The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Some Internet marketing tactics are timeless – they will always work. You may do them poorly and in that case they may not work. But if you do them well, then they will work.

Here are 6 Internet marketing tactics that worked when they were first used, work today, and will work until the technology on which they are based dies.

1. E-mail marketing – Whether you send newsletters, e-brochures, or product giveaway postcards, e-mail marketing is a marketing tactic that simply works. Anyone can do it.
2. Blogging – Blogging not only is a great marketing tactic, it’s good for SEO. That may be why it will always work.
3. Social networking – Social networking can take many forms. In the past it was known as forum marketing or bulletin boards. Today, it’s just simply social networking. But no matter the form, if it involves socializing (even online), then it will work. Networking is networking.
4. Word of mouth – Word of mouth always works. Online and off line. Online, word of mouth takes shape in the share icons you put on your pages. You do put them on your web pages, don’t you?
5. Visual imagery – TV advertising is still alive and well. Online, it’s called video marketing. Yes, it works just as well as TV advertising.
6. Paid advertising – Free advertising is great, but it may or may not work depending on the venue. Paid advertising works. Off line, print newspapers and magazines offer display ads for your dollars and boy do they work. Online, PPC is the best paid advertising you can get. It’s the equivalent of your hometown newspaper ad.

There’s no question about it. These online marketing tactics work. They always have and they always will.

Video production is a worthwhile endeavor if you have a purpose. And video marketing certainly can deliver traffic if handled with the right amount of patience, a good plan, and a good video.

Before you start your video production you should ask yourself a handful of questions. Start with these:

1. Who is your audience? – I don’t just mean your business target. I mean the target audience for your video. Narrow it down to a specific subset of your total audience. Not all marketing messages will appeal to every segment of your audience, so define the audience for that specific video.
2. What is your budget? – Budget matters. If you want to include a particular element in your video but budget constraints won’t allow it, you need to know that before you start production.
3. What is the goal for this video? – Without a well-written objective you likely will not meet it. Know exactly what you want your video to accomplish for you before you start producing it.
4. Does it tie in to another promotion? – If so, which one? Some videos are standalone. They are their own promotion. That’s fine, but if your video is being produced to tie into another promotion, then you need the input of the team that is putting that other promotion together.
5. What is your deadline? – Define your deadline before you begin. Then work hard to stay on schedule.

Every aspect of your video production and timeline need to be defined before you begin production. Don’t leave anything to chance.

Have you ever wished you could broadcast a video online in real time to an audience of thousands of eager watchers? It won’t be long before you can.

I like this idea. It’s about as sublime an idea as I can think of. But what does it take?

1. First, it takes a Google+ account. If you haven’t signed up for a Google+ account, then I’d suggest you do so. This is only going to get better.
2. Secondly, you need a YouTube account. If you don’t have one, sign up for one now. Remember to sync your YouTube account and your Google+ account by using the same login address.
3. Start a Google+ hangout. Invite people. Enjoy the hangout.

The Google+ Hangouts on Air hasn’t been rolled out publicly yet, but when it does go public, you’ll then be able to have a recording of your hangout post automatically to your Google+ stream and your YouTube account. Then, you and the other participants, as well as people watching the recording after the event, can discuss it. That’s powerful video marketing.

In fact, it’s the most powerful video marketing ever. After all of that, you’ll be able to share the video on Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn, and wherever else you have a social media presence.

Google+ Hangouts is already a powerful feature of the new social network owned by Google. When you add the ability to record your hangout and have it post automatically to YouTube – well, you can’t beat it. It isn’t exactly realtime (thought the event itself is), but it’s just one step away.

Is it getting more difficult to market a business online? I can see how a business owner would think so. There is so much to think about. You have to build a website, then you have to promote your website. You have to come up with a search engine marketing strategy, perhaps a pay-per-click advertising strategy, and put together a social media marketing plan. You may need a video marketing plan, an e-mail marketing plan, and even a display advertising plan in some niches. There really is a lot to think about.

While there is a lot to think about when you embark upon an Internet marketing venture, it isn’t as difficult as it seems. There are some things that are actually easier online than off line. For instance, there is a lot that you can measure online that measuring off line is unheard of.

Still, it helps to have a plan.

A good Internet marketing plan starts with research. In your research you should include some time to study your competition. Learn what the movers in your niche are up to. Not that you’ll follow them, but it helps to know what others have done and are doing in your industry. You may find some things that you like that you want to emulate while tossing out other strategies that don’t fit in with your goals and mission.

When you start with research you will eliminate a lot of your options. Taking items off the table that don’t belong there is a good way to narrow your focus and research can help you do that. Build your online marketing plan on solid research and it gets easier. A lot easier in most cases.

If you do a fair amount of TV advertising and your target market is Web savvy or a tech savvy audience that spends time on YouTube, then you can improve your TV advertising performance by adding a YouTube channel to your campaign. How do I know? It’s been done before.

Watch this video and you’ll see what I mean.

Using YouTube for audience engagement is nothing new, and I’m sure other television advertisers have added a YouTube channel to their TV advertising campaigns. But I haven’t seen anyone talking about the results from doing so – until now.

Reciprocal Consulting has said all along that a YouTube-TV advertising combination would be effective. Just think about it. You can produce one video for your YouTube channel and use it for your TV advertising as well. That will save you on the cost of production of your videos.

Another way to make it pay is to produce two versions of the same video – one for TV and one for YouTube. If your video tells the same story with two different endings, then you can drive traffic from the TV ad to the YouTube channel where you can get a little deeper engagement with your audience, not to mention track them a little more closely. Then, your engaged audience can interact with you in the comments of your YouTube channel.

If you have thought about adding an online video marketing element to your TV advertising campaigns, there is no better time than now.

What will Internet marketing look like in 2032, twenty years from now? Care to take a guess?

If you look at the history of Internet marketing from the beginning of the World Wide Web until now, it’s very interesting how we have progressed to the point that we have.

• 1990 – Birth of the World Wide Web including browsers and hypertext, online bulletin boards are very popular communication channels
• 1993 – Excite, the world’s first search engine, was created
• 1994 – AltaVista was created and later would become the world’s first major search engine; Yahoo! became the first powerhouse Web directory
• 1995 – GeoCities launched, becomes the first successful online community; webrings begin to rise in popularity
• 1997 – SixDegrees is the first official social network
• 1998 – Google was born, the first search engine to analyze back links
• 1999 – Overture became the first company to offer pay per click advertising; Blogger.com launches
• 2000 – Google enters PPC market with Google AdWords
• 2003 – Google AdSense program starts, increasing Google’s hold on the PPC market; LinkedIn and MySpace both launch
• 2004 – Facebook is created
• 2005 – YouTube launches; Google introduces personalized search
• 2006 – MicroSoft LiveSearc started; Twitter launches
• 2007 – Mobile marketing starts to pick up
• 2008 – Facebook becomes most popular social network
• 2009 – LiveSearch rebrands, becomes Bing; Google rolls out personalized search for logged out users
• 2010 – Local search becomes more important
• 2011 – Google+ launches, Google proclaims it is the future of the search engine’s search and social product

This is a very sketchy history of Internet marketing, but it can shed some light on the direction that online marketing is going. More personal, more local, more social, more mobile, and incorporating more video and visual results. So what will all of that look like in 2032?

Truthfully, it’s anybody’s guess, but if I had to hazard a guess I would say that all of these components of search will be more integrated and more sophisticated. Are you preparing your company to make the most of your opportunities in each of these online marketing channels?

Do you have a good idea for a YouTube channel? Think you could become the Jon Stewart of online video entertainment or the Brian Williams of online video news content? What about your own niche programming serving up videos to your website’s audience. Maybe you could be the Tim “The Toolman” Taylor of hardware, or you could deliver video car reviews.

Whatever your passion is, you can now enjoy the same monetization opportunities on YouTube that were previously only open to producers of popular content.

In other words, if you have only 500 subscribers to your YouTube channel and regularly receive just 20 likes on your videos, that’s OK. You can still join the YouTube partnership program and start monetizing your videos. This is an incredible opportunity. Not only can it provide incentive and encouragement for you to continue with those videos – if you’ve considered giving up due to lack of attention – but you might be able to leverage it into an additional revenue stream for your business.

The first step, of course, is to sign up for a YouTube account. If you haven’t considered your own YouTube channel until now, it might be a good time to do so.

The second step is to start producing videos. The good news is they don’t have to be long videos. You can post 1 ten minute video per week and with the proper social network campaign you could drive your viewership up and up and up. That will increase your revenues and your exposure.

If you’ve had an eye on YouTube, start your video marketing right now. You have one more motivation.

A new study in video ad marketing suggests that you should start your video with a surprise to engage your audience, then quickly shift to something uplifting that inspires joy. That is, if you want to keep your audience engaged.

Bunk.

The key is engagement. I grant you that. But how you engage your audience depends on a number of factors including your product and brand and your audience. Duh.

I don’t discount that surprise engages an audience. I also don’t discount that elements of joy within your video will keep your audience engaged. I do discount any notion that the key to effective video marketing is to use these two elements back to back. I’m pretty sure that’s not what Marketing Pilgrim intended to say, and almost equally sure the study wasn’t conducted to suggest that. But it doesn’t hurt to dispel the myth anyway.

To be effective in marketing through videos, you do have to have audience engagement. That means, don’t throw a TV-like commercial together and hope people will watch it.

Your video marketing will be more effective if you tell a story. People love stories.

Engage your audience using storytelling techniques while placing your product or brand into the story. That’s the most effective video marketing you can get. But your story has to be engaging. It can be funny or it can sad. It can even be scary or dramatic. But it should engage your audience and it should be appropriate for your brand, your product, and your company’s personality.

One topic that doesn’t get discussed a lot among Internet marketers is time management. Whether the marketer is a search engine optimizer, a social media marketing professional, a PPC expert, a video marketer, a hybrid of these, or something else entirely, Internet marketing professionals tend to talk about the concepts of their specialty, but not time management.

Today I’m going to discuss some time management principles that you can implement as you go about managing your marketing activities online.

The first principle I’d like to discuss is the principle of like activities. These are activities that you perform daily that can be fit into a tidy little group.

For instance, your social media management activities. If you have a Twitter account, a Facebook account, and a LinkedIn account and you have a tendency to check in with each service every day, make a point to check in on each service at the same time every day. Also, limit yourself to no more than 15 or 20 minutes for each service. This way, you can easily manage your activities and you don’t get caught in the “I’m here all day” syndrome.

Use the same principle for each of your other marketing activities. Pick a time of the day that you write your articles and do it the same time each day. The same goes for blogging.

Of course, we all know that things pop up during the day that take us away from our scheduled activities. You can easily get overrun with events. What should you do if a phone call takes you away from your planned activities and gets you sidetracked? How do you get back on track?

The important thing is to remain diligent. That two hour “must take” phone call took you away from several important activities. You still need to get those things done. Take time out to perform those activities you missed on account of the “wrench” in your schedule, but truncate the time you spend on them. Instead of 20 minutes, only spend 10 minutes in each social media site. Instead of spending one hour blogging as you normally would, take thirty minutes to kick out a quick blog post and get on with other business.

With these time management tips you should be able to manage your Internet marketing activities much more effectively.

Social video marketing is a new term that is beginning to catch some momentum. But what does it mean? Is it just about slapping a video up on YouTube and going about your business?

In a word, no. There’s much more to it than that.

The keyword here is “social.” Video marketing involves high quality video production and then uploading your videos to the right video sharing websites and/or posting it to your website or blog. But social video marketing takes that a step further.

Google gets it. Its new social media service, Google+, makes video sharing very easy. There are two ways to share on Google+. You can click the YouTube slider on the top right of your screen and search for a video by keyword, then click to share that video. Or, you can click the video icon in your post box and record a video live to post it in your stream for your followers to see.

Of course, you can also share videos on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. But social video marketing is as much about the social marketing as it is about the video marketing.

You should be commenting on other people’s videos. And you should be sharing other people’s videos. Don’t forget that YouTube is as much a social network as it is a video sharing site. So use it for networking. That means befriending people with like interests, liking their videos, embedding their videos, sharing their videos with your friends and followers, etc.

Take video marketing to the next level. Make it social video marketing.

One of the most important things that you can do with your content today is to repurpose it. But which content should you repurpose and what benefit does it serve?

The best content to repurpose is content that has done well. Do you have any web pages, articles or blog posts that have been popular in the past? If so, that’s great content to repurpose. It’s really good to repurpose content that did well for a time then fell off the radar. For instance, if you wrote a blog post that became your most popular blog post ever during a 30-day period of time then quit getting page views after about six months, it could be time to revisit that topic and repurpose the blog post.

But you don’t want to repurpose it on your blog. You want to take that content and massage it for another medium.

Think of new ways you can use the same content. Maybe it would make a good video. Or maybe it would make a good article or guest post on someone else’s blog. Perhaps you could turn it into a standalone website and turn the content into a microsite from which you could solicit orders.

Whatever ways you decide your old content can be repurposed, take it and make it brand new. You do that by reordering the content and rewriting it completely. Don’t take any chances on duplicating your content.

The benefit to repurposed content is that you can take popular content from last year or two years ago and make it popular again. You re-capitalize on that content to drive new traffic and increase conversions. If it did well once, it will likely do well again.

One growing branch of online marketing is online video marketing. It seems to be picking up speed. But there are certain principles that video marketers should cling to if they want their marketing to be effective. One of those principles is to keep it short.

I’m talking about your videos.

High quality shorter videos seem to attract a great response from viewers and have the best potential for going viral.

The reason shorter videos work best is because people in today’s fast-paced global marketplace are crunched for time. A thirty second video will go much further than a one hour documentary. Especially if your goal is to attract attention and drive traffic for marketing purposes.

If you want to provide in-depth videos on a given topic, you are better off using short videos to attract attention to your business and website and using them to drive traffic to your longer pages. You might even put those long educational videos behind a paywall and charging admission. Then you know that someone interested in that kind of time commitment is willing to pay for it. When people put their wallets on the line, that’s a commitment.

Put your marketing budget into your short videos. They don’t provide any more SEO benefit than longer videos, but they are also don’t provide any less SEO benefit. But they do work for driving traffic.

Online video marketing isn’t rocket science. You can be effective with just a little forethought and some respect for your prospect’s time. Draw them in with short videos and close them with your on-page content.

Remember when everyone went ga-ga over video marketing? The talk of the town was it’s the next thing. Remember?

It happened right after YouTube started to climb sharply in popularity.

Then, remember when mobile marketing was the big thing? When did it happen? Right after everybody and his dog decided that you could Facebook on your phone. Now mobile phones are supposedly smarter and marketers are trying to figure out a way to get into your ear through them.

That’s cool.

Well, it seems that now nearly 20% of consumers have e-books and another 19% have tablets. So it’s time to start on the tablet marketing bandwagon, right?

Hold on before you start mocking me. I’m not being facetious. Not entirely anyway.

What can a tablet do? Play music and other audio files. Broadcast videos. Display e-books. Think any of those could be useful in promoting your business? How about that Internet radio show you wanted to start last year? Or that YouTube video channel? Maybe that e-book you’ve been putting off writing?

Yep, all of those can be marketed to tablet owners. So maybe now is the time to start looking at tablet and e-book marketing.

There are other benefits to promoting you and your business through these media. It also doubles as reputation management. That is, the more you publish and the more you promote yourself in a positive light the bigger and better your reputation will be online and off line.

Don’t just take up tablet marketing because it becomes a fad – it will. Do it because it delivers on the benefits.

There are three things that we know will always be true.

1. Sex sells; dirty sex sells even more
2. All marketers are liars (thanks Seth Godin)
3. Video marketing is on the move toward the future

So what can we make of these three truths?

First, if you want to make your business popular, try one. Some marketers have been very adept at creating sexy marketing campaigns. Even when it wasn’t necessary. The sex caught people’s attention and the company was catapulted to notorious fame (think GoDaddy).

Of course, you can always stretch the truth a little bit. Exaggeration is not just a literary technique. It’s also a marketing principle.

But, better than sex and lies, video marketing has come of age. Savvy online marketers can produce high quality videos on a fraction of the budget that they used to be able to do. And you can distribute your high quality videos online to drive traffic to your website. You can do it all day long.

But I’d guess the best, most effective marketing strategy is to mix these three elements together. If you can create a high quality video that plays off sex and exaggeration (lies), then you can develop a buzz and watch your traffic soar. Is that what you really want, sex and lying notwithstanding?

Should you host your video on your own website or should you host it on video sharing sites like YouTube?

Answer: It depends on your video marketing strategy.

There are times when you might want to host your video on the video sharing websites. If your intent is to submit the videos for promotional purposes and drive traffic back to your website, then that is a legitimate marketing practice. If the video isn’t going to be viewed on your website at all, then it’s certainly viable to host them offsite.

I won’t say that you should NEVER host your video elsewhere and embed it on your site, but it’s not a practice that we generally agree with. If you want to use the video for marketing and traffic generation purposes BUT you also want to feature it on your blog, then you might host your video on YouTube. However,

if your intent is to feature your video on your own website rather than use it to promote your website, then you should host it on your server and on your own website. Don’t host it at YouTube.

When it comes to creative marketing – like video marketing – there rarely are hard-and-fast rules. Just do what makes sense.

You cannot manage a website without traffic. It is the lifeblood of any online business. So how do you drive traffic to your website? How do you ensure that your website is profitable when you are building your business?

Here are 5 incredible sources for website traffic no matter what kind of business you are running online:

1. Search Engines – Search engines are still the No. 1 driver of traffic to most websites online today. That’s why we always recommend that you dedicate a portion of your online marketing budget to search engine optimization.
2. Pay Per Click Advertising – PPC ads are immediate. You can start a campaign today and see business results today. Yes, you pay for the clicks. But if you do it right, it will be profitable. And the results are instant.
3. Newsletter - An e-mail newsletter is one of the most profitable investments you can make. After more than 20 years, it’s still one of the most effective online marketing tools. You can take e-mail subscriptions right from your website and deliver your newsletter electronically more cost efficiently than any other kind of online marketing.
4. Videos – Online video marketing is just as effective as TV advertising and much more cost effective.
5. Social Media Marketing - The best thing about social media is it allows you to build relationships off site, then you can drive that traffic to your website for the close.

Use these five online marketing strategies together for incredible traffic generation results.

Google+ Pages for Business are finally here. Some of use have been waiting for these for awhile.

If you’re wondering just what a Google+ business page is, think of it as a Facebook page for Google. There are, of course, some subtle differences between Google+ pages and Facebook pages. One such difference is that you must have a Google+ personal account before you can add a page. But that’s a minor hurdle. I recommend that you get a personal account as well.

So what can you do with a Google+ business page?

For one thing, you can post to Google+. If you’re not sure if that’s a benefit or not, consider these points and then make up your mind.

• Google+ is owned by Google, the largest search engine online. While SEO benefits are currently unproven, you can bet that Google will eventually provide greater weight to personal profiles and business pages for brands.
• Increased online reputation management opportunities.
• Better targeted marketing as you can create circles around your different market segments and communicate with each segment more easily.
• Multiple pages possible, which means you can have one for each product or brand you support as well as each location you serve.
• More effective video marketing since YouTube and Google+ are integrated allowing you to share videos more easily.
• Google+ is the fastest growing social media website in history.
• You can schedule hangouts with your clients and partners and communicate for free with them via video right inside Google+

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Google+ is only going to get better. If you haven’t joined yet, I highly recommend that you do and set up your business pages now.

If you haven’t started using Google+ yet, I have one more reason why you might consider it. YouTube video marketing has just got easier. In fact, it’s easier than Facebook and Twitter.

It happened in just the last couple of days. Google added a YouTube search feature. In the top right corner of your screen (if you’re using Google+) you’ll see the YouTube icon. Click it and a search bar extends left a couple of inches.

All you have to do is enter a search term. When you do, a popup box the size of a YouTube video appears with a video playing related to your search term and a playlist below it. You can watch videos right through the playlist or go to the video you want to watch. Then, when you want to share on Google+, you click the green Share button.

The share button allows you to pick your circles, write a message, and send, just like on Google+.

So how do you make the most of this? If you’re a video marketer, upload your video to YouTube. When you’re ready to share it on Google+, just use the YouTube search feature. It’s the easiest video marketing I’ve seen to date.

Is it possible to brand your business with videos? Of course, we believe it is. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your video branding strategy.

• Include you logo and business brand name in every video. Make it a standard practice to showcase your business logo and brand in the opening sequence of your video and in the closing frame at a minimum.
• Use a cornered logo often and when practical. In lieu of the above suggestion, add your logo to the corner of your video screen so that it is visible throughout your videos.
• Create a YouTube channel. Distribution is a key element to video branding. Create a YouTube channel and distribute your videos on a regular basis through that channel.
• Establish a voice for your videos. If you use the same voice over artist for every video, you’ll establish that voice for your company and it can work as a branding element.
• Establish a visual style. Small elements such as video transitions and effects can be used to brand your videos. The key is consistency across all your videos.

Video branding is all about establishing top-of-mind awareness for your brand through videos. It can be done with simple elements and a consistent approach.

Google has announced that it plans to add 100 new channels to YouTube. This looks like it could be a great new marketing opportunity for small business advertisers. Forget about channels themselves as the media.

Of course, you’ll likely still be able to add your own channel. I’m not saying that. But these channels will be Google-guided, which means that they will be a top-down production. Some of the channels will be produced by high octane talent such as Ashton Kutcher, Jay-Z, Shaquille O’Neal, and CSI creator Antony Zuiker. They will, of course, need sponsors.

So how will this sponsorship work? I’m guessing that it could be similar to TV sponsorship. But I could be wrong.

Currently, you see PPC ads show up on the bottom of your screen when you view YouTube videos. That could continue with these new channels and if it does, great. But you could also see featured productions preceded by a sponsored video. If that happens, look for a great opportunity for advertisers.

Also, look for TV advertising to begin its decline. I’m not saying it will come to a crashing halt. But it could fall of if YouTube channel advertisers start to see positive results and make the shift from TV to YouTube advertising.