The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Google+ has opened up a lot of new opportunities for online marketers. One of those opportunities is with video marketing. Through Google+, you can do four types of sharing:

• Links
• Photos
• Videos
• Long posts, like blog posts

Each of these Google+ forms has its own strengths. But with videos, you can add a whole new dimension to your Google+ experience as well as your total online marketing.

Since Google owns both Google+ and YouTube, sharing of videos is seamless through Google+. You can upload your videos to YouTube and share them via Google+. But that’s so obvious.

Another way to expand on your video marketing through Google+ is a bit more complex (and not so obvious).

Google+ has something called a Hangout. It’s a video conference that you can hold through the Google+ platform, and you can invite anyone you want to attend. You need a camcorder and a microphone. Google+ does the rest.

But what about that video? Glad you asked.

Promote your hangout, send out your invites, and deliver a keynote address on some topic that is important to you and your followers. While you’re at it, record your hangout. If you use a camcorder that records and saves your presentation as you are making it, then you can have your video made as you are delivering your keynote. Then you can upload it to YouTube and save it back on Google+. Just a thought.

Reciprocal Consulting has been an advocate of video marketing for years. There are good reasons why, and the following statistics (borrowed from this article on video marketing) illustrate some of those reasons:

• Over 40% of consumers watch videos on a weekly basis.
• Viral video marketing campaigns increase clickthrough rates by 750%.
• Product videos sell 45% more products.
• YouTube is considered the second biggest search engine online; it may someday surpass Google as the No. 1 search engine.

Video marketing is already hot. It’s about to get hotter. As companies figure out how to provide cheap videos that drive traffic to any website, you can bet that more and more videos will be uploaded to sites like YouTube and Vimeo.

Here are our top three tips for helping you produce a world class video that will market your products and services.

• Make your video creative. Give it something to make it stand out. With billions of videos being uploaded to YouTube every day, competition is stiff – and it’s going to get stiffer.
• Use testimonials, but make them real. Don’t stage your testimonials or use fake testimonies with actors. Use real customers who are excited about your products and services. Testimonials are powerful mareketing tools.
• Keep it real. Be genuine and be yourself. People will see through any veneers you create so make your video a true reflection of who you are.

You might think that, if you watch a lot of YouTube videos, online video marketing is a low quality endeavor. That’s not necessarily true. It is true that many online videos suffer from lack of quality in terms of production features, but don’t take that as an indication that all online video production is low quality.

First, the most important thing about online video marketing is that it be effective. If a home made video produced on a shoestring makes its creator a few thousand dollars in a couple of weeks, then that’s effective marketing. Who cares if it’s low quality, right?

While it’s true that low quality videos can make you money, it’s also true that a higher quality video has more potential to make you more money. Effective marketing is effective marketing.

Keep in mind that you have other alternatives to YouTube. There are other online video sharing sites that can drive traffic to your website and allow you to show your marketing prowess. The key to successful video marketing online is quality, and there’s no reason you can’t have a high quality production that makes you money.

When you want to find out the truth about online video marketing, talk to a professional who delivers on quality.

YouTube presents one of the best online marketing opportunities around. And I’m not just talking about producing an occasional video and uploading it to the site and bookmarking it. I’m talking about producing your own series or regular YouTube show through your own channel.

A YouTube channel is essentially a home page on YouTube where all your videos are posted. But it’s a more organized and strategic method of producing and marketing videos on an ongoing basis than simply throwing up a new video every two or three months. It’s like having your own TV show except that it’s on YouTube instead.

So what are the benefits to having your own YouTube channel? Here are a few off the top of my head:

1. It’s free. It costs nothing to start a YouTube channel.
2. You can drive targeted traffic to your website with every video.
3. If you can consistently produce great video content that entertains and informs your audience, then you can attract a loyal following of viewers on YouTube.
4. You can also monetize your video content on YouTube and turn it into a money-making channel as well.
5. Having a popular YouTube channel is a great reputation management tool.

These are just a few of the benefits to having your own YouTube channel. There are plenty more. I’d encourage you to look into it for yourself.

If you are regularly publishing videos on your site, then it may pay to add a video sitemap. Sitemaps are important tools that assist a search engine locate your web pages. A video sitemap, therefore, will help search engines locate your videos.

One of the benefits of a video sitemap is that you don’t have to host the video on your site. You can host them on YouTube or one of the other video hosting sites. All you need do is publish those videos on your website.

So why do you need a video sitemap? Videos are themselves becoming important traffic generators. Videos are now appearing in organic search results, so in theory, the more videos you have indexed, the more likely they are to appear in a set of of search results. Ideally, you will have optimized those videos with proper alt tags and titles – this will ensure your videos are associated with the correct keywords.

Videos have become popular marketing tools for many website owners, and the use of video, particularly well-created videos, is proving to be popular with website visitors. For website owners, there is no such thing as too much promotion when it comes to providing search engines with the data they want – and yes, search engines like Google want to see sitemaps, video sitemaps included.

With this in mind, asking if a video sitemap is really important becomes redundant – it’s essential if you publish videos. In fact, if you create videos that you host on YouTube, it may make sense to publish them all on your website – all on different pages, of course. A video sitemap then adds that extra touch to SEO campaigns.

Most people have probably heard of the recent online phenomena surrounding Ted Williams. He was a homeless individual whom someone decided had a great voice. They made a short video and posted it to YouTube. From there, it went viral, and suddenly Ted Williams became one of the most popular men in the US – at least, for a short period of time.

Ted was flown around the country, interviewed by the best, including Dr Phil. He even had large sums of money thrown at him to do advertising voice overs. A true rags to riches story. Unfortunately, he was detained by police days later for being drunk and disturbing the peace. The problem was, much of his story centered on him being a reformed alcoholic. Now, he is yesterday’s news and no one want to know him.

It’s not our role to comment on the rights or wrongs of what happened to Ted Williams. Rather, it provides a very telling lesson on the difficulties of online reputation management. Consider how your business would have fared if a similar situation arose.

Rather than Ted Williams’ voice being the draw card, it was a video of your product in action. Everyone loves the video, the product looks great, and suddenly sales are booming. You have achieved every marketer’s dream, a viral marketing campaign.

But what happens if, a week or two later, someone posts a comment about how your product started a fire, or some similar catastrophic situation. Your reputation will suddenly go down hill, fast. Your video will sit unwanted, and your sales will drop altogether. Ted Williams, despite everything that has happened, still has that perfect on-air voice. Your product may be totally harmless, the fire or event being caused by misuse rather than poor quality.

The final result is still the same – like Ted Williams, the Internet skyrocketed your product to the starry heights – just as quickly, the Internet brought your product, and your business, back down to earth with a grinding thud. Online reputation management can be tough, especially in situations that involve viral campaigns.

Although video marketing has become a very successful marketing channel, there are still those who have serious doubts about its benefits. Cost is one factor that is used as an excuse, often because there is a perception that there is a need for professional voices or actors. Videos are not television commercials – yet, at least – although users expect a similar quality.

If you pay a visit to YouTube and view many of the videos on offer, you will be surprised at how few actually feature humans. When they do, it’s often only the hands. While many videos do include voices, viewers are not expecting professional actors – your own voice will normally be the best.

For many business owners, that is where the real hurdle lies. They are apprehensive about appearing, either in person or just in voice, in their own marketing videos.  Most people are nervous about appearing on camera for the first time. There are many professionals who are nervous before appearing on camera, and they have done it for years. There are several things you can do to help yourself relax.

From a filming point of view, using the smallest camera and the smallest microphone possible can be a big help. If the camera and microphone are not obvious, then the person being filmed can totally relax. I recall a story that described how a professional crew were being frustrated by the nerves of their subject. Their solution was simple, they hid the camera and microphone, told their subject it was just another practice run through, then recorded their practice run. It was the best recording to come out of the filming session.

It’s hard to learn to relax, and it’s easy for others to say ‘forget the camera is there’. Really, if you are going to appear in your own promotional videos, that’s what you need to do – relax and act in a normal manner.

According to a recent report on Search Marketing Standard, one of the best ways to increase a page’s chances of appearing on the front page of search results is to include video. It seems a video has a better chance of gaining a high ranking than a page does. In fact, it’s commonsense, there are fewer videos on any given topic than there are pages.

What should make most small business marketers sit up and take notice is that viewing video was the second most important conversion after ad clicks. Consumers are looking to relate to businesses and video is proving to be one of the best tools for achieving this. A video allows a potential customer to hear and often see the person they are about to do business with – add some important data like contact details and you have a fairly useful tool.

Videos on their own can be a very important sales tool. If a potential consumer can see a product in action, see how easy it is to use as well as the end results, then they are more likely to consider purchasing it when compared to just a text-based landing page.  Naturally, the video needs to be well made and clearly address the issue it was designed to answer. The quality of video production is become more important as users get used to high quality material being produced.

For a video to make it to page one, it needs to be well optimized including, titles and tags. It is also helpful to have your video transcribed – this makes it easier for search engines to determine the video’s content, and content is one of the guiding factors in ranking any page or video for search results. Get your video right, have it well optimized, and place it on your landing page, and you may well see an increase in sales.

Market your video well through social media like Facebook and YouTube and it could also lead to an increase in traffic. If the video ranks well in search results, then an increase in traffic is almost assured. Video marketing – it seems it pays to start with your landing pages if you want to increase conversions.

Can you build an online business without the help of free traffic from search engines? In simple terms, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” In fact, most online businesses are built without the help of search engine traffic – at least, the free organic traffic that comes from search results. The reason, it often takes months before a website’s pages start to appear on the front page of search results.

If that’s the case, can you continue to run a business successfully without traffic from organic search results? Again, the answer has to be yes – if you’re prepared to work at it. There are many businesses surviving on pay per click marketing including pay per click from minor search engines where ‘quality scores’ are not an issue.

The biggest move in non-search marketing is social media marketing, particularly sites such as YouTube and Facebook. They say that YouTube is the second largest search engine online. That may be so, but it does take time and effort, and sometimes money, to put together videos that are of an acceptable quality. Even then, there is no guarantee that viewers will actually visit your website.

Facebook is another story. Being the most trafficked site on the Internet, it is quickly becoming one of the major target areas for business. Add Facebook’s own advertising program and the opportunities are there to succeed without search. If you can steadily build an email marketing list from your social traffic, so much the better.

There is, however, a certain irony in building a business without the reliance of search. Over time, your pages will rank (unless you block them). You will start to get a trickle of traffic from search engines and it will have an impact on your business, even if it’s just a small impact. If that’s the case, then why not incorporate some of the basic tenets of search engine optimization. It doesn’t take a lot of extra effort, and the benefits down the track could be significant. Can you succeed without search? Many businesses already think they do – notice I said “think!”

Video marketing has been popular for several years now and if you took a look at YouTube you may think it’s all fairly saturated.  You could be right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that video marketing is not for you. We are reaching a point where quality is starting to count. In the past, you could put together a video using a web cam and still wow people. For business purposes, it’s no longer good enough.

That doesn’t mean you need to employ a professional video team. It just means you do need to create videos that look and feel a little more professional. So is video marketing worth pursuing for your business? Consider these points:

• Do you have something to say? In other words, can you put onto a video what you have put down in words? For most businesses, the answer has to be yes!
• Would a video provide value to your visitors? If you have any ‘how to’ instructions on your site then a ‘how to’ video should be your first consideration. If you don’t have ‘how to’ instructions – could you?
• Can your products or services be shown to better advantage through a video? In most cases, seeing a product in use, in moving pictures, can be a great selling aid.

I could go on of course, but I think you get the picture there. Almost every business could gain some advantage by incorporating video marketing. However, I did say that YouTube was looking a little saturated. The mistake there is in thinking ‘YouTube’. Don’t – start to think blog, website and Facebook. These are ideal channels for displaying your videos. YouTube becomes simply the store room for your videos. If you gain any traffic from YouTube, so much the better.  Is video marketing worth pursuing? If you can put together a decent video – it most certainly is.

Social media marketing has come of age and today it is nearly impossible to market yourself online without doing some social media marketing. The following 5 social media strategies are specific strategies that you would be foolhardy to ignore.

• Facebook – We might as well start with the largest social media site on the Web. Facebook is a tough animal because spamming is strongly discouraged and Facebook has internal controls to get rid of spammers. However, it can be very effective if done the right way and it is the most trafficked website online so you can’t ignore it.
• Twitter – Twitter is a great adjunct to Facebook. Some people think it’s an either/or equation. It’s not; it’s both/and. Your audiences on Facebook and Twitter will be different audiences. Chase them both; be effective and you will love the results.
• Video Marketing – I’m broadening this one to include online video marketing in various forms even though you know we’re talking about YouTube. But don’t limit yourself to YouTube. With Twitter and Facebook you can design special strategies that fit those websites on their own, but with video marketing you can design a strategy that works for YouTube and other online video sharing sites too.
• LinkedIn – There is hardly a business that can’t benefit from LinkedIn. It’s a special social media site designed for business interactions. Ignore it at your own peril.
• Blogging – No discussion of social media is complete with a discussion on blogging. If you don’t have your own blog then you need to get one. You especially need one if you plan to use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn. Blogging is the beginning of social media marketing.

It’s called Universal Search. Google has been doing it for a couple of years now. Including videos in the organic search results for certain key phrases. Where do you think those videos are hosted? Most of them are on YouTube.

Most of them, not all of them. But YouTube is the most trafficked video site online and the second most popular search engine. That means that video content found at YouTube is highly valuable to the search engines. You can get your YouTube videos to appear online for search queries and have those videos rank reasonably well for the key search terms you are targeting.

The first step, of course, is to produce a really good video that people want to watch and share with their friends. Secondly, upload it to YouTube.

Beyond that, how do you optimize for the search results page?

Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you optimize your video content on YouTube for the search engines:

• Use your video title as an opportunity to target the right key phrase.
• In the text portion of your video upload, describe your video accurately using the proper keywords.
• Establish a YouTube channel with your keyword in it.
• If you include links in your YouTube video, make sure they point to a relevant page on your website.

Video optimization is just now getting its start, but you can be sure that YouTube videos will have as high a chance to appear in the SERPs as any content can.

I must admit, I’m getting tired of all the newfangled URL shorteners appearing now. I blame it all on Twitter.

In the old days it was Tinyurl and a few other struggling upstarts trying to compete for space in the URL shortening arena. Of course, there was no money in URL shortening so it was just a service to help webmasters who wanted a short URL – largely to help affiliate marketers mask their affiliate IDs and conceal the fact that they were sending their site visitors to another site to make a quick buck. But things have changed.

Twitter has made the URL shortener a necessity and not just a choice. While no marketer is obligated to use Twitter, not to do so is to miss out on a growing opportunity. I think it’s here to stay and will likely become an important part of doing business online. But you have to communicate in 140 characters or less.

Since Twitter has asked us all to share our favorite links online in 140 characters or less, there have been a ton of new URL shorteners appear on the scene to help us do that. The best ones offer link tracking so you can see how many clicks you are getting on those links. And now savvy webmasters are using those URL shortening services on their own websites.

Recently, Google announced their own URL shortening service – Goo.gl – which can only be used on its own site. And now, the latest, Youtu.be. Doug Caverly recommends using it for YouTube videos. I don’t know. Do we really need another one?

I’m all for social media in any of its forms, and YouTube is one of the best social media websites around, but what if they all had their own URL shorteners? How silly would that be?