It is amazing how some people use smart (cost-effective, efficient, etc.) ways to sell their brands online. Social media has made it more easy to share your brand’s story and also get other people to spread the word about your products and services for free. Unfortunately “the word” people spread about you can be good or bad. It can help you make sales and it can help you lose sales. That is why it is best to master online Public Relations techniques.

Today, I will be sharing with you a short guide about how to do online PR. I’ve listed things you need to be using and doing and I also shared some links to tools you should be using.

Read on and take notes.

Case-Studies:

Case studies are an awesome sales tool since they serve as testimonials and also highlight benefits of your service at the same time. What you need to do first is have some case-study type articles on your business’ blog. When your product or service helps someone solve a problem or do something differently, write a blog post about it.

Share the step-by-step process you used to resolve it and how other people (especially prospective customers) can avoid or solve such problems. You can also share case studies as guest posts on other blogs. This is a powerful way of leveraging some other site’s audience to drive more traffic to your website and sales for your business.

Daily Alerts:

There is no better way to monitor your brand(s) online. Subscribe to daily alerts and respond to questions and rumors about your company. If someone asks a question about your business on Facebook, Twitter, on their blog or any other place on the internet, write blog posts that answers their questions and point them to the article. They might share your answer with their audience.

Some tools for tracking your company online are:

• Google Alerts
• Social Mention
• Trackur (commercial)

Networking with Journalists and Bloggers:

Contact bloggers and journalists via email, Facebook, Twitter or their LinkedIn profiles and start developing relationships with them. You can start by telling them how you loved or hated one of their recent or old articles and continue from there.

Unless you are going to pay them to do it, develop relationships first with bloggers and journalists before you ask them to write about your product or service.

If you are inexperienced with influencing people, I suggest you read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. Also, you can read the blog articles below:

Some tools for finding and networking with journalists:

• Muckruck
• Help A Reporter Out
• FlackList
• Newsbasis
• MediaKitty

I only knew about Muckruck and Help A Reporter Out; I saw the rest on Ben Lang’s post on Mashable here: 10 Ways For Entrepreneurs To Build Brands Online

If you have money and want to save time, write a press release and go to PRWeb to get it distributed to the news media for you.

Online shows:

Find online shows you want to be on and contact the host to have you on it to share your expertise or advice.

• Get on webinars as a guest host; You can offer yourself for free and teach someone else’s community for free. You get free publicity in return and you increase the value of you and your company just by hosting a webinar because you are perceived as a consultant/ trainer and that lets people perceive you and your business as value deliverers.
• Contact bloggers to interview you on their blogs. Many bloggers do this nowadays. My favorite blogger in this area is Andrew of Mixergy. He does a great job. Ask bloggers in your niche if they will want to interview you and see where it goes.
• Get on podcasts relevant to your business area  as a guest and offer free advice.

Conclusion:

What you just learned is basically, the essentials of online PR. Use the lessons in this article to grow a powerful online brand. If you also have something to share about online PR, be my teacher and share it in the comments box. I suggest you share and bookmark this article using the social buttons below. Don’t forget to also subscribe to the RSS feed for more.

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Today’s article is a guest post by Paul Wallisan from webprofits.com.au. Paul Wallis is an award winning professional freelance writer, working in the US, Canada, Australia and Belgium. He’s published 13 books on lulu.com and some of some of his other work can be found at Digital Journal.

The business blog is unlike other blogs. Business blogs are valued for different reasons. They’re like an SEO search result, geared to motivated readers who want information value and quality. This is a far higher standard than “hobby” blogs, and it’s also a potentially tricky situation for bloggers.

There’s no sugar to be put on this situation: If the information doesn’t measure up to the audience requirements, you can expect serious consequences.

I’ve put together some Do’s and Don’ts to help people avoid those consequences.

The Don’ts for business blogs

This list is a little long, but you’ll see where it leads:

• Don’t recycle information: Old news is just that, and it’s appreciated accordingly. If you want peace and privacy, recycle business news. If you want readers, stay current.
• Don’t dumb things down: Ever. It’s insulting and it’s lousy writing technique. You’re writing to professionals. If they need information beyond your text and the links, they’ll ask. (Even worse, if you dumb down enough, you’ll get real idiots, not real readers. You’ll be writing kiddies investment news, etc.)
• Don’t touch trashy business opportunities: The great new Get Rich Quick In Your Dressing Gown thing is long dead (like a billion years ago), and it’s staying that way. Steer clear, because your reputation will go with it if you don’t.
• Don’t use spiel if you’re selling a product or service. Business people can spot it a mile off, because they’ve heard it and seen it before and usually didn’t like it then, either. If you’re really trying to sell something, stay original.
• Don’t get naïve or “clever” with sponsored materials: If you’re writing for a sponsor or supplier, say so. “I got this very interesting new (whatever) from (whoever) and…” This means your association with both product and supplier is clear, and you’re staying honest with your readers, which is always appreciated. You’ll be suspected of doing an ad if you don’t, anyway.
• Don’t imitate other business blogs: This is real “planned suicide”. It means you’ve lost the brand battle before you even start. Even if you can do it better than the other guy, you’ve compromised your own brand ID and have gone from unique selling point to joining a crowd of look-alikes. You might as well start looking at funeral plots.
• Don’t defame anyone: This modern audience is chronically, permanently, allergic to businesses that defame other businesses (competitors) just to gain trust. Avoid doing this and other mistakes, and never be purely negative and destructive as if you were writing a political blog.
• Don’t forget case studies: As simple as this may sound, case studies on business blogs are a very good way of earning trust from first time visitors. Case studies in the form of interviews work even better. Works better than regular testimonials. Don’t forget to it.

The Do’s for business blogs

This list is much shorter, but also very direct:

• Do be original and stand out: Following directly from not imitating other blogs, make your blog the one that really shows the way with better material, better media and better ideas. You win, they lose.
• Do check your facts: With this audience, you need to write like a journalist to the extent of checking information and verifying your points. If you don’t, expect to be haunted in very unambiguous ways.
• Do be professional: “Cute” doesn’t cut any mustard at all with the business crowd. Professional, expressive, articulate, insightful, and all the other professional characteristics will.
• Do what others are not doing: Experiment with your business blog. Try new ways of promoting your blog, increasing subscriptions, etc. Try and think of how to make your blog fun and sticky. Include some tutorials here and there, host weird competitions, do what others are not doing.

The bottom line

Emphasize your standout skills and always use your best quality as your benchmark for publishing.

Many people are familiar with the common way of launching a blog or website; get a domain name, buy hosting, get a website design, add content and then that’s it. It’s that easy but you can do more with your launches. Know how to use landing pages?

You’ve seen many internet marketers and businesses use landing pages in their product launches. The reason why they do this is that, it gets potential customers in the door for their products. Some of these people order the product when it finally launches. It is a system that works for internet marketers and it can be used in any other industry to start a community for your blog or website before it actually goes live. So how can you do this with your new website launch?

What you will need

You will have to spend some money but not more than what you will spend setting up a new website the common way. So here is a list of what you will need to set up a landing page for your prelaunch:

• A domain name: I recommend that you get a .com or .net domain name. You can buy your domain names for $10 or less on Godaddy.

• Web hosting: Hostgator is the hosting service I recommend. I use them to host my websites and I haven’t had any problem so far. They also have excellent, responsive tech support too. That is rare with other hosting companies. Use coupon code TEXAS to get the first month for 1 cent. You can sign-up here.

• Landing page template: You can get one for between $8 and $12 on Themeforest. Click here to see some examples.

• Newsletter system: I recommend Mailchimp for this. They allow you to collect up to 2,000 emails before you pay anything for it. That’s the best deal I have ever seen when it comes to newsletter systems. Get it here.

So adding it all up, you can expect to spend less than $25 on everything. After grabbing all these tools, set them up and then build your prelaunch content.

Prelaunch content

Before your prelaunch content, you will need your introductory content; the content that you will send out to anybody who joins your newsletter once it is set up. It can be a welcome message with an introduction of yourself and what your blog will be about. It’s that simple.

The prelaunch content is the content you send after your introductory content. I recommend that it should be a tutorial of some sort or about something you’ve observed in the niche your site will be about. Write 2 or 3 pieces of this content, send them to your subscribers one at a time and then ask them to forward it to a friend. If they do, more eyes will see your content and their friends might actually visit your landing page to join your newsletter too. You can send them one piece/ article each week. You can set this up easily inside most newsletter software. Make sure whatever you teach or show them in your prelaunch content is relevant to what your site or blog will be about. After all, that is why they joined your newsletter.

The next stage is to set up your landing page.

Landing Page set-up

I am going to assume you already know how to set up a website but I have a few tips and recommendations for the landing page.

First of all, make sure you write a catchy headline that showcases the benefit of joining. Your headline is what draws people to join your newsletter. If you need help in this area, Brian Clarke has tons of articles concerning headlines. Just go to Google and put in this query, “site:copyblogger.com  headlines” (without the quotation marks) and you will find a goldmine of articles there about headlines.

The second thing you have to look at is your graphic elements. Some experts say that big buttons drive conversions so you want to make sure that your buttons are big. Some also say that arrows also aid in converting visitors to subscribers. Maybe a User Experience expert can explain it further but what I have been told is that, it works so try experimenting with it to see how it goes.

After setting these up, you will now have to promote your landing page.

Landing Page Promotion

In order to get people ready for your launch, you need to send them to your landing page so they can subscribe to your newsletter. I will show you the 2 cheapest and fastest way to get people to your site; it will cost you no money at all.

Here are some tips for landing page promotion:

1)     Write guest posts to pre-existing blogs who write about your topic or a similar one. You can use specific keywords you will want your site to rank for as anchor text for the link to your website in your byline. You will need to check with the blog you are writing for to know if they accept this. This will help your site to start ranking for those keywords even before you launch. That’s just one of the SEO benefits of guest blogging. Read my article on 10 Places to Find Blogs to Guest Post On if you need some help finding places to send your guest posts.

2)     Turn your prelaunch content into presentation slides and upload them to Slideshare.com and scribd.com and leave a link back to your landing page in the description area and also inside the document itself. You should actually tell people who read this what you want them to do. This will work just fine, “We will be launching a blog soon to teach more of this stuff so you should visit our website at http://www.yourwebsite.com to sign-up for our free newsletter so we can notify you once we launch.”

After collecting some subscribers, you can actually go ahead and launch.

The launch

On your launch day, just email your subscribers and let them know that you’ve launched. If you are launching a blog, I recommend that you have at least 3-5 articles ready to be published on your launch day. Once published, you can send your subscribers to your blog and ask them to interact and discuss the content there.

Set up RSS feeds and social profiles so that you can continue building your community; thereby, expanding your network of fans, followers and subscribers.

Conclusion

I hope I explained this post in the simplest way for you. However, if you have any questions, suggestions or recommendations, I urge you to share them in the comments area below.

Subscribe to our RSS feed and like us on Facebook to receive free future updates. Also, if you loved this post, share it with your friends and colleagues using the social buttons below.

Do you get stuck on articles to write on your blog? Coming up with article ideas for your blog can be very challenging; especially if you publish often. This happens to a lot of people including me. I have found a solution though and I am willing to share them with you. I will teach you 5 ways you can get hundreds (100′s) of blog article ideas.

Let’s get started.

1. Scan through books in your niche:

This is one easy way of getting tons of article ideas. Pick a book or whitepaper or report in your niche and scan through the table of contents for some ideas. You don’t have to copy the title word for word. All you should be doing is to get inspiration for your own article ideas. You can also scan through the real content of the book or report. I use this technique to get lots of article ideas and you can too. It works magic.

2. Q&A sites:

Question and answer sites like Startups.com (for business) and Yahoo answers (general topics), etc. are awesome places to find article ideas. These websites are updated every day with questions that people want answered. If people need answers to their questions, why don’t you write a blog post about what they are asking about. When you’re done with the post, you can go back to the Q&A site and answer the question, leaving a link back to your blog post as reference. That last tip is just a bonus, let’s not lose focus .

3. Online Video Sites:

You can search for a general keyword in your niche. Find videos on Youtube and other video sharing site that talk about this keyword. ‘Steal’ some ideas from the videos and put an article together for your readers.

4. Social Bookmarking Sites:

Visit social bookmarking sites that feature your blogs in your niche. Go through the titles and see if you can come up with your own ideas. Titles that are on the front page are titles that are in demand (in other words, solves a lot of peoples’ problems) but are rather scarce. Write similar articles if you can. You might also get lucky!

5. Blog Comments:

Comments on your blog and other people’s blogs are also places that you can pick blog post ideas quickly. When readers leave comments and raise concerns, that’s an opportunity to write a blog post to address those concerns. When you read other people’s blogs and someone raises issues you have knowledge about, that’s when you should start writing (or drafting an article) for your blog. When you read articles on other blogs in your niche and leave comments, be sure to subscribe to the comments if it is allowed. You will get updates whenever someone comments on that article. Try to find blog posts in those comments.

6. Forums:

Forums are also excellent places to find blog topic ideas. From people’s questions to comments to tutorial entries, you are assured of many sources of writing inspiration.

7. Your own experience:

Nothing beats your own experience when it comes to finding blog post ideas. What can you do that you can teach your readers to do? How did you solve that problem you had when… Share your experience in a story form or just teach other people how you deal certain things in your niche. Solutions are always in demand because people always have problems.

Conclusion:

When you take the tips I have given you seriously, you will not have any trouble coming up with article ideas. If you are too busy, you can hire me to write your articles for you. Contact me to discuss what you want.

How do you benefit from Twitter? Do you know that, you could double or even triple that benefit if you cleaned up a little? Nope, I’m not talking about unfollowing people. I’m talking about three even cooler ways you could optimize your Twitter activities for the utmost benefit; favorites, RSS and lists.

So we’ll first look at how best you could use the ‘favorites’ feature on Twitter.

Twitter Favorites:

This feature allows you to save tweets. Any tweet you ‘favorite’ will be stored in your Twitter ‘favorites’. You’ll find the favorites button when you hover your cursor over a tweet. It’s the small star on the right:

Some of you may have figured the benefits already but for the rest of you who haven’t (;)), I’ll tell you. Because most people’s Twitter timeline gets updated several times a minute, it’s sometimes hard finding a tweet you saw like an hour ago unless you visit the “Tweeter’s” profile. Sometimes, people share some valuable links or quotes that you’ll really want to use later but if you decide to come back later without adding it to your favorites, you might lose it forever.

This feature even works better with Twitter’s search tool. If you’re doing any kind of research, Twitter’s favorites feature and its search engine are your best tools; oh, I mean after Google lets you down . It sometimes does that doesn’t it? Anyway, back to Twitter. All you have to do is just search tweets with keywords you’re interested in learning more about and then favorite the tweets you think you’ll want to look at. Voila, you just saved your search in an organized way.

You can delete your favorites any time. Just go to your favorites page and click on the star again to un-favorite.

Twitter RSS:

Now, I know Twitter’s RSS feature can be used in two ways; if there are any other ways, please let me know.

So the first way I know is to subscribe to the tweets of people who really matter to you on Twitter. Not just family and friends, brands also. So you go to a user’s profile and add their RSS link to your feed reader. You’ll find the RSS button below that person’s ‘following’ list. Here is a screen shot of @Chrisbrogan’s profile and RSS icon:

Yea of course, lists can help you do that too but you’ll still miss some tweets.

The second way is what I find interesting and what you might too. You’ll need Twitter’s search engine again so go there and search for a keyword you’re interested in. You’ll find the RSS icon on the first widget at the right side of the page. Click on it and add the link to your feed reader. Here is a screen shot of an example search I made:

Every time someone sends out a tweet containing the keyword you searched for, it will be sent to your feed reader. This is an easy way to track brand mentions or find useful links or even email list building.

You could build your newsletter subscription lists on Twitter by tracking questions with your keywords, answering those questions and then directing the questioner to a place on your website where they can find more answers. You could ask them to opt-in and download your whitepaper or eBook or any other free stuff you might be offering at that time that will help them find what they are looking for.

Twitter Lists:

So you know what Twitter lists are but are you using it effectively?

Having very organized lists cuts through the noise on Twitter. It’s like re-following your favorite people.

The best way to make lists work for you is to split them into little tiny pieces. If you have Tech bloggers, Health bloggers and business bloggers all listed under “Favorite Bloggers”, it could get quite noisy and disorganized.

However, if you split that into “Tech Bloggers” lists, “Health Bloggers” lists and “Business Bloggers” lists, you’ll find a lot of value in that. Because you can follow news and tidbits more easily.

So if you have to just read tech updates, you just visit your “Tech Bloggers” list and so on.

It’s okay to iterate if you think your lists need more optimization.

Conclusion:

After going through this short Twitter lesson, I hope you’ll be using Twitter in other ways too apart from just promoting your stuff. It’s a great tool if you’re looking at doing any of the following:

• Finding information via shared links; research.
• Generating leads; building email lists
• Networking with experts and brands
• And of course, promoting your stuff.

If I missed something there, let me know. It’s your turn now. How do you use Twitter? Any tips and tricks up your sleeve that you may want to share? By the way, don’t forget to retweet this post and follow Sociatic on Twitter.

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Guest blogging helps you spread the word about your business or website. It is one way I get more people to view Sociatic and increase my RSS subscriber counts. It is also definitely one of the ways to become a better content marketer. Have you found any value in guest posting? If you haven’t, then you haven’t been looking in the right places.

Here are 10 places you can find blogs to guest post on. No matter the niche you’re in, I promise you’ll find a blog to guest post on.

• Look on Invesp: This blog ranking directory provides a lot of insight on different blogs in different niches. It was on this site that I learned that Seth Godin has over 450,000 RSS subscribers. I don’t think he accepts guest posts though so don’t rush to contact him. Visit Invesp’s blog rank directory to see if you can find a blog that’ll be interested to accept a guest post from you.

• Alltop: If you think there are no blogs in your niche to guest post on, guess again. AllTop is a news aggregator site that covers a diverse range of niches. I’m sure you’ll find some blogs there to guest post on so check them out.

• Blog Ad networks: Sites such as AdvertiseSpace, BlogAds and BuySellAds (for creative industry) makes it easier for you to identify big blogs by sharing some stats with you. These are great places to look for blogs that accept guest posts.

• Use MyBlogGuest: This is a forum community where bloggers give info about their blogs and then ask for guest posts from other users. You can also request to post an article on a blog whereby you share the terms and conditions of your offer.

• Technorati.com: Look in the Top 100 blogs in the world or top 100 in your niche to submit guest articles to. Better still; look in the top 10 blogs in your niche. Mostly, these are the blogs with lots of subscribers and authority. That’s what you need.

• Blogrolls of popular blogs in your niche: This is an overlooked place when it comes to finding blogs to guest post on. Authority bloggers normally list other authority bloggers in their blogroll. Most of the time, they blog about the same topic so be sure to check these places out too.

• Adage Power 150 blogs: The power 150 is a list of the top marketing blogs. If you want to reach the business community, be sure to request to guest post on one of the Power 150 blogs.

• Junta42 Top Blogs: Junta42 is the authority on content marketing and their list of the Top 42 blogs is a great place to find blogs to guest post on. You’ll find blogs covering topics in the area of content marketing, social media, and marketing in general.

• Check out TopRankBlog’s List of Top Online Marketing blogs: If you want to reach readers interested in business and web technology, try reaching out to the authors of the blogs listed with a guest post.

• Check out the social bookmarking and voting sites: Normally, the blogs on the homepages of sites such as Delicious, Digg, Reddit, etc. , receive lots of traffic and they have many subscribers too due to their success on these sites.

Other Tips to Remember About Guest Blogging:

• It is not every blog that accepts guest posts. Look for a link or page that asks for guest posts to be submitted. If you don’t find any, you can contact the publishers of the blog to find out if they do.
• Guest Posting works best when you write for a blog with many subscribers. If you write for blogs with just a few subscribers, there wouldn’t be any significant increase in your overall traffic and subscriber count (unless you plan to write a guest post every day). When it comes to guest posting, I don’t post on blogs with less than 5,000 subscribers. You can set your own subscriber limits.
• Use Quantcast to check the blog’s RSS subscriber count if not available elsewhere. You can also ask the bloggers about this.
• Hang around on a blog for a while before submitting a guest post. Mingle with its community and provide valuable comments. Leaving 2 or 3 valuable comments is enough to get the publisher’s attention.

Guest blogging is a really great way of marketing your business online on a shoestring and building a community around your brand. What other tips can you share regarding guest posting?

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Are your followers on the social web for real? I ask this because sometimes it seems no one, out of thousands or tens of thousands of followers, is paying attention to anything you say or do. We hear stories of businesses with just a few hundred followers closing sales whiles others with thousands of followers are not able to leverage this and close a single sale.

If your primary aim of using social media is to help and direct people, then you’re qualified to be called a social community leader. That’s the only reason people will pay attention to you; if you lead them.

If you want to direct people to do what you want, take a cue from these 18 tips for social community leaders:

1. Develop synergistic relationships with your community so that they automate your marketing for you. Help them to achieve their goals (solve their problems) and they’ll help you solve yours.

2. Clarify your goals and objectives for each of your social web profiles. If you’re going to sell on one Twitter account and provide support on the other account, say so. Mixing things up is okay but some people find that hard to cope with.

3. Provide feedback to your community. Don’t always take their feedback and testimonials; give them yours. A good way to do this is to share with them the results you’ve got due to their participation in your business. This is a great way to show appreciation to your community and it also shows them that you listen to them.

4. Encourage and participate in discussions by asking questions in your status updates. Discussions often lead to more ideas and better insight of your community.

5. Strive to answer questions thrown @ you in a timely fashion. Huge time lapses reduce the momentum needed for a conversation to start or continue.

6. Don’t be ethnocentric. I don’t know how some people think but I added this one because I saw a terrible example of a status update with ethnic favoritism. Your community might be made up of people from all races so you don’t want to be ethnocentric no matter what you believe.

7. Develop a reward system for people who participate and take action in your social web communities. It doesn’t have to be a scheduled promo. You can give out stuff at random without announcing it. Announce it only after you’ve done it. This will make people start paying attention to you. They may even follow you and put you on a special list if this happened on Twitter so that they can see what you’re up to and take action when you ask them to.

8. Perform a social media audit regularly. This will help you improve your social media campaigns.

9. Brainstorm creative ways you can use to power up your community. Maybe offering freebies, tips and discounts sound interesting but how about adding some creativity to these campaigns?

10. Don’t argue. Drop your ego to a certain level. If you start arguing with one person in your community, everyone else sees it and people will begin to take sides. This will break the community you have worked so hard to build.

11.  Continue learning new ways to improve your community. Learn about online trends and facts so you know how consumers are evolving and also where they are spending more time and money.

12. Marketing Automation doesn’t mean using a bot or other tools to reach your community. Rather, it means you’ve gotten to the point where your community does your job for you.

13. Learn more about content marketing. Content sharing is now a big part of social media and smart marketers are producing more content. It is best to learn about different content marketing techniques so you can reach many people with different content formats.

14.  Strive to be indispensable to your followers. In other words, don’t be the average Joe. That’s too common and people are used to ‘common’. Be a resource.

15.  Explore ways other community leaders are building their communities. There are a lot of creative minds and campaigns out there. Borrow their ideas and mix them up with yours.

16.  Track and measure your effectiveness. That way, you know what you’re getting wrong and what needs to be fixed. Maybe the only person who’s paying attention to you is yourself. You’ll only know when you track and measure.

17.  Don’t share your blog post again and again. Don’t share your promotions again and again in one day. This is called spamming. I hate and so do your followers.

18. Only follow people you deem as qualified for helping you achieve your goals. By qualified, I mean targeted or your target audience. Following just anybody will only make your work difficult.

19. This is a bonus point. After harnessing all 18 steps, rinse and repeat . It’s time to get real with your followers. Just do it (borrowed from Nike )!

Here are some other articles you should consider reading. They are a valuable resource to me and will be to you:

On Managing a Community : ChrisBrogan.com

The Role of Leadership in Social Media: ScottMonty.com

The Power of Community – A Social Media Success Story by Hessie Jones: DannyBrown.me

Sometimes, when I see posts that I love (like the ones I’ve shared), I share them to say thank you. Just an idea for you to use if you know what I mean .

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Yesterday, I went to Digg’s website and saw a beautiful new look. The design however, looks and “feels” like Facebook’s design. I logged in to my account and found also that the features there closely resembled Twitter. All of this is what they call Digg 4.

The service now has a “follow” and “unfollow” feature. I thought that was cool. I also noticed that when you log in to your account, you are taken to a page where you see all the submissions and diggs of the people you follow.

It also has a suggestion page that shows you a list of people and brands to follow. Just like Twitter.

Before I could say “Jack”, this page came up:

Has Twitter bought Digg or Digg is just copying Twitter? If it’s an act of copying, then Digg overdid it. Twitter has a fail whale and now, Digg is flaunting their “broken axle” page.

I’m still checking it out. I think they did too much copying this time. Have you found any features similar to Twitter’s on the new Digg? It’s like the company has Twitter’s blueprint.

Online video marketing is one part of content marketing that needs to be taken seriously if you really want to effectively communicate your brand online. The best advice most experts don’t give about online video marketing is, “learn to use SEO techniques in your online video marketing campaigns”. Video is getting big and some businesses have been able to go viral with videos shared around the web, especially on Youtube. We’re going to look at how to achieve a similar fate using video SEO techniques.

Even though we will be focusing on Youtube, the process can be applied on other popular video sharing sites.

Now, let’s begin.

The Best Video SEO Advice Ever : 

When you start uploading a video on Youtube, you’ll see something like this:

So basically, you’ll type in your title, in the “Title” column, your description in your “Description” column and your tags in your “Tags” column. These are the three most important areas as far as Youtube SEO is concerned.

When a user searches for a video, results are shown with the search’s keywords bolded in the “Title” and “Description” columns of the results. For example, in the screen capture image below, I performed a search using “flat abs” as my key phrase:

You can see that the search’s term (or keywords) was bolded in the “Title” and “Description” columns of the search. Youtube’s search system delivers results based on the relevancy of the titles and descriptions given to videos, in regard to the keywords or phrases used in the search. This is why it is very important to optimize these areas when uploading your videos.

Your titles, descriptions and tags should contain keywords that are both relevant to your content and also relevant for getting viewers via Youtube’s video search system. This will ensure that you reach lots of viewers to watch your videos whiles staying on topic. It’s a tricky thing to achieve. Don’t twist your titles or descriptions just so you could get lots of views for your videos whiles misleading people with a video that is not directly related to your title and description.

If you find this technique daunting, then the best thing for you to do is to do your keyword research. This will help you find the best keywords relevant to your niche, for your video marketing.

How to find the Best Keywords for your Video:

Let’s make some assumptions here. Let’s assume we’re going to promote a video about getting flat abs and see how we’ll go about doing the research for it. With that in mind, let’s begin.

1. We’ll start by listing keywords that relate to getting flat abs in a text editor. So we’ll have keywords like: flat abs, abs workout, six pack abs, sexy abs, abs fitness, workout abs … etc.

2. Open a tab or new window in your browser and go to Youtube.com

3. Open another tab and go to Youtube’s Ads Keywords Tool

4. Select one keyword or phrase (in our case, let’s start with “flat abs”), then, copy and paste it into the Youtube.com search bar and click on search like so:

5. Next, go to the tab where you opened the Ad Keywords Tool. You can change your country and language settings for more insight and if only you want to target a particular country or language. By default, the country is set to “United States”. Put in your keyword, and then click “Get keyword ideas”. This snapshot will help you understand further:

6. Since I didn’t change any of the settings, this is what I got after clicking on “Get keyword ideas”:

7. From the results, you can see that the search term (or keyword/phrase) is searched 6,200 times a month on average. Mind you, this is the search volume for searchers living in the United States.  6,200 is not a huge number but with the right optimization, you can reap great results from this. Now go to your search results from your search on Youtube.com

8. Analyze the competition by looking at the number of results returned (in the top right corner) for the search term and the number of video sharers using the search phrase in their titles and descriptions. Use this snapshot as your guide:

9. Our results show that there is less competition for the search term as only 5,240 results were generated. Some search terms return millions of results so 5,240 is pretty a good sign that there’s a chance to get many viewers. In the result above, we can see that all the videos have been viewed a great number of times in a short period. Also, we can see that not all the results have the exact search term, “flat abs” in their description and title. An example is the second video result which has just the keyword “flat” in its title and description. Considering all the factors mentioned, “flat abs” is a good keyword.

10.  Let’s move on to our next keyword, “abs workout”. A search for the term on the keyword tool gave the following results:

11.  The results show that 156,700 people in the United States alone search for “abs workout” videos every month. Now if we go to Youtube.com and search for “abs workout”, we will get this result:

12.  Notice the number of times each video has been viewed. Video number one has been viewed over 5 million times over 2 years. The other results are equally as massive. Here’s a snapshot of the competition for this search term:

13. The snapshot shows us that there are 303,000 videos competing for the search term “abs workout”. This is also good (but not great) considering that the term is searched 156,700 times every month in the US alone.

If you want to reduce the competition, and reach more viewers, combine keywords.

The Art of Combining Keywords in Your Video’s Title & Description:

Combining keywords in your titles and descriptions will go a long way to help you get more viewers for your videos. That’s just about how the first video result in our “abs workout” search got over 5 million views in two (2) years. Let’s look at it again and start decoding:

Glancing at the title and description, one will notice that the uploader, “passion4profession” has packed in some keyword combinations. Keywords used in this video’s title and description are: “abs” (US monthly search volume: 613,000. Competition: 422,000 videos), “fitness” (US monthly search volume: 246,800. Competition: 777,000 videos) and “workout” (US monthly search volume: 1,652,800.Competition: 439,000 videos).

Taking a further look at it, examples of keywords that will qualify for search phrase combinations are:

“abs fitness” (US monthly search volume: ? (not available). Competition: 263,000 videos) “six pack” (US monthly search volume: 240,000. Competition: 289,000 videos), “six pack abs” (US monthly search volume: 27,800. Competition:93,100 videos), “abs workout”(US monthly search volume: 156,700. Competition: 303,000 videos).

Now go to Youtube.com and let’s do a little more analysis. You’ll see that when we enter the keyword, “abs”, “passion4profession”’s video shows comes up as the third (3^rd) result.

Also, when we search for “fitness”, the video comes up as the first video result.

Search for the other keywords and you’ll see that the video shows up in the first 20 results. Most of the time, it is ranked number 1.

Having a combination of keywords like that helps spread the competition across different high volume search terms.

Final Thoughts:

• Skim through the suggested keywords to find other words that you forgot to add to your keywords list. You can also use the related search suggestions found right below the search results after you perform a search. Most of these suggestions will do good for your video campaign. 

• Apart from keyword combinations, keyword optimization also works best when you use basic copywriting techniques. This is because your titles and descriptions are just like classified ads and they should sound or look interesting to attract people to view its content.

• Share your website link in your video. Even better, divide the video into two parts: part 1 and 2. Then share part one on Youtube and share the link to part two at the end of your video. This will get people to check out your website, thereby increasing traffic.

• Ask your viewers to subscribe to your channel. This will ensure that you have people ready to view your new videos as you post them.

Conclusion:

Optimizing your video’s titles and descriptions = getting more viewers= getting more subscribers to your Youtube Channel= getting more targeted traffic.  I recommend you start experimenting with your own videos.

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Do you have an easy means of reminding yourself of what social media is about? There are so many posts on this subject.

I’ve decided to summarize it so you can easily remember it for your business purposes.

Social media is about L.I.F.E. with your prospects on social sites.

Now, let’s define what L.I.F.E. means in social media. I’ll show you what each letter means; of course, starting with L and ending with E.

• ‘L’ is for Listening: Your prospects are out there. Are you listening to them? You can use these any of these social media listening tools: 10 tools for listening in social media.

• ‘I’ is for Innovating: What’s your unique feature? Have you blended that into your social media strategy? Innovation sparks interest. Here is a resource article for innovation: Using social media to drive business innovation: insights from Guy Kawasaki and Target’s Michael Axelin

• ‘F’ is for Friending: Friending means building relationships. You’ve earned some prospects (fans or followers) so the next thing to do is invest in them. Chris Brogan shared some tips on this: Deepen Your Networks.

• ‘E’ is for Engaging: Start conversations about your brand. Join conversations concerning your brand. Be present wherever your brand is being talked about. Kyle Lacy wrote a great article about how to engage: 20 Ways to Engage Contacts in Social Media.

In summary, social media is about Listening, Innovating, Friending and Engaging with your prospects.

Next time you want to remember what social media is all about, think, L.I.F.E. The meaning will let you draft a better social media strategy.