I recently had to stop Twittering, my doctor said I was going to go blind.  Seriously, even as big as an Internet geek as I am, I was completely overwhelmed with the massive amount of messages from friends and those I was following, it was just too much. However, at the same time, the social contact is critical to marketing.  So, while I am off the Twitter - pipe for now, I have discovered something worth sharing.

Now you know Ty and I are all about Video, it is a major player in SEM now and in the future.  Well, in doing some reading and research, I was finally able to get invited to be the pre-alpha tester for the hot new social video tool, called Seesmic.  We’ve both been experimenting with video on our blogs, and are implementing it in our , and also with video sites like Seesmic

I mean they are brand new, still in alpha testing.  But, as you can see from the video above, the skinny on them is that they are like YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, etc., just without all the extras.  I think it’s best summed up as Twitter plus Video allowing video conversations.  So, instead of writing short “micros” posts about anything you want and sharing it with your friends and followers, you instantly and easily record short videos, which are then shared with the community.  Pretty cool!  Got your webcam ready????

I guess the reason this appeals to me so much is, well, do you remember the days before cell phones, when we use to have to pick up the actual phone and call one of your friends to talk with them about something on our minds? (Anyone remember that?)  Well, Seesmic let’s you do that (sans phone), using your webcam ($30 at Office Depot) and gives you the option to share that short video message with your friends, family, colleagues, customers, in an instant, all at one time!  Remember, they are still in testing, expect greater upload speeds and their Ajax-community scroller area to improve and be even more usable once this is published live. [Keep tabs on the release at  http://www.twitter.com/seesmic for status updates.]

For now, for current searchability and scale, YouTube wins. Everyone has heard of YouTube. It’s accessible directly from AppleTV and a whole range of devices including the iPhone (”Hot”!). You can upload in a range of formats. It has a very slight “conversation” aspect as it is possible to post “video responses” to someone else’s videos, but it’s not an ongoing conversation like Seesmic. Handy for embedding into blogs, and there’s some ability to find out how many views your videos have had.

Now true, Viddler is already offers a great video service, but it does not offer a “video conversation” service like Seesmic… but for is great for sharing, embedding and tracking online video, screencasts, or whatever, I just think it’s the best of the current crop until Seesmic is fully baked.  [Of course, one of the current downsides to Seesmic is that you can't embed Seesmic videos on my WP.com blogs, which is a must for most of us and I'm confident they are working on this, and is super easy to do with YouTube and the others mentioned above.]

That’s my two cents for today on this hot video sharing issue.  Don’t be fooled, this still an emerging giant.

I came across this post today, entitled “52 easy ways to optimize your blog on your coffee break” and thought you all should take a look.  This article is well written, and to the point!  I plan on utilizing several of her suggestions.
In short, here are just a handful of great tips:

• Add a favicon
• Add sociable
• Don’t require registration to post comments
• Add your blog to your email signature

There are 48 more tips, go check them out!
Oh, by the way, Jennifer Slegg is the blogger, and search engine marketing consultant.  You should check out her blog and services, she seems to know here stuff!

Video search as I commented before in our blog, will provide driving growth that marketers will need to consider. Today I noticed interesting changes in Google’s search engine results. The sponsored ads to the right are in a full yellow box, and right below them appears YouTube videos, and news articles, just like they said they would at SMX, in fact Tim wrote about this here. They are also appearing in the top 10 results in the organic listings, so basiclly, the video gets two recognitions!

I won’t go on about ‘Stats’ showing why you need to put video in your website, but let me reason with you a bit as to why you had better get on the stick.

Think about this, when you are sitting on your couch, like Tim does all day, watching your favorite athlete (Me) are you interested in commercials? No! you are in “lean back” and “Chill” mode aren’t you? That’s because you are in “sports watching mode”.

Conversely, when you are on the internet, you are likely in “search” mode, you are looking for a service, product, or educational feedback, thus you are in ‘Lean forward’ mode, and are more inclined to view videos, or video commercials right! Yes, just agree with me, you are in the search process.

Well, I don’t think I need to convince you anymore about why you need to put video in your site, but now let me give you some practical tips, a step by step guide as to how to optimize your video for the web. You see, you simply don’t want to throw a video on YouTube thinking you are a video king, and it will be seen by thousands of eyes, you must treat this like you would a web page. So in my next post, you will find 20 steps you should follow to get your videos ranked in the search engines.

Here you go…….

1. Optimize your website first, prepare your site for video, and make it easy for spiders to crawl pages your video/videos live.
2. Make sure your target audience responds to web videos.
3. Perform keyword research for the type of video you will produce
4. When adding your keywords, make sure to include keywords such as “video” or “videos” in the mix.
5. Get a game plan! Create a business model for your videos, and discern what type of viral content strategies you will employ.
   • Will they be funny, corky, entertaining?
   • Personal experiences, testimonials, opinions, emotional crying like Tim does?
   • How-to, Educational, training, announcements, news?
   • Promotions, contest, demonstration of products, benefits vs. features, freebies?
6. Showcase your top selling product if you have an e-commerce website.
7. Keep your videos between 30 seconds to 3 minutes max. Anymore and you will bore them.
8. Find out or predict when there will be groundbreaking news, or other industry news, and produce a video about that in advance, or time the release.
9. Optimize your video files – Do not use total flash videos, these are still hard for search engines to index. Use AVI, Windows Media, .mov, or MPEG-4 file compressions.
10. Use keywords and phrases within your in-file metadata while you are video encoding. This is similar to a webpage – Title & meta tag info.
11. Brand your company with your watermark at the beginning, and last scene or slide.
12. First scene or slide should include legible graphic text, and end with text call to action. This is because videos are displayed in search results as static graphic icons.
13. Create a subdomain where your web videos or content reside, this will assist spiders to crawl your video library much better.
14. Make sure each video has it’s own page to properly optimize custom title tags, meta tags, and ad copy.
15. Add a video sitemap on your website.
16. Create and submit a video sitemap to Google and other search engines.
17. Make sure your video player on your site displays social book marking links such as digg, delicious, stumble upon, redit, technorati to expedite viral marketing.
18. Do not use pop-up video players, search engines do not index these well.
19. Submit your videos to every video search engine you can find.
20. Track your results, visits, and time spent watching the video with services from sites like www.Tubemogul.com

Need more help? Go to our website and let me know what you need!

A good friend of mine (Corey Creed) who owns Hippo Internet Marketing Training in Charlotte, North Carolina, is holding a power packed, comprehensive class on Google adwords techniques, as well as other internet marketing pointers. Usually he charges $200 per day for this class, but has availability for 5 more students, and would like to have a complete class, thus he has reduced his tuition to just $100 per day.

The sessions will be held March 25th-26th in Charlotte, NC, so check out the schedule and curriculum, you will not be disappointed I promise, especially for only $100???

That is truly a bargain, Corey has been teaching and operating his own marketing business for almost 5 years now, and has built an outstanding reputation for search engine marketing and Pay Per Click techniques. If you have a business on the internet, are interested in affiliate marketing, you owe it to yourself to go to Charlotte!

Here are further details:

You can sign up for any of them at www.HippoIMT.com. (The bottom of that page lists the dates.)

The coupon code brings the price down to $99 per day.

The coupon code is LM808650.
Note: The code is only good until this Saturday (March 22) at midnight.

Tell Corey I sent you, perhaps he will give you a secret Adwords tip!

CUT!

Well, are you? With the trend moving toward videos being an organic search engine result, as well as a Google Adwords option, I suggest you start thinking of adding a video to your website.
I do not claim to be an expert on making videos, but I have several resources that do. If you are considering video, there are some things you may wish to consider first.

• Is your website optimized?
  Why start a website video project when you have not even optimized your site or blog?
• Will you produce videos yourself, or will you have a online web video company create one for you?
  If you do this yourself, be prepared to spend time getting the lighting, and sound just right, even then it may not look good.
• Are you creative? Artistic?
  If not, don’t worry. Some of the biggest viral videos on YouTube are from idiots. Side note though, if you are doing this to promote your business, you might want to get a creative mind in the mix.

These are just a few points to remember about making videos, there will be more down the road. If you are wanting to create nice clean and simple website videos, I know someone who knows someone….know what I’m saying? If you live in North Carolina, Wilmington, Raleigh, or where ever, I can pull some strings, and get you going with a pretty nice embeded digital or flash video for your site, just drop me a note!

If you are in the online retail business, and have an internal search engine, have you thought about ‘mining’ your own search results keywords & phrases? Let me tell you, you can strike gold with a plethora of qualified keywords, from human results, actual visitors to your site.

A couple of weeks ago while attending SMX, I was eating breakfast before the session and struck up a conversation with a gentleman named Ed Hoffman, VP of sales at Sli-Systems. This company is incredible; basically they utilize a patented search technology that actually “learns” from past site searches to your site by tracking visitors’ search queries and click thrus, then this system compiles data that gives you relevant search results based on popularity. I was shocked! I never even thought about doing this. This is a gold mine of targeted search results, in your own back pocket!

After researching this further, I found that when people use your search engine, they expect to find what they came there to look for on the first page, or they’ll abandon the site. Sli-Systems claims their learning search technology can help keep people on your site 95% of the time by learning behaviors of search terms, then making keyword adjustments to your backend, or content management system. I believe it!

One of my clients is a large e-commerce site, and as an experiment I got the IT guy to download its search engine data…GOLD! You would not believe the words, phrases, misspellings, part numbers; you name it, I found gold, gold, gold! Do you realize how valuable this is for PPC? SEO? When I compared some of these terms with their PPC terms, there were several ‘nuggets’ I never thought of! Goodness, I feel like I won the lottery…

However, I do not have the patented Learning Search advanced search technology that SLI-Sytems has, so it may not be long until I contact ED. If I were you, I would visit their site.

We pitched this idea to Danny Sullivan, as well as Google, about handing out laptop and notebook skins with their logo’s on them.  That would be pretty slick marketing tool for them (or any of us really - watch for the redvwbus one coming soon!).  It really makes your laptop stand out from the dull sea of plain gray lids of Dell, HP, Sony and even the Mac’s. “bleck!”

To ride this developing wave, a number of companies are already doing this.  This really is part of the whole social media thing going on, being an individual and expressing yourself.  By choosing anything from your favorite hobbies or interests to jazz up your laptop this is just another way to set yourself apart.  Here are just a few sites where you can find some pretty nice designs to spice up that boring gray laptop lid.

• http://www.schtickers.com
• http://www.skinit.com
• http://www.designerskins.com
• http://www.getyourskins.com

If you have a Dell, check out here for custom skins: www.dell.skinit.com/smb

Happy shopping!

Are the rumors true or not? Is one of the social media Goliaths up for sale? If so will Google acquire them? Some say Microsoft might? But then, some reports claim this is all just a stupid rumor…You be the judge.

Sphinn Story

Search Engine Journal Story

After two days of non-stop note taking, and hearing mile high ego’s talking about how successful their SEM firm was, it was nice to just chill a little on the eve of the “Google Groove” at SMX. In fact, we had so much fun, that even Tim’s ego ballooned into some serious wishful thinking, a position at the Google booth!! Honestly, this was more like a candy stripers position, these Googlers were like kids! I guess that’s why Tim fit just rightttttt in!