Internet Marketing

YouTube For Driving Traffic

Driving Traffic To Your Site With YouTube

YouTube has had a dramatic effect on the Internet marketing landscape, making huge changes in how marketers promote their products and services. For years, Internet marketing was confined to text-based websites with a photo or graphic and beautiful headers.

The new software that makes creating videos easy has generated millions of video sales pages and other graphic presentations that can go viral quickly. It seems like the browsing public, regardless of their choice of subjects cannot get enough of videos.

Successful marketers always know they have to stay current with the latest and greatest marketing processes if they want to continue to attract buyers. The hottest marketing tool right now is YouTube.

To take advantage of marketing with YouTube, you first need to register for a YouTube account. If your video grabs attention and is well-done, it has a chance of going viral, which means that it will move around the Internet as people upload it and send it to their lists or it gets mentioned in forums, membership sites, newsletters and blogs.

When posting your videos on YouTube, do not upload long videos. Three to four minutes is a good length for marketing videos. Your intention is to create enough curiosity to make your viewers click on your site link at the bottom of your video. Traffic generated from your link can mean steady income for you.

Keywords are still valuable and should be included in your video title. Do not forget the basic marketing practice of using your keywords in your first paragraph and intermittently in the rest of your presentation. What you want to do is make your videos interesting enough to have others send an email or the link to their friends and subscribers, which makes your video a viral marketing tool. The more people who click the link to your video, the better your ranking, the more Google will love you, and the more chance you have to make sales.

What should you do videos about? Remember you’re a marketer – the only difference is the delivery media, in this case, YouTube videos. Instructional videos, PowerPoint presentations, your personal story about finding the solution to a problem, or your sales copy for your product are good examples.

Check out your YouTube competitors to not only see what they are doing, but to find possible opportunities to add your video as a response to what they are posting. People will find your video and follow your links if they are interested in what you are saying or offering. Targeted traffic is pure gold.

YouTube has a couple of interesting and useful tools for you to use. One is the “Statistics and Data” section, which lists the numbers of visitors sent by other websites. You are free to copy the tags popular sites use to keep their videos and websites popular. Use them in your videos to improve your listings.

Keep in mind these facts about YouTube’s popularity and don’t dismiss the site’s power as a marketing tool without giving it a try yourself. YouTube has monthly visitors that number way over several million each month. Almost 100,000 new videos are uploaded each day and your possible customers generate hundreds of million clicks on a daily basis. Those numbers alone should get you to start your video marketing immediately.

Posted in Internet Marketing

Paypal Custom Payment Page, An Extra Bit!

There was one thing I forgot to mention with the Custom Payment Page with Paypal and that was, if you have more than one custom payment page that you want to use, you will need to select the Add advanced variables (this is right at the end before you save your button) and then add

page_style=nameofcustompaymentpage

Do this when you are setting up the Buy Now, Add to Cart or Pay Now button.

Whichever Custom Payment Page you have selected as your Primary will be used for all your transactions, so the above will get around that for your various website.

Okay, that’s it for now, catch you later and take care

Cheers

Posted in Internet Marketing

Set Up A Custom Payment Page With Paypal.

I found this useful so thought you might too

It is how you make a Custom Payment Page for your Paypal account. This makes accepting payments look much more professional. Often times your Paypal and the site you are selling from have absolutely nothing to connect them and your customer may just be unsure they are purchasing from the right person and so click off and you lose the sale. So to prevent that here is what you can do.

The first thing is:-

Log into your Paypal account and click on My Account

Then select Profile.

You will then have three lists with options. the one you want it the “Selling Preferences”

Select “Custom Payment Pages”

You will have the standard Paypal page as your Primary.

Click on Add and you will be taken to “Edit Custom Page Style”

Where “Paypal” is entered, change this to whatever you want to call your option.

The next section is where you enter the URL for your header image. This needs to be 750 x 90 pixels in size. If you don’t already have this ready then, simply change the size to the 750 x 90 px and upload it via FTP. Once uploaded to get the correct URL, right click the file name in your FTP client, on the menu that comes up, select Properties, you will see something like this

You need whatever is after the html/ in this case it is /images/ctbheader.jpg and attach that to your site URL yours would be, http://www.yoursitename.com/images/header.jpg . Now before you go any further, open a browser,copy and paste that URL into the browser and if you have done everything right, you will see the header image.

Now paste that URL into this section above.

Enter the color codes you want in the boxes below.

Save your settings.

If you want to match any colors this little tool will do it for you, you can download it here for free.

You only need the numbers and letters not the #

You can Preview your new Custom Page and if you want to make it your default then simply click on the radio button and your custom page will be used for all your Paypal transactions.

If you want to change at any time then simply go to your Profile and select Selling Preferences then Custom Payment Pages.

Below is how my Custom Payment Page looks with the header I set up, much better than the default Paypal settings.

You can add up to three page styles. I kept this simple but you can change the look dramatically by adding a page background color that reflects your website.

This is what Paypal says

“With our Custom Payment Pages feature, you can tailor PayPal’s payment pages to the style of your website and give customers a seamless payment experience. Choose custom page colours and add images to make PayPal’s payment flow yours! This feature is available exclusively to Premier and Business Account holders.
Custom Payment Pages can be used with all PayPal Website Payment pages, including those for Buy Now Buttons, Donations, Shopping Cart, Subscriptions and Web Accept Express. The page style you select will apply to every page in the payment flow, including account creation for new PayPal users. “

So now when you go to set up your Buy Now buttons, unless you wish to change your Custom Payment Page, you just go ahead set everything up and if your primary is set to your website header or logo option then you are set to go and your customer will know for sure they are on the right payment page.

I hope you have found this useful, thank you for visiting, take care.

Posted in Internet Marketing

Searching With Google, Interesting & Unexpected Finds!

I was searching for how to contact someone and as usual Googled the someone, as you do.

Well, I found the person’s site but along the way, found another site simply because on this site there was a review about the someone I was looking for newsmine (got that? still with me?). Actually there were several reviews about different products etc.

One of these caught my eye becuase it was about Butterfly Marketing and it’s launch. As BFM had just finished it’s launch I assumed this article and review about the launch was written within the last couple of days.

How wrong I was, it was written back in January 2006, it is an interesting read, even those promoting it back then, were promoting it again recently.

This is even more interesting, how BFM came to be what is is today, I guess you could call this ‘read’ the “birth of BFM” way back in ?

Then there was this post which was written back in August 2006 and could have easily been written today.

It’s nice to know that although we often feel that things change on the Internet too often and too quickly, there are some things that never change, so it seems, marketing being one of them.

Maybe a good lesson to be learnt, never give up on any of your projects, keep adapting, keep renewing, keep on keeping on and surely things will come your way, one day!

I certainly hope so, catch you again soon, take care

Cheers

Posted in Internet Marketing

Get Your Headers Here!…Too Good An Offer To Miss!

I’ve become a bit of a fan of Big Mike and his trusty sidekick Diego from Icansoft.

They have produced some neat tools, like Social Bot, Directory Bot and RSS Bot. I call this my Web 2.0 Stable.

Big Mike and Diego have a freebee at the moment that I wanted to let you know about.

Header graphics, you get the header, footer, background plus the # numbers for the colors.

If you want to have a look at this good one I’ll give you the link and no I’m not an affiliate, just think it is good value.

Put your cursor on this line, follow along here and then do the click thing NOW

One header pack is delivered every day, so far they are numbered but there is a list coming soon of what niche each pack is but you can always name them yourself.
.
The headers are nice, not overly done, clean and plenty of room to add your text. The size is a good average size so will fit most sites and at a good average size, if you wish to increase or decrease then that works out well too.

So if you want to build up a file of headers for niche sites, you can’t go wrong with these and the price is right.

That’s it for now, catch you later, off to do website building.

Take care

Carmel

Posted in Internet Marketing

Embedding And Making Videos Private For Membership Sites

I have this awful feeling that I might be developing into a WSO junkie.

carmelbaird.com But, mostly the special offers that I have bought have been good value and the one I got today, I think will be the same.

As the saying goes, it is all in the timing. and the timing today couldn’t have been better.

I have been looking for a way to embed videos without the expensive bandwidth. As I use mostly WordPress for the sites I build, I haven’t had much success with plugins that embed videos.

Youtube videos can only be the under 10 minutes variety too and I find it very difficult to keep mine under that. And keeping them private is a problem too.

Well this WSO, which you can find out more about by clicking here, is my answer. I won’t try to explain it, it’s Alan Petersen WSO and he does a much better job than I could.

But I will tell you, it works and following Alan’s easy instructions and videos, I had my videos embedded in no time amd private too. He doesn’t use Youtube and the site he uses allows bigger videos than Youtube. And……the WSO was only $10…..bargain!!!

I love it when things just ‘work’ like it says on the box and this does that.

So here’s the link.
Alan Peterson’s WSO.….well worth it.

Posted in Internet Marketing, Tutorials

30 Day Challenge Plus, The Awesomeness Of It!

There is “No Charge For Awesomeness”, that is the catch-cry for the 30 Day Challenge, and a better catch-cry there couldn’t be.

Yes! the 30 Day Challenges have been definitely awesome, I would go further and call them A A, Absolutely Awesome!

I think I’m called a 30DC Veteran as I’ve done every one so far and while I haven’t made my $1 or $10 each time within the 30 days, (have twice), I have made my more than one dollar and my more than10 dollars very soon after the thirtieth day. And…..might add am still doing that using the 30DC process.

Ed Dale, in case you don’t know and have been never on the Internet until this very moment, is the person behind the 30 Day Challenge.

When I started the first 30DC, I couldn’t believe what was being taught FOR FREE! , yes!, free, zippo, zilch, such valuable information.

I learnt how to do so much and each year that learning has been built on by Ed and his team. Ed’s generousity is part of the awesomeness.

But wait there’s more!

Now Ed Dale and Crew are taking the Awesomeness to the next level.

Yes, it’s the 30 Day Challenge Plus and it will take you to the next level for sure.

We are in the first month, and already the content is A A (Absolutely Awesome) and will only get better and better.

Okay now the 30DC Plus is not free, and neither should it be but the price is A A too, in that it is incredibly reasonable. The membership may not stay at this price, so you want to get in early. I can assure you, you will be amazed at what is being given in the training and video/audio/PDF tutorials.

This is what Ed says,

“Every single month, we’re going to show you a completely new way to develop products easily and simply – including all the cheat-y tricks we use to create them super fast.

Some of these methods will literally take a couple of hours. (Incredible!)

If there’s a way to capture & package content for sale, we’ll bring it to you inside Thirty Day Challenge Plus.

We’ll show you audio, we’ll show you video, we’ll show you ebooks.

We’ll show you podcasting and producing DVDs.

We’ll also show you good old-fashioned printed books – we’ll even do comics!

We’ll show you how to create every type of product that is making money right now.

We’ll also explain how to pick the best format for your product. And let me tell you, picking the right format and delivery method is more than half the battle. (This is something that other people just don’t cover!)”

And that’s not all………….

So don’t say “later”, go do it now, join here and take your knowledge to the Awesomeness Next Level!

Posted in Internet Marketing

I’m Focused! Well This Will Keep Me Focused, Good One!

Well, I’m hell bent on making my wish #4 come true and I think I’m on my way, well the first steps to staying focused.

I need that ‘thing’ up in front of me where I can set out what I need to do each day and something that will be easy to update without going into a program.

I had a blackboard and a whiteboard but having rearranged my working area, these boards just don’t fit anymore.

So I went looking for an online solution and guess what?

I found it!

It is a corkboard screensaver, interactive, has sticky notes, to do lists, date, time, even a phone for conference calls etc.

This is one neat screen saver. So far I’ve been able to change the backboard to a background of mine, rearrange the sticky notes and to do lists, change the fonts and best of all add my lists for what I want to get done tomorrow and …..forever .

It really is interactive, click on any key and it sits itself down on the task bar, activate it from there and you can update, check on how you are going, really make yourself accountable. I’ve also added a photo of my daughter and I just before her wedding.

This is one neat little application and it is all free, just download, they ask you to register but that is only to make sure it will be available to you …….forever.

Better tell you where you can get this……
http://www.mycorkboard.com/Download.asp

Go get your own and get focused and have fun!……:-)

This is my ‘whiteboard’!

I’m loving this

Cheers
Carmel

Now to get some other chores done…..my step grandaughter is coming tomorrow and the next day so it will be action, action, have to get organised. The list to get done is on the ‘whiteboard’

Posted in Internet Marketing

My Wish #4 For 2009 Is Focusing

Focusing , this is a problem for so many of us, I know I’m not alone.

This is one area that I’m determined to master during 2009.

I make all these to do lists, task lists, get ‘er done lists, you name it and I have made the list.

A huge difference in working/running a business online to working/running a business offline is the distractions.

Offline, because what happens daily in your business is mostly related to what your business is about. Staying focused is not such a problem.

I owned florist shops and before the big days, like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, for about eight weeks, there was so much planning, so much focusing on that one big day, that there wasn’t any room mentally for anything else, apart from the day to day running of the business.

It was such a natural thing to do, focus on what was needed to make that big day a success, because that is what was all around you.

So I know I am capable of ‘doing’ the focusing.

The big difference is the Internet is changing so much and at an almost faster than a flash rate. There are so many opportunities presented to you and updates are happening all the time.

While some of these changes on the Internet, will take your attention because they are new, others take your attention because they will improve the way you can operate, or will be something that you have been using that is updated and has a few more whizbangs that need learning and adjusting.

So the focus is shifted sideways.

I use WordPress a lot and it is forever being upgraded both the platform and the plugins that make it work so well. Plugins upgraded and new plugins that will perform a function you may have been looking for or will solve a problem you have.

Now this is not a bad thing, quite the opposite. But…..to take advantage of these upgrades, takes your focus away from the job at hand because you can see that by implementing the upgrade, will save you time later, solve your problem now etc.

That is just one little scenario, there are many others.

I do know that when working at home, it is easy to say, I can finish that up later, like after dinner when everything has settled down. That for me can be a really productive time too but it is too easy as well when the distractions come along through the day.

So, a better plan of working is what is needed, that’s for sure. If you Google the words, focus and focusing there are lots of results and lots of meanings, the most relevant to my needs would be these

From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focusing

“focus is just a short period of time to concentrate on the immediate task at hand so that it can be completed, not the absence of all else around”

One of the Merriam-Webster dictionary Focus meanings that are close to what I want the meaning to be for my purposes are:-

“A center of activity, attraction or attention. or a point of concentration”

Maybe the above meanings will get me started on my plan to keep myself focused for 2009 and beyond.

If you are like me and have this problem, let’s know your ideas for getting on track and focusing in 2009 and beyond.

There are many other things I wish for in 2009, but these four are the main ones for my online business.

Take care

Cheers
Carmel

PS I’ve been looking for an idea to help me with this focusing, kind of center me and just before I posted this, I found something that looks good. Will get beck here and let you know if it is going to work.

Posted in Internet Marketing

My #3 Wish for 2009, Pay Back, Thank You!

Wish #3, Pay-Back and Thank You

One of the better things I did during 2008 was to join the War Room over on the Warrior Forum.

I don’t remember exactly how much it cost but it has been worth every cent.

The amount of great information and products that people have shared is amazing. Generousity abounds.

So my #3 wish for 2009 is to be able to pay back to those generous people with something that they will consider as much value to them, as I have, with what they have shared with me.

This actually takes me to my #4 wish, so will be back soon with that.

Till then

Take care

Cheers
Carmel

Posted in Internet Marketing