Small Business Marketing & Business Acceleration | FrontlineMarketingSystems.com

One Simple Tactic That Can Give You an Unfair Advantage in Local Search

Posted on 07. May, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, Local Search, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, video, YouTube

Showing up in local search results is a pretty big deal if you’re any sort of local business. When people search online locally, but plan to buy offline locally, being the organization they find first and find when mobile could mean the difference between growth and death.

While lots of people publish tips about Google Places pages, local web content, address citations and the sort, not enough people are talking about the power of local video when it comes to gaining an advantage in local search.

Many people are talking about video from a content standpoint and I agree, but what about locally optimized video for SEO. I’ve seen this intentional tactic produce some pretty incredible results in a very short time – particularly when it comes to a Google and YouTube combination.

See, here’s the deal – Google wants to give people interesting search results and as often as possible that includes a mix of local Places pages, videos, products, images and blog posts all mashed together on page one for specific search phrases.

Local businesses that get good at producing and optimizing video can find their YouTube videos zapped to page one for highly competitive search terms with very little effort.

I did a little test over the weekend to prove this theory. Granted there may be other factors at play here, but here’s what I and I believe you can do it too.

I am hosting a couple workshops in Kansas City in June. Since this is for me a rare local play I wanted to see what could do to get some local search results. So, here’s what I did.

• I created a very brief video recorded directly to YouTube.
• I even did a little bit of editing using the new YouTube Tools
• I named the video Kansas City Marketing Workshop and Training
• I added a description with this term
• I added keywords that related to the term
• I saved the video
• I embedded the video on a page on my site.
• I pointed to the video on YouTube from my Facebook page

Total time invested was about 15 minutes. About 30 minutes later this video showed up on page one for the search term – “Kansas City Marketing Workshop”

A day later it moved to the #2 position for the search term and #4 position for the term Kansas City Marketing Training. I conducted these searches logged out of my Google account and even received the same results using private browsing in Safari.

There’s no telling how long this video will stay at the top of the results for my search term, but it certainly reinforced the idea that this is a powerful way to gain additional local search results while creating useful content.

Below are tips to keep in mind as you explore this tactic:

Do the keyword research

Use a tool like WordTracker or Google Keyword Tool to hunt for some search phases that make the most sense. You’re not looking for hyper competitive terms like “Marketing,” you’re looking for longer, less searched phrases that you can quickly impact.

Also keep in mind those frequently asked questions. Focus on making videos that address those issues.

Create multiple videos

The idea behind this approach is to create dozens of simple videos that allow you to build a library of content that addresses many of the things your prospects are searching for.

Make the videos sell

Make sure you add URLs and annotations to your videos so you can send people to pages that give them even more information.

Optimize for specific terms

Use the search phases you uncover as your video titles, in descriptions and as keyword combination. Do a search on YouTube for the phrase you are trying to win and see what comes up. Once you find the top videos in your search term make note of the keywords and borrow liberally.

Point to the videos

Google loves it when other sites point to videos that are hosted on YouTube. You can give your videos even more juice by linking to them from your web site, Facebook and other video hosting sites.

Experiment with the intriguing little tactic and you may uncover some pretty fantastic results for frequently searched terms that might not otherwise stand a chance of competing for.

One Simple Tactic That Can Give You an Unfair Advantage in Local Search is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

10 Tools To Get More From Your Video

Posted on 02. Mar, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, video

10 Tools To Get More From Your Video

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

This post originally appeared on AMEX OPENForum

Video has become an essential marketing tool. It’s a great way to tell your story, show the human side of your business and communicate highly complex ideas in an easy to digest manner. But while video has the power to deeply engage, it also has the power to bore the viewer to tears—and creating compelling video is different than writing, say, a compelling blog post.

Starting a camera and spouting out a thousand words of brilliant prose does not make a compelling video. There are proven techniques and tools that can help make your videos engage, hold attention and wow the viewer. Here are 10 tools that can help you get started.

1. Prezi. This is a interesting take on the slide presentation as it allows you to create one giant and more easily connected idea and then use the tool to zoom, pan and fly all around the presentation to create a really dynamic feel. It’s not the easiest tool to master, but check out some of the incredible examples on the site to get inspiration.

2. YouTube Editor. I like this tool because it’s free, and because you’re using YouTube to host and stream your videos anyway, it gives you some nice editing capability right in YouTube. You can also add annotations and transcripts to your videos making them more SEO friendly.

3. Camtasia. This PC and Mac desktop software is the market leader in the screencapture video world. Screencast videos are a great way to demonstrate how something online works. Camtasia has some nice features that allow you to add focus to areas on your screen as well as annotations and URLs.

4. Animoto. This automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from your photos, video clips and music. It takes a little trial and error to get right, but adds surprisingly professional touch when you do.

5. Stoome. This is a really unique tool as it adds a crowdsourced element. You upload video clips and borrow from other users. You can then work on your project alone or with others. This is an awesome tool for creating videos when you attend a big event or conference.

6. GoAnimate. This tool allows you to make full-featured animated movies using characters and sets of your choosing. Animation can be a really powerful way to tell your story in a unique manner.

7. Magistro. This tool takes your raw footage and goes through and picks out what it thinks is the best of the best to create a short video. The tool then lets you add music and titles. Again, this is one that is awesome when it gets it right, but a little clunky with it doesn’t.

8. Sellamations. This service will create doodle videos where a hand draws out your story with a marker in high-speed capture. It’s not the cheapest route, but it’s certainly one of the best ways to create a one of a kind video that’s simply hard not to watch.

9. Common Craft. This is another really unique way to tell your story using video. Common Craft uses paper cutouts moved around or white boards to tell your story. This is probably one of the best ways to take a complex idea and really make it easy to understand. Again, hard not keep glued to this format.

10. ReelSEO. This one actually isn’t a tool, it’s just the best place to learn about tools like this as well as how to more effectively use video to build your business in general.

(Video) 4 Mistakes You Make When Posting Video on Your Blog

Posted on 21. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Blogging and Content Creation, Guest Posts, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media optimization, video, Video Marketing

Guest post written by Rocky Walls, who has more than 10 years’ experience in digital content creation. As CEO of 12 Stars Media Productions, Rocky works with businesses to create video that’s so real and simple it changes audiences into relationships.

It’s no secret that embedding videos on your blog post is a great way to attract readership and conversion. However, using video to its fullest potential involves more work than slapping an embed code on an otherwise empty post. Here are four common mistakes we’ve seen along with some tips to help ensure that you make the most out of a video on your blog post.

1) No Indication That There is a Video in the Post

You should let your readers know right away that your blog post contains a video. You can accomplish this in two ways.

First, specify it in the title of the post. A good way to do this is to star the title out with “(VIDEO)” – this will let folks know right away that the blog post contains a video. Following “(VIDEO)” write your title as your normally would. For example, a good video blog post title would look something like: “(VIDEO) A Private Tour of Our Offices.”

Secondly, be sure your embedded video appears relatively close to the top of the post. If possible, you want to avoid the video appearing below the fold. Even if readers ignore the title of your post, they will see right away that there is a video on the post if it appears towards the top.

2) No Text Content

Too often we see blog posts that are comprised solely of an embedded video. It’s a good idea to give your readers some context before asking them to watch an entire video. Introduce your video with a few sentences, and then summarize the video in a paragraph below. If you’ve transcribed the A-Roll in your video, you can use some of that content to form the summary paragraph.

(Editor’s note: Here at Convince & Convert, we use Speechpad.com to transcribe our video interviews and the http://socialpros.com podcast)

3) No Customization 

Another common mistake is not optimizing the size of the video to the width of your blog. Whether you use the old embed code or an iframe from YouTube, the first line of the embed code will always start with <object width=”560″ height=”315″> – make sure that the width of the video doesn’t exceed the width of your blog’s content column. It’s best to find the width of the column and set your video width to just slightly less. Don’t be afraid to employ a little trial and error – set a resolution, check to see how it looks, and then make a tweak if its necessary. The height will always conform to the width by automatically adding black bars to the top and bottom of the video in order to maintain the aspect ratio.

You can also customize the code for other aesthetic value and advanced functionality, such as allowing/not allowing related videos and setting a specific start time. Check out this post from the 12 Stars Media blog that talks about ways to customize your embed code to optimize overall viewer experience.

Why YouTube Annotations Can Make the Difference Between Viral and Lame

Posted on 07. Nov, 2011 by Andy Havard in Blog, content marketing, Guest Posts, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, video, Video Marketing, YouTube

Guest post by Andy Harvard, a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company.

YouTube Annotations have always been a hard tool to grasp for both user and viewer. In the early days,  YouTube users sometimes used Annotation to spam their viewers.

These Annotations were never ‘cool’ or user friendly, they were always gaudy, uninviting and looked very unprofessional, so you can imagine my surprise when YouTube Annotations suddenly became useful.

Why We Used To Hate Annotations

It wasn’t just the look of Annotations that made viewers want to run as far away Internet video as possible, it was the general practicality of Annotations. YouTube Annotations no matter how honest or professional they were, never looked trustworthy. They always looked out of place and made viewers felt a tad uncomfortable that their viewing experience was being rudely interrupted.

YouTube has always been a site full of great ways to gain quick SEO value by using Tags, Descriptions, Titles and Closed Captions. Therefore many users had hoped Annotations would only add to the SEO value YouTube offers, but unfortunately Annotations never carried any SEO value at all. You couldn’t even include a clickable URL to help increase traffic to your website. You could only include video URLs, which may be handy, but that would only keep viewers on YouTube longer and keep them off your actual website.

The biggest problem with Annotations was that no one had come up with a clever way of using them, no one had thought of a way to make them look professional or make them useful to users and viewers alike, until now.

Why The ‘New’ Look Rocks

YouTube hasn’t issued any changes to their Annotations, in fact their look and use is still the same. However, YouTube users have smartened up and changed the Annotations game for themselves.

Many users have taken to using the clickable video URL YouTube allows, to make their videos look slick, professional and a great way to showing off more of their impressive content.

Here’s a look at what I’m talking about:

Forward to 1:25 (you’re welcome Scott Monty)

Or this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua5qh40x4KA (Fast forward to 1:51)

Companies of all sizes are incorporating this new YouTube convention into their videos. This technique is a simple case of putting other video content into another video in the editing stage (before YouTube upload), then making use of the video URL hyperlink to enclose it (once uploaded to YouTube). It’s a very simple and effective way to make your video content look sharp to your viewing audience.

Annotations Make Video Interactive

This new video convention hasn’t just stopped at making Internet videos ‘look’ better. It’s created perhaps the most engaging style of video ever made – interactive video.

This impressive way of using the video URL hyperlink has paved the way for a broad new spectrum of Internet video, in particular two key genres; interactive videos and video games.

Let’s take a look at an interactive video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbEei0I3kMQ

The user experience an interactive video provides is unlike any other. Getting viewers to actively interact with your content and enjoy the material on display can be a fantastic way to build brand awareness. It certainly helps to make your video content stand out from the crowd.

Annotations Can Turn Video Into ‘Video Games’

You’ve all heard of video games, but perhaps not quite like this. The engagement an interactive video provides is great, so you can imagine how much better creating an interactive video game could be. The World Wide Web is full of users playing games online, and now there’s a way you can get users interacting with your video content in a similarly engaging way.

If you thought Sesame Street was a blast from the best, take a peek at this:

Hopefully you’ll have come back to this article, but I can’t blame you for getting lost in the video game magic (in a way if you have got sidetracked it proves my point). By now you will have definitely seen the power YouTube users are generating from their content by taking this innovative direction on YouTube Annotations.

Ironically, in some of those video examples you will have seen the pesky issues of the old Annotations creeping in (some users just can’t leave well enough alone), but it’s undeniable that YouTube users are creating cool, effective and furthermore innovative video content, by using the basic uses of video Annotations.

What Does This All Mean?

Depending if you’re an everyday YouTube user, a marketing executive, a blogger, an advertising agent, or a small business owner etc, you may have different views on this brave new world of YouTube Annotations. There are definitely some amazing new ways to use Annotations.

How can your company use YouTube Annotations to make a difference? Best idea wins a copy of The NOW Revolution!

A Social Media Marketing Case Study: Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields

Posted on 29. Sep, 2011 by Jonathan Fields in Blog, content marketing, List Building, Online Product Launches, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, Traffic, video

I started blogging in 2007 because I’d just signed my first book deal with Random House and I realized that social media was about to become a huge tool in any author’s marketing arsenal.

What I didn’t realize was how huge.

It’s become the core of my marketing outreach not just for books, but for everything I do.

But with the launch of my new book, Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance, I decided to take things to an entirely different level, test a bunch of new strategies, and bring video strongly into the picture.

I knew some things would hit big and others would bomb. The results, though, surprised even me.

Here’s how it’s unfolded …

A brief outline of the entire approach

My Major Goals for the Launch:

• Generate thousands of pre-orders
• Build substantial buzz that ramped to fever-pitch on launch

My Major Goals for the Book – Long Term:

• Get ideas and strategies into the hands of creators to help them do great work, without suffering
• Arm entrepreneurs and corporate teams with tools that fuel higher-levels of creativity and innovation

My Approach:

• Create a highly-differentiated design & user experience
• Create a time-release anticipation & buzz-building launch sequence
• Leverage video to turn a text product into a multi-sensory experience
• Give a ton of high-value content, experiences, and tools along the way
• Create irresistible pre-order “experience” offers
• Blend response-principles with social outreach
• Integrate social media, video and applications

The big picture strategy

I’m a bit of a freak about visual feel.

I was heavily involved in the cover design process of the book and I wanted to ensure that everything we created online for the launch also created a visual experience that said, “wow, this is different.”

But, I also knew I wanted to be able to start to let people know something was coming, while we worked on the bigger launch pages. So, I started by adding a very simple “book page” on my blog that had the book cover, a few paragraphs, and links to booksellers to pre-order.

Behind the scenes, though, we were in heavy design and marketing mode.

The big challenge was to create something that was visually stunning, but also was really smart and effective from a response-driven marketing point of view. I’d seen a lot of book mini-sites and, while some were very polished, they were also really ineffective at driving visitors to a particular call-to-action.

And I began to realize that to really pull of what I wanted to do, we’d need to create not only a series of very cool pieces of mixed-media “engagement” content to release, but a website that progressed through a number of different phases that would allow the structure and design to support the key calls to action and media at each point of the pre-launch campaign.

So, here’s what we did …

The tactics and the sequence of events

Phase 1: The Opening Shot and Conditioning the Market

This happened almost two months before the book came out.

Traditional book marketing wisdom says this is way too early. But the main point here was to get onto peoples’ radars and start to build an emotion around the “brand” of the book.

We were also looking to start building a segmented list of people who’d be interested in pre-ordering the book, which would allow us to reach back out to them a number of times over the course of the launch.

I also didn’t want to put up a full mini-site with navigation at this point. It was too early to be giving so much information and asking for any substantial action. This was all about building energy, emotion, anticipation, and a list.

I wanted to set the tone for what was to come and use storytelling and video to make that happen. So we hired Michelle Vargas and her video production team to create a very simple, yet really powerful book trailer where I actually never even mentioned the book or asked anyone to buy it. In fact, the only call-to-action in the video came in the form of a bigger question about life at the end. You’ll have to watch the trailer to see the question.

Here is the video:

We then embedded the book trailer on a very simple landing page and made the video ginormous on the page. Next, we added a few calls-to-action aimed not at selling, but at evangelizing and commenting.

• Sign up for info about pre-order bundles
• Share the page on social media
• Leave a comment

At first, we were going to use the typical WordPress comment section, but changed it to Facebook comments to capitalize on the viral potential within the Facebook platform.

I had Charlie Pabst, from Charfish Designs do the building all the way through every phase of this launch and he also did the design for the first few phases, until we launched the full mini-site.

Here’s a screenshot of the first landing page (it’s not public anymore).

As soon as we published it, I shared it on my blog, twitter, Facebook and Google+ and did a small amount of DMing to simply tell a few friends “this exists.”

I didn’t overtly ask anyone to spread it around, but rather leaned on the gut feeling that we’d created something that would really resonate. Sure, I hoped people would consider it worthy of sharing. Whether they were compelled to share it or not would come down to how good the video was and how clean the page was.

A few minutes later, I had my answer.

It took off. The site started getting shared very quickly, Facebook comments poured in creating powerful social proof, the social buttons underneath the video were racking up serious counts, and the pre-order notice list started to build.

My email was flooded with stories from people all day, sharing their own stories. I literally sat in front of my screen for an entire day on the verge of tears. It was amazing to be sitting in the eye of a tornado of such deep emotion and connection like that.

We then pulled back and let that energy feed on itself for about a week, then it was time for phase 2.

Phase 2: Rolling out The First “Experience”

In this phase, I wanted to inspire people to not only pre-order, but pre-order more than 1 book for a number of reasons.

One, because I wanted to move books. But, also, for a more old-fashioned, human reason. I love when someone hand-selects a book and gives it to me. There’s something really powerful about that. It’s much more meaningful. So, I wanted to encourage people to buy multiple copies and give the book to friends. To create that connection.

But as a marketer, I also knew that the more options I introduced at once, the more likely potential buyers would be to suffer the paradox of choice and buy nothing.

So I started with a single offer, the one I thought would be the most desirable (and likely to be purchased). This was a 3-book bundle “experience.” I knew I’d create other offers, but I held them back to avoid muddying the decision-making process and hurting conversion.

We kept the same design, but stripped the Facebook comments and list-building form and added in long-format copy for the 3-book offer. We also kept the video in mega-size on top because, by then, we knew it was really moving a lot of people and driving a lot of sharing of the site.

It was also important to me to create an offer that was truly extraordinary, not just another dopey “pre-order and you’ll get a bazillion PDFs worth $2 gazillion dollars that everyone knows are available without cost all over the web.”

Not my style. I wanted to create a genuine experience that both expanded on the book and also allowed me to create a real value proposition that was somewhere between 50 and 100 times the cost of the book.

So, I did some things that have never been done before and decided not to just keep it digital, but create something powerful and tangible.

I spent months working with badass Austin, Tx illustrator, Marty Whitmore and Megan Morris from IdeaSchema to create two insanely cool concept illustrations around two key ideas from the book. These were then turned into 16″ x 20″ limited-edition, signed, numbered giclee fine-art prints — real works of art with real value.

Here are mini-images of the two illustrations:

Then I added in a 6-week live teleseminar-based training with me and convinced many of the high-level people I interviewed for the book to allow me to edit the interviews into a super-cool Creative Masters Interview series.

The value of this bundle went into the thousands of dollars, and it was a real value. People realized that. Once we had this all ready to post, we went live, I again posted it around social and the pre-orders began to flow.

Time for the big shift.

Phase 3: Mini-site, Multiple Offers and Buzz-Central

We gave that first offer some time in the market. Then, behind the scenes, I’d been working with the amazing Reese Spykerman to design the fuller mini-site. But even then, I didn’t want the entire site to go up all at once.

Too much to think about.

And as long I was creating multi-book experiences with additional elements that allowed me to create irresistible offers, I didn’t need a whole lot of extra information about the book itself up. People were buying the larger experience and the larger value proposition. At this point, the book pretty much rode along as the sprinkles, not the cupcake.

I knew that would need to change over time, but not yet.

We launched the new design, but only in the form of a landing page with multiple pre-order offers and, again, people started buying. Though, as I suspected, the 3-book experience was very much the sweet spot.

I then introduced a number of videos, all designed to keep drawing people back to the site to experience the video content. And I spread them around, too, both on the book site and on my main blog. I hosted all the video on Youtube in order to create the greatest opportunity for sharing, too.

One video was a really goofy, tongue-in-cheek offer to shave a company’s logo in my hair and dye it to match if they brought 10,000 books (Marc Benioff from Salesforce.com, call me, dude!). That got a lot of giggles and the production value and animation was actually super professional.

The next was a slideshow video based on a poem I wrote called Have a Little Faith. It had a powerful indirect message for the exact demographic that would benefit from the book. I went subtle again with the call-to-action here. You can see it at the very end.

There’s nothing about buying the book in the video. It’s more about creating an emotion that anchors to the book in a very under the radar way, while also creating a standalone experience that had value, regardless of whether the viewer ever bought the book.

Some went on my main blog at JonathanFields.com. But if it wasn’t on the book site, there was always a clear call-to-action in the post text and leading the Youtube description field to learn more about the book by clicking over to TheUncertaintyBook.com.

At the same time, with each passing week, the buzz around the book, the offers, the videos and the ideas from the book were gaining steam.

Uncertainty and its “multi-sensory brand extensions” were pretty much everywhere. Pre-orders were rolling in.

About two weeks before launch date, I staged in the full mini-site with a ton killer reviews, sample pages, the whole yadda yadda. You can see the current full site design here.

Oh, and, I should probably also tell you, I was running a bunch of this while spending 3-weeks driving up the California coast with my family. That was an interesting adventure!

Phase 4: Launch Window

This is where we are right now.

During this entire process, I’ve also been doing a massive amount of outreach to my community, my relationships and friends to inspire them to help in the final launch phase. A lot of people offered to help get the word out, both because they believed in the book, and in me.

That, by the way, is an incredibly humbling thing.

I wanted to make that process as easy as possible, so I offered to write a lot of guest posts (like this one) and do a ton of interviews.

This was a huge amount of work, but many of these folks were friends who were doing something really nice for me, so to the extent that my personal bandwidth could handle it, I was happy to do it.

Starting about 10 days before the launch date, I began to post more actively about the book and ask my tribes to do the same. Every day, the buzz continued to build.

This week, I then launched a story-sharing contest which has seen the creation of dozens of insanely inspiring personal stories, both in the comments on my blog and on websites all over social media.

On Tuesday, I released a special online application called the Creative Mindset Audit tool, which is a mindset assessment app I had built for the launch. I mentioned this tool across social media and hundreds of people started completing the assessment and sharing both the tool and their scores.

And, today, to celebrate the actual launch day for book, I’m holding a live-streaming book launch party at TheUncertaintyBook.com.

I’ll be live-streaming there from 1-4pm EDT (New York) time, having a ton of fun, answering questions, having special guests stop by and giving away a bunch of super cool prizes that include a Kindle FIRE, Kindle, iTunes and BN Gift Cards and more. But you’ve gotta be there to win. Feel free to swing by and say hello, btw!

Wrapping it all up

While this may seem like a lot, what I’ve shared here is actually only a fraction of what went on behind the scenes. And, since this is already a monster post, I’ve left a bunch of things out.

I have an amazing team and, in the end, what we’re really all trying to do is not just move a ton of books (we pre-sold thousands, btw), but change a lot of lives.

The book’s website is still getting shared across social media like crazy with nearly 3,000 Facebook shares, 1,110 tweets, and, to my surprise, it’s been emailed more than 600 times. That’s all due, in large part, to the power of the book trailer video and the strong emphasis on sharing on every page. But, it’s also about the message.

I worked so hard to bring this book to market, because I know in my heart it’s going to help people. Especially artists and entrepreneurs who struggle with the need to make choices and take action in the face of uncertainty. The big message is that you have to go to that place, but properly armed, you don’t have to experience it as anxiety, pain or suffering.

And, that’s a message I hope people can get behind and experience.

Truth is, this is all fun, cool stuff, but the single most important thing you can do as a marketer, an entrepreneur or a creator is … build something remarkable.

Do that, everything else falls into place.

About the Author: Jonathan Fields is the author of Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance, he blogs at JonathanFields.com and runs the acclaimed Tribal Author Camp online book marketing training.

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• [...] A Social Media Marketing Case Study: Uncertainty by … by Making sales with Social Media: a case study « Marketing Local Business Online
• Congratulations on the whole shebang, Jonathan. You clearly did … by Colleen Wainwright
• Thanks, Joel. And much gratitude for joining in. by Jonathan “Not the Cookie Lady’s Son” Fields
• [...] Fields on Copyblogger A Social Media Marketing Case … by Blogs for Self-Publishers for September 25 – October 1, 2011 — The Book Designer
• I think this is one of the best-run book launches I’ve seen … by Joel Friedlander
• Plus 5 more…

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• How to Get Your Blog the Traffic it Deserves (Check out the Sweet Trailer)
• 23 Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Making Any Money (And What To Do About It!)
• What Bestselling Fiction Can Teach You About Writing Better Landing Pages

Content Marketing Is Not New, But the Opportunities Are [Video]

Posted on 14. Sep, 2011 by Joe Pulizzi in American Express, Blog, case studies, content marketing, content marketing world, Fun Stuff, Get Content Get Customers, Junta 42, Junta42 Events, LEGO, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, video

One of our goals for my opening keynote at Content Marketing World was to make sure the marketing professionals in the audience understood that content marketing is NOT new.  This two minute video tells the tale (this video opened the conference):

Most people think that content marketing is a new thing, but it’s been going on since the time of the cave paintings.  John Deere, and their customer magazine The Furrow, is given credit for the first content marketing initiative.  At that time, farmers needed to be educated on the latest in technology so they could be more successful. Instead of buying attention, they created a print magazine in 1895, teaching farmers all about the latest in technology and trends for farmers.  Over 100 years later and 1.5 million in distribution to 40 countries, The Furrow could be the most successful content marketing initiative in history.

Some other timeline facts you may not be aware of:

• 1900 – Michelin develops the “Michelin Guides” to help drivers maintain their cars and find decent lodging.
• 1904 – Jell-O distributes free recipe book that leads to $1 million in sales by 1906.
• 1930s – P&G creates and sponsors radio “soap” operas.
• 1982 – Hasbro partners with Marvel to create G.I. Joe series of comic books, which leads to a revolution in the toy industry.
• 1987 – LEGO launches Brick Kicks magazine (now LEGO Club magazine)
• 2004 – Microsoft launches Channel 9, one of the first corporate blogs from a major brand.
• 2007 – BlendTec develops Will It Blend? video series.
• 2008 – American Express launches Open Forum.
• 2008 – P&G creates BeingGirl.com for adolescent teen girls.

And on and on…

Brands have been telling stories for centuries. Content marketing is not new.  Even so, there are more opportunities than ever before.

If content marketing was a baseball game, then we are just getting out of the dugout for the first inning.

Today, there are literally no barriers to entry when it comes to content marketing.

As Newt Barrett and I discussed in our first book, Get Content Get Customers, the following reasons have left the door wide open for brand marketers to become THE publishers in their industry.

• Buyers accept content from corporate sources more than ever.
• Shrinking media budgets are leaving an opportunity for YOU.  You can invest in the research and content that the traditional media in your niche aren’t willing to do.
• Technology is accessible to companies of every size.
• Journalists, editors and content agencies like we have at Junta42 are willing and able to help you tell your story more effectively.

So, although creating valuable, compelling and relevant content (storytelling) for your customers and prospects has been going on forever, there is still time to make your mark as the leading informational expert in your industry.

For more on developing a content marketing strategy that works, Managing Content Marketing (my new book with Robert Rose) will help.

Perception, Happiness, and Getting Anything You Want

Posted on 02. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Book Reviews, CD Baby, Derek SIvers, personal branding, Seth Godin, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Book, video

I’ve read a lot of books. But I’ve perhaps never been personally impacted as much as I was reading Derek Sivers‘ new book Anything You Want. Part of Seth Godin’s Domino Project that’s rewiring the publishing industry from the inside-out, Anything You Want is a concise (one hour read) and motivational account of Derek’s experiences founding, growing, and selling CDbaby.com, the pioneering indie music e-commerce site.

I like this book so much, I bought some to give away to readers of this post. See below for details.

In the book, the life-long musician talks about:

• How he accidentally founded the company (he taught himself programming and digital commerce to sell his own CD)
• Intentionally kept it smaller than it could have been
• Refused all investor monies
• Eventually made himself superfluous to day-to-day operations
• Sold the company when he lost his passion for it

There are lots of books, and speakers, and training classes and such that espouse a philosophy of “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Derek Sivers lives that principle 1000%.

From his new home in Singapore, Derek sat down for a Skype interview about his career, the book, and making decisions through a happiness prism.

I’ve done a lot of interviews (including the ground-breaking Twitter20 series), but this is my favorite one. It’s a little longer, but I sincerely hope you’ll spend the time to watch it.

If you sometimes find yourself wondering “is this it?” watching this interview and reading Anything You Want will hit you like a ton of bricks.

We all have to worry less about what we have and how we’re perceived, and worry more about making our customers – and ourselves – happy. Thanks Derek for the reminder. For less than $10, Anything You Want is the cheapest life coach in history.

Let Me Send You a Free Copy

I believe in this book so much that I bought copies to give away here at Convince & Convert. In the comments (or on the Facebook page), tell me what about your business or company makes you happiest. The answers that are most interesting, creative, and true will win a book.

(links are Amazon affiliate. Domino Project sent me the book for free)

See Candidio for  Help with Your Video

I’m an ambassador for Candidio. They take your raw Flip video (or similar) and polish it up. I use them for all my videos here at Convince & Convert. They do a great job, are very reasonably priced, and are a joy to work with – no attitude. Tell them I sent you.

Popularity and Reciprocity are the Enemies of Connectivity

Posted on 13. Jul, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, facebook, Mark W. Schaefer, Mitch Joel, personal branding, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social networks, Twitter, video

As I spend increasing amounts of time playing with Google Plus (see my analysis of it here), I’ve come to recognize that the success of social networking eventually brings about its demise. Twitter originally felt a lot like Google + does today, where you recognized most of the people in your stream, interactions were more conversational, etc.

But popularity changes the game. When lots of people flood into a social network, the personal connections that made it attractive in the first place get overwhelmed sometimes.

Further, Twitter’s big mistake was perpetuating the notion of reciprocity. That if someone follows you, you should probably follow them back. If you don’t, you risk being labeled as aloof and elitist. (I really enjoyed the debate on this point from two guys I respect immensely, Mitch Joel & Mark W. Schaefer)

With its built-in Circles component, Google + may have solved these problems. You can have many participants, but engage with different groups in different ways, and you can reciprocate without overwhelming your own interactions on the network.

Has Google + defied the Dunbar Number problem (the research that posits you can only maintain 150 relationships)?

If you’ve played with Google Plus, how do you find it comparing to Twitter and Facebook in its ability to connect you with others?

(video editing and support from my friends at Real Simple Video. Quality video help from quality people and affordable prices. If you need video editing and spiffying up, check them out here)

David Ogilvy’s “Secret Weapon” of Online Marketing, Selling, and Business Success

Posted on 02. Jun, 2011 by Robert Bruce in Blog, Blog Psychology, content marketing, conversion, Copywriting, Email Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Headlines, Landing Pages, persuasion, selling, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, Traffic, video

Almost forty years ago, storied ad man David Ogilvy sat down in an office somewhere in India and recorded a little film confessing the — as he put it — “secret weapon” of the advertising world.

It was a hot day, so he took off his jacket, exposing his infamous red suspenders.

Ogilvy spoke simply and directly to his audience on the other side of the camera.

The prophecy he uttered in that grainy 7-minute film all those years ago has come to pass, with a bullet.

Though visionary, Ogilvy could not have imagined just how powerful his “secret weapon” would become in the age of the internet, or how it would ultimately be wielded by individuals building media companies with nothing more than a laptop and sufficient quantities of sweat.

Watch the grand old man below. If you think his ideas outdated, you’re simply not thinking.

Make the connection between Ogilvy’s 80-year-old secret and the principles we talk about around here week in and week out.

There is nothing new under the sun, we need only the humility and wisdom to correctly apply and re-apply what has come before.

(And in case you’re afraid that Ogilvy’s legendary impatience with “creativity” means you have to be a hack, nothing could be further from the truth. Ogilvy wrote about the benefit of an ad writer being both a killer and a poet, and the ads he wrote showed he was a master of both.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, I envy you. For forty years, I’ve been a voice crying in the wilderness. Today, my first love is coming to its own. You face a golden future. ~ David Ogilvy

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s resident raconteur and copywriter.

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How to Sell in Tough Times Webinar Replay

Posted on 13. May, 2011 by Michel Fortin in Blog, Copywriting, download, Ken Calhoun, News, seminar, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, success, system, video, webinar

Last week, I conducted an hour-long webinar with my friend Ken Calhoun on “How to Sell in Tough Times.”

This webinar was a fireside chat, so to speak, where we touched base for the first time since hosting the now famous Copywriting Success System seminar in 2007 and since released on an eight (8) full-length DVD set.

As I promised, the webinar has been encoded and replay is available right now. I apologize for the tardiness as a client’s looming deadline demanded my full attention.

In fact, because I’m so late in bringing this to you, I’ll extend the offer made we made at the end of the webinar until May 31st, 2011.

Click here to watch this video (new window).

Check out the Copywriting Success System.

How to Sell in Tough Times Webinar Replay originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.