Chris Towland

Video Marketing

Video Marketing at YouTube

I was wondering this week how many of you are doing video marketing to promote either your own products or those as an affiliate. It can work wickedly well, but there are some things to keep in mind.

In my own case I have found that over 90% of my video traffic comes from my YouTube videos. Sure, I submit promotional videos to a number of video sites, but YouTube really is the workhorse at least in my case.

If you are submitting videos manually, you can use a free service such as TubeMogul to submit the same video to about a dozen prime directories with the push of a button. And, while I do submit to a number of directories, like I said, the vast majority of my video traffic comes from YouTube.

If you are promoting products in a number of different niches, remember, you can easily create different user accounts at YouTube using different email addresses. I have half-a-dozen accounts I use for different purposes.

Your biggest choice is where to send the traffic you get from your videos. Just as in article marketing, you need to decide whether you want to send traffic directly to a sales page, or–to a squeeze page, so you can collect names and email addresses.

This decision kind of depends on your niche. If list building is not a concern for a particular product or niche, you will probably want to send traffic directly to a sales page.

The very best place on Youtube to add a link to your website is at the very start of your description. In other words, start the description of your video with the full http:// url of the webpage you want them to visit, then add the rest of your description.

A big key is to try to get people to subscribe to your channel. Another thing is to keep fresh videos coming.

If someone subscribes to your channel and you only post a video once every six months, it is likely they won’t keep an eye out for new videos. It’s a numbers game, the more videos you post, the more traffic you generate.

Article Marketing, List Building

Article Marketing to Build Your List

I know that a lot of you are using article marketing to build your lists and to drive traffic to your sites. What I’d like to talk about today are some of the advantages of sending your article marketing traffic to a squeeze page (an opt-in) page to collect names rather than to a specific sales page.

Suppose you write a 300 or 500 word article on affiliate marketing. You have a page with a product of yours related to affiliate marketing. Your first temptation might be to put a link in your author resource box pointing to your site so you can make some sales.

One problem is that down the road you may create another, or several more products in this niche. You would then have to write another batch of articles with a different link point to your sales page for that product when you submit more articles.

What I believe is a better option is to set up a squeeze page (a page set up with your auto-responder to capture names and email addresses).

Once you get names on your list, you can market to them by email whatever product you wish. In fact, you can send them ongoing emails promoting endless products in the niche.

So my advice is sometimes to use the author resource box in your articles to point to an opt-in form to build your list. Then, use that list to market dozens of different products to your list over the course of a year.

List Building

Building a List – One of your Biggest Assets

There are two very important aspects of selling online. Of course the first is to generate some sales of your products or those you promote as an affiliate. But the other thing is huge as well. That is your list and how you market to it.

The first two investments people usually make when the decide to sell ebooks online are a domain name and a web hosting account. Those things will establish a presence for you online.

The third investment should probably be an auto-responder service. A good service such as Getresponse or Aweber will only run about $20 a month; It is worth far, far more than that. I personally have used Getresponse for many years so can fully recommend it.

An auto-responder service is much more than a service that lets you send out bulk emails to your list. A good auto-responder service will allow you to create pop-up forms to use in opting in visitors to your list. It should allow you to create multiple, sequential emails to send to your subscribers. This creates an auto-pilot system for marketing to your list.

Of course you can create spontaneous emails and queue them to send at any desired time. Tracking is an important consideration as well. A good auto-responder service will track the open rates of your emails, the percentage of people who are actually clicking on your links in your emails, and bounce rates.

I would also recommend a service that allows you to do split testing of your lists. This is important because as your list grows, you may want to test two versions of an email to see which pulls the most sales.

You should also use a service that allows for the creation of double-opt-in lists. Here, visitors opt-in to your list, but then they are sent an immediate auto-response requesting them to confirm their wish to subscribe to your list. This is almost a must. It prevents people from claiming they never signed up for your list.

As for mailing, everyone has their own schedules. A good schedule is to mail 2-3 times a week, but many top marketers mail every single day to their lists. I consider that a bit much. The important thing is to maintain contact with your subscribers and provide them with valuable information. Build a relationship with them and they will be more likely to do business with you.

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