too–people who don’t speak english well, don’t respond to their emails, do half-assed work. Sometimes it’s quicker just to do it yourself.
3. I don’t have money to burn. I have this gnawing anxiety whenever I think about spending money. I can’t be certain MentorNet will produce income. Can I risk forking over cash just to save myself some time and frustration?

Well, I know the answer. It is worth it to outsource these kinds of jobs. We can find developers who do quality work. And my time is better spent working on the business rather than frittering my time away doing webdev puzzles.

I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Technorati Tags: MentorNet, online business, web development, php, css, stylesheets, UI, user interface, website

Anyway, it was so impressive to see how compelling a case he made through the videos and other material. He used his own techniques to sell the product, which was his techniques. And since you found yourself wanting to buy it, you realized that the techniques must work, which makes you want to buy it even more. So it creates this kind of virtuous spiral of desire and reinforcement. Brilliant!!

Watching his countdown to Feb 1, 2008 and seeing that x number of people were already pre-registered to snap up the limited number of openings, you could practically feel the excitement of people counting down the minutes. The whole time I was witnessing this I’m thinking “Wow. This guy is going to make a million bucks in the space of an hour!” I never did actually find out if he did make a million buck, but I can’t imagine how he didn’t. Now that sound like a lot of fun!

I’m looking forward to checking out Frank’s blog going forward, and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to do an interview with him on MentorNet once we get it ready for prime time.

Technorati Tags: frank kern, mass control, mentornet, online marketing, video advertising, online business, internet business, online success, online opportunities, business plan

As I’ve probably mentioned already, and probably will again, Rich and my problem is not coming up with enough ideas–it’s narrowing them down to one that we can really concentrate on. Well, I think we’ve finally got it here. Drumroll, please!……………

MentorNet

No, not that MentorNet, the NEW and IMPROVED MentorNet! I’ve actually owned the mentornet.com domain since 1995, when I first jumped into the Internet business. (I know, I know, pathetic that I’m still trying to strike it rich after 13 years). For most of those years the website as been a stale, neglected piece of brochureware., ignored by us and the world alike. It only saw action when we pitched a website project–we’d go in and spiff up the portfolio and as soon as we got the project we’d forget about mentornet.com again.

Yet, I’ve always loved the name and thought it had great branding potential. I’ve often thought about turning it into a kind of hub for mentors or a portal for people trying to achieve success in online business.

Well, the time has come. Go check out MentorNet if your interested in seeing what we’re up to. And please, let us know what you think! Interested in participating? That would be cool!

I’ll be posting more about the project in the days to come.

Technorati Tags: mentornet, mentors, online marketing gurus, internet business experts, internet business, online success, online opportunities, web business resources

Even though I did buy a site on one marketplace and took the template and tweaked it, optimized the code for the search engines and promoted it to all the top social bookmarking sites and then flipped it on another marketplace, I think I will develop from scratch the majority of the sites that I will sell online.

So now Dane and I have to make the process of creating and selling sites as automated and as efficient as possible. It might be time to revive a project of ours that’s been sitting on the sidelines for years… I need to talk to Dane about it before I give away the details.

So, what am I doing right now? I’m learning how to use Joomla, a content management system. Supposedly it is much better than Wordpress, which is more of a blog management system. Even though Wordpress is the best blogging tool that I’ve used, I’m always spending way too much time with plugins that don’t work and templates that have too many bugs. The key is to know which plugins and templates to use. I’ll write more about Wordpress some other time.

I think Joomla will be the platform to use to create high-quality, membership sites and get some traffic and revenue and then sell them online. If you’re interested in learning more about Joomla I highly recommend this site… How to Build a Free Sophisticated Website with Joomla. Also, here are some Joomla videos and here are the extensions to use recommended by the SiteFlip Academy to use: Fireboard, Group Jive, Community Builder, Marketplace, AEC, Sigsiu Business Directory, Ion Files and All Videos Plug-in. I don’t know much about these extensions but will try them all out and let you know.

Technorati Tags: site flipping, selling websites, Joomla, Joomla videos, Joomla extensions, Wordpress, Wordpress plugins

Absolute Authority was basically a directory of vertical portals made up of authority guides building their sites by adding related links, articles, affiliate programs and more through an easy-to-use online control panel.

Authorities could even view their traffic stats, tap into a resource section packed with traffic generation and marketing tips, advertising information, a contact manager to manage their own subscribers and so on.

By the way, we didn’t have the ability to add Adsense ads because this was happening before even Google was around! We did include Commission Junction ads because they were one of the first to offer affiliate program links.

Anyway, to make a long story short, the Internet bubble burst and we couldn’t close on our second round of funding from angel investors and we had to let go of all our programmers and eventually sell the site. That was a bummer. We did learn to never again use Cold Fusion for developing web sites! It’s all PHP these days. I’m sure we’ll have more posts on Absolute Authority - I don’t want to get too depressed right now. I want to get back to writing about Jack Humphry because he wrote a very informative and comprehensive resource on creating authority sites and using Web 2.0 social media sites to bring in traffic. You should download the free resource at Authority Blackbook. BTW, he’s launched a new site called Bending The Web, which I haven’t even had a chance to check out yet.

I’m a big believer in promoting through social bookmarking, social networking, video sites and other web 2.0 sites. I think there’s a lot of potential here to tap into some great traffic, if done right. There’s a new coaching course called SMARTS that looks like they’ve got social media marketing all covered. Check out this Social Marketing video by StomperNet.

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, absolute authority, web 2.0, authority blackbook, Jack Humphry, Keith Baxter

Rich has so many projects going on and so much knowledge about online marketing tools that whenever I talk to him my head starts to spin. So we started talking about about the need to have a way of getting organized that:

1. Would allow us to keep all our information stored in a central location
2. That we could each update on our own time
3. That was easy to customize for our specific purposes

I could develop a system like this from scratch using PHP, but I’ve done that and I know how much time that takes. So we went looking for something that already exists. We looked at basecamp which is a really decent project management/collaboration tool. But we needed a structured list of all the logins (for example) and this just didn’t cut it. In other words, we needed a database program. I thought about Intuit’s QuickBase which does allow you to create your own database driven applications online, but they are now charging for it, and Rich and I are loath to spend money since we’re not making much money right now.

So as we were talking, Rich did a search on something I said and BLAMMO! He found just what we were looking for!

It’s called ZoHo. It’s a beautiful suite of Web2.0 applications, including word, spreadsheets, presentation, collaboration, project management, etc. The one we started using was Creator, which allows you to create an online we application with incredible ease. So we built an application within about an hour and started inputing our data right away. Getting all our data in there is going to take longer. But it’s a beautiful application and it’s completely free (at least for the moment). Maybe by the time they start charging for it we’ll be making a bunch of money and it won’t matter!

Technorati Tags: zoho, spreadsheets, project management, basecamp, project tools, management tools, collaboration tools online