Five Reasons to Post Your Commercial on YouTube

By Apryl Duncan, About.com

Don't let the money you've already spent on your commercial go to waste. You should stretch your ad dollar even further by posting your commercial on YouTube.com. Here's why:

1. Your Commercial's Already Produced
You spent your ad dollars to create an effective TV commercial so make the most of your money. Posting your commercial to YouTube is free and you get a longer shelf life on your ad even after your run on local airwaves is over.

2. New Way to Reach Customers
There are a couple of new ways to reach customers by posting your commercial on YouTube:

• Invite Current Customers
  Send an invitation by mail or Email to your customers inviting them to watch your commercial on YouTube. If you have a newsletter mailing list or contact Email addresses, send a personal Email that announces your commercial and where they can see it.
  Just be sure your customers have given the okay to be contacted so your company isn't considered a spammer. You always want to make sure you send any bulk Email responsibly.
• Reach Customers Outside of Your City
  Millions of people visit YouTube and the site's traffic consistently falls in the top five of every online ranking system. Even if you live in Small Town, USA, selling local products, you have the ability to reach new customers by taking your ad campaign outside of your immediate area.

You may or may not get a sale because someone saw your ad on YouTube but you could generate a lot of buzz, which leads us right into the number three reason to post your commercial on YouTube.

3. Possible Local Coverage
There are a couple of ways you can get even more exposure for your company by posting your ad online. Make a PR effort after your ad is posted. Send press releases to local media outlets announcing that your company is taking its ad ad campaign online with your TV commercial being available on YouTube. This is a good story for newspapers, magazines and Web sites that cover local interest stories.

Don't ignore your TV markets, though. While this is not really a story that's a right fit for TV coverage on its own, you never know when a morning show needs a guest to talk about online advertising and what you've done.

You also want to keep tabs on how your ad is doing. When you reach a milestone, such as 10,000 views, a spot on the "Most Discussed" list, being featured, etc., send out another press release to announce the latest news. Be aggressive with your PR efforts to get the most out of your YouTube ad campaign.

4. Potential to Earn Revenue
You can get paid when people watch your ad on YouTube if you qualify for YouTube's Partner Program. You'll want to stay on top of your PR push after your video is posted. The more people that view your ad, the higher your commercial's rank climbs, the more potential you have to earn money back on what you've already paid to have created.

5. An Easy Way to Get Your Ad on Your Site
Your Web site helps advertise your company. Take your ad campaign to a whole new level by allowing your customers to watch your commercial just by visiting your Web site.

Once you've posted your ad on YouTube, you can easily put it on your site. There are a number of reasons why you would want to do this:

• Save Your Bandwidth
  When potential customers come to your site, they need to be able to see your products, prices and answer any of the questions they have fast. If you have people watching your commercial through your own site's bandwidth, that commercial is hogging the speed and slowing down your site.
  
  Most small business Web sites don't have a lot bandwidth to support videos being watched because they don't need it. After your ad is on YouTube, though, you have the option of linking to your ad or embedding it on your site. YouTube covers the bandwidth and your site continues to run smoothly and unaffected.
• Increased Video Views
  Adding a link or embedding it on your site helps your video views. Since the commercial's hosted on YouTube's server, you get credit for every view. This also increases your commercial's rank, which helps you in your PR efforts as well as your potential to earn money if your ad becomes popular enough.

Many companies are missing out on a unique opportunity to attract customers. Don't post your ad and call it a day, though.

Be sure to follow up with an aggressive PR push and track your ad's success. Not only do you get extra mileage out of your commercial, you never know who's watching.

Source : About.com

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Content Relevancy and Link Popularity Explained

How does a web page get ranked #1 on Google? There is no doubt that the methods of the 1990s no longer work - and most definitely, not since Google went public in 2004

Back then, the content of your website's pages was the major factor. Today, however, having links on the Internet that point back to your website is another important criteria, which will require that you involve yourself in the Internet community.

The later point is a very interesting to consider. How do you involve yourself in the Internet community? What does this have to do with search engine optimization (SEO)? Actually, involving yourself in the Internet community doesn't directly have anything to do with SEO; however, many people seem to pigeon hole anything related to the search engines into SEO. Therefore, we will need to define the various acronyms that are used in the Internet industry.

The Internet has also created an environment in which institutional control of information has been lost. As a result, control of information has trickled down to the individual level. Imagine the transition from several thousand companies once controlling messages through traditional media to today's expansive communication via several million individuals free to distribute their own information on the Internet. What you find is that the logic process has also been spread over millions of people; and for this reason, it is harder to explain why certain things happen on the Internet.

Because the Internet has opened the communications to the individual, the individuals are now exposed to the concepts of business. Not everyone has a business degree and most only have a superficial understanding. As such, the definition of marketing and how advertising plays a role in this process is not well understood at the individual level. This has caused improper usage of the various acronyms used on the Internet today.

Marketing and Advertising Defined

Before we can understand the various acronyms being used within the Internet industry, it is important to understand the definitions of marketing vs. advertising.

* 'Marketing' is the process or technique of promotion, selling and distributing a product or service. * 'Advertising' is to make your product or service publicly known; an announcement to call public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to purchase.


You can see from the definitions that advertising is part of marketing. Marketing includes everything about raising the awareness of your business from branding, messaging, public relations, advertising, events, customer relationships and much more. Advertising is a component of marketing and should never be the only method used to promote your business.

Defining SEM, SEA, SEO and LP

Using what we have learned about the definition of marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) would include all processes related to promoting all of your website's pages with the search engines. Included in this process would be Search Engine Advertising (SEA), which would be the sponsored search advertising - or, what some also refer to as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. These are the sponsored links along the top, right side and bottom of search results. Also, included in SEM would be SEO and your outreach program on the Internet away from your website that increases the number of links to your website, also known as Link Popularity (LP).

What is SEO?

It is important to understand how to tell the search engines that a particular page of your website is an authority in a particular topic. Keywords and phrases are utilized to communicate this expert status to search engines. You will notice that we are talking about pages of your website. Each page of your website can be optimized for a topic based on its visible content. We are no longer optimizing blindly the entire website for the same information, but using each page to help drive traffic to our website. By all means, this does mean that for a particular search result, visitors may enter your website from somewhere else other than the home page!

Each search engine has a different algorithm in deciding what the person searching is seeking and how relevant the information on the individual pages of your website relates to the search. They take into account the title of the page, the meta description, and the visible text. Some search engines do look at your meta keywords, but not nearly as much as they used to in the past. What you are presenting with visible text is what the visitor will see; and therefore, the content has more value than the Meta keywords. This also prevents spammers and fraudulent websites from hiding their true identity.

Why is SEO Important?

The volume of information on the Internet is staggering. The Internet seems larger than our real world. Search engines have an enormous task to filter all of this information to provide something meaningful to the searcher in a matter of seconds. Compared to the old days of using search tools like Archie and Veronica that required hours and sometimes days finding information on the Internet, the results from the current search engines are significantly improved.

The competition of web pages (whether they are direct competitors or not) as well as your business competitors are all seeking to also be ranked within the first three pages of search results. It is important that you seek out the right resources to help you optimize your pages and give you a fighting chance.

What to do before you SEO

Research, research, research! There are many tools out there that provide you information about what people actually type into the search engine, the number of searches performed over a 30 day period, as well as how many competing web pages exist for that search term. These are the three major parts to the research you are seeking. The search engines can provide you the first two with their tools, while the third item may require you to perform a search in quotes to get a real understanding of the total competing web pages. There are third party tools that can also provide the complete information, however, always keep in mind that the search volume is not an absolute from any source including the search engines. Use the information as a guideline to give you direction. Regardless of the tool(s) you use for your research, they will all provide you options for other key phrases to consider based on your initial entry. This will be helpful to consider other alternatives you may not have thought about.

In this process you will learn two important items.

* First you will learn that the rest of the world may not necessarily search for your website's products and services the same way you expect them to. For example, you may be ranked number one for a particular term, but if no one is searching for that term, what difference does it make if you're number one or number 100? Go with what people are searching.

* Secondly, you will want to seek out a balance between the number of searches and the number of competing web pages. The search term that has several million competing web pages will take you longer to rank where as those that are only in the thousands will be easier. Take a look at the search volume to see what would happen if you had 1% of those visitors purchase? Based on what you are selling you may not need to be ranked for terms that have thousands of searches. For your business, those with lower search volumes and less competition may suffice as a foundation.

Consider your research as a starting point, not an end point. You can always change your optimization later; and always keep in mind that you can optimize the pages within your website to cover a variety of possibilities from your research.

What you do to SEO

Search Engine Optimization does require some technical understanding of the HTML code in order to add the necessary meta tags, insure you have the right image alt descriptions, the right link title descriptions and lastly, to appropriately write the visible text on the pages. The elements of this process include the following:

HTML Code

Be sure that your HTML code adheres to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standards. Many will ask the question why and the answer is simple. If you adhere to the standards, you can't go wrong. If you don't adhere to them, there is a higher chance that it will have a negative effect for browsers and search engines.

HTML structure

Websites with outdated Flash animations, frame designs, and broken links are certainly not going to allow search engines to identify the content of your web pages. Use current coding methods, not table based websites. Can you easily navigate your website? If not, then neither can the search engines; and therefore they cannot identify how to rank your web pages.

Website Flow

Does your website allow a visitor to reach your business objective easily from the point of entry? Make sure you have a call to action on all pages of your website.

Use of all meta-data

Meta data goes beyond Title, Keywords and Descriptions. There are a variety of meta tags that inform search engines about the content of your web page. Use all of them. Don't forget to have unique Title, Keywords and Descriptions for each of your web pages. Duplicate content is not something the search engines appreciate.

Visible Content

Be sure to have well-written, grammatically correct and spell-checked content to your web pages. If your website becomes a resource for its unique content you are more likely to receive traffic-seeking information about your business.

Your Outreach Program: Link Building

Consider link building as a process that will increase the critical mass of information about your business. The information or content you post (vs. advertise) on the Internet will have a shelf life of years. Therefore, the links to your website will also accumulate over time and also have a shelf life of years.

The more links you have pointing back to your website the more popular your website is considered by the search engines. Based on the content that is posted your website will be considered an authority on that topic.

The process of posting content on the Internet will not only generate traffic from the search engines, but also generate traffic to your website from the websites where the content is posted. Oddly enough you will get traffic from these websites before receiving traffic from the search engines.

Content you will post on the Internet will come in five primary forms: Articles, News Releases, Videos, Photos and Social Media Marketing. The process of content marketing is quite involved and is also labor intensive when done correctly. If you come across anything that may sound like a "link farm", you will want to run because they will not give you any long term results and are not considered responsible link building.

Finally the link building process comes in three formats: direct links to your website, cross linking content on the Internet, and deep linking to specific pages within your website. Understanding this process becomes a strategy in order for your prospects to find you and have all paths lead back to your website.

Conclusion

Is this an overnight process? Absolutely not! It is an ongoing process that acts not only as a public relations tool, but also as a long term advertising tool. The process of maintaining your website and the content marketing process of link building is something you do daily, weekly and monthly. Part of this process and Internet marketing strategy also requires the initial research process and the measurement of the results and the effects of your efforts.

About the Author: SmartFinds Internet Marketing agency (Smartfinds) develops strategies for corporations with a sophisticated approach to digital marketing. From website development, creative, branding, to research and strategy development to digital marketing to digital advertising to measurement, reporting and data analysiss.

Entireweb.com

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When Should You Increase Advertising Spend?

You may get a bigger payoff from increased spending on advertising if you wait until the economy begins to contract, says new research. That doesn't mean advertising in a healthy economy is a waste of money. But when advertising spending is already high, there's a risk of "overspending," says the study. Too much advertising may help rivals by increasing a buyer's awareness of a category and not your company's brand!

Conventional wisdom was right

To examine the long-term return from advertising, researchers analyzed the performance of nearly 2,700 companies — and grouped them by type (consumer, industrial and service). They then compared returns from advertising in recessions and upturns. They found advertising was an asset that contributed to a company's financial performance for up to three years. And increased spending during a recession produced greater benefits than increased spending when the economy was doing well.

One reason for this outcome: Advertising sends a positive signal about future performance to investors. It works in much the same way that exhibiting at a trade show during hard times may inspire confidence in customers and sales partners.

What this means?

If increasing advertising pays during a recession, what's the impact of budget cuts? You may lose momentum, but it's not fatal, finds the researchers. Here's why. Past advertising has a cumulative effect that can help you maintain your position for three years. But to get the biggest bang for your buck, they urge companies to maintain spending at a steady pace.

The researchers also found that not all companies are equal. Advertising spending had a bigger impact on consumer and industrial products than it did on service companies.

Source: "Should Firms Increase Advertising Expenditures During Recessions?" MSI Report, No. 03-115.

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Sex! Why Getting Your Attention Is Never Enough

The Lots of companies use interesting and attention-getting ads with the brand name or major takeaway buried somewhere in the ad - completely divorced from the attention getting element. So what happens? Consumers remember this great ad, but for the life of them have no idea what it was for or who it was by. This is a huge waste of resources.

If we are dealing with a familiar product and we have a familiar message, maybe consumers can attend briefly to our message and brand name while they are doing something else. They can divide their attention because the ad and message are familiar and well-known. This is what reminder advertising is all about.

But if we have a new brand, a new message, or something complicated to say, consumers won't possibly be able to attend to this message while simultaneously undertaking the complexities of a stressful, multitasking, interruption filled environment.

Does this mean we can't develop new or complicated messages? No, it just means that we have to be all the more careful about making consumers attend to the right things and make sure our message is interesting enough to have them put aside something else and think about us alone.

What Attracts and Sustains Attention?

Psychologists and marketing academics have learned important lessons about what attracts and sustains attention. We list some of them here. Think about them as a checklist for developing your ad, email promotion, or website. They will help you make your marketing effort interesting and attractive for the right reasons.

On a very broad level, things attract attention if they are personally relevant, pleasant, surprising, or easy to process. There are a lot of ways in which we can achieve these things, as we explain below.

Is It Personally Relevant?

Consumers pay attention to things that that have implications or consequences for their lives, especially if they appeal to their needs, values, or goals. Mothers, for instance, pay attention to ads that feature kids because kids are relevant to their needs, values, and goals. We also pay attention to people who look, act, or seem like ourselves, perhaps because we think they have similar needs, values and goals, similar problems and perhaps, because they know something we don't.

Are you attuned to who your typical target consumer is? Are you using people like them in your ad? On your web-page?

Another way to capture consumers' attention is to ask rhetorical questions—those asked merely for effect. Questions like, "How would you like to win a million dollars?", and "Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everyone did?" make the consumer think, "Yeah, I do"! It gets consumers to shift their attention to your brand or service and what it can do for them.

Is It Pleasant?

We attend to things that are inherently pleasant. No doubt this has evolutionary significance. We want to approach things that make us feel good and avoid those that don't. So, for the marketer appealing to the more primitive desires in consumers, here's what can be done:

First, use attractive visuals. Advertisements containing attractive models have a higher probability of being noticed because the models arouse positive feelings or a basic sexual attraction. Do you pay attention to ads with Cindy Crawford, Christie Brinkley and Mel Gibson? Of course you do. You also pay attention to beautiful sunsets, cute babies, enticing food, and beautifully decorated rooms. They are all pleasant to look at.

Music is another way of making something pleasant. Familiar songs have considerable attention-getting power, which is why some companies have used popular and familiar music and famous artists like Reba McEntire, Aretha Franklin, and the Beatles in commercials. Optimally, the chosen music fits with the message you are trying to send.

Humor can also be an effective attention-getting device. This is perhaps one reason why Clio award winning ads become winners. They have attracted the attention of the people who vote for them.

The problem with humor is that not everyone agrees on what is funny. And a good joke loses its punch after it's repeated a few times. Companies misstep with humor when the joke is completely unrelated to the point of the ad. The result? People remember the humor, not the brand name or message.

Is It Surprising?

Consumers also attend to things that are surprising. Again, evolution explains this phenomenon. We are automatically conditioned to things that are surprising because we have to quickly judge how to respond to them (should we fight, run away, or approach this surprising thing?). Two things make a stimulus surprising: novelty and unexpectedness.

We attend to novel things -- those that are new and unique -- because they are different and require analysis. Of course, being new, unique, and different is hard work and requires creativity. Talking Internet ads, shockwave technology, pop-up ads and the like were all, at one time, novel ways of attracting attention. Unfortunately, once something new comes along, its very success makes others want to copy it, which makes it old, not new.

While we have been talking about advertising and web pages, remember that products, packages and brand names that are novel will also grab attention. The perfume labeled "Dirt" is, you must admit, different. "Catalyst for Men," packaged in test tubes and laboratory flasks, will certainly stand out from other fragrances at Macy's.

Something important to remember about novelty: things that are new are not always preferred. We often dislike food, for instance, that tastes different from what we usually eat. The same goes for new clothing styles and new and unusual music.

A second feature affecting surprise is unexpectedness. Unexpected stimuli are not necessarily new, but their placement is different from what we are used to. 3-M created attention with surprising ads that featured chickens with fluorescent, stick-on notes with words like "Rush" and "Copy" stuck to their bodies. One company showed a picture of a man and woman gazing intently at their wallpaper while their baby swung from the ceiling fan. Unexpectedness is a much easier thing to achieve than novelty.

Although unexpected stimuli attract attention, using things that are too unusual can sometimes be confusing. Thus, we might pay attention to them, but then decide they are so weird we don't want to focus on them any more. This potential problem is illustrated inthe Reebok U.B.U. campaign that used bizarre images like a three-legged man and a ballerina vacuuming the lawn. Though effective in getting the attention, the visuals were confusing and rendered the ad unsuccessful.

By Debbie Maclnnis,

marketingprofs.com

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Media Advertising

Learn the basics of multiple types of ads - print, television, radio, and more.

The media is a powerful thing -- the average person spends an enormous amount of their life consuming it in one form or another, and will spend a significant percentage of that time looking at, listening to or watching advertisements. If you want to use the power of the media, though, you need to know what you're doing otherwise your investment will be a financial disaster. Listed below are the most common forms of media advertising. No doubt you can think of others as well.

Advertising in Newspapers and Magazines

There are two kinds of advertising you can get in newspapers and magazines: classified and display. Classifieds are the small ads towards the back of the publication, while display ads can be almost any size, from a small corner of a page to a massive double-page spread.

If there's a publication you're interested in advertising in, either go to its website (the rate card section) or call its advertising department to find out the rates it charges. Now pick your jaw up off the floor. Yes, advertising in the print media really is that expensive, and for most home businesses it probably just won't be that economical.

There is, however, an exception: niche and trade magazines. If you've ever looked around in a newsagent, you will have seen just how many magazines there are out there, filling every conceivable gap in the market. You need to find the magazine that people who are interested in your services might read. For example, if you're a wedding photographer, look for a magazine called 'Your Wedding', 'Bride', or something similar. Advertising in these magazines will be far cheaper than placing an ad in a general-audience publication, and far more likely to actually get some responses.

Advertising on the Radio

Wherever you are, the chances are that there's a local radio station. Once your home business grows to a decent size, you might consider buying some time on it.

Really, though, the only kind of home business that can benefit enough from radio ads to justify the cost is one that does anything to do with cars. Since radio is almost entirely limited to use as in-car entertainment now, you know that almost everyone your ad reaches will be a car-owner, and so might be interested in what you're offering. If you offer something that people need cheaply or even for free, you can get a big response.

Unfortunately, that response could be a little too big -- thanks to the time-sensitivity of radio, you'll get mobbed the next day, and then everyone will forget you again. Radio advertising offers the listener no opportunity to keep your ad and refer to it later, or to find it again in the future. You will find that any ads involving a phone number are spectacularly useless.

Advertising on the Television

Unless your business is getting pretty big, this would be quite a bad idea. You'd have trouble producing and airing an ad even on local cable channels for less than $10,000. Of course, if there's a market for your product and you've got the budget for this, you could take a gamble and make a mint. The home businesses that tend to do best out of TV ads are ones that have a 'unique and useful invention' product with easy-to-demonstrate benefits -- think infomercial. Research shows that you can sell almost anything given a 60-second ad, a free phone number and a price point of $19.95.

Advertising on Billboards

Here's one that gets overlooked pretty often, but can be very effective if you do it right. Billboard ads are relatively expensive, but they do generally stay up for a long time, and they can be very specifically targeted to an area -- the one where they're physically located. You'll have the best results with this if you can put one near enough to your business that it could say 'turn left at the next junction', or something like that. Phone numbers are, again, pretty useless, although you could have some luck putting a website address up there.

Advertising at the Movies

Finally, here's one that often gets overlooked. If you turn up to the cinema early, you might have seen that before the big-budget ads, ads for local businesses are run. This can be a great place to advertise relatively inexpensively in quite a high-profile way, and it works especially well for takeaway food businesses.

Source: Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of CyberTech SoftShop
Suppliers of the Ebook Maker and Publishing Wizard.

BY LEE ASHER

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