Category Archives: SEO & Traffic Generation

Generating Traffic For YouTube Videos

Posted on September 24, 2008

It seems like video marketing is all the rage these days. I’ve posted about it a few times, mostly in relation to my use of Traffic Geyser. However, recently I’ve posted a few videos to all those sites, and I haven’t exactly had immediate, magical results. So, I thought it would be helpful to delve into the intricacies of how to drive traffic to a YouTube video and see what I could learn. I’ve included the highlights for you here; if you’ve got strategies that you’ve used successfully, or even unsuccessfully, or haven’t even tried at all yet, comment on them below and we can learn from each other. So, here goes.

Keyword Research

It’s one of the great under-rated and under-practiced arts in internet marketing. I know that I’ve often been guilty of giving too little effort or precedence to keyword research; however keyword research really is necessary and important. If you’re making a video, you need to do your keyword research the same as if you were going to write an article. I don’t profess to be a keyword research expert, but I know that the highest traffic keywords aren’t always the most profitable ones. However, that said, sometimes you just want to get in front of millions of people. I have a site that is geared towards Adsense, and I couldn’t really care less whether or not those people come to my site in a buying mood; just that they go on and click an ad. What they do on the other side of that click is none of my concern. On the flip side, I also have an online store, and I desperately want people to arrive in a buying mood, or at least in a mood that is interested to sign up for my free e-book so I can continue to market to them. It depends on what you’re going for; choose your keywords accordingly.

Keywords are important because search engines cannot yet process the content inside the videos; they need something else to give them context. That is why videos have keywords associated with them, some places call them tags; some just call them keywords. Most places also give you between 300 to 1000 characters to describe the video, and basically to attract the attention of the search engines. Think of this as a mini article. Don’t waste this space!

The Link

Don’t forget to put a link in full http:// format as the first thing on your description field. Most sites will turn that link into something clickable.

Social Media

If you’ve created something that is actually going to be of value to someone, link to it. The first time I thought about this, I thought I would prefer to spend the link juice on my own website; however the point of your video is to be a first point of contact with you. Treat this almost as a different form of squeeze page. So link it up! Digg, Twitter, Stumble, everything you can think of. Try to get it in front of people that will talk about it. If you can get other bloggers talking about it that’s great. Probably easier said than done though!

Clone Something Popular

This might not be the most white hat of methods; however it might work, depending on your topic. Do some research on YouTube and find a white hot mover that is getting tons of views. The all you need to do is clone the title, description and tags. Your movie should show up directly after the popular one, with a strong probability of people watching yours next. However, these won’t likely be very targeted viewers.

Comment on Other Videos

Do some research on the other videos that are out there related to your topic, then post comments under those videos saying something to the effect of “For a similar video, see this.” The idea is of course that someone watching the other video is hopefully interested in seeing something similar. So put yours in front of them. Another idea is to post yours as a video response to the other video.

Well, there you have it, a few different ideas to boost traffic to your YouTube videos. Like anything else in this world, there is no silver bullet to magically generate YouTube traffic. It remarkably resembles work, especially if you’ve submitted a video to dozens of sites. Some things are easy to do, just a question of doing it right the first time. Other things, like the social media work can take time. Feel free to outsource this work too though!

If you’re got other ideas, please leave them in the comments below.

 

 

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Stomping the Search Engines II for Free!

Posted on September 4, 2008

StomperNet sorted out their technical glitch.

They’re live.

It’s free.

What’s not to like?

Go check it out!

Stomping the Search Engines II is a DVD course that will teach you how Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins turned their web businesses into multi-millions per month businesses! Talk about SEO!

I just ordered my copy – the total came to $11.56 for shipping to Canada. Talk about a deal.

Anyways, this is one product that I think really has potential to teach me to do some damage out there. I’m excited because I’m currently in the midst of promoting my webstore, selling physical products, and that is exactly how Brad and Andy cut their teeth in the internet. Physical products. Brad sells wedding favours. $22 million a year’s worth. I don’t know what Andy does, but it’s along the same lines. A lot of the stuff you come across these days is geared towards info products etc.

Stomping the Search Engines works for info products, for physical products, for everything. From what I’ve heard it is a master’s degree in SEO, and selling online.

If you’re still skeptical, wait till I get my copy, and I’ll tell you all about it. However, if you can afford $11.56, you might want to just get onboard now!

Go check it out!

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StomperNet: Stomping the Search Engines 2 for FREE!

Posted on September 3, 2008

During StomperNet’s last launch, when they re-opened StomperNet, I watched with great anticipation as it got closer to the opening hour, not sure what the price was, but reading and absorbing every scrap that was written about it. I’d never really heard of StomperNet until I started getting guru after guru emailing me for days on end, and then I figured out there must be something to it. I quickly found out it had a cult following. 

So I followed the launch, right up to the launch date. 

Only to realize it cost $800 PER MONTH to get in! Now, I’m doing fairly well online, but I don’t think I can chuck that kind of bling around at the drop of a hat. I know, there’s the big argument of “but what if it produces much more than that?” well, yeah. Sure. There’s always that. 

Anyways, I didn’t go for it, and they clsoed the doors. I was shutout forever once more. 

Until today. 

I started getting emails again about Stomping the Search Engines 2 (STSE2), and one of them had a price tag mentioned of $497. Delete.

Then one mentioned it was completely free. That kind of got my attention.

Anyways, I ended up checking out Brad and Andy’s sales page, and sure enough, it is pretty compelling. These guys don’t really miss when they aim for something. It seems like they always deliver, and it seems like have quite a loyal fan base as well. 67+ millionaires and counting from the first product? That is pretty impressive. 

Did I mention this was free? The trick here is that they are giving you a $497 product, a complete DVD tutorial on SEO from the top minds in the world, for free. All you need to do is pay for the shipping and handling, and sign up for their Net Effect Journal, which you can cancel at any time; even before you get the second copy if you wish. 

I currently subscribe to the DotComSecrets monthly magazine, and Dan Kennedy’s newsletter, and I recently tried Mike Filsaime’s Best Damn Newsletter as well (though I canceled it due to overlap). StomperNet is releasing a journal though! Notice my word choice… newsletter, magazine, journal. These are all quite unique, and that is what each one is. The Net Effect is a 45 page journal on very advanced SEO topics, written by the StomperNet team, which is of course, world class. It’s going to be the same price as the newsletter I get from Dan Kennedy. Seems like a pretty good deal. 

Anyways, I’m going to be slapping down my shipping and handling fee pretty quickly (they’ve delayed the launch until Sept 4th due to technical issues), and then I’ll be waiting anxiously to see what shows up in the mail. I hope it arrives before I head to Mexico next week so I have some reading material!

If you’ve followed this blog at all, you’ll know that I don’t mind giving crappy products a hard time. However, on the flip side I want to give kudos where it is due. That’s the purpose of a trusted recommendation, right?

TAKEAWAY: If you haven’t checked out Stomping the Search Engines 2, you really should. You can’t lose. It’s free!

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Charting My Traffic – August 2008

Posted on September 3, 2008

Well it’s time once more to do the old “chart the traffic” routine. Is anyone out there listening?? LOL. 

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 637,161 (improved from 795,166)
Google PR: 2 (same as last month)
Technorati Authority: 12 (up from 9), Fans 0 (guess I pissed someone off ={)
RSS Subscribers: 12 (up from 11)

The Golden Rule
August 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 1546 (last month I had 835)
Pageviews: 2085 (1.35 per visit, up from 1.27 per visit last month)

Inbound Links
I’m now using the tool found at MarketLeap.com which seems to give fairly consistent results, if not super accurate.

Google: 7 (up from 3)
Yahoo: 363+54=417 (spread across www.jonathanboettcher.com and jonathanboettcher.com)

Conclusions
Overall traffic has nearly doubled from last month, which is cool. 45 people per day is pretty much average now. Unfortunately, the majority of that traffic goes to three posts, all of which are not internet marketing related. Guess I’m still trying to find my place here =). 

My Alexa ranking is improving slowly, my goal now is to see it under 500,000 by Christmas. It seems to get harder and harder the lower you go, which makes sense. 

One little bright spot is in the pageviews per visitor stat. There’s been a small improvement since last month (1.27 to 1.35). I think part of that might be due to the fact that I recently installed a plugin called Yet Another Related Post Plugin which automatically pulls up related posts and inserts them just below the current post. You’ll see it in action if you just scroll down a few lines from here, just above the comments. The idea is that even if the visitor found your page in the search engines, you likely have other stuff they’re interested in, but wouldn’t take the time to look for. I know I rarely take the time to dig deep into someone’s blog without being enticed in some way. This plugin provides the enticement factor, and hopefully people spend a few more minutes on your site. 

See you next month ;)

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Link Building & Forum Posting

Posted on August 18, 2008

Regardless of whether you’re an affiliate marketer or a product owner, you can benefit from forum posting. In fact, pretty much anybody who has a website of any variety would be well served to get involved in a few forums.

The great thing about forums is that they contain a lot of people who are looking for answers. What better place to get a link in front of a customer than right when they’re frustrated and looking for answers?

The way to go about this is first to identify which forums are talking about your area of interest. One tool I recently discovered that lets you do this is Omgili.com which basically functions as a multi-forum search engine. Type in your keyword and the only results that come up are forum postings.

Once you’ve found a few forums with recent activity on your keywords, go sign up and become a member.Take the time to fill out some profile details; people tend to distrust anonymity. Sometimes a profile picture or avatar can go a long way to creating trust in a subconscious way. You might even be able to use this as a way to stir interest in your product if you’re creative.

Now you need to make sure that you create a killer signature. Nearly all forums these days allow you to leave a signature after your post. Most will also allow HTML tags in them. Have a quick peek through some other threads on the forum to see if others have html tags on their signatures. If they do, then you’re good to go. If they don’t, you might want to check a bit closer as some forums disallow their use.

In your signature, you want to try to create a mini-ad for your product. If you offer something for free, this is the perfect place to let people know. For instance a tag line I’ve used for my digital frame store is “Don’t even think of buying a digital picture frame until you’ve read our “Savvy Buyer’s Guide to Digital Picture Frames.” You then link the keyword text you want to your landing page. Preview it to make sure it is both catchy and yet not too in your face.

Now you need to get involved with the forum. Find the thread talking about your niche and jump in. Be helpful, ask questions, but above all, don’t get salesy or spammy! If you do, you run the risk of getting banned, which really hurts the sales-pitch!

The benefits of this approach are that you’re slowly gaining keyword targeted link juice with the search engines, and, probably more importantly, you’re putting your offer in front of qualified potential buyers.

The great thing about forum threads is they hang around forever. I’ve often times searched google for something or other, and a forum thread comes up high in the rankings because it has so much content in it. When I look at the date of the last post, it is often a year or two old, though still relevant. So even two year old posts can provide traffic, as the original authors may be long gone, but as that thread gets hits, your offer will still be seen by the new eyeballs on a daily basis.

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