Internet Marketing Consultant – Dan Blakeslee

How to Get Your YouTube Viewers To Take Action

A common mistake business owners make in video marketing is to make a great video, upload it and then do nothing, and yet wonder why they never sell anything. The truth of the matter is that any self-respecting local business wants to ring up sales not just to entertain or inform people.

The problem is that we are often reluctant to pinpoint exactly what we want to accomplish. So as a business owner, ask yourself: what exactly do I want the viewer to do after seeing this video?

Do I want them to opt-in to my email list?
Do I want them to buy a product?
Do I want them to visit my blog?
Do I want them to join my Facebook fanpage?’
Do I want them to Tweet me?

Once you know the specific action you want your potential viewer to take, then tell them to do just that. Craft your copy to include your call -to -action message in these three areas of your video:
Within your video content
Within your annotation text
Within your description

Here are a few call- to- action sentences you may use:
This video shows just one use of our product. Get more free tips when you purchase this amazing product by visiting my blog at abc.com/blog
Click here to watch more cosmetic surgery videos
Sign up for our free newsletter on interior decoration by clicking this link

By doing this, you will be able to see tangible results from your video marketing. Better yet, you will be able to accurately measure how effective a particular video campaign helping you to know what works and what doesn’t work. For example you will know which copy works better, which videos bring in more sales conversions, which videos generate more opt-ins and so on.

How to get people to open your local business emails

“The money is in the list.” Almost everyone marketing online repeats this statement over and over again, but in reality the money is in the list only if people actually open your emails. If your subscriber doesn’t open his mail, your business will not make a sale.

The average person gets around ten emails a day and if he has multiple email accounts or forgets to open his emails for a couple of days, then he is in all likelihood going to be staring at an Inbox full of over 20 messages. Considering these facts, why would he open your business email and not those from others?

The secret to getting your emails opened is found in the title and first line of your message. These are the two parts of your message people see first as they scan the list of emails in their inbox.

Use these tips to create strong and compelling titles and first sentences for all your emails:

1. Use power words- these are words that are grab people’s attention
Create curiosity E.g. Did you get this product? Guess who’s coming to town?
Use Humor
Create shock factor E.g. Facebook overthrows Google
Stir Controversy
State Facts e.g. 10 people will die of cancer today, Fly to London for $500 this month
Employ Boldness E.g. New, important, Open now, Here it is, Free, Discover, Secret

2. Format your title
Use Brackets or parentheses. Believe it or not, these actually double your open rates.
For example instead of writing your title as-
Important garden chairs on sale, you would rewrite that as
Important (garden chairs on sale) or (Important) garden chairs on sale
Capitalize one or two words in your title. Using the above example, the title would now read (IMPORTANT) Garden chairs on sale
Use quotes to also get attention. E.g. New “Italian Cooking” EBook.

3. Short titles. Use no more than 40 characters and make sure your title hits your subscriber’s sweet spot of need. Keeping your title short enables it to be read faster and keep the readers attention.

I hope you now realize that your business’s emails have to be captivating enough to grab your subscriber’s attention and that it only takes a little creativity to increase your open rates.

How To Build Your Local Business Email List: Part One- Driving In Traffic

An email list is a great way to create a continuous stream of income for your local business because you can automatically communicate with a targeted list of people over and over again without starting the whole sales process from scratch. But how exactly does one build that coveted email list? First one needs to drive traffic to your squeeze page and secondly one needs to get them to sign up on that squeeze page.

Here are ways to drive traffic to your squeeze page:
Social media- you can drive your Twitter and Facebook followers to your squeeze page through your tweets or your business’s fanpage. The wonderful thing about generating leads this way is that your followers can help you drive even more traffic for free due to the viral nature of social media.
Article Marketing- this free method works by submitting articles related to your business to article directories and providing a link to your squeeze page through the author resource box or through anchor text links.
Video Marketing- uploaded videos on YouTube or other video sharing sites should have links that direct people to your squeeze page
Pay per click – if you can afford it, this is a very quick way to drive traffic to your squeeze page. You can place ads on search engines, social media sites or specific websites that have high levels of traffic in your target market.
Affiliate traffic- you can sign up affiliates who will do the work of driving traffic to your squeeze page in exchange for a fee per signup. You obviously have to consider the cost to benefit ratio before you use this method.

Having driven traffic to your squeeze page, it is now time to persuade people to sign up. How to do that is covered in our next article, “How To Build Your Local Business Email List: Part Two- Super Squeeze Pages”


How To Build Your Email List Part Two: Super Squeeze Pages

Email marketing is a very cheap way to generate sales for your local business as you can use your email list for successive marketing campaigns without going back to the drawing board to get new prospects. In our previous article, we tackled how to drive traffic to your squeeze page and in this article we will look at how to create a compelling squeeze page that gets people to sign up to your list.

As you know, a squeeze page is designed specifically to get people to opt-in or sign up and there are some simple ways to increase your conversion rates.

No distractions- a common mistake is to try and put too much information on your squeeze page but this only distracts your prospects and lowers opt-in rates. The only information that should be there is a clear message for just the name and email address of the prospect in exchange for the free product/service you are offering. This is not the place to start putting ads or links.
Create a valuable product/service to give away for free to make people feel they are getting a good deal when they sign up. That free offer should offer amazing value in the eyes of the prospect. You can create a report, a video, a coupon or whatever suits your kind of business and budget.
Reverse squeeze page- you can use this technique that uses reverse psychology to get sign ups. Basically you offer the first part of your free offer directly to your prospect and then offer the second part if they sign up. This actually helps you filter your traffic to create a more targeted email list of potential buyers rather than mere window shoppers
Create a professional looking squeeze page. Choose clean and modern designs that don’t look hyped up or phony as prospects will be suspicious about the credibility of your business.

High Authority Backlinks for Your Local Business Website

Backlinks are an important part of SEO, but just not any backlink will do. The quality of your backlinks is definitely more important than the quantity. Two quality back link will boost your rankings more than four poor quality backlinks.

High authority websites with a high page rank are respected by search engines and they place greater value on backlinks from them. Here are sources of high authority websites your local business can link to.

Government sites. These are sites with a .gov domain name. These sites would work well if your business services government agencies as your association with them would provide an open door to getting listed or mentioned on their sites which would help your business website capture that all important high quality back link.
Educational sites. These are sites ending in .edu and are a good option if your business has an instructional or research-related element.
Directories- there are certain high authority directories that can provide quality backlinks. The Yahoo directory costs about $300 per year to be listed on, while DMOZ directory has people to personally review and approve every website that seeks to be listed.
Article directories. Submitting quality articles to article directories that have high page ranking is a great way to get backlinks and greater exposure for your local business. People will click on your link within your author resource box as they read your business article within the site or from the site that has grabbed the article for republishing elsewhere.
Forums, blog, social sites- as you join forums, blogs and social sites related to your local business niche, you will find opportunities to comment, ask questions, provide answers and connect with others. If the site allows it, you can add a link to your local business.

Getting your local business noticed on YouTube

YouTube provides your local business a chance to get before the eyeballs of millions of people all across the globe, a much more powerful marketing tool than you could possibly imagine. But how does a small business owner hit it big on YouTube, especially when the most popular videos seemed to be rather outlandish such as talking bobble heads?
Here are some key ingredients to getting your video noticed on YouTube:

Choose the right keywords.
To help your business video get found in YouTube’s search engines results, you will want to use keywords that filter through the millions of viewers to target the small number of specific people your business niche reaches. Using longtail keywords will yield highly targeted viewers. For example it is better to use the keywords “real estate Atlanta, GA” instead of “real estate”.

Put a quirky twist to your message
This is where most businesses get their video marketing messed up because they don’t understand that YouTube has a strong entertainment factor and that’s what attracts viewers. No matter what you’re selling you must have an amusing twist that engrosses people attention, even if you’re selling something as mundane as industrial equipment. And that’s when the viral power of YouTube will skyrocket your views.

Create a YouTube channel
This becomes like your own TV station where all your uploaded videos get stored and where viewers can join as subscribers. Your subscribers are like your fans and followers whom you can interact with and who will spread the word around about your business.

Network amongst the YouTube community
You can get your business noticed in the hallways of the YouTube community by contributing comments on other people’s videos, sharing with others within groups related to your niche or creating a group if one doesn’t exist yet. Soon you will become a go-to authority in your field that will boost your local business’s presence on the site.

Converting Lists Into Cash: How To Get People To Click And Take Action

When I think of ways to get my email list subscribers to click my links and take action that will generate sales, I often remember the saying that goes “you can get a horse to the well, but you can’t force it to drink.” That analogy is so true in email marketing because you can have a list with thousands of people on it, but that doesn’t mean anything unless you’re able to turn that list into hard cash when you need to.

Here are ways to get people to take action

Give them clear cut calls to action. This might seems obvious but unless you tell people to take specific action, they won’t. People often need to be taken by the hand and shown exactly what they need to do. You therefore need to include action sentences such as: Click here, Buy Now, Place your Order Here, Click this link, Here’s how to get your product.
Provide money back guarantees. These put your prospects at ease and give them confidence to whip out their credit cards. Offering a solid and genuine guarantee protects your prospect from bad deals and getting ripped off. You can offer a 30 day guarantee where they can get a full refund if they are not happy with a product or service.
Quality guarantees. This is useful for certain products especially technical gadgets, machinery, automobiles and food products. Assure your clients with warranties, quality certifications etc
Offer to covers extra costs like shipping and handling so that your customer feels your business is covering more risk in the transaction than they are. This will also give you an edge over your competitors who may not be willing to foot these expenses. As you go the extra mile in customer service, customers will choose you over other local businesses.
Offer bonuses such as accessories related to your offer for free. For example, a coffee shop may offer a free mug on all purchases of fresh roasted coffee beans. You can also increase your sales by offering bonus packages where you sell a product package for a discounted price. For example, the coffee shop could offer a three- pack package of fresh roasted coffee beans in different aromas for a discounted price that results in a $10 saving to the customer.

8 ways to optimize your local business videos

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

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.

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

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.