Almost all website owners are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to build links to their websites. When they come across such an opportunity, they grab it with both hands. Let me point out one such brilliant opportunity.
The emergence of video marketing:
A new phenomenon in internet marketing is the recent emergence of video marketing. There are dozens of video websites looking to capitalise on this new trend. According to the New York Times, 75% of online users watch videos. And according to eMarketer, video accounts for more than 50% of online traffic. So for a smart marketer, it's absolutely inconceivable to neglect this new opportunity. If you want to gain backlinks for your website and get a lot of free traffic, you need to pay attention to video marketing. Add video marketing and video submissions to your SEO efforts!
From an SEO perspective, it used to be enough to submit articles and website directories. But that's no longer enough. You also need to target Web 2.0 traffic - and for that you need to add social bookmarking and video submissions to your armoury. Video marketing and link building have a lot in common. You need to apply the same approach and mindset to both. In link building, you are constantly looking for places from which you can get a few links to your website. Similarly, you should be on the lookout for great places to submit your videos to in order to get as much exposure as possible.
Video marketing simplified:
Let me outline a few key steps to do video marketing and reap great SEO benefits.
- Make a short, high-quality video about your product, service or a topic related to your niche. The video doesn't have to be perfect or totally professional. But make sure it's unique, interesting and useful to the viewer in some way.
- Upload your video to popular video portals such as youtube, Google Video, Yahoo Video etc.
- Add your important keywords to the tags and video description while uploading your video.
- Don't forget to include a link to your website in the video description.
- Social bookmark the video link you just submitted to youtube or another video site. This can help to get more links pointing to you.
- Find other such video websites that are frequently visited and submit your video there.
- Create more videos and repeat the above steps. With practice, you should get better. To save time, you can use video distribution services such as heyspread or tubemogul.
Advantages of video marketing:
The above steps will help you in many ways. Firstly, you will get instant attention and free traffic from these high traffic websites. Secondly, you will get backlinks to your website as you have provided a link in the video description. These backlinks are very important from an SEO point of view. This is because most video sites have a high pagerank and Google values links from such sites.
Another advantage is that you reach people who are not interested in reading long articles but would rather watch a video. You are utilising different media and not just relying on articles. You know that you need to utilise all the tools and resources at your disposal to stay at the top of the search engine rankings. It would be a big mistake if you didn't, because your competition will easily beat you to it. So use video marketing to build backlinks and get free traffic.
Tip: If you want your video to appear at the end of a competitor's video, all you need to do is use the same title tags and keywords that your competitor has used. Just make sure you place them in the exact same order as in your competitor's video, and your video will appear next after the viewer has finished watching the competitor's video!
Resources: Yahoo Video: http://video.yahoo.com/ Daily exercise: http://www.DailyMotion.com/ iFilm: http://www.iFilm.com/ AOL Uncut: http://uncutvideo.aol.com/ VidiLife: http://www.Vidilife.com/ Grouper: http://www.Grouper.com/ Veoh: http://www.Veoh.com/ Revver: http://www.Revver.com/ Camtasia (currently only for PCs) http://www.Camtasia.com/ iShowU (Mac users) http://store.shinywhitebox.com/home/home.html
Video distribution sites: You Tube: http://www.YouTube.com/ Google Video: http://video.google.com/
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