Business Website Videos

I am asked all of the time; "What is the benefit of putting a video on my website?", and the follow up question; "How much time and/or money should I invest in putting a video for my site?"

Of course, this always leads to more questions...

What is the purpose of the video?

Are you trying to build trust and credibility?

Is it to build a more personal relationship with your clients or prospective clients?

Are you trying to improve your search engine rankings?

Are you trying to show how a process, product or your business works?

Who is your audience?

One of the first steps I would take is to take a look at what other businesses are doing in your area and around the country. Many videos can be found on YouTube, but you will need to go through some sites to see how other businesses are using videos on their sites.

If you take the time to do this, you will likely see videos that will give you some great ideas for how you may want to use video. You will also see videos that make you cringe.

1-High-end/high quality videos.

Why use a videographer as opposed to a do it yourself scenario?

If you do not, you may do more harm to your image than not having a video at all.

You may have fun shooting the video. You may have done your darndest to make it look incredible. Rarely does that translate into a video someone else will be impressed by. As you look at videos on other sites you will see some absolutely horrible videos that try to look professional and fail miserably.
(By the way, there is a great time and a place for very cheap/free videos, and I will discuss that in point "2-" below)

How much should you spend on a high-end video?

These types of videos are shot by a "professional" or "semi-professional" videographer. They usually require a half day to full day of shooting, professional lighting, a story board, at least a "loose script" and after the shooting a significant amount of time editing.

I have seen good quality videos for as low as $695, but these are often very hit and miss because the company selling them usually has very little control over who actually shows up to shoot the video. They tend to use a national network of full and/or part-time videographers. As a result you may end up with the equivelent to a nightmare version of "the cable guy"-and often you do not know until they show up how good or bad they will be.

I would ask not just for references from the company, but references from the actual videographer who is going to do the work. You may get a very good result from this type of service, or you may be very disatisfied. It is a crapshoot.

Important: many of the video services that large companies sell that do not specialize in videos but sell them as an add-on product are reselling the same $695 video service for $1,500-$3,000. They still offer some advantages in that at least you have a big company backing the service, but they have very little control over who shows up. The sales rep that sold you the video will often try to show up the day of the shoot to help make sure things go smoothly, but he or she often has little control over who the videographer will be.

If you can spend more than $695-say $2,000-$20,000+, then I would look for a local company or individual that allows you to see some of the work done by the people who will be working for you. Again, you don't just want to see their portfolio of videos, you want to find out about how the process goes and specifically who will be working with you.

A good quality 60 second to 120 second video will likely cost you $1,500 +, but you may have to spend more than that to find someone with a great track record that you can trust. As you know; time is money. If you spend 1/2 a day working with a cheap videographer and the end result is not worht puttng on your site because it will actually hurt your image-how much would THAT cost you?

2-When can I use a free, cheap or YouTube type video?

First of all, I have seen a number of businesses utilize video clips from shows they have been on and commercials they run on TV. You already have these, so why not post them on your site and on YouTube?

The two videos I put on this blog post are examples of videos I should be posting every day-but only on a blog, or a place on my website that people go to to "hear from the Dan". You can build trust, relationship-even "intimacy" in the most appropriate sense of the word with these types of videos.

It enables people to see the "real" you and determine whether or not you are someone they want to work with. They don't expect it to be nor do they want it to be an over produced video because they want to learn something about what you do and who you are. You can utilize these types of videos in addition to a professional video you put on your home page, but don't try to replace a professional video with one of these "blog" type videos.

You can shoot these types of 30 second to 2 minute videos in your office from your computer's camera (or buy a pc camera for $40 or less), or even use your smart phone. I told myself when I purchased my iPhone 4 I was going to use it all the time to blog post because it has a "video yourself feature". I have a hard time getting around to doing it, and so will you, unless you make it a daily or weekly habit.

All you need to do is commit 5-10 minutes to shoot the video and post it to your blog. It may take you longer the first time you do it, but as you do it more regularly you may be able to keep it below 5 minutes.

This type of blog post is easier than even writing a blog post, therefore you can do more of them and possibly every day.

SEO Benefits: This type of activity can help you with your search engine optimization efforts, because search engines are actually "listening" to videos now, so they are great ways to add more content to your site for the search engines to index.

My friends criticize the professional looking photo I have on my lawyer marketing site because they know it is not even my real smile. It's a professional pose, and it is appropriate for where I placed it on that blog. My less professional looking blogs have pictures of me mountain biking, playing with my kids, etc. The point is that like pictures professional videos build your "professional credibility", the blog type videos build relationships and and a more personal trust.

I hope you found this information valuable. It is not rocket science. If you have good common sense you probably resonate with much of what is in this post. If you have new ideas you would like to share, or any questions, please feel free to post them here!

Of course, you can always give me a call for free consultation.

Happy Holidays!

Bobby Dean - No Sausage

Some of you have heard me talk about my buddy Bobby, well here he is on TV today: Way to go Bobby!!! Way to represent!

 Bobby Dean Video

This Saturday at Restoration Community Church

Message from Ron Johnson today...

Ready to summit?  All summer we have been on a spiritual journey together through our Happy Trails series.  This week we will conclude our series by talking about the traits of the spiritually mature and how to reach our spiritual potential in this life time. 

I love our church.  I tell those who have not come that we have the greatest people you could ever meet in our community.  God is doing something unique here.  He is making us into a one of a kind church with a special destiny.  I thank God this morning for the honor to be a part of your lives and what God is doing among us.  Let's pray we meet God in a special way Saturday night.  I look forward to seeing you then.

Blessings,

Ron

Ron Johnson
Restoration Community Church in Denver Colorado

Improving Your Online Presence Part 6: Video Blogging & Marketing

Videos and SEO.



Video blogging is a great way to improve your online presence.

Why post videos online?

1. Content, content, content. The search engines yearn for it, and you need to be providing more and better content than your competitors.
2. People are watching more and more videos every day. Don't believe me? Don't take my word for it: search "how many people watch videos online".
3. It's a great way to communicate to your prospects and customers.

Mistakes to avoid:

1. Don't worry too much about the quality of the videos that you put on a blog. You want quantity, not quality from a production perspective. The new iPhone 4 is a perfect tool for recording videos.
2. DO make certain that the videos you put on your site look good and represent your business in a professional manner.
3. DO make certain you have great content on your site. No one wants to have their time wasted watching a video of someone who cannot communicate well, or with bad information.
4. Relax and be natural-DON'T read what you are going to say. It makes you look ridiculous!

Enough for today. There is a lot more to discuss about videos. Where should you host them? How much should you pay for a professional video?

I will post more on this topic soon...

Improving Your Online Presence Part 5: How to Utilize Social Media for Marketing Your Business

Social Media Marketing Strategy Development
I suspect that the followers of this blog were more interested in this topic in this series "Improving Your Online Presence" than any other topic.
I presented on this topic in front of a group of small business owners a few weeks ago, and to be honest, at least one person was frustrated because I was asking as many questions as I was answering.
It probably has to do with my "Jesuit" education, but I believe the best way to find better answers is to ask better questions.
In the midst of one small business owners frustration she asked "How do I utilize Linked In, Twitter or Facebook to gain high value clients?"
My answer; "That's a great place to start."
In other words; you need to ask a lot of really good open ended questions to get your brain moving in the right direction.
Once you know your business goals, then start applying questions around social media and those business goals like the business owner I mentioned above.
Simple, right?

Ok-ok - let me get to the part where I give some helpful advice on social media marketing.
First of all, assuming you understand your business goals, the next step is determining how social media might help you achieve those goals.
While I have not heard of any type of business that cannot benefit in some way from social media, there are two things you need to know from the start:

1. It is likely that your social media strategy is going to be partially or almost completely unique to your business.
2. Spending a lot of time on social media may not be an efficient way for you to market your business online.

In fact, just as there were many businesses that blindly threw millions at Internet marketing back in the late 1990s and early 2000s without first developing an ROI based strategy, there is a risk that businesses will do the same with social media marketing. There is a lot of buzz around social media marketing, it is considered cool and sexy by some right now, but that doesn't mean that just jumping into to social media is going to make or break your business. You are probably at more risk of wasting time and money than making money from social media. Whatever you do, make certain you do not fail to look at search engine optimization, pay per click marketing or offline marketing.

The best advice I can give you on social media marketing is that you need to be prepared to invest resources to make it work. Which is not so different from offline social networking efforts - it takes resources, but the right work can be very beneficial for your business.


Step one: Determine how social media can help you meet your goals. In order to do this you are going to have to spend some time learning about social media. You can either spend time on the Internet or reading books on social media. You could also hire a consultant. Of course, you need to determine if you have more time or more money. If you are really busy and your time is very valuable, then it may make more sense to hire someone to develop a social media plan for you. Just make sure they take the time to understand your goals, and that the road map they give you to meet those goals has measurable results.
How much time do you need to invest? At least in the neighborhood of 10-20 hours.

Step 2: Once you have come up with a plan, you need to determine if it is going to be worth it to implement the plan. It not only takes some resources to develop a plan, it is going to take even more resources to implement it. Again, this is a balancing of time and money. Your time may be better spent doing other things to grow your business. If you have come up with a good plan, you are going to need to dedicate a significant amount of time weekly or daily to implementing it. How much time? I would estimate 1-10 hours for setup, and 2-40 hours a week of work-depending on the details of your plan, of course.

Step 3: You are going to need to track and analyze the results, make adjustments and implement the adjustments. While social media may be out of its "infancy" stage, it is still in the "toddler" stage. If you are not tracking and analyzing results, you are at significant risk of wasting a painful amount of time and/or money.

Here are some good resources for learning more about social media marketing:

• Books about Social Media Marketing
• Step by step process to developing a social media marketing strategy

Good luck-and if you need any help feel free to call me at 720-279-1876 for a free initial consultation.

Improving your online presence Part 4: Adding the right kind of content to your website

I remember back in the 1990s when doing something akin to simply changing a comma to a period every day on your website might improve your rankings on the search engines. Assuming you are doing everything as good or better than your SEO competitors, making a slight change to your website might help, but the chances of it making a difference are slim. Nowadays, you need to have a strategy for adding content to your site on a regular basis. Of course, if your site is not already well optimized relative to your competitors, adding content may not help you meet your SEO goals. There are other reasons to add content to your website, especially if your site is a resource for others. However, if you want to help your SEO rankings you need to have a specific content building strategy, and you probably should invest in an SEO expert to help you maximize content building and SEO efforts.

I like the idea of having a blog on your site, but here are some other ideas for adding content to your site:

• Product Reviews.
• Press releases.
• Client testimonial.
• Client success stories and case studies.
• A FAQ page you update regularly.
• All of the above could be done in short video snippets. 

Important things to remember:

• The content you ad to your site needs to be unique
• Be careful about adding content stuffed with keywords
• Look for internal linking opportunities for your keywords within the content you add to your site
• Don't forget to format your Heading tags and Meta-data correctly when you add new content to your site
• Try to get external links that go directly to your new content, not just to your home page.

Adding content can be tedious, but if you develop a plan for updating your website's content on a regular basis you will have a much better chance of having a positive impact on your web presence.


Good luck-and if you need any help feel free to call me at 720-279-1876 for a free initial consultation.

Improving your online presence part 3:Track Your Results

If you do not sufficiently track your results, the odds are that you will waste money on marketing and advertising programs that do not work.

What should you track?

1. Conversions
   Gone are the days of tracking only site traffic. You need to be tracking the results of your Internet marketing and offline marketing efforts at the conversion level. This can mean conversion to a lead or conversion to a sale-BOTH should be tracked.
   For those of us selling products via a shopping cart on our websites and driving traffic via Pay Per Click marketing this can be as simple as placing the right code on our site. This will enable us to track which keyword search led to which sale so we can adjust our PPC campaign for optimal results.
   However, most businesses do not sell their products or services via a shopping cart on their website. Most businesses rely on offline customer interactions to secure sales, and some have sales cycles of up to 2 years.
   The more sophisticated your sales process, the more sophisticated your conversion tracking needs to be. This could be as simple as putting a tracking phone number on your website, or it could be much more involved. You may need to utilize multiple  tracking phone numbers, integrate your tracking system into your CRM or even invest in a sophisticated marketing automation software system. This can get more complicated when you are integrating your offline marketing (but still necessary).
   How much should you spend on tracking your conversions?
   If you spend $1,000 a month on marketing, you probably do not want to spend $1,000/month on tracking. However, you should probably spend $1-200.
   If you spend $10,000/month on your marketing and advertising campaigns, then it probably makes sense to spend $1-$2,000/month on conversion tracking.l
   In both cases, if you can improve your ROI or CPA by 10% or more this is a worthwhile investment. Many times a well integrated, monitored and professionally analyzed conversion tracking system can yield up to a 60% improvement in results. Well worth the investment.
2. Types of traffic
   Many business owners or marketing professionals receive many reports from Webtrends, Awstats, Webalizer or Google analytics, but they are not sure what they should be analyzing.
   You certainly should be looking at unique visitors vs. repeat visitors, bounce rates, time spent on site, the pages visited, the last page visited before exiting, etc. Most reporting tools will easily show you this data. You can also look at paid traffic vs. organic traffic, and branded vs. non-branded traffic. These require a little more sophisticated knowledge of utilizing, sorting and organizing the data. Nothing can completely replace human analysis by someone who knows your business and the goals of your marketing programs.
3. If you are utilizing SEO, you should track the external back links to your site and your rankings on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
   If you are engaged in any type of Search Engine Optimization efforts, you should track your site with ranking reports and back link reports. Google webmaster tools will give you insight into this data for free, and there are some paid programs you can utilize that may be a bit more user friendly and provide some enhanced analysis capabilities.
   You also need to regularly perform keyword analysis, which is an art and science in and of itself.

I hope you found this information helpful.  
Do me a favor - if you see any typos in this post or have any questions please let me know via the comment section. Of course, for more detailed information on the topics discussed above you can follow the links to my Internet marketing website.and I am available via the phone for consulting.
In your initial call I will spend 15-30 minutes with you for free.
You can call me (Dan Stratford) anytime at 720-279-1876.

Improving your online presence part 2

Part 2: Fix your website!

At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, you really need to fix your website. My website is about search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, social media marketing, and all of that Internet marketing stuff. I do not spend as much time time updating my website as I should. It probably does not convert as well as it should (I am reminding myself now that I need to simplify my home page), but it is setup correctly-for the most part.
Here are some basic things you need to do to get your website up to snuff. If you don't have your website setup correctly, anything else you do is going to have to fight like a salmon swimming upstream.
Assuming you have built a website that tells the human visitors about what you can do for them, this is what you need to do to let the search engines know what your website is about:

1. Have integrity based meta data.
   Your meta data needs to match your pages. Not exactly, but don't put anything in your keyword, description, or title tags that is not actually on the page they are describing. Don't repeat keywords and keyword phrases over and over and over again, but be clear in your meta data what the page is about. If you do this, then all of your meta-data will be unique from page to page, assuming all of your pages are unique.
   I hear different numbers regarding how many characters should be in each area, but here are some general numbers to follow:
   Title Tags: about 70 characters
   Description Tags: about 160 characters
   Keyword Tags: About 4-9 keywords or keyword phrases, about 100 characters. Bonus advice: don’t repeat any individual keyword more than 3 times, and don’t repeat any keyword phrases at all.
    
2. Fix your Heading tags:
   1 unique “H1” tag for each page-give your page a title that tells the SEs what it is about.
   If it makes sense to have more than one H2 or H3 tag, then go for it. Have at least 1 H2 tag.
    
3. Have an xml sitemap-and keep it updated
    
4. Submit your xml sitemap to Google analytics
    
5. Setup a Google analytics account
    
6. Setup a Google webmaster account
    
7. Fix your URLs
   If possible, format your URLs like this:
   Main Keyword Phrase should be dashed in URL
   Example: http://www.domainname.com/keyword-keyword-keyword
   NOT:
   http://www.domainname.com/ keywordkeywordkeyword
   http://www.domainname.com/ keyword_keyword_keyword
   Important: Needs to be unique for each page and relevant to each page
   
   There are a lot of other things that you will hear and you should pay attention to some of them; “flash is bad” (not necessarily true), “what about 404s” and “403s” and “errors”, “301 redirects”, “blah-blah-blah”. These are important, but not for discussion here. You should address those other issues, but if you are not doing what I suggest in this post, you will be fighting to swim upstream with everything else you do.
   
   You always have the option to call me for consulting-720-279-1876. I offer free advice and direction over the phone, and if it makes sense for us to work together, that may also be an option.
   
   If you saw any typos-please let me know by commenting on my blog post!

10 Things you can do to improve your Internet presence

In no particular order...

1-Blog
2-Fix your website
3-Track your results
4-Add content to your website
5-Utilize Social Media
6-Create videos
7-Utilize Press releases
8-Have a story written about you and/or your business in a print magazine
9-Make the most of your links
10-Hire an honest consultant
11-Bonus: Don't forget about local search.


All of these can improve your web presence and search engine optimization efforts. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? The question is; how do you implement these 11 strategies?

Over the next few weeks  I will be answering that question on this blog, so come back here for more information, sign up for an RSS feed, or post a comment here that you want to be added to my newsletter emailed out monthly and you will get the updates you need.

 You can also call me directly for a free 15 minute or so conversation at 720-985-7945. Visit my Internet Marketing website anytime. It is full of a lot of good information and not just a sales pitch.

So number one: "Blog"

Most everyone agrees you should blog at some level (having written that-often it is a waste of time!), but there are ways to blog that will benefit you, and ways that won't.

Here are some reasons people blog, along with my comments on how this reason may be of benefit to you.

1-They like to write about their lives: 
Call it narcissism, egomania, or simply extroverted behavior-some people like to blog about their lives. I have done this in the past with a group of friends from all over the country and it is cool how over the years we have stayed in touch-although lately we have all been blogging a lot less and using Facebook, Twitter, and on the professional side; Linked In.

What's the benefit? Well, if it makes you happy, it's probably not that bad of a thing to do. If you really like blogging, you may actually be able to monetize a blog if you can write about something that some people somewhere find useful. It's worth exploring.

2-They want to improve how their website ranks on search engines.
So here we are-back to the business side of blogging. Blogging can improve search engine rankings, if the correct strategy is implemented.

Starting a new blog on a new domain and then linking it to your website may be a very inefficient use of your time. The links won't be all that strong, and it will take a lot of time for your blog to be worth much in the eyes of the search engines.

Blogging on your site can be a great way to continuously add content to your site and build internal links. For many businesses, in the short and long run this is a better place to blog.

The best results you will get from blogging in terms of how positive of an effect it will have on the search engine optimization of your website is to blog on a blog that has a high page rank, and is in your industry.

Their are two ways of getting to this level of blogging:

1) Optimize a blog that is related to your industry-this will take time and money.
2) Purchase a blog or access to a blog network in your industry that will immediately give you the ability to blog on a high page rank site and point follow links back to your website.

That's it for today. Again-call me anytime you have questions about any of this stuff and I will do my best to help you figure it all out-720-279-1876

SEO Strategies for 2010

Strategy Number One:

Build a good website!

Good grief-I was looking at a Drupal implementation TODAY that did not come with the ability a have sitemap, or make a title tag even slightly different than the H1 tag!

I was looking at a Joomla implementation this week with URls longer than an NBA player’s left arm, and the code would make the brain of even a “Beautiful Mind” shut down.

So pretty please, with sugar on top, get the basics right:

Back-end on-page Optimization

• Unique and relevant meta data.
• Unique and relevant heading tags.
• Only one H1 tag per page.
• Internal links via keywords, pointing to those pages that actually have the keywords in them.
• Clean, SEO-friendly URLs. (What do these look like? Another blog topic)
• Fast loading pages.
• Don’t forget about 301 re-directs-at least make certain mydomain.com is pointed to www.mydomain.com.
• An xml sitemap.

Human facing front-end content:

• Good content written for the average Joe. (I don’t practice what I preach; my websites and blogs can be too technical.)
• Good quantity of content. Tell your story; provide good information-more and better than your competitors.
• Update your content as much as needed. (How often do you need to update your content? Hmmm-I should blog about that)
• Unique content on each page.

Did I forget something? Probably, but I can always come back here and add it later. If you have any positive input or questions, take some time to respond below. Good luck in 2010!

Here is a bit about my Internet Marketing Consulting company I wrote today. What do you think?

"Integrity Internet Consulting is a 4 year old Denver based business that employs some of the leading expert consultants in the ever changing world of Internet marketing, including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC), Social Media Strategies, Website development & blog development. We also provide comprehensive business consulting and marketing strategy development and implementation. We provide these services to technology companies, law firms and various other businesses in Denver, across the US and internationally. We have grown over the last 4 years leaps and bounds via our reputation. We are well connected in the legal and technology industry. Please take the time to visit our website www.integrityinternetconsulting.com and one of our business partner’s websites that we do a significant amount of work for: www.demandmcg.com. We have an office in the Art District just south of downtown Denver at 910 N Santa Fe. We have a very talented group of employees and contractors we work with throughout the Denver and Boulder area."