Start Your Online Avalanche. Now.

Note: A hearty welcome to the members of the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs Meetup! This post’s raison d’etre was my participation as an expert on web video at the “Ask The Experts” panel for the Meetup on May 15th, 2008. I would recommend any entrepreneurial types in the Atlanta area to attend this Meetup, the networking opportunities are enormous.

Introduction

By now, you’ve probably watched hundreds of videos on YouTube. You might even have an account with YouTube to help you organize your favorite videos for posterity, or for participating in the community. If you’re tired of adhering to television’s strict schedules and spotty on-demand coverage (like me), you may also be watching your favorite television on the internet through sites like Hulu.com.

So, given these things, video on the internet must have finally arrived, right?

Wrong! But we are starting to see the beginnings of what it will turn into. It isn’t that the TV or YouTube models are wrong, per se, they just aren’t finished growing into the Web. Humanity has MUCH more diverse needs for video than the ones served by these approaches, and the Web knows it (much as it slowly comes to know pretty much everything.)

Today, I’m going to explore a few of the new Web services out there (as well as techniques for some older ones) that are pushing this envelope. As always, I’ll be speaking with an eye towards leveraging these platforms to spread your brand, which can be anything: your startup, your cause, your organization, even your face. So what services am I talking about?

Here’s the table of contents:

• YouTube
  
• Seesmic
• Justin.tv
• Qik

We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s get started…

Tracking Your Viewers and Maximizing Exposure With YouTube

YouTube.com did an amazing thing by leveling the playing field for video on the Web. It is now trivial for anyone to create and share videos across the Web, a huge component of which is linking to or embedding video on blogs, social networks, and the like (and I’m going to assume you know how to do these things already.)

But as marketers, we like to be able to track our visitors, and all of this embedding and linking to YouTube means we aren’t in control of the content we post there. Or are we?

Enter YouTube Insight. Launched in late March this year, Insight is like Analytics Light for video. It breaks down the viewers of your videos by lots of interesting metrics, so you can tell in which countries you are most popular, or on what search terms your video is showing up (searches on Google or YouTube.) There’s potential here to do some traditional keyword research and targeting (which many of you will already be familiar with.)

Here’s the overview video from YouTube:

“But how do I target keywords? ” I hear you ask. “Google can’t understand video yet, can it?”

No, not yet. But you DO have a description and tags at your disposal. To me, it is really sad how few people take the time to fill out the description. Believe me it is worth it, even if you aren’t engaging in exhaustive keyword research! I’ve had my videos embedded by spiders just by mentioning key phrases in the description, like “Amazon Kindle” (don’t laugh, this was my first web video.)

A couple of quick tips (i consider them best-practices): Always make a link to your own website the very first thing in your description. Most of the content will appear “below the fold” as it were, because users will have to click “More Info” to see anything beyond the first few dozen characters, and you want as many people exposed to your link as possible. Also, getting your link on-screen during the video is wise, if you can manage it. If you achieve that, then embedders become your friend, because no matter where your video is viewed, your own website gets exposure.

(The embedding tips go for all video services.)

Lastly, tell all of your close friends/fans to rate all of your videos. I can’t prove that it helps you show up anywhere, but it would be hard to believe that Google isn’t using those ratings for SOME kind of relevance, probably in YouTube searches.

Technically, Google also allows people to create video responses, but they downplay this option, and its frankly rather clunky to use. If you’re interested in this type of interaction, then you should check out…

Seesmic: Bringing the Video Conversation to the World

Seesmic.com is a new startup from the prolific Loic Le Meur, a man who seems to have made it his personal goal to break down global boundaries and become friends with everyone (seriously, everyone.)

(Note: Seesmic is not officially “open” yet, but you can sign up for it via our video comments at the bottom of this post.)

The point of Seesmic is to make it trivial for anyone with a webcam and microphone (most modern laptops are perfect) to quickly record video and post it instantly (unlike YouTube, which has processing lag time built-in, even when you record via the Web.) Seesmic has a sizable community that spans the globe and is always lying in wait to respond to your posts, so you can literally fire off a video about whatever you are thinking right now and have a response from someone across the pond in minutes. Check out one of our first experiments with video conversation.

Here’s an interesting response from a complete stranger, posted mere minutes after our initial post:

Another really powerful possibility with Seesmic is the concept of an “all-video blog”, that is, a blog in which all posts are videos and all comments are videos. Seesmic has an amazing WordPress plugin (and now a Disqus plugin if you’re not on WordPress) which allows you to create video posts or leave video comments on the fly. It’s as easy as clicking “record”, leaving your message, previewing your message, and clicking “Publish Now” when you’re satisfied.

Again, Seesmic sets it live immediately, there’s no post-processing time involved.

I see this as a major first step to video becoming a first-class citizen of the Web, as a video-only blog seems much more compelling than all that text we constantly deal with. We will naturally tend towards throwing the keyboard away, as more and more people realize they can interact much more meaningfully (and easily) with video systems of this nature.

“But I don’t want to converse with people, I just want to broadcast live!” I hear some of you grumbling. Let’s look at some live video options…

Produce Live Television With Justin.tv

Justin.tv is one of a handfull of startups that are putting the power of live broadcasts in your hands, for free. You can sign up for an account quickly and easily, and from there it’s one more step to broadcasting live to as many people as you can convince to watch you.

Oftentimes, we will hesitate to post videos because we feel like they are not good enough, or there needs to be more polish. I think a lot of people share in this feeling. After all, we all want to leave a great impression on our viewers.

Being live changes all of that, because it changes expectations. When you broadcast live, it excites your users greatly, especially if they can interact with you. Of course, Justin.tv allows this interaction. There is a chatroom attached to your channel, so that you can host a kind of show for your viewers.

Here’s an example of someone playing GTA4 live (you can easily send different video sources to Justin.tv) while interacting with vitriolic viewers in his chatroom (and drinking and driving in the game):

We’ve considered doing a live show every day at a certain time, discussing web marketing and fielding web marketing questions from anyone who cares to join. It has Twitter integration, so you can let all of your followers know that you are live and increase your live viewership. It also allows you to record sessions and make them available to be viewed at any time.

If you were to utilize all of these things, you would almost certainly form up an audience after a couple of weeks. It may sound time-consuming, but really, what better way is there to build your brand than to involve your fans directly, daily? Biweekly or weekly would certainly work also, but the uptake would be commensurate with your frequency. The more often you post, the faster you get an audience who cares about you and comes back.

For those of you who prefer a little more power over the production quality (you want to embed logos, or put text on the screen, etc), I highly recommend the CamTwist software (Mac only.) Ed Dale is the master of utilizing all of these things. He uses his Thirty Day Challenge as an excuse to indulge in his technophilia, I think. (We here at Snowcap Labs highly recommend the Thirty Day Challenge to beginning web marketers.)

Here’s Episode 2 of Ed Dales Thirty Day Challenge Show. He’ll briefly discuss the technologies that he is using for your edification:

For those of you who want to be able to do live video without the need for your laptop, wifi access, and production software, there’s…

Live Video, On Location With Qik

Qik.com just had its alpha launch this past winter, and already I have seen such amazing things as foreign diplomats interviewed live at Davos by Robert Scoble and some of the first footage of the Tesla Roadster by Jason Calacanis.

Some Davos action:

And holy crap this car is fast:

How did they achieve these things? Well, aside from being prolific bloggers or self-made millionaires, all they needed was a certain phone, a nice data plan, and the wherewithal to go record something.

This service is not exactly free, I suppose, since you have to buy hardware and potentially change carriers. The Nokia N82 and N95 can use Qik, but Scoble tells me that the N95 is preferred for its 3G access (more bandwidth = better video.)

Sound easy? It is.

So who is this for? What kinds of brands can leverage this? Actually, I have a hard time thinking of brands that couldn’t leverage this:

Got a music blog? Broadcast from the next festival you go to.

Got a band? Broadcast from backstage or from the studio (everyone’s a groupie!)

Got a business blog? Broadcast from the next conference you go to.

Got a big, stuffy, corporate business that needs to look more human? Walk through the cubicle farm and ambush your most photogenic employees with a quick interview.

Got a cat or dog blog? Well, you probably don’t need any advice from me on how to follow your animals around taking annoying pictures, but now you can do it when you walk your dog in the park.

Like Justin.tv, you can embed your live channel on your blog, removing the need to visit someone else’s site for your content. Let’s take a music blog scenario for illustration:

You’ve got a music blog with your Qik channel embedded. You’re away at a your favorite yearly music festival, blogging it in the afternoons when you get access to the bloggers tent (or what have you.) Night falls, and your number one fan has gotten off of work and is now reading your coverage of the festival (a festival that he desperately wishes he could attend, if only he didn’t have that pesky day job!)

Now, your favorite band begins their set. You pull out your phone and begin to record. Suddenly, in your number one fan’s browser, your movie starts to play automatically…

“What!”, he thinks. “That’s Ultra Clown Jacuzzi Pop taking the stage! Holy crap, this is live!”

Now what is this fan going to do next? First of all, he’s going to link everyone he knows to your blog, instantly. Second of all, he’s going to come back again and again, whenever he thinks you’re going to broadcast.

Here’s Calacanis at Duran Duran (…i think?):

I just can’t imagine a better way to explode buzz around your brand, week after week (the frequency-to-uptake ratio holds, as with Justin.tv)

So What Are You Waiting For?

Aside from these, there are many other great video services and software out there that I haven’t covered, such as Vimeo for hi definition content (that you don’t want YouTube to mangle), or ScreenFlow (Leopard only) for creating super-pro screencasts. The best thing you can do is start using them!

It’s no secret that video is about to happen to the Web. I’ve even heard talk that the new face of huge corporations is going to be the video blog. So if you’ve often felt that you “missed the boat” on this whole World Wide Web thing, and have been wondering when there will ever be as much opportunity as there was in “the good old days”, I’m blogging to tell you that those days are still ahead of us.

What uses have you found for video on the Web? Would you like to see a more thorough treatment of any of these technologies, or others? Leave us a comment (preferably a video comment!) and we’ll work work to dig deeper and teach the techniques that YOU need to get your brand out there.

Thanks for reading and watching!

Two words: Market Research. Before entering any single market, take the time to educate yourself on many markets. Within each market, you’ll want to look across a broad list of measurements - and not all of them necessarily involve numbers. There’s also no excuse for poor research practices because most of the information is free.

At Snowcap Labs, we understand the importance of researching a market thoroughly before entering it. We’ve spent many hours researching topics from vinyl records to yoga, on such metrics as total search volume and the number of Google bidders on the top term.

It would take quite a while to cover all of the tools and tactics we utilize to study and compare markets. Properly taking a group of topics through the entire market analysis phase takes months. In the following video, I reveal several basic mathematical metrics we use in the initial phase of the research process.

The main question we get here at the Lab is from smart people looking to get their names/products/services/brand out online. They want to know “Where do I get keywords?” or “How can I create a strong keyword list?” It seems like plenty of people know what their core competencies are, they just don’t know how to get the word out about them on the web. (Watch for a later post if you haven’t actually picked a market yet, we’ve got some secret recipes in the Lab for that as well.)

Today I’m going to show you how to take your “keyword seeds”, the broad terms that define your market, and blow them up into thousands of keywords. You need to go through this process if you want to compete in the Pay-Per Click markets, of course, but there are a number of other reasons you might be interested in learning about the “keyword continuum” surrounding your market:

• what are people looking for? (what terms are being searched on)
• how many people are looking? (volumes)
• what words should be in my domain name? (a Lab-Approved SEO tip!)
• how big is my niche? (or are there multiple niches, here?)
• what type of information are people looking for? (what “conversation” do they want to have?)
• where are people looking? (literally! what cities, states, countries, etc)
• how do i address my audience? (”ya’ll”, “you’se guys”, “yinz”, or “hey idiots! buy my #&%$ing product!

That’s a lot of disparate types of information! If you immediately think “I bet there’s a lot of data to manage”, you’d be right, there is. But you don’t have to do everything at once, and its really easy get started: you only need a little bit of data to accomplish any given goal, so you can get right into the fun (and believe me, it can be really fun, perhaps even addictive…)

So today i wanted to share our addicti… errr, occupation with you, kind audience. I’m going to expand an example keyword list for a given market. Yesterday we had an excellent comment from Josh’s recent post on Keyword List Building Basics, where Scott asks how to get started with his chosen market of “personal development”. It looks as though Scott hasn’t yet launched his web asset (he has chosen to start a blog.) But this is a good thing, because he can take the time to refine his focus, find his audience, and learn to speak their language before he ever creates a single paragraph of content.

So let’s get started with today’s Snowcast entitled How to Turn a Market Idea Into a Keyword List:

The resources used in this video:
http://seobook.com

And here are the keywords i ended with:

Download .csv

That’s all for today, we hope you found this information useful! If you’d like to see more examples like this, or in other parts of the web marketing process, drop us a line in the comments and we’ll do our best to pull a recipe and demonstrate it for you.

Running a search campaign requires that you collect and analyze a bunch of data. Of all the metrics you are collecting what is most important question that you should be asking? Some might say what is my conversion? Others might state cost per click. But chances are you aren’t collecting the most important thing.

What should you be asking: Why are my potential customers here? This is by far the most important and overlooked aspect of a campaign. Let’s say for example that you are a jeweler and advertising on terms related to “ruby.” Now, from your perspective that makes perfect sense. You sell rubies so you should naturally be advertising on them right? Not always.

What you should be asking yourself is what do people typing in this term really want? In the case of “ruby” most of that traffic is actually looking for information on the Ruby on Rails programming language and framework. So you might be paying for quite a lot of traffic that completely misses the mark.

When you are researching your market you want to break up all your keywords into really tight groupings. Each of these is a segment. Now ask each of these segments. So in our jewelry example we might have a tight group around “ruby” terms. When you drive traffic from this segment you’ll want to ask them “What were you looking for today? What is your most important question?”

When you start collecting this data the psychology of each and every single terms starts to unfold. By analyzing their answers you’ll realize that a majority of the traffic search on “Ruby” wants computer stuff and not gems. On the other hand you might find that “Rubies” is the where your audience truly lies.

But wait, it gets better. when you collect this data you can immediately integrate it into your search campaigns. When you analyze the data you can prioritize a list of concerns that people in a particular segment have. You can use this information in your landing pages and absolutely trounce conversion. When you speak to your audience in the same language and hit on all their major concerns you are much more likely to close the sale.

Go out and start digging into the psychology of your market. I bet you’ll find a huge pot of gold.

Branding is a tough game to play. In traditional advertising building a brand can cost millions of dollars. The big boys on the block (think Wal-mart, Sears, Coke, Miller) literally spend billions of dollars annually building the brand. I’m sure that you would be happy to to have that kind of money to throw around, but chances are that your budgets are significantly smaller. Let’s take some learnings from the big guys and show you how to apply them to your business.

Measuring the value of a brand is pretty tough work. Owning the trademark for Coca-Cola has got to be worth something right? In practice it is hard to nail down a price because a brand is not a tangible thing. In truth, it’s more of an art than a science. In the financial world when they put a dollar value on a brand they call it “goodwill.” This is the figure that traditionally gets tossed around.

In the online world there are a few fantastic ways to measure the penetration of your brand. The two best metrics you should follow are:

1. Direct Navigation Traffic
2. Number of monthly searches on the brand term and it’s derivatives.

Take Bidz.com for an example. I went to Google Trends and typed in “bidz.”

As you can see, over the last few years, they have enjoyed about a 20% increase in their brand term searches. Now, that’s cool. The data above is Google’s view of the world. When you are assessing the demand for your brand you’ll want the hard facts from your web analytics package.

Go back six months. Measure all the traffic that you received from search engines that included a brand term. Do the same for last month. What is the change in the traffic from these two periods?
Do the same process for your direct navigation traffic. Is your brand getting more prevalent or less?

Start now. Go measure the pulse of your brand.

Have questions about this post? Ask a good question in the comments section below and I will answer it and give you a link on our blog roll. Fire away!

Grinding out a proper keyword list is like foreplay – it requires time and patience to do it correctly, but most rush through and do a very poor job. A robust, exhaustive, and targeted keyword list is the foundation of well executed online search marketing campaigns.

I usually begin with as many relevant “seeds” as possible. A seed is the main word or phrase pertaining to your market. For the example in the video, I only used one seed – “green card.” For a full campaign prepared for launch, I would have chosen even more seed terms like “immigrant” “immigration” or “lawful permanent residence.”

In this video, I talk further about the basics of Keyword Building:

As promised, here is the Excel file with the full ad group layout for the seed “green card” and an additional tab with a template that’s ready and waiting for your keywords.

Green Card Ad Groups and Template

Duncan of Indie Music 2.0 asked this in response to my post and video about valuing web properties:

“Interesting presentation Charles… as more and more people purchase properties as income generators, do you see Google modifying its algorithm to prevent these kinds of sites from showing up in the first 10 listings of a search?”

It’s a good question and I wanted share my response with you.

Duncan,
Good question. When purchasing web properties you need to make sure that you follow a few hard and fast rules to avoid being penalized by the big G and the like.

1. Make sure the domain is transfered anonymously
2. Put the site on a new C-block IP address.

You’ll need to make sure that when the domain is transfered in that you register with privacy protection. For reference, Google is also a domain registrar so they have access to all the domain records. Registering the domain anonymously keeps them from knowing that you are aggregating sites. There is some heated debate about rankings and transferring ownership of a site. Some people have had issues. In my experiences the traffic has stayed consistent.

Put the purchased site on a new c-block level IP address. You want to make sure that you aren’t aggregating too many sites into one IP. If Google sees that these sites are linking to one another and concentrated in the same IP, you risk them pinning all the sites to you. We use SEOHosting to spawn new web hosting accounts onto separate IP blocks. Their setup is great, you are able to spawn new accounts and set them up very quickly using the standard web host manager and cpanel software packages. It’s really a breeze. It works out to about $7/month per account if you buy the 10 site package.

Good question, what questions do you have? Ask a good one and I’ll add your site to the blog roll.

One of my all time favorite work tasks is finding and acquiring web properties. Purchasing web sites is one of the few ways I’ve found to reliably double and triple your investment over a few short years. You can go out right now and purchase profitable web sites at crazy good valuations. You just need to know what to look for and understand how to assign value to a web site. In this video I cover three ways to value a web sites:

And the Presentation:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dd6c2wqw_643xvq63hf

And the links in the Presentation:
http://www.electronicappraiser.com/sample/fullsample.html
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/18550
http://www.Sitepoint.com
http://www.tdnam.com
http://www.stuntdubl.com/2006/02/20/website-valuation/

Be sure to subscribe to this blog for more great tips and videos like this.

Have questions? Comment below.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Google. I remember quite clearly what it was like surfing the net in the 90s. Finding what you were looking for was often really hard. Google was absolutely the key to unlocking information quickly and we loved it. Years ago, when I started advertising with them, I loved them even more. While Google gets their money from advertisers, it has always been on the side of the search user. Fanatically so. Over the past few years they have made countless changes to the rules advertisers must follow to be qualified the give them money.

They were the first to use your click through rate when deciding on your bid pricing. They were the first to consider the relevancy of the landing page. They punished campaigns with single page landers. They’ve changed a lot, but now, they have set the bar too high for most advertisers. Recently they stated that they will be considering landing load times when determining your quality score. Ok, I get it, another update. But when is enough, enough? What’s awful about all these updates is that somewhere along the way Google lost site of the small guy. Just about every day I hear from people with horror stories:

“I tried advertising on Google, but they wanted $10 a click. There is no way I can afford that.”

Its not that Google really is charging $10 per click. They are just telling you that “something” is wrong in your campaign or your web site. The tables are getting tilted again. The big sites with the big budgets and the big servers are less affected by all these changes than the huge base of small advertisers. And that is a shame. You shouldn’t have to be a technology and advertising guru to send a little traffic to your web site.

This is the tragedy of Google’s success. In fearlessly championing the search user, they are now pushing out many of the very businesses that helps catapult them to their huge success. One thing is for sure, it’s not getting any easier for the little guy.

What do you think? Have you been cut down by the big G?