Work From Home

Thanks to YouTube.com, (#5 in Alexa currently) online Video is “in” right now in a major way.

All you need to do to grab some of this traffic is to make your own simple vide on your niche’s topic.

It doesn’t even have to be a music video or a well scripted video… Nor a budget video or heck, even an interesting video. Like everything else
Marketing, attaching the right Keywords to your video will get it found. And your video, much like an Article or a Podcast, you simply present a “Call Action” that gets them to click over to your website.

Even Better… With Camtasia and the new IM version of CamStudio, you can simply set the movie to automatically re-direct them to your website when it finished!

Videos can also be used on your site as content, which in fact is a great use for them… Video is the highest form of content on the web right now, as proven by YouTube. However, for our purpose here today, you should come to think making videos as the same thing as writing articles… Plus a little bit of a software learning curve.

Camtasia is still the best tool for making these desktop videos, but it costs shopping $299 for a single user license and doesn’t show any sign of coming down soon. For a no-frills version that will help windows users make the similar product without all the extra effects, there is the totally free “CamStudio, Internet Marketers Version.”

What should you make a movie about? Well, it almost doesn’t matter. But for the sake of producing good content that people will tell their friends about and he build you extra traffic, ask yourself what you can do on your desktop that people in your niche market might find useful.
Anything at all… I’m making one now about how to select keywords. If you’re in a math-oriented niche, whip out MS-Calc.exe and talk about your computation while using the calculator on screen. Artists? Surely you have a writing tablet on your PC… You can teach techniques for drawing while showing them in real time what the drawings are.

Videos made with screen-capture movies are easy to produce, and if you know your niche, simple to write. Perhaps one day our standards will all be higher, but if you’ve spent more than an hour YouTubing, then you’ll agree that the majority of the content out there is really low-end stuff. Hollywood directors need not apply.

So make your desktop videos, name them with a keyword, open a YouTube account and upload them, tagging them with all of your relevant keywords… The Traffic is already there and you could see hundreds or even thousands of people watching your film short before the morning!

There are already tons of smaller YouTube knock-offs popping up out there, so perhaps one of them will be focused on your niche. If not, then you can stick with YouTube alone until one does pop up.

How to find them is a good question, I’d use Google’s Video Search to Google our top five keyword phrases… Surely if there is one that focuses on your niche then their website would offer up a few of the resulting videos.

Any Internet Marketers not Squidooing right now simply aven’t tried it yet! This exciting Web 2.0 application is truly a business Marketer’s dream come true. You can think of it as ySpace, but for serious professionals. It’s a lot like being given editorship of our own topic at About.com, but with even more functionality!

A lens is a web page on their domain that “brings into focus” your niche topic in a few and dynamic way. It’s a place for you to show off everything you know about our topic, as dynamically as possible.

Started in the Fall of 2005, within one year flat Squidoo had already gotten gotten itself into the top 1000 sites according to Alexa, and it’s been pretty steady ever ince, slowly growing.

I believe a lot more Internet Marketers would use this service if they only knew about it. I’m already starting to see Squidoo Pages pop up in the #1 spot at Google for those member’s keywords!

They’ve now got about 65,000+ lenses, although considerably fewer members… few people have cranked out many lenses on all of their favorite topics, so here’s no reason you can crank out one for each of your business ventures or marketing ideas.

To attempt to get your lens featured, simply email their review team once it’s one and they’ll consider making it the “lens of the day.” These get some serious traffic, but of course they won’t select a lens that appears to be blatant advertising.

One other great feature to note is they share all advertising revenue with you for dvertising on your page! Some people are making lenses, and treating them as irtual Real Estate style publishing sites… Theoretically, you could make a few undred great lenses and live comfortably off the income forever.

For our purposes, however, the benefit of using lenses for marketing our other websites is clearly the main reason to get involved. The branding you create and the nearly automatic stream of traffic will be well worth the time.

Technorati: Marketing, Squidoo

Easily confused with Safelists, there are many eZine services that sell Solo Ad mailings to their big, loosely harvested lists, and sometimes they’ll even offer a free emailing just to get your business. Of course they want to sell you a much bigger eMailing down the road.

It is common to see an ad from a company that looks like a legitimate eZine “collector” company, offering a free Solo Ad submission to a list around the size of 5,000 - 50,000 recipients. I haven’t tested too many of these because of the hoops they make you jump through and the long lines you have to stand in. In my experience, these companies have the power to collect and sort such a list out of their main, untargeted list and use it as described above in a sort of “bait & switch” routine.

I can’t verify if they all do business this way, but I have seen it happen more than once. The free mailing will go fine but you’ve got to buy a second mailing… So you choose a package, pay $67 or more for the mailing, and a month later when it’s your time to be featured, the much larger list doesn’t convert nearly as well as the little one did!

Let’s not overlook that you really have no way of knowing how many recipients got the email, or if they were safelist boxes, completely untargeted, etc… So any time you see the words “eMail your ad to 2,000,000 people for only $X,” just remember that there are many more than 2 million safelist email boxes online!

The only way to take advantage of this technique is to keep using the “little lists,” by jumping from service to service, never paying for a bigger mailing. However, there is usually a few weeks or more of waiting in line to get through each time, and from time to time an outright scam can occur.

One of the few times I attempted this I used PayPal to send the company $1 to “hold my place in line.” They said I’d even get the dollar back so I said ok, not even caring about the buck.

Three weeks later the 5,000 subscriber mailing went out, and I got a paltry 115 people to show up on my very closely targeted website. Naturally I wasn’t going to sign up for a bigger package, so I didn’t contact them again, not caring about the fate of my $1.

I won’t make that mistake again! Apparently their fine print said that the $1 was a “down payment” for the bigger solo ad later, and if I took no action within 30 days, my default package was the $89 Solo Ad to their 150,000 general subscriber list! My PayPal account was charged $88 a month later and I had no clue what it was for!

Getting out of these kinds of situations, especially when dealing with companies that don’t have a phone number, is just not worth anyone’s time. Making this
technique work requires a lot of searching and a thick skin to hassle. If you want to try your luck, however, simply google the phrases “Free eZine
mailing” or “Free eZine Ad Blast.” You’ve been warned though. It’s a tough road.

Technorati : adcertising, ezines