I must say that I have gotten my degree in Online Marketing from DigitalPoint.com. There has been a plethora of information available to me from my fellow DP members and for your generosity I thank you. And so it behooves me to give something back. In addition to the information I’ve extracted from the this forum, I’ve spent over three hundred dollars on ebooks on this topic—some from DP, some from other sources. I’ve read blog after blog to glean whatever information I could and I’ve distilled it in a useful form that I’ll pass on to you. I use the following Web 2.0 tools to market mine and other businesses products and services: YouTube, Blogging, Twitter, Justin.TV, and Facebook. In addition to these tools, I use email campaigns and press releases to increase exposure and market share. YOUTUBE If you are trying to market a webpage, business, product and/or service but don’t have a YouTube account to help promote yourself, you’re missing out on one of the best free promotion methods available to you. If I only had YouTube to promote my businesses, I’d be happy—fortunately, I’m not limited to just YouTube. After taking the time to figure out what it is about your product/service/website that distinguishes you in the marketplace, get in into a slide presentation or make some kind of video commercial to promote yourself. The better quality the video or powerpoint presentation is, the greater the impact it will have on convincing your potential customers to buy from you. So get the video up on YouTube and now the fun begins… BLOGGING Of course you have your choice of blogging tools to use. I’m going to narrow it down to two choices, WordPress and Blogger.com. Of those two I prefer WordPress for the flexibility of the format and tools available and I prefer Blogger.com for it’s ease of use and simplicity to setup and maintain. Your mileage may vary depending on your blogging purpose and style, so I’m not going to tell you which one is better for you—only you can make that assessment accurately. Whichever tool you use, start posting blogs right away. Make it interesting by adding pictures of you, of your business, of your customers, of your website and oh yeah, let’s get your videos posted to your blog that you have on YouTube. The message your blog conveys will make the difference in landing customers so make certain you are managing the message effectively and not just rambling to hear (or read) your own words. FACEBOOK What a wonderful marketing tool Facebook has become. Your first step in using Facebook is to create a page for you and a page for your business. Once you have both pages setup, try and find everyone you know and add them as friends. Unfortunately to start out, this is a bit of a time consuming chore, so you should look at it as a process and not try to add everyone overnight. Everytime you add a friend to your personal page, recommend them to your business page. Your business page should have marketing information that is specific to your business and add pictures and videos (don’t forget to add any YouTube videos you’ve created to your Facebook page), events, and applications that assist in the promotion of the product. Don’t accept every single invitation you receive to add applications or join groups—make sure it’s applicable to your business. For your personal page, well that’s another matter altogether. After you’ve set up your personal and business pages, the next step is to create a group for each product and service that your business offers. The days of a scattershot approach are long gone and this is your opportunity to find out who is interested in specific products or services that you offer. While this may seem like more work than it’s worth, if you continue to work it correctly and don’t drop the ball, you’ll see significant benefits to doing this. Facebook offers businesses an opportunity to pay for advertising directly to Facebook members and while they use an algorhythm to identify who on Facebook is interested in what and then push your ads to those whom they think are a good match, personally, I don’t think it’s worth the money—particularly when I can use Facebook to virally spread my message to my potential customer base. If you really want to spend money on marketing, offer incentives to Facebook friends who bring customers to you; you’ll have more success that way. One feature I really like that Facebook offers me is that that push new friends my way by saying, “You might also know ___________, would you like to add them as a friend?†and then they give you a list of people who are friends of your friends that you can add to your personal and/or business pages. Invite everyone to be a friend to you and your business. The worst thing that can happen is that they’ll refuse your invitation, but you’ll never know until you try, and if you never try, you might miss out on potential customers. TWITTER I love Twitter and I’m not ashamed to say that out loud. It is one of the best and most efficient ways of promoting your marketing message you will ever find. In 140 characters or less, you can tell your “Market†(in other words, those who are following your Tweets) what’s going on with you, your business, what new and special offers are available for your Twitterati and where and how they can hook up with you and your business to complete a transaction. When you can convince your followers to receive their Tweets via SMS on their cell phones, your marketing efforts become even more potent. There’s so much you can do with Twitter, I’ll leave the rest up to your imagination—you’re likely to figure out ways to use it to promote your business that I’ve not even thought of yet! JUSTIN.TV I’m not going to lie, there’s a lot of crap available to the general public on Justin.TV, but at the same time, there’s also some high quality programming content. Hopefully you can make your programming at the higher end of the quality spectrum. While Justin.TV began as a social experiment in “lifecasting†it is the great equalizer, because it offers you the opportunity to have your own TV program at no charge. You have your own channel that you can promote on your blog, on YouTube, on Facebook and on Twitter (actually they should all be cross promoting one another so that you increase the chances that you can reach your potential customer using a touchpoint that resonates with them). Again, with Justin.TV, you are only limited by your own creativity or lack there of. BADGES OK, I didn’t mention this earlier, but badges are another effective method of marketing your business. Every badge is essentially a clickable graphic that brings the clicker directly to your website. Your website by the way, should be the ultimate destination you want to direct your customers to. I’m not going to go into the fundamentals of how the marketing funnel works—I’m presuming you know how to use a search engine to find that information elsewhere, but suffice it to say, all the Web 2.0 tools should bring your customers to your website, and your website should be setup in such a way that you can close the deal. If your website is purely informational, you need to get some help with a redesign. You’re potential customer should know by the time they’ve garnered the important information from your website, whether or not they want to do business with you. So anyway, back to badges. Badges are a graphic that you put on every site you can. Put it on your blog, on your YouTube, Facebook and Justin.TV pages. If you can convince others to put it on their blogs and webpages, so much the better. The graphic should be interesting to look at and intriguing enough to get them to want to click on it to get more information. EMAIL If you’re not using email in your marketing campaign, you’re not getting the job done. Email is such an effective method of getting your message out, you ignore it to your detriment. Don’t even bother purchasing email lists, unless you want to get banned by your Internet Provider for spamming. However, if you can think of a creative way to get people to email you first (always find something you can offer as an incentive to get people to contact you), then mass email companies like Constant Contact, or Vertical Response, can’t peg you as a spammer and block you from using their services in the future. There’s so much I could tell you about using email, but I’m probably being overly verbose already, so I’ll lay off here. PRESS RELEASES Just because you release a press release doesn’t mean the media is going to jump right on it and print it in the newspaper, but if you can get a media outlet to print your press release in a notable newspaper or magazine, Google, Yahoo, and MSN will have you in their SERPs by the end of that very same day. Which brings me to another tool I use, which is Google Alerts. Winning in an online marketing campaign can be measured several different ways, and one of the key ways is to look at the top 50 links in the SERPs and see how many times you are listed with the desired key words your customers are mostly likely to use to find you. A good press release will get you high in the SERPs right away and Google Alerts will tell you the minute your listed. Incidentally, I created a special Gmail address just for my Google Alerts. Read the section about Netvibes to find out why. A couple more tools and then I’m done… CRAIGS LIST I don’t really need to say much about this as I’m pretty sure the majority of you reading this can figure out how to put CL to best use in promoting your business. NETVIBES While Netvibes is not really a promotional tool, it is an integral part of my marketing management strategy. Netvibes is an RSS reader that allows me to get feeds on all my blogs, as well as containing widgets for my YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, CL, ALEXA and email accounts. And I put my Gmail account on this page specifically to receive Google Alerts. This way I have everything I need to review and manage my marketing campaign in one central console. Anyway, I do hope this has been helpful to many. I’m committing this information to the DP Forum for two reasons. First, as I mentioned before, there have been so many before me who have so generously shared useful information on this site and I feel it’s my turn to give back [hopefully] in a meaningful way. Second, I’m putting together a seminar on the subject and I need to organize my thoughts anyways, so I needed to write this up anyways to get my PowerPoint presentation ready. To your success!
You spam and fill youtube with waste of videos !!! People come to see some interesting videos on youtube but marketer's start promoting their sites and products. Social networking sites all getting so annoying with so many users spamming about their sites. Try to get real visitors
So use your YouTube search tool more effectively and you'll only find the information that you want by the keywords you use. No one is forcing you to sit down and watch videos that businesses put up to promote their products and services. I think you're defining spam a bit too loosely in this case.
usually most watched videos contains videos like - win free ipod, make money free. what are these ? can you explain. tell everyone what are you promoting on youtube and then we'll decide whats spamming
Very nice contribution you have there. But then it's a bit long. I was half-drowned by the words. Not that I discount the effort you have put in here. I think Youtube can be utilized for tutorial videos. It can generate targeted visitors if used accordingly. It can also be a vital tool for interviews. I think it is not limited to offers alone.
Avi8er, excellent post. Agree it was a bit lengthy for a forum post, however, may I suggest using it as an article or blog post? Karen http://ezwealthsolution.com/?karenconley
I personally am not promoting anything on YouTube. I consult with businesses and individuals to help them understand the power of the Web 2.0 tools in promoting their business with it's respective products and services. I also am putting together a seminar and what I posted on here was the foundational ideas that will be parsed out into slides. I don't understand your hostility here--you're coming across as a troll rather than a reasonable, thoughtful individual. Hopefully you're not like that in person. Perhaps the anonymity of the internet fosters that in you. Do you have a kinder, gentler side? If so, I'd love to see it.
For the rest of the commenters on my forum post; I'm glad to know you appreciate the information. Thanks for the feedback. Perhaps it needed more bullet points to make it more readable. Anyways, I hope it helps someone at some point. Good luck and God speed to all!