Increasing traffic to websites recently became easier with the entrance of video submission sites such as YouTube.com. Advertising has changed in recent years, making it challenging to keep up with. Businesses benefit the most from video submission. Similar to article submission sites, at least for business marketing, video submission sites contain vast libraries of videos about many subjects. Joining one is typically free.

You must be getting excited. You wanted to use video advertising, but your budget has no room for the hefty price required by television stations and networks. Finding out you can often submit your marketing videos for free opens up a whole new world for your business.

When you get ready to submit, you have several options to consider. Some marketing experts suggest manual submission rather than the automated processes offered by some professional distribution service companies. In a nutshell, that means you may get a better response if you submit the videos yourself. Just make sure to categorize your video descriptions and meta-tags properly so that the search engines can find them.

One challenge facing videographers is the large file size of video submissions. It is very important that you check out the website before you complete submission to ensure their library can handle your video. Video quality is another area of concern. Amateur submissions make it more difficult for high-quality videos to make it to the stage.

So where can you submit your marketing videos? First on the list of recommended video sites is the most famous — YouTube.com. Obviously, this is the premier name among them all. Everybody has some knowledge of YouTube. Once you post on YouTube, millions will have access to your company information.

Yahoo is the next name in video. Like YouTube, this site is widely viewed, offering good exposure opportunities for your video marketing campaign.

Photobucket.com, a venture started in 2003, reached number one on the web photo popularity list. Like our first two services, this site offers free submission. In 2005, Photobucket was acquired by Fox Interactive Media, a part of the News Corp. family of businesses.

Dailymotion.com ranks 65th top website in the world and is the world’s largest independent video entertainment site. With traffic like that lining up to see videos, yours is more likely to be noticed.

Metacafé.com has 25 million unique visitors each month. One difference between this site and other video submission services is that videos are typically 90 seconds in length. This modality works well for video marketing, and makes it more likely that Internet surfers with short attention spans will watch your video in its entirety.

Modern marketing methods change faster than Windows versions. Businesses like yours must keep up or become a bad cliché. Now you have one more exciting tool to add to your bag of marketing tricks.

Written by Mark Bove’

Are you a traditionalist in relation to marketing strategies? Yes? Then it’s time you came into the 21st century. In today’s world, outbound marketing is one of the old strategies. Outbound marketing includes direct mail (junk mail), e-mail, cold calling, and traditional advertising methods. Typically, these methods generate a 1 to 2% response rate. This sounds like shouting to the forest to find a weed. Are you really happy spending your hard earned money on such a low return for your investment?

Outbound marketing techniques are becoming useless. Most people sort their mail over the trash, discarding anything they do not recognize. Spam filters and delete buttons eliminate annoying and unwanted e-mails. The do-not-call list grows by the day. If you choose to break the rules and call these people, you face hefty fines. Radio and television ads do still work, however, expect to spend a lot of money. You can use these outdated and expensive ideas like most businesses, or you can come into the 21st-century and use inbound marketing techniques.

What is inbound marketing? Simply put, inbound marketing involves using your website as a base of operations to reach out to the Internet and draw people in to view your webpage and potentially buy your products.

How do you get started?

· First, you need a good website that has your products available for sale, a blog, and possibly a community forum. If you don’t know what these terms mean, then research them.

· Get a Facebook page. What? Facebook is a popular new social networking site. You can use pictures, add friends and business partners, and share information about your business. The biggest benefit to Facebook is that many people use this site to find information about others. By joining, your business can now be searched on this popular site potentially bringing new buyers to view your sales page.

· List your website in the directories like Yahoo. Just having your webpage listed in the directories canl help potential customers find your website.

· Start building backlink relationships. To optimize your website rank on the search engines, build relationships with other sites that link to your webpage. This includes reciprocal backlink agreements with other sites, submitting articles to content directories, affiliate marketing, blogging, forum posting, and writing press releases.

· Spend some advertising dollars on website marketing. Just as there are traditional marketing companies, the internet has its own set of marketing professionals.

· Make sure that your website captures information about your visitors. You worked hard to bring them to your site, now encourage them to leave their e-mail information. One way to do this without turning your visitors away involves creating a newsletter. Sending out weekly information to e-mail subscribers allows you to build relationships working toward the day when you begin offering your product.

These are just a few of the many options available to your business on the internet. While it’s okay to still use traditional outbound methods, it is inevitable that the virtual world of the internet is the marketplace of the future.

My inspiration for this article came from a great imformative website I just found: http://www.hubspot.com/

Way Better than Making the Honor Roll: Good Grades on Website Grader

61%. A lousy 61%. When my friend Mark Bové sent me a link to WebsiteGrader.com, with a little note: “Cool tool! Try this out.” I jumped on the chance to have someone give me objective feedback on my site(s).Like most info marketers, I’ve discovered the long learning curve and the unending to-do list involved. Content creation, marketing tasks, SEO, SEM, PPC, JV’s – the initials alone are a little overwhelming. With the help of an internet marketing mentor, I went from barely knowing how to right click to being able to build my own sites. (Which, by the way, are about to be professionally re-done by Mark’s team. He’s so funny – he sent a little note saying he’d been looking at them and that if I ever needed some help, he’d be happy to turn his team loose on them. Tactful and gracious. And if I’ve learned one thing in business it’s this: don’t be too proud to accept feedback and help. Only your true friends will tell you the truth.)Anyhow, there’s always this nagging feeling that I’ve forgotten something in building my sites. Something important. Something I don’t even know that I don’t know. So, given the opportunity to run some quick, free tests on my sites, I couldn’t wait to get started.

You just type in your URL, type in your email, and wait a few minutes. You’ll get an email with a link to your report. At the top of the report, you’ll find your site’s overall grade.

That’s where it got ugly.

61% is a failing grade no matter how generous the curve. And this was on a site with a top 15 SERP for my primary keyword. After an initial “What the?” I dug into the meat of the report.

The report’s broken up into sections. Each section gives a little explanation about how a particular aspect of your site should work, shows what your site has, and identifies ways you can improve it.

Some areas you’ll see on your report:

Meta and page info: keywords, titles, descriptions, and the length of your descriptionHow many images on your site, presence (or absence) of alt textInbound links301 forwards (there’s an explanation in the report – something I never knew about!)

How many pages Google’s indexed

Your page rank with Google

Whether you’ve got a blog connected to your site (and whether it’s being hosted appropriately – another matter that was news to me)

How you’re doing on Alexa and Technorati

Whether your site is listed on DMOZ and Yahoo

Whether you’ve got functioning subscription (or other) forms on your site

and more

Oh. Oh boy. Time for some site maintenance and repair.The gauntlet was thrown. Report in hand (er, in window), I started on the list.Some of the items were really easy to fix. Shorten this description, add keywords on this page, add some alt text here and there. Some of the items are beyond my skill set right now. Some seem to involve some money (getting listed in Yahoo seems to cost a few hundred dollars? still looking into that).But after about 25 minutes of tweaking and fixing, I republished and re-ran the Website Grader.76%. Hey, it’s not an A, but it’s a solid C (a “Gentleman’s grade” as my husband referred to it in college). And as I figure out how to tackle the other items in the report, the grade will go up – and along with it, my traffic and profits.

Kind of gives new meaning to the well-worn internet marketing advice to “test, test, test” – and when the site finally gets an A, I’m putting that report up on the fridge.

Sue LaPointe
Triumph Communications, LLC
Choice words to help your business succeed
#1 ranked writer on Guru.com
www.triumphcom.com
www.workingwriterhappywriter.com

With advertising budgets shrinking, businesses must divert resources toward more economical choices to generate sales. Websites have replaced newspapers as the advertising vehicles of the future. Your company has put a lot of time and effort into creating the perfect website. However, a great website needs to be seen by potential customers. How do you get your site noticed without breaking the budget?

Article submission sites allow users to post content and receive one-way links back to their own website. On most directories, article length is typically around 500 words. When you submit your articles, make sure the subject matter is similar to your own site.

How do you find an article directory? Use a search engine. Here are a few examples for your review.

PR Web: This is the press release newswire. Press releases offer business owners a huge advantage, because submissions are free. Traditional newswire agencies submit releases to standard media outlets. Most often, journalists pick up the stories generated from standard media outlets. This is a very expensive option. PR Web distributes information to Yahoo, Google, the Associated Press, e-mail subscribers, bloggers, and other subscribers. You can create a membership for free and have access to the entire World Wide Web.

Digg.com: This impressive article submission site was founded in 2004. Its popularity has grown to such an extent that users sometimes crash the site. The process involves a user submitting an article and viewers voting up or down. Popular articles get a spot on the front page. The site is so popular your article will reach the masses.

Technorati: Launched in 2002, this popular search engine continues to gain popularity on the World Wide Web. What makes this site different is that it tracks blogs. It is the Google of the blog world.

GOARTICLES.com: Founded in 1993, this Canadian-based submission directory was one of the early pioneers for article submission. Like other article submission sites, this site allows users to post articles free of charge.

Articlesbase.com: Another site for article submissions, this directory allows users to rate the popularity of articles. Similar to Digg.com, popular articles are then featured on the front page of the site.

EZinearticles.com: E-zine is the top rated article submission site on the Internet. They recently began testing free author submissions, whereas they used to charge a nominal fee.

Articledashboard.com: Ranked among the top 10 for article submission, this site not only offers submission service, but it also has downloadable article software so users may start their own article submission directories.

These are just a few examples of the many available submission services from which to choose. However according to experts, you should avoid the temptation to place articles with more than five sites at a time. In the same way that having several backlinks can increase your page rank on the search engines, having too many could rank your site as spam thereby lowering your page rank.