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8 ways to optimize your local business videos

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 at 10:21 PM  
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Video marketing is a powerful medium to use to market your local business, especially if your products or services are best represented in an audio-visual manner. For example, a landscaping business would find videos as the best way to show a garden makeover compared to using an article or report.

However video marketing should also be geared to please search engines so that your videos achieve higher search engine rankings. Here are 8 important ways to optimize your videos on a video sharing site and on your business website.

1. Title-use your business’s primary keyword in the title of your video. For example if your keyword is ‘plant roses’ then your title could read “How to Plant Roses in Spring”
2. Description- use your primary and secondary keyword in the description area. This is the area beneath your video where you describe what your video is all about and what you would like your viewers to do.
3. Tags- make sure to input your primary and secondary keywords in the tag box of every video.
4. Comments-encourage viewers to leave comments beneath your video. This spurs conversation and greater traffic to your video.
5. Favorite-encourage people to favorite your business video. They simply click on the favorite tab below the video.
6. Traffic- drive as many people to your video as possible from your website, emails, social media accounts, articles and other sites. This will drive up the number of views for your video and improve its rankings
7. Like or thumbs up-encourage people to leave a like or thumbs up for the video. They do this by clicking the thumbs up icon. This helps to rank your video for popularity.
8. Links- link to and from external sites using your primary keyword in the anchor text. This helps to build up your backlinks.

4 Reasons to Choose the Right Keywords for Your Local Business

Saturday, February 18th, 2012 at 10:21 PM  
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A common mistake business owners make when choosing keywords is adopting a hit and miss technique. They don’t really take time to research for the right keywords that will make the difference between the success or failure of their websites. It is no surprise therefore that 95% of people who try to make money online fail in their efforts.

Here are 4 important reasons to choose the best keywords for your business:

Quality traffic. The right keywords will bring your site the right sort of traffic which is people who are searching for exactly the same information that your website is all about. You would rather have relevant traffic of 500 people per day than a chaotic and irrelevant crowd of 5000 people.
Moderate competition. The best keywords to choose are those that give your business a high chance of ranking highly in search engines against fewer websites. By using the right combination of keywords you will be able to compete successfully with other business owners in your niche. The right keywords will also enable your business to bid on Adwords at affordable prices. This does not mean we want keywords with absolutely no competition, because that means there is no business market in that field. A low to moderate level of competition is healthy to your business.
High traffic. Only about 10% of all keywords have high levels of traffic so it’s critical to choose keywords that are actually going to generate traffic. There is nothing as disappointing to a business owner than investing so much time and effort to create and optimize a website and then have very little traffic. The right keywords generate organic traffic from searches and links.
Profit. The right keywords have a strong money-making potential while the wrong ones have a poor cost to benefit ratio. Targeting profitable keywords will generate greater income for your local business.

Need Part Time Work at Home Hours?

Thursday, February 16th, 2012 at 1:46 AM  
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Need Part Time Work at Home Hours?

Doing the daily grind and being chained to a regular job just doesn’t work for some people. They can’t stand the thought of a regular, written in stone schedule where they have to meet the needs of a boss or the company before their own.

When the sunny weather calls to them to hit the beach, they want to answer that call, not be stuck in a cubicle. Those kinds of people need more flexibility than what a regular job offers. Still others have a job that they love and can’t imagine leaving it. Yet they’re struggling to make ends meet. Fortunately for both types of people, there is a solution. That solution is found in Internet Marketing.

Internet Marketing not only provides freedom to the ones not wanting to be tied down to a traditional job schedule and all of the responsibilities associated with it, but it also offers the part time income that a lot of people can use. The great thing about Internet Marketing is that it’s there when your schedule permits you to work it.

If you’re not a morning person, the Internet will still be available for you at two o’clock in the afternoon (with no one breathing down your neck telling you that you’re late). You can work around your appointments with the doctor, around running your errands, around spending time with your friends and loved ones.

For someone who has a job and needs some extra income, you won’t have the pressure of rushing from one job to a second job. Internet Marketing is a business – but it’s a business that you control – a job you run, not one that runs you.

And the part time income you can generate can vary depending on what type of marketing you do. This type of work is great for moms and dads – especially single parents because you have the option of still being home to spend time with your kids – to be available when they need you and yet still bring in an income.

The Secret Way To Get Your Local Business On The First Page Of Google

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 at 10:21 PM  
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Achieving first page ranking on Google’s search page results doesn’t need to be as daunting as people make it out to be. A well kept secret to rocketing your site to the very top rankings is by posting optimized videos about your local business’s products and services to YouTube or any other video sharing site.

One of the things I have often repeated is to give Google what it wants and it will reward you. In other words, use the way Google works to your advantage.

Here’s how Google works in ranking videos versus text content. For keywords that have video results, Google gives video pages in its index a better chance of appearing in the top results than text pages. Infact Google will give your videos a 50 times better chance of ranking highly compared to any of your blog posts or static website content.

Another reason it easy to rank highly with videos is because there is less competition for keywords in the video results compared to site results. For example, the highly competitive dog training niche has a staggering 62million site results and only 30,000 video results. That’s good news for any local business in a market niche that seems overcrowded with lots of competitors.

Follow this two step process and see the effect:

Load your video to YouTube or any video sharing site.
YouTube is the preferred site for your video marketing efforts because almost one third of searches on the Google network are done on YouTube. Better yet, YouTube has over ten times more videos viewed on its site than its nearest competitor.

Post your YouTube video on your business blog or website.

In both steps, always optimize your videos by including your keyword in these crucial areas: titles, tags, descriptions, categories and anchor text.

Tips On How To Have An Effective Twitter Business Strategy- Part 2

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 at 10:18 PM  
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In a previous article we looked at 4 tips to help you use Twitter effectively as part of your business’ online marketing strategy. They dealt with tweeting often, being creative with your Tweets, providing customer service and building a community.

In this article, we explore 4 more tips:

1. Build Trust. It is important to be as truthful and transparent as possible on Twitter because it is such an open social platform where the slightest falsehood can be easily detected by users and result in a damaged business reputation. Building trust means being consistent and honest 100% of the time and being able to handle any problems in a straightforward manner. If and when you make mistakes as a business, quickly own up to them, apologize and seek to make things right. This will make your Twitter followers respect you all the more.

2. Let your employees participate in your Twitter strategy. This is especially so for those employees who are constantly in touch with your customers on a day to day basis as part of their normal job description such as sales managers and customer service personnel. They are often the ones with the most firsthand experience dealing with your clients so assign them a company Twitter account to help them do their job better.

3. Track your Twitter strategy. To really know whether Twitter is working for your business or not, it is necessary to track your Twitter links. You can do this by having separate links, landing pages, coupons, email lists, opt-in forms just for your Twitter account and then use various analytic tools to measure your conversions. If you don’t want to use this method, then you can promote your products and services on a particular day just on Twitter and you will be able to see how effective your Twitter strategy was compared to your other forms of marketing on other days.

4. Monitoring your brand. One of the vital abilities Twitter gives every business is the ability to monitor your business brand. By using the @Mentions feature and entering your business keywords in the search box, you can monitor who is talking about your business on Twitter in any part of the country or the world and what they are saying about your business. With these tools at your disposal, you’ll never be at a loss to know what the word is on the Twitter grapevine concerning your business.

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