10 Creative Ways Small and Medium Businesses Use Youtube

Youtube is a huge venue for user-uploaded videos. It’s also, however, one of the largest social networks on the internet. Millions of people are interacting on Youtube on a minute to minute basis. Youtube is therefore a huge social media market with enormous business potential. Like all social media venues, the protocol is to give value away and cultivate a following. As with Facebook, there’s significant SEO potential (after all Google owns Youtube). But the real value is in organic traffic to your web site and interacting with (commenting upon, sharing, and subscribing to) your videos in the same way that people interact with blogs or your Facebook page.

1. Search Engine Results

The SEO value of videos, podcasts, and images are in the title, description, and tags. Properly optimized videos often rank highly for their targeted keywords on the search engines. Businesses take advantage of this to get lots of exposure.

2. Generating Leads and Traffic

From both the SEO and the social media value (sharing, commenting, subscribing), videos on Youtube can be a good medium for generating leads and traffic. Instead of focusing all your efforts on a web site alone, videos that offer advice, insight, analysis, training, explanations, etc. can actually help you generate leads. A lot of businesses use Youtube the way others use blogs.

3. Training and Instruction

Whether sustaining the growth of your business by implementing training for internal audiences, providing training for your client base, or simply making a case for all the things you say all the time anyway, videos can extend your business’ effectiveness and marketing, just as they do internally for large corporations.If you’re weighing the benefits of giving classes locally (a great marketing technique) vs. doing it online, what not record your local classes, and upload to Youtube. A lot of businesses do both.

4. Extending your Brand

Youtube can help you build your brand very effectively. Create a channel with your company name and logo and use video to explain your core values, your unique market differentiators, and explain where you add value. The number of business Youtube pages is growing exponentially.

5. Client Testimonials

Invite satisfied clients to upload their video testimonials, helping you build credibility and increasing your sales. Or ask key clients to let you film a brief testimonial, then splice them together with video editing software, to make a combined video. Most startups provide a variety of video types on Youtube – instruction, sales, and testimonials too.

6. Your own Infomercials

Why spend money on old-fashioned TV ads when, cost per value, you can do it on Youtube? Whatever product or service you’re offering, make a case for it using your own infomercial format. If Youtube is the new TV, you see the next logical decision, and this places advertising in the hands of everyone. But the rule of the thumb is be incredibly creative. Just an ad spot will get few views – but an interesting show that entertains, while positioning your service or product is a good sell.

7. Fun as Publicity

If you haven’t seen the Trunk Monkey videos, they’re worth your time. Humor is a great way to get attention. Create highly informative or funny videos and disseminate them using services like tubemogul. Humor can break through the “spam” barrier and giver your website more eyeballs, increase your popularity as the videos go viral.

8. Tutorials

Tutorials are a specific kind of training and instruction, so we list it separately. Provide clients step-by-step videos guides for things related to but not including your services and products. For instance, if you’re a real estate agent, explain how to stage a home. If you’re a landscaper, demonstrate the best times to water your lawn.

9. Your Talk Show

Like podcasting, you can do video podcasting, addressing issues close to the hearts and minds of your clients. If you find customers talking about a specific issue, take their side and add your two cents in an ongoing series addressing their concerns.

10. Product or Service Trailer

You’ve seen movie trailers. Product or service trailers utilize the trailer-style for a fast, quick and captivating presentation of your offerings. Think about what you’re doing for clients, and roll-out new products and services, before they launch, with “coming soon”.

Keep in mind that you can upload videos to Youtube, then embed them in your own web pages, occasionally changing them out for newer ones as you go. Youtube makes this easy by providing the correct code with various options for size, etc. It’s a great way to send clients from your web site to your Youtube page, increasing interaction and viral spreading of your marketing, just as it brings clients to your web site from your Youtube page and the branding you add to each video. Make sure all your videos  mention  your company name and web site address.

Advice: don’t agonize over the equipment and setup first. You’ll make some trial videos anyway. Focus on brainstorming creative ideas without criticism, and on narrowing down your central message into key bullets, your elevator pitch, and your market differentiators. Pair the two – your creative ideas with your market message, and make some videos. You can always redo them later, but getting the process started will give you fast experience with what works and what doesn’t.

The Rules of Using Photos on your Web Site

Imagine going to a web site trying to sell you professional services.  You work in an office. You dress well and take care of personal hygiene. But when you get there, the staff photos are scruffy looking, frowning, mug shots! What’s your buying response like at that point?

A lot of people wonder whether they should even have personal photos on their site. If your pets look better than you do, should you really have personal photos at all? Should you hire a model?

Sites with no personal photos look dead. So yeah, you need photography with actual human beings in it, if you want a response out of the 50% of visitors who are socially motivated. Whether it’s you, clients, or just guys that look good in their Dockers, you need something – and make sure it’s on the landing page, at a minimum.

Most people look decent in decent clothes and with a smile. No need to hire models. I’ve been building business web sites for ages, and I have yet to see someone so hideous that a coat and tie, or some professional attire, and a genuine smile makes a bad photo.

Dress like your clients. Here’s a tip – if you get your hands dirty for a living, but your clients work in an office, put on office attire. The reverse is true too – just ask every politician that speaks at an AFL-CIO rally. If you work in an office and your clients get dirty for a living, ditch the tie and put on a blue collar. Maybe even a hardhat, or hold a clipboard. Dress like your audience.

Use a flat background. Whether you get portraits made, or are just taking staff photos outside your building, get some photos in front of a flat background of only one color. It can be a good idea to get in a skyline or something, but a background that’s too busy distracts from your other graphics and site colors,  like your  logo. And try to avoid shadows! Photos with flat backgrounds and no shadows can be easily photoshopped for various uses, cutting out the background without losing part of your hair.

Get professional portraits. Eventually, you’re going to need these. Your photo is part of your brand. It’ll be your avatar in places where you aren’t using a logo – like maybe Twitter or Facebook. It’ll be your personal motif you add to e-mail newsletters and web sites. Pay a photographer and tell him you don’t want to buy any prints at all. Just the disk, please. Why scan photos in, reducing their quality, when you can start out digital? No one wants print versions for professional work. Go digital, and get it done in the right light, with lots of different poses, so  you can take them home and use different ones for different purposes. Make sure you’re leaving with at least a 2-3 good images that you like on that disk. When people listen to what you say, they are also looking at how you look. If you’re in a hurry and need it tomorrow, CVS and Walgreens do on the spot passport photos. Tell them you want a plain background and maybe an angle shot at your face instead of straight on, to avoid the mugshot look.

Wear the glasses sometimes. If you wear glasses, get photos with and without. And ask professionals in your target audience for their opinion on your final pics. Personally, I don’t like having my glasses on in my photos, but they do make me look smarter and also more approachable. Without them, I’m more like an alley cat. With them, I’m like a well-heeled Russian blue. So, I wear them for pro pics.

Using models isn’t wrong. You may want some professionally licensed model photography for your site. Don’t swipe it off the net, or you’ll regret it later. If you use it, pay for the right licensing first. The plain truth is that about 10% of the population looks better to 90% of the population than 90% of us do to each other.  If you’re looking for people who look truly happy, fit, excited, beautiful, and involved in whatever you’re selling, that’s exactly what models do. And small businesses should take a cue from the big guys in this regard – commercials, corporate sites (often doing many things wrong, they do this part right), product catalogues – these all use models for a reason.

Invite everyone who works with you. The front person needs separate photos, but staff photos are quite effective for marketing and company image, also. Whether your people are employees, contractors, colleagues you share work with, or just a couple of family members who join you part time, and maybe a temp from an agency, invite them to do staff photos for your web site, and individual photos and bios for staff profiles.

Get permission. If you use staff photos, get a release form signed for use of their photo on the internet. And not the old-fashioned model release forms that don’t have clauses for internet use. Get one that’s up to date, with the web in mind. I won’t post mine here, because I’m not a legal expert and not offering legal advice. But if you want a copy, and you’re already a client, feel free to request it. I’ll share it as a “this is what I’m doing” – not as a “here’s what you need”. Consult an attorney – that’s what they’re there for – to keep you from meeting other people’s attorneys.

Resize and crop those darned things! The biggest issue, literally, we see with photos provided by our clients is that they’re the size of a wall. Lower the darned resolution on that camera to the smallest it’ll do. Photos for the web need to be fast-loading. Windows picture viewer fakes it, by showing you the size you expect, but that’s not the real size. Use something like irfanview (and tip the man for using his software – it’s worth it) to see the *real* size. If you’re taking pics at maximum resolution with you’re camera, you’ll probably see an eyeball filling your monitor. Yes, that’s how big it actually is. You can use the same software to resize your existing photos to something reasonable, like 400px width. Even if you *display* the photo at smaller width on your site, it’s loading the entire photo every time someone loads the page, slowing down your site, chewing up  your web space and bandwidth, and all for nought. Don’t waste the net, or your money, or your visitors’ time. Shrink those photos for the web. And crop out the needless backgrounds. If there’s a table edge in one corner, use the same software to crop it. Rule of thumb – show what’s relevant – omit what’s not.

Don’t make your business site a personal home page. A lot of people want to put photos of their cats, their favorite vehicles, or their kids on their business web sites. As someone who does internet marketing, I walk gently here, unless I think the client is open to advice. But my general advice is, unless you’re a micro-business and family or pets or your vehicles are part of your brand, don’t. There’s a difference between a personal home page, which has your favorite songs, colors, etc. and a business site. The former is what Myspace is for. It’s free – use it. Better yet, if you’re in business, use Facebook for that. You’ll get more value. Your business site needs to appeal to the model visitors that constitute your prospect and client demographics. And they’re looking for specific kinds of content. If you don’t know what to put on your site, that’s what an internet marketing consultant is for. We’re happy to help, or there are others out there.

That’s it. Straight, no-nonsense advice on using your photos on your web site. Let us know if you think of something we’ve skipped. We’re always accumulating new ideas and insights as well. Have fun. I can hear those digital cameras clicking away already.

10 Creative Ways Small and Medium Businesses Use Twitter

Almost everyone uses Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Myspace to keep in touch with their loved ones, business colleagues, and friends. But social media can be tasked for business too, whether you work online, in a brick and mortar business, or a hybrid. Twitter is the new kid on the block, and a lot of people don’t get it. We’ve written about that aspect elsewhere. Here, we’re just going to give you ideas.

1. Creating Live Updates on Product or Service Launches: A great way to let the world know about a product’s progress, or a new service as you are building it, is tweeting about it. Small business owners can consistently post their challenges, as they encounter them, give progress reports, and ask people for input. The latter is called crowdsourcing, and it’s a great way to tap the public for advice, rather than just build it and hope for a positive response.

2. Get Quick Feedback: Again, crowdsourcing. One of the many reasons why some product launches fail is because of a lack of feedback from the intended customers. Who knows better about Jimmy Choo shoes or makeup than women? So, if you want decent feedback on your products’ satisfaction or non-satisfaction, you need the customers to consistently give you feedback. Email correspondence might do it, but nothing is better than just scrolling through a list of real time responses that you can reference and attend to immediately.

3. Posting Recent Rates and Costs: In certain businesses, the rates and prices of services, products and commodities vary on a daily basis. For instance, a stock broking company can consistently give a stream of real time estimates and prices of each company’s stock prices, a mortgage broker can easily post daily rates and so on.

4. Product or service development research: Twitter accounts with large numbers of followers are often a potential source of information when developing new products or services. Sometimes, a company can just take a look at the frequently asked questions to determine which problems are recurrent and then provide a solution for that problem. It’s not just about posting tweets – it’s also about reading them.

5. Networking: You can build or develop a whole network of likeminded individuals, make new contacts, share ideas and generally, make more profits from your partnerships. If you’re not a big believer in networking in general, you won’t ever relate to social media. In some ways, social media is really the new Rotary Club, coffee hour, or social organization. Where is everyone when you go those, now? They’re in social media.

6. Attract More Clients: Things that happen on twitter often spread like wildfire. Businesses can create a contest, a giveaway, a virtual event, and spread the word via Twitter. Not only will it catch the attention of the relevant people, it will also bring in more clients and give more exposure.

7. Upcoming Live Events and Conferences: Besides virtual events, upcoming live attendance events and conferences can be posted on Twitter, so prospects can easily track them and share with others. There can be a countdown timer embedded on the profile or just consistent tweeting of the countdown date.

8. Building a Brand Presence: Twitter is great for building a brand presence online, which is important even for (if not especially for) brick and mortar businesses. Building a brand can be as easy as simply tweeting useful free information and following a few new people every day. When the content is genuine and informative, followership occurs naturally. Remember, if you spam everyone with requests for business, people will drop you.

9. Fun: A lot of people come from the “what happens in my off time is MINE” mentality, but as small businesses grow, increasingly you have less time that’s really just “yours”. You become embedded in your business, like an icon or a mascot – you become your brand. There’s nothing wrong with posting the movie your team is attending, or jokes about yourself as the owner, or even just jokes about your business. You could even create a mythical mascot (if you’re a gym, Jumpy the Fitness Mouse) and track his comings and goings, foibles and failures, like an ongoing reality program. Make no mistake, fun sells.

10. Blog: If you’re blogging, share links to your blog posts, with brief excerpts, on your Twitter account.  Why shouldn’t your social media be integrated? It’s your brand. Your blog postings are events too. Just a rule of thumb – don’t tweet more than once a day on the average – these can flood someone’s Twitter page – give someone else a chance, and you’re more likely to be followed and remain followed.

10 Creative Ways Small & Medium Businesses Use Facebook

One of the more popular social media communities is Facebook and, unless you have been living on mars, you ought to know that it has a ton of potential for those who are creative in using it for business. Here are a few creative ways others are using Facebook.

1. Posting Coupons and Discounts: Many businesses lose customers by not publicising their discounts and coupons. Companies can post up package deals, discounts, coupon codes on their Facebook wall and put a limit on how many people can have access to it. For example, giving out a coupon or discount code to only 50 people will create a frenzy and a mad rush for products.

2. Keep Customers in your Orbit: A business can easily have the customers lurking on their page for more offers. As in the above example, businesses can post the codes randomly once a week. For example, coupon codes can be posted Monday this week, and Thursday next week. This keeps customers interested.

3. Release Product Excerpts or Post Beta Testers Notice: Products like software often needs beta testers. What better way to connect with the market other than through Facebook. Most times, customers, and fans can be contacted to beta test a product and report on their usage. Facebook is an excellent place to locate such people.

4. Networking and Connecting: There are experts in very field. Via Facebook, a company can connect with an authority in its niche and ask him to become a guest blogger and update the status on their wall. This method is often timely and more effective when a crucial topic is discussed or when there is a new development in the industry or niche.

5. Building Clientele or Customer Base
A stream of new clients and customers can be gotten from Facebook if a company maintains a consistent rapport with its fan base. Group members or friends can easily tweet or email a really good blog post updated on Facebook to their friends leading to more leads and customers.

6. Releasing Viral Reports: Informative reports can be easily released and can go viral when posted on Facebook. Companies can release book excerpts, videos, podcasts and so on to create more awareness, build or strengthen the brand and get new buyers.

7. Post Business Updates: Companies can post more business updates on the wall, thus letting customers and shareholders in on recent happenings in the company and creating an impression of transparency or openness.

8. Combine With Other Social Media Tools: Facebook can be combined with other media tools to create a synergy and more exposure. For instance, questions asked and issues on myspace can be answered and addressed through a blog post which is then updated on a company’s Facebook wall.

9. Buy Facebook Ads: Companies can increase their visibility and build their brands by buying Facebook ads.

10. Resident Expert: There’s nothing quite so important as consistency, and giving away free info, advice, and insights is a way to not only have sustainable Facebook activity and attract followers, but it avoids the ‘all I have to say is buy my service’ approach which just gets you marginalized. If you were Ted Koppel, Andy Rooney, and Rush Limbaugh, how would you talk about your industry or locale in Facebook?