The reason you want videos on the web is to give what search engines want in sites now days. The more video you have of your product or services the higher you get ranked from search engines like Google because they lean heavily towards all forms of social media such as blog sites, images, audio and video in order to rank your importance on the web.

Check out the video below of an interview with the founder of Tubemogul.

O’Rourke Interview with Brett Wilson, Co-founder of Tubemogul from O'Rourke Hospitality Marketing on Vimeo.

There has been a lot of buzz lately about the fact that video channels, and individual videos are being terminated from the youtube site. As you may know Google has terminated many conventional websites just because they deemed the content within these sites to be worthless junk. Google has chimed in time and again about the standards what they enforce on their search engines which is sites with only high quality content will be able to stay online and ranked in their search engines.

It seems that Youtube is currently filtering out their video submissions and only want to allow “high quality” video content only.

Popular video blogger, Gideon Shalwick, has a video that addresses this current trend of deletion of videos from their site.

Social media is the movement for conversing with each other through many channels on the internet. It could be from an RSS feed from your blog, interacting with many members from a particular social media site like Facebook, even exchanging referrals of products and services to buy through simple emails in your inbox. Whatever we think of social media, always remember the purpose is to connect with other people.

As mentioned before, social media is not a platform to sell on, rather, a platform to meet other people and start a two way conversation about likes, dislikes, philosophies, common interests, favorite sports, fashion, celebrities, etc.

When a group is formed or joined for the purpose of sharing like interests, you are experiencing social media at its best.

Your blog is a social media source as well. Blogs may be the only social media channel that will outlast many of the other forms of social media sites for years to come. Why is that? Blogs are a great source of content in all forms. Text articles, video, pictures, audio, profiles, calendars, events, it all seems to converge nicely with blogs. No other social media site can be used as a total content management system while serving as a hub for social media at the same time. And the best part of it all is that anyone can master the art of publishing a blog within a matter of hours.

Blogging will last for years to come so plan out and implement your plan on the content you want your blog to have and align it with your personality. You can’t go wrong because someone out there will want to partake in consuming what you have to offer on a regular basis!

Check out the video made by well known video marketer Gideon Shalwick. He is an expert on how to market with video.

Think about this for a moment. You make a simple video that profiles your business or blog and you post it to Youtube. You catagorize and tag it with appropriate terms and labels that relate to your product or service. So when someone goes to Youtube or the other video sites, there is a “search” box just like a search engine, your video will come up in the search listings just like a normal search engine bringing up websites.

What does this mean to your business? Simple, more sales! Here is how it’s done. Make a video promoting your business. It should be between 1 and 3 minutes long and explain what your product or service offering is. It should end with showing your phone number, and/or website information. Upload this to Youtube first since it is the largest video host site in the world. You want to be able to capture a percentage of the 400 million views per day. Just think of how many people are going to search for your product or service when they enter their search terms within that site.

Remember that you are going to tag your video with the appropriate key words of your product or service. Then, after your complete the upload and tag the video, proceed to upload to viddler, daily motion, metacafe and repeat the process. You then have the power of putting your business in front of the millions of people who are searching for your product or service from all over the world!

Now what is the purpose of gaining the attention of the whole world when your business is located in a small community or fairly large city? Simple, the people who are searching in your locale that find your video with your local information are likely to visit you in person. For the rest of the world, the video being viewed by more people from outside your locale are actually helping to build your search engine rank of your website! So there is value of the people around the world who see your video.  One of the most important aspects of video marketing is to gain as many views as you can so it will count as a popular video. In a sense, websites are judged based on a world wide popularity contest. The more people who view your video or your website will make your website rise in the search engine rankings with all search engines. The higher you are in the search engines, the easier it is for more people to see it and contact you based on the contact information you provide there.

Video marketing is where it’s at now! Start making your videos and making sales.

1. You need to carefully plan out your marketing strategy
2. Use the social media. “Plug in” your blog to the social media sites that make sense to your business.
3. Join in the conversation. Comment on other blogs and make new online connections.
4. “Stand out in the crowd.” Have a unique angle or twist to how you present your product or service.
5. Create videos. Videos is only getting more popular on the internet and if you put out more videos, it will only lead to higher rankings to your blog.

We have a video that goes in detail what we mentioned above.

First of all, it is natural for all of us to be very enthusiastic when starting a blog. You have many ideas and you can’t wait to get your various content out to your readers. As a matter of fact, you may even stuff too much content all at once when starting. It is better if you plan how to manage your content by “dripping” your content on a regular schedule. In a “perfect” world, you should be submitting one blog post per day. Now think about it. You don’t want to run out of ideas for blog posts because that is your main life blood of keeping the search engines coming back to your blog site again and again.

Rule #1 – Plan out and have ready your blog content in advance. This means have at least 2 to  3 weeks of blog content ready to insert in your blog.

Rule #2 – Brainstorm content ideas going forward. Take notice of which keywords are attracting your target audience. Why is the visitor coming to your blog in the first place? Take the keywords that have attracted visitors and concentrate more content towards those topics.

Rule #3 – Vary your content within your blog to make it interesting. Insert pictures, video and sound to liven up your blog so that it is pleasing to the eye and ears.

Remember that you can never run out of content to present. It is only a matter of taking a look at the trends within your industry and start talking about that as well as new products and current products you offer your customers.

1. posting area
2. page area
3. link box
4. able to upload video and pictures
5. has a way to add plugins
6. able for visitors to make comments
7. able to change out blog themes
8. able to custom edit any part of the blog with html code
9. can time release content
10. able to attach social media to the blog

With blog technology constantly improving there will be even more enhancements that are standard in this platform. 

The best feature of the blog platform is that it is extremely user friendly. That means that if you, as a total non technical person, can learn how to blog within several hours at most. If you can learn to write and make a new blog post, insert a photo, insert a video, and moderate a comment, you have about 90% of the blogging process down!

What blog technology has done is also reduce the time and expense to get a website up. If a business owner wants to make a website, he or she can simply upload the software to a web host account, open up the program, select a blog theme, and within minutes can start filling the blog with valuable content.

Blogs have greatly replaced full HTML websites because programming them and re editing the content can sure be so time consuming, even with the most experienced of webmasters, it can be time consuming.

But there is much truth in that. Blogging is not easy. Blogging takes dedication, focus, belief, and most of all “elbow grease.” Once you have planned out the blog and how it will represent your business, you should from that day forward make it routine to manage it on a daily or weekly basis. The blog becomes a living thing on its own to help promote your business and to make sales.

There is no problem in getting excited to starting a blog, because everyone is saying to get one. What they don’t tell you is that the same people who suggest you get a blog quite often don’t manage their own blogs very well either. They can be inconsistent at posting which, in a previous post here is a big NO NO. If your blog stands a chance at making your business money, you have to be consistent it the frequency of posting, to the insertion of videos and pictures or events.

This brings us to the point of considering hiring someone to manage your blog. What’s involved in managing a blog? Here are several things that come to mind.

1. Blog posting
2. Adding pictures (important for search engine rank)
3. Adding video
4. Updating events announcements
5. Commenting on other blogs (for search engine rank)
6. Measuring viewer results (analytic software)

Blog posting is obvious. Every time you make a post, you automatically “ping” the search engines telling them you made a change or addition to the blog. When the search engine “bots” visit your site to see the changes you made, it then adds to your page rank “points” and help you rise in the rankings.

Adding pictures helps with making your blog interesting. Who wants to look at a blog with all text only? The bonus of adding pictures is that you can “label” each picture with a word or phrase that applies to the niche topic of your blog. Great for search engine optimization.

Adding video is even better because most people upload the video to a free hosting site like Youtube and then embed the video player code back to your blog. You get search engine “love” and you also get the bonus of having your video on other sites that link back to your blog site, which counts for higher search engine ranking.

Updating events is most important, especially when you have a physical location. You announce your specials, seminars, discounts, “house parties” on your blog and attract more people to your event.

Commenting on other blogs gets you known with audiences from other blogs and valuable backlinks to your blog that helps with search engine rank.

By installing visitor analytic software on your blog, you can measure just about every metric there is and then you can make the necessary changes or additions to help make your blog more popular.

So, should you hire someone to manage your blog? Yes. Eventually you should delegate the above duties to someone else after you get enough experience at doing these tasks yourself. In the end, you will be more successful with your brick and mortar business from getting a blog to help market your business.

The video below is from well known video blogger Gideon Shalwick. He talks about the tremendous credibility you get from video blogging. It brings out your own personality if you host your own videos. If you do presentations, you credibility can be developed with very good content.

Gideon has been doing video blogging for only several years and now making over a six figure annual income.

How is this done? First, you upload your finished video to youtube and create your own “channel” or your own space within any other video site, if possible. You simply tag the video with the appropriate keywords or keyword phrases that match your business topic or niche that you want to attract traffic from.

Because of the large influx of views from Youtube alone, literally 92 billion page views per month, you simply cannot miss on getting a good share of page views to your video and therefore traffic coming to your site. You see, in addition to tagging your video with your keywords, you also have an area where you insert the domain name of your site so that viewers can, in turn, click on the link and arrive at your site for more viewing.

Many businesses are now focusing on this very effective method for attracting free traffic to their sites. Of course this method should be used in conjunction with other ways of attracting traffic to your site.

In our next blog post, we will go over the method of article marketing to get free traffic to to your website.

Here are some of the things you will need to focus on in order to maximize your blog.

1. daily posting of content
2. announcement of special discounts
3. monthly contests
4. new videos
5. new audio/podcasts
6. insertion of digital pictures
7. linking to other related websites
8. social media tie in (Facebook/Twitter)

Of course there are many more things to do with your blog but these are the most common items you should be concentrating on.

I highly recommend that you list out all the items you implement on your blog and think about how you can delegate some or all of these tasks to an assistant or staff member or even hire someone. You will find that even if you can outsource or delegate just a small amount of these tasks, you will get your blog to work for you by higher page rank with the search engines and result in higher visitor count, and therefore more sales from customers.

Blogs are definitely here to stay. They will outlast the latest social media sites and even bookmarking sites. Blogs have already replaced most conventional HTML and flash sites.

Blogs are very important going into the future because along with the attraction of new customers it gives you, but it also strengthens your brand. We don’t have to tell you how important it is to brand your business out in the “brick and mortar” world. You definitely know it is necessary for getting customers to purchase from you again and again.

To manage a blog can be information overload because of the many things that is capable of doing, but only with your hard work into it. If you haven’t already, start planning how you manage your time with your blog.

To avoid being overwhelmed, we suggest you put up a large whiteboard in your office and split up the tasks needed to maintain your blog. Assign the necessary people to do each task. Give a timeline of the items to be done and who is responsible to complete them. Always get feedback from your staff if there are “roadblocks” that prevent them from getting done. And lastly, get rid of tasks that are not productive. There are things such as checking your email 8 times a day, which is counter productive. If you check your email once in the morning and once in the afternoon would better serve your valuable time!

Since that time, there have been millions of new blogs put up on the internet and now it has become more competitive to get higher rank for the keywords you have. It is not impossible, but more planning has to be done in order for your blog to be seen by the target market you are going for.

Google has greatly affected what you put in your blog to make it rank higher as well. As you recall, Google implemented algorithm changes on what they require now for any site to rank high. The most important part is that for a website to rank high, there needs to be a variety of things to be done for maximum impact for Google. Here are some of the things that Google requires for high page rank:

1. Relevant keyword in domain name
2. H1 and H2 tags related to keywords
3. Insertion of high quality text content in posts
4. Insertion of videos with proper keyword tagging
5. Insertion of digital pictures with proper keyword tagging
6. Meaningful backlinks to your site from high page rank sites
7. Submission of your URL to meaningful directories
8. Insertion of privacy and terms of service of your site
9. Regular posting of content to your site to show updates
10. Tying in social media such as Facebook or Twitter to your site
11. Submission to the most popular social bookmark sites

This is just a part of what makes blog marketing successful in the eyes of search engines. The name of the game is serving up high quality content everywhere on your site.

Blog marketing is a learned “science” which, when implemented on a regular basis, can generate customers 24/7 for your business