Marketing Techniques: Viral Video

If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur, viral video marketing provides you with the most powerful and effective method of connecting with your market. A quality video that establishes your credibility and professionalism is a hot ticket to reaching your market in the best way possible. Most website and blog visitors do not like to read volumes of information. They will scan headlines and sub-headings, look at images and if the overall design and content get their attention, they will eagerly click on a video to get the full scoop. Marketing videos can be one of the most effective viral marketing techniques online.
There are three considerations for making your video presentation create a viral marketing effect online. These include:

1. Making your video marketing message effective
2. Getting your video to the right market
3. Using the internet effectively to get your video to the largest numbers of people in your market.

1. Making Your Video Marketing Message Effective

Before you set out to make marketing videos, keep in mind that you have one shot at winning your market. If your message lacks a strong appeal for your market and isn't compelling and powerful, you might as well not waste your time. Unlike a live audience who doesn't want to offend you by leaving, the internet visitor will end your video and be on to the next site in a heartbeat.

Think about your goals when designing marketing videos for syndication on the internet. Your video may be for promotion, sales, lead generation, branding, education or entertainment. Craft your presentation carefully and make sure that it follows a logical order with a powerful opening, body and conclusion. End with a clear call to action with your offer and incentive to act right now. Your presentation should include all of the elements of an effective sales letter:

* Your opening should offer a clear benefit or solve a significant problem for a particular market. The more niche your market, the better.
* Establish your credibility and what motivated you to solve this problem.
* Present your easy, unique solution and how it is different from everything available to your market.
* Answer all objections, e.g. easy of use, risk free, price, support, guarantees, etc.
* Offer testimonials.
* Offer bonuses.
* Provide low risk offer with incentive to act immediately.
* Include a form that allows them to join your list regardless of whether they purchase your product or service.

Viral video marketing requires that you project a powerful image on video ...

If your goal is to create viral marketing videos, your professional appearance and video production must wow your audience. If it creates the "wow" effect, your market will naturally want to share your video with those in their network. That is where the power of viral video marketing explodes your brand, lead list and profits. A big part of your professional appearance includes clothing, hair, make-up and jewelry. Long dangling earrings and overly revealing outfits act as distractions from your message. Keeping your appearance, clean, professional and simple is the best rule of thumb. Dress in colors that appeal to your market. Black and white are good choices for projecting a powerful image.

Setting the stage for video marketing video productions ...

You do not need to be an accomplished videographer to make a good video production. Professional consulting with an Internet marketing expert can however, help assure that your video marketing production will capture and convert your market into quality leads and customers. If you are producing your own video, quality camcorders are inexpensive, compact and easy to use. Having a tripod allows you to control uneven movements and keep the camera steady. Carefully consider the setting where you will record your video. Good lighting and a plain, simple background are recommended. If that is not possible or desirable, make sure the background enhances your message and is appropriate for your market and goals. If you are sitting at a desk in your office, remove all clutter and items that will distract and make your presentation uninviting.

2. Getting your video to the right market

Once you have produced a professional quality video with the "wow" factor, you will want to share your video with people in your niche market. When promoting your video through websites, blogs, email marketing, social networks or video sharing websites, be sure to optimize your content with keywords and keyword phrases that will attract your market through search marketing.

Why is search marketing so powerful and effective? Unlike the visitor who finds your information online through a link, ad or news item, search marketing produces a visitor who is looking for something in particular. They do not just casually find your information. Through search marketing, the results that appear in top positions and match closely in relevance to the visitor's search inquiry, have a very good chance of getting a click. If the visitor can be wowed with a good quality marketing video, a conversion is much more likely to happen.

Video Sharing Websites ...

Just about everyone on the Internet has been exposed to the power of YouTube®. YouTube is only one of many free video sharing websites that allow you to easily connect with your niche market. By incorporating some relevant keywords and keyword phrases into tag fields when submitting you videos to these sites, visitors searching for those terms can easily find, share and rate and review your marketing videos, creating a powerful viral video marketing effect. Statistics are readily available and help you to learn about the effect of your videos on your market. They also reveal strategies for making your video marketing more effective. Taking time to analyze marketing videos that are produced by your competition can often provide valuable insights about the most effective viral video marketing techniques.

3. Using the internet effectively to get your video to the largest numbers of people in your market.

Blogs, social networks and RSS Feeds are one of the best viral video marketing strategies. When set up and managed properly, they effectively work together to reach and propagate a highly targeted market with automation, ease and cost effectiveness.

There are many benefits to blogging. Some of these include:

* Blogs build like-minded communities.
* Postings achieve higher search engine rankings.
* Postings contribute to powerful back links for websites.
* Communications are more efficient and effective.
* Standard versions are available for free.
* Blogs can be syndicated through RSS feeds and provide subscribers with an instant notification of changes.

Here is what some of the experts have to say about blogs, social networks and RSS feeds:

According to Business Week, "Blogs Will Change Your Business & Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later..."

Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki has this to say, "According to our research, 58 (11.6 percent) of the Fortune 500 are blogging as of 5/17/08"

Bill Gates in a speech at the 2004 Microsoft CEO Summit in Redmond, Washington said, "If you just put information on a Web site, then people don't know to come visit that Web site, and it's very painful to keep visiting somebody's Web site and it never changes & And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail -- that it's too imposing & blogs & RSS is about solving that."

Posts made to blogs and social networks:

* Make it easy to share content with a particular community for relationship marketing.
* Make distribution of content readily available through RSS feeds.
* Create more website traffic as search engines value and reward new content.
* Make it easy to rapidly build opt-in lists and connect with leads that can be reached through email marketing.
* Distribute powerful content that can enhance branding, credibility, education, marketing, lead generation and sales.

MSN had this to say about social networks: "While their use is still largely limited to less-than-mission-critical purposes, online social networking services are becoming more popular each day . . . there is growing evidence to support claims that some social networking services can be a powerful professional ally to businesses . . . in particular, independent entrepreneurs and smaller companies, for whom each new personal connection is a significant business building block."

Blogs and social networks such as facebook, Linkedin, friendfeed, flickr, twitter, plaxo and many others can be linked together so that entries in one area automatically update the others. I think you can begin to see the powerful effect of sharing your video through your blog and social networks. An added bonus is the fact that the search engines love fresh content. That means your postings that incorporate relevant keyword terms, are much more likely to produce a high ranking in search engines.

RSS feeds - a key viral video marketing technique ...

The value of RSS to viral video marketing cannot be overemphasized. RSS means - really simple syndication. Millions of website and blog owners publish feeds. A feed can be made for just about any type of content that is updated - blogs, articles, ezines, videos, podcasts are some common examples of syndicated content through RSS. As updates in feeds are made, subscribers receive instant alerts and can access the content easily and choose to share it with others in their network. Feed readers provide an easy to access directory where multiple feeds are available to the subscriber. Websites like feedburner.com make it easy to syndicate your feeds throughout the internet. RSS feeds can easily be incorporated in your blog and important social networks like facebook. Hundreds of RSS feed directories allow you to publish your feeds for free or a low cost so that people searching within a category can find and subscribe to your feeds.

In conclusion, this article has provided you with information about powerful viral video marketing techniques and strategies. You have learned:

1. How to make your video marketing message effective through your presentation.
2. How to get your video to the right market through optimization of content in blogs, websites, social networks and video sharing websites.
3. How to use blogs, social networks and RSS feeds to create the most powerful internet viral video marketing effect.

Many business owners and entrepreneurs do not have the time or patience to figure all of this out for themselves. This is where a good internet marketing expert can take all the confusion out of the set up and management process. Regardless of whether you do this yourself or hire a viral marketing company, viral video marketing through the Internet is a powerful trend that is growing by leaps and bounds. Those who pay attention and invest in these strategies will achieve great success. The others will be left far behind.

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