Expand2Web Podcast #12 PDF Edition Bob Thordarson Interviews Don Campbell of Expand2Web About Online Video for Small Businesses and Affiliates Welcome to the Expand2Web Podcast. Hello everyone, welcome to the videobosstraining.com webinar. The video marketing secrets from a small business and affiliate marketing guru. This is Bob Thordarson, founder of Blucapp Software and the videobosstraining.com education site. Today we have a very special guest, Don Campbell. Hey Don. Don's an old friend, president of Expand2Web.com. He's an amazing human being and incredibly smart at small business and affiliate marketing. Hey Don, welcome to the webinar. Hey, thanks Bob. It's great to be here. Appreciate that intro, too, by the way. Thank you. So Don, we've been old friends for a while and I know you left Microsoft, what, three years ago? Yes. To start your own business. And at the beginning, I'd just love for you to tell the story about how that happened, how you made the decision to break the chains that Microsoft bound you with and started your own company. Yeah, sure. I had a really, really neat job at Microsoft. I mean, I was basically a technical evangelist where I got to fly around the country and, introduce the newest technologies and APIs and work with partners so that when we launch some new version of a product, we already had really cool showcase wins. And so for me, being a software person, that was pretty neat, right? I loved that kind of a thing. And, you know, I live in Silicon Valley, so I'm just really a software person. Originally from Michigan, but my wife and I moved out here in 1998 when all the the excitement was going on around the internet.
And I joined a company called Interwoven, which did web content management. And that was a really, really fun thing. So, I got to do that. I was a product manager for a really neat product. I got to see how Amazon and Federal Express and Ford and everybody managed their websites. We sold software for that, IPOed and went through all of that. And that was an awesome job. I loved that. Then I went to Microsoft for four and a half years, had a cool job, but ideally I wanted to have my own business, right? I've always wanted to do that. And so, finally I decided this is my chance. I'm gonna go do this and I really haven't looked back since. I've been doing Expand2Web for three years now and I love it. It's really fun. Congratulations. Thanks. So, today we want to, I wanted to talk to you about video marketing and really how videos become this incredible marketing tool. And I know that you deal with small businesses and help them better market themselves on the web as well as doing a tremendous number of affiliate offers that you've been incredibly successful with over the last couple years, and I wanted to just take a deep dive and really hear your story about the work that you're doing there, both on the small business side, the affiliate side, and what started this conversation before we got on this webinar together was us talking about what an incredible opportunity video is and some of the amazing stats that we've seen come out of YouTube in the last couple years. And I think, you know, the stat that's been thrown around a lot is that YouTube is now the number two ranked search engine, like, right behind Google. Yeah, sure. Yeah, which is incredible. I mean, you think of Yahoo search and MSN Bing search, but many people don't think about YouTube as a search engine. But it turns out that there's 3.5 billion searches on YouTube every month. Yeah, that's crazy. An unbelievable number. And, you know, some of the other stats that we've talked about are like, there's 2 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day. Wow. Yeah, it's really phenomenal, right, in terms of the growth and just the time that people spend on that site. It's like Google or Facebook, right? Yeah, that's right. That's right. And, you know, the other stat that we learned was that 82% of all Internet users in the United States states watched online video in April, 2011. Yeah, it's crazy and it's going to mobile too, right? I mean, they had like a hundred million views a day just on the YouTube mobile site, and the irony of it though is that a lot of people that are out on the web doing things aren't leveraging video right, and it's kind of a big opportunity. It's, like, it hasn't really caught up yet with the prominence of online video.
The usage of it. Yeah, I mean, you work with small businesses every day and, you know, I think most businesses and people trying to attract viewers on the Internet are still focused on blogs and text, right? Yeah, exactly. Well they're even struggling with that, I mean that challenge, right, is everyone's trying to adapt to this new, all these eyeballs are shifting from television to the web, right? It's not like TV's going away, but a lot more time is being spent on the web by people all over the world every day. And so, people are struggling still with how to I publish and update my website. A lot of them aren't even thinking about video yet. And so, it's this huge opportunity to just kind of move right in. And the beauty of it is because it's early, it doesn't have to be perfect, right? Use it...video on the web does not mean Hollywood production. I mean, it has to be good, but...a lot of people, what they're looking for is just real, like, they want to know who your are and relate to you. And you can do a product review or something on your website and they get to know you, they're much more likely to do something than some article on an anonymous website somewhere. So it's like this huge opportunity to relate to people. And for a small business, it's ridiculously easy to rank a video for a local area search, compared to getting listed for anything else, right? Didn't we dig up that other stat from Forrester Research? You're...a video...you have like a fifty times better chance of ranking a video on the front page of Google than, like, a regular article. So, it's cool. And the other thing we talked about Bob yesterday was the fact that, you know, what Google is doing with universal search results and, Bing is doing this too. When you type in, it used to be that you type in a search query and back would come a bunch of text links. Right. Well now they're moving in what they call universal search. They're blending in video and photos and other types of content. It's social media content now. And so, you might have a chance to rank twice on the home page, right? In fact, I have an article like that on my blog, it's a very popular topic. And usually when I do topics on my blog now, I'll do a video in a blog post. So, I have both.
You know, I can get ranked twice on the home page sometimes, on the front page of Google. For the right topic. And so, there's an extra chance that somebody's going to click on my topic, you know, instead of someone elses. Yeah, if you can pull that off that's a huge win. And you only have 10 slots. Right, yeah. On the front page of Google. If you can occupy two of them. Yeah, I mean, it's not a sure thing, but it just gives you a better chance. It either gives you a better chance of ranking at all, in some cases, you know, it gives you extra a chance to rank more than once even, so it's pretty cool. And now you know, for small businesses it's a really good idea too because imagine that you're a contractor or a realtor or a chiropractor and, you know, one of the chiropractor's that I worked with, you know, she's great. She 's got a little tripod and a Kodak ZI-8 camera that costs a hundred and fifty dollars right and she's got a good microphone and she will ask her best patients right when they're in the office. You know, she'll have some patience there you know, she's just really personable and works with nd when you're researching for a chiropractor in Sacramento, you know, who are you going to go to? Are you going to go to this anonymous website chiropractor or are you going to go to the one who's got a video of her introducing you to her practice and testimonials from thirty different patients. So how does she do that? She just, just takes out her ZI-8 camera? Yeah. And shoots the customer right there? Yeah and she makes it easy for them, too. People are a little bit you know tentative sometimes and some people don't want to do it and that's fine but she's got plenty of people who are willing to sit down and for a 30 second hey here's the way I came in and, you know, thanks so much for helping me, it's great to work with you and that's it, they're willing to do it if you make it easy for them. And now she's got all this great content, she has a YouTube channel set up. And then she can publish that on her website and on the YouTube channel and then she knows how to optimize the YouTube entry so it will show up for a local search. Yeah, let's come back to that. Let's definitely come back to that cause I know you have some killer secrets on optimizing YouTube.
Right. So, we'll come back to that. That's great. Sure. Yeah, and for small business owners too, you know, the other thing that the can do is, you know, on their Google Places page, which is kind of an another topic. But if you're a local business with a physical address, you can claim this free profile in Google to help you get ranked in the map listings. You 've probably seen this right? When you've searched for a plumber in Seattle or you've searched for a dentist or something. And you'll see the map results come back. And you'll see a little map over to the right in those little place markers. Well, to get there, you just claim your free Google Places listing. Well, Google gives you slot for five videos in there. So, if you're... if you can...you can list up to five YouTube videos - you've got to have them posted on YouTube - and they can be part of your profile. So, it's a really good opportunity to use those as an additional reference for your business, in Google's eyes anyway. So, just...you know, there's a lot of ways if you start to get this kind of content out there that you can start using it to help promote you business and get to rank better. Yeah, and what was that other stat that we learned about from Tom? The click through rate on a small business that has a video attached to their profile goes up by like thirty or forty percent. Right, yeah. It increases clicks. And that's true even in non-small business situations. You know, they've proven for, you know, landing pages, for affiliate marketing, things like that, if you've got a video there, it increases clicks, increases clickthroughs and promotes engagement, so... So, it seems like video is this huge opportunity......but, I mean, what you seeing with your small business customers? Are a lot of people doing it? Yeah, not very many, right? I mean, it's tough. And you know what's funny? Even photos...so even before you get to video, just having good, quality photos on your website is a huge thing. Or even in a blog post. If you're publishing a blog post, you should always have some sort of a photo to go with that.
If you're a small business owner, the most successful sites I have seen have a really nice photo or video on the homepage. So, you know, just the photo there having...struggling...a lot of them are struggling with, let alone getting to a video. But it turns out that it's not that hard, right? Once you figure out a few basics about the video, then it's really easy to do it. I mean, I've had the example of the chiropractor earlier. I've seen realtors do this too, where they'll just do...take a standard camera, walk around and do a little tour of the house, and post that out as part of the property. I mean, it has to look good, but we're not talking about setting up a video production crew and Channel 7 News coming out front, right, it's not like that. And I think that's the most popular misconception, is that people think it has to be like a Hollywood feature and that's not what it takes, you know? Yeah and we're seeing this increasing trend of authenticity. People want to connect with real people. They don't want to see this corporate, beautifully produced, you know, $50,000 cost video. They want to say Who is this person I'm dealing with and are they real? You know, can I associate with them? Right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean I have a funny story. When I worked at Microsoft I was on this really neat little project. It was called Channel Nine and the whole reason it was called Channel Nine was because that's the channel, like on United Airlines, you can listen to Channel 9 on your headset and hear what the pilots are talking about. So, the idea was to make what's going on inside of Microsoft, and it was a developer marketing activity. It started off as a little skunk works project. And a couple Guys took hand held video cameras, like home consumer grade videos that you would use to film your kids, or your dog, or something. And they would walk into a room and walk up to some guy and go, "Hey, who are you and what do you working on?" Maybe this is the guy that's doing, that, you know, at the time he was doing the IE 7 and he was adding RSS support or, you know, some technology. You'd say, "Oh, I'm, my name's John and I'm adding RSS into Internet Explorer" or "I'm working on the next version of Office" or whatever it was. And then you would just kind of do this really informal interview and what we found was it just took off because people were like, "Oh my gosh this is, you know, Microsoft's not this big black box anymore. I know John, he's the guy that's doing this, and even though everybody says, "I hate Internet Explorer cause they don't do standards right", all of sudden they became more human, right, and you got to know the people.
And so this became very successful and this project, I mean, this Channel Nine site was getting, grew from nothing to like four million visitors a month. It just got huge. Oh, my gosh. And it was basically a big video blog for a while. I mean, it's expanded a lot more than that now But one of the things that was interesting is now all of the sudden you've got budget, and stuff, right? And so, one of the teams decided we're going to do this really nice interview now. And they hired us a real production crew, and they had three, like they had an executive and a couple other people sitting in these high chairs, and they had three different camera angles in this really nicely done video interview about a certain topic, and people hated it. They said, "We don't want this crap. We want to see the real thing, we want to see". So it's that authenticity. I'm not saying that interview wasn't authentic but it just didn't come across the same way, when they tried to over produce it. Because really at the end of the day it was just a conversation about a technology, or some of the challenges and problems they were having or some things they're excited about. So, anyway, kind of long story but that, that taught me then not to get wrapped up too much in how, you know, do I have all the makeup on, or do I have the right lighting? And, you know what I mean? It's not about that. It's about coming across and sort of relating with your audience I think. That's a great story. And, I want to talk about the affiliate site because I know you've done some super smart things with video for the affiliates but I want to stay on the small business side for a little bit longer. OK. What else have you seen with your small business customers? Do you have any examples that you have recommended to a small business customer that they've deployed and it worked well? You know, one thing I would say, there's a lot of interesting examples, right, in all different industries. But one thing I would say is even if you have a small business owner that, you know, we get this a lot where somebody goes, you know, I'm just not doing a video, all right, I'm not comfortable with it. Which is fine.
What you can do is, you know, there's some really nice software out there on the web, or that you can get on your computer, and you can just take photos. Most of the time, you can at least get some photos of the office, of the doctor, or the business owner, the staff or maybe the products. And if you get 20 of these photos, you can make a really nice video slide show right, with music behind it. You know it starts off with a screen that says "here is the business". this right and what it does, and then there's some nice photos. And they kind of have that Ken Burns effect where they're floating. Yeah, right. And you can do that very low budget. And now you've got a video for the business, right? And you can create your YouTube channel, optimize the listing, get it in your Google Places page, and put it on your website. And now you've got a video, right? And you can do that for your different products, or maybe just one video if that's all you can get them to do. But you can do that on a very low budget, and now they have a video that they can work with. So, really it's just a running slide show, but, you know, it's a start. So what's amazing about that is that so many people think that video is all about being a newscaster, right, standing behind the lens of a camera and talking into it. And, you know, it really doesn't have to be that way, right? You don't have to appear in the video at all if you're not comfortable with it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think ideally, you know, depending on what you're doing, it would be great, because people want to relate with other people. You know, people buy from people, not from websites. But, you know, but yeah. A lot of times you can do a great job with just a nice introduction to your business, you know, with those slides like we talked about or maybe just a nice video tour of your office or whatever. You can do some pretty cool stuff without having to be a star, you know, what I mean in the frame yourself. Yeah, and the other thing I've seen work is maybe, you know, 20 to 30 sees you and hears your voice and then you switch out to the slides or photos and, you know, do the rest of the video that way. Yeah, exactly, it's a great way to do it, in fact you know, you do the intro and then you kind of fade out as whatever you're talking about takes over and so really nice way to do it for sure.
So, I, before, I don't want to spend anymore time on small business because affiliate marketing is such an amazing success for you and I wanted to make sure that we cover that here on the webinar. So. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're up to, and Expand2Web.com, the blog, and how you think about affiliate marketing in general, and how you use video in that way. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think it's a great tool for, as we talked about, it just is, in small business or anything else, a video is just such a great way to... It works great for affiliate marketing too. The way that I've been using it is, I try to turn Expand2Web, the blog, into a resource for people. Anybody who is either a do-it-yourself small business owner or a consultant who helps small business owners to come and learn about WordPress and local search optimization and social media, and kind of put a plan together for what to do for a small business website presence. And one of the things I kind of learned early on, which is a little counterintuitive but, it's give away everything you know. You give it all away. Video is a great way to do that. The way I've chosen to do it is, on the blog I try to do a lot of video screen casts. So, I will do a screen cast that shows, for example, if you're using WordPress, how do I claim my website and verify it in Google Webmaster Tools. Something like that. Or, there's all different topics. How do I get my Google listing? Or how do I publish a video in WordPress? Or there's all different kinds of topics, there's a million topics. And I try to just do these really short, five minute or less, all my videos are five minutes or less. And I do these screen casts and they really, I think they work great. Because, you know, they're instructive, people like to kind of follow along. And then I surround that in a blog post too. But, it works really well for affiliate marketing, because I have about a handful of affiliate offers that I do on my site and they're all very closely related to my topic. So, for small business owners with websites and, you know, how to do email and how to do all of those kinds of things. And then what I try to do is use videos to show them how to do it. And it really works well, because now I can show them, it's a product, I only do affiliate stuff for products that I use and I canshow them how to set it up or how it works. And it's just a really nice way to do it, because then they can see the thing. And then if they click on my link then, you know, I'll get a credit for that. If not, it's okay. But, that has worked well for me. And I like video to do that with, because people can relate to you, you know. Sure.
Yeah. And it's interesting, because I think so many affiliate marketers, they're trying a zillion different things in no particular category. But, you've really narrowed down your niche and are offering products that you only use and you're doing videos already around, you know, the small business and local business marketing aspect. And so, it's just a logical addition to what you already do. I think, you know, I've seen a lot of affiliate marketers chase whatever is hot, and they chase around a lot of different offers. And, you know, at least for me, obviously there's a lot of great perspectives on this, but for me I think it's better just to do something that you love. Choose something that you really care about, and stick close to that topic. Because, otherwise you just divide your time up way too much. And the other thing I think is real key, and video helps with this, is this concept, it's called marketing by sharing. And there's a really neat YouTube video. Maybe we can put the link to it in the notes for this. It's called "Marketing by Sharing," by Jason Fried from 37 Signals. And it's just a short video. I think it 's less than 15 minutes. But is a key concept. It's the fact that people, they trust and they buy from people who they learn from. So, if you're out there blogging about your topic, and doing videos, and showing people how to do things, then you build up an automatic credibility and trust with them. And you don't want to abuse that. That's why I only do things that I know, that I like, and that I use. It 's a really great way to do it. And that's been the principle I've been trying to follow. He talks in the video how they go out they don't even have a marketing budget. I mean, this company is doing, you know, tens of millions of dollars in revenues. They're a very successful company and they don't do marketing. They've done a great job getting out there, and sharing information and blogging and doing videos and creating great products, and it just kind of takes care of itself. And I think that's a really neat concept and I think it lends well to the deal. Yeah, absolutely. I've seen 37signals blog and they do such a great job of posting such interesting content. It makes me want to go back there. Over and over again.
Sure. That draws me in. It's not, I mean they have amazing software. We, you know, we use some of their software, but it's their blog and the content that they put out there and the commendations and. It's truly useful stuff. It's absolutely useful stuff, exactly. Yeah, right. Yeah, the with all this stuff is that, you know, we talked earlier that you don't have to be in the video. But there is something to, you know...and for a small business owner, I think that's fine. When you're doing affiliate marketing, that can be fine too. But what at least what I have found on my site is kind of like interesting little discovery. I had...i did all these video screen casts, and then one of my friends from Michigan, we were talking one time, and he said, "You know, I saw this video the other day where the instructor was in the lower corner of the video as I was watching it." He said, "You should do something like that." And I was like, "Ah, I don't know." I mean, 'cause what's the purpose of having a little picture of me talking down there? They're hearing my voice. They can see the screen. So, this is a couple of years ago. So I started experimenting with it and the feedback was really, really good. And obviously there's no use for having, you know, a person in the corner. But it turns out that you don't even have to be there the whole time. You can fade yourself out, right, you know, like we talked earlier, maybe fade yourself out when the focus should be on the screen. But what was interesting is people...they just like to get to know who it is that's telling them this stuff. Right. And I got a lot more comments and emails and phone calls based on that, just because I think it made it more personable. And it's the same thing with sharing your photo on the website no matter who you are. People just want to get to know who's behind it. Right. And I think it's because on the web we're spending all this time on the computer, but you know, we're really made for human to human interaction. And so I think it's important. Video allows you to bring some that to your website. And it's very important, I think.
Yeah, and I think you made the comment the other day about the struggle that you've had with just keeping up with all the writing involved with keeping up a site like expand2web, but you were saying that video is almost easier. Can you tell, tell us about that? Yeah, I mean, I learned this too, I mean, a lot of people, I try to emulate some of these great writers out there like problogger.net and, you know, these guys are awesome writers, then they hire great writers then they've got all this writing staff. And, you know, I love to blog about these topics but it was interesting because I was spending hours researching, writing this blog post. And I can write okay, but it takes me a lot of time, and I started realizingit 's easier for me just to sit down and do a video. And then just summarize. Do a paragraph about it, or two, in the blog post. Most of the times in the video. Now I've gotten pretty good with the production. There 's some amazing software on the PC and on the Mac for video, doing these screen casts and doing some really simple editing. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to use it. For me, I'm training in a way now, where I'm just going to start doing videos of everything. I have over 60 videos on the site now. I'm just going to myself now, whenever I come up with a new idea. You're in the shower, and I'm like, "Oh, I've got to blog about that," or I read something. It's like, do a video. Don't sit around and agonize over how you're going to write this thing. Because I'm not the world's greatest writer but I can do videos about that, screen casts, or interviews, like we're doing right now. Sure. People love those. I've been interviewing experts on different areas for my blog. Cool. People like that kind of interactivity. So, anyway, that was kind of what we were talking about the other day. For some people writing is going to be easier. Other people, maybe podcasts. Other people, maybe it's just getting down and doing a screen cast or a video or something like that. So what about affiliate marketing and videos for physical products? I mean, we talked a little bit about it, I think you had a great example but, how does an affiliate use a video with physical products and what's the strategy there and how have you implemented that strategy? Yeah, so I haven't done a lot of that because most of my products aren't physical but I've seen that done to great effect. I mean, if you're doing, if you're an affiliate for a physical product than it's just a brilliant idea to do video because you can show people the product and you can. You know, I've seen people do a really good job.
Sometimes it's, you know the one's that I'm always envious are, I've seen a few affiliate sites where people go on vacation somewhere. They'll go to a resort, and they'll take all this video of their room and of all the facilities then they'll come back and put together this really nice video and take you on tour of where they went for vacation and then they're an affiliate for that resort. Isn't that cool? Smart. Yeah, that would be a great affiliate thing to get in to, right, is to do something like that. Or, if you have a physical product where you can show it, where you can show someone using it, then that's also brilliant. I've seen that work really, really well. And, you know, the only experience that I had had with that was my daughters, my two girls, and they're both pretty little. And I was in an affiliate conference and one of my friends pulled me over and said, "Oh, Don you've got to get this for your daughters because they would really like it." It was this product one of the affiliates was showing off and it was a bag, it was a zipper, this big giant zipper and as you zipped it up it turned into a bag. So they're called Zipper Bags and they have all these different kind of bags. They have like, you know, laptop bags and clutches and purses and things like that. So, the affiliate manager running the affiliate program for that product gave me a couple of the bags and said, give these to your daughters, and oh by the way, there's a video contest that we're running and whoever makes the best video will win like $500 or something. So, I immediately went home to my, you know, 8 year old and 10 year old daughters and said Hey, you guys, we're going to make a video, right. And we just had fun with it, I mean, it was really good time, and we made this little video, and what's cool about it, is my daughter, who at the time was ten. She did, like I got her started in imovie. We got the video off the camera, we did a few takes and I showed her and got her started and she edited the whole rest of the thing. Wow. And they submitted it and they ended up winning. So they won like $500. To them they're like, "Oh my God, that's all the money in the world!". They thought that was amazing! Awesome. And then they built a little affiliate site around that to, you know, just showing the bag and how it worked. So.
Anyway, that's just an example, if you don't, here's a bag that's got this really unique interesting capability. The first time people see that they go, "Wow, that's cool." How are you going to show that with a picture on a website? Right. I mean, show a video, people get it. They get it immediately within 10 seconds. And then if you do something fun with it like they did. They had a story around it and they had like a, it's a two or three minute video with kind of a story line, and it turned out being really funny. And so you know, it's just a little example of the kind of things you can do. Yeah, the other product affiliate video that I've seen is with a camera. I mean, you go to Amazon.com and it lists all the specs for the camera. Everything's there. Most everything's there. And, you might see a few photos of it. But actually seeing a real person holding the camera you're thinking about buying and really giving their honest opinion of it. I like this feature, I like that feature, here's where it kind of sucks but... Yep. You know, it's okay. I looked at this and this and this and this camera. And I chose this one because of this and this and this. Perfect. I mean, that's great. I mean, as someone who's about to buy a camera I'd love to hat's great. I mean, as someone that's about to buy a camera, I'd love to watch that video. Because, again, it's that human interaction. It's the honesty, and it's really getting the inside scoop from someone that actually bought the camera. Yeah, and especially if they'll tell you, you know what this Yeah, and especially if they'll tell you, you know what, this camera is probably not good if you're doing this kind of shooting, but if you're doing this kind of stuff, then it's perfect. And they tell you that, then that's perfect. You know, another company that does that really well is Zappos. When you go to zappos.com, it's really kind of cool. You're looking at a certain shoe. Well for a lot of different shoes or products they'll have a little video you can watch. And it's one of their employees. And they'll be showing you the shoe and they do it really like in a goofy way. Yeah, and they all do it a little different, but it's totally fun!
And they're showing, they put it on and they show you. You know, and it's just, people watching this could go check that out for an example of just a short little goofy video on a shoe. It makes you kind of, OK, I've seen it in action, right, so maybe I would try it. Great example. So, OK. So, you have an affiliate product. You do a video, but how do you get it ranked within YouTube and the universal search results? And, I know you've done a lot of work in SEO. So, what are the some of the ideas? you know the cool thing about Youtube, and the reason Youtube really took off is because you can publish a video. They made it first of all, the bar for publishing a video is very low. It's super easy. You get the video off your camera. You upload it to YouTube. They can transcode it into whatever format that they need it, and your video is there. Now, the other reason is because they made it really easy to embed those videos into to your blog post or your website or whatever. They made it pretty straight forward. So, you know what I have found to be really valuable is to create a YouTube channel. Which anyone can do, and it's free. And you create a channel, which is essentially a holding place for all your videos that you publish on Youtube. And for a little mini community, so people can subscribe to your channel and they can get updated if you publish a new video, for example. Now, there are a lot of other sites you can syndicate your videos too, right. So, we're just kind of focusing on YouTube right now. But, I think YouTube is a really great place to start, because of what we talked about earlier with those stats are huge. And, you know, you build up this channel, and you start adding videos to the channel, and people start subscribing and you have a chance in that channel to do all kinds of things like link to your website, describe what you're all about. It's got keywords and tags and so for whatever it is your specialty, you can optimize this little YouTube profile. You can put a custom background color, things like that. From there, every time you upload a video there are a few things you can do to the video to optimize it for search results. So, for example, for every video there is a title. Well, that title can have, you get kind of good at figuring out okay what keywords am I trying to rank for. Obviously it needs to be human readable so it needs to attract someone's attention when they see that video show up. But you can also include keywords in the title. The other thing is the description of the video. A lot of people just don't put anything in there or they put one sentence. Here's this huge opportunity to describe here is what you're going to learn or here is what I'm going to show you in this video. And the very first thing in that description that you
do should be a link to your blog or your website. And if you put in http:// expand2web.com it will turn into a live hyperlink. You'll be surprised how many people if they come and watch your video and like it they are going to click on that link and come to your website. So that's another thing, because now you know maybe they found you through YouTube or through a Google search result that led them to your YouTube video, now they're coming to your website. Right. Then you're adding content into those descriptions, and then tags, and categories, and things like that. So there is a lot of interesting things you can do with that. So what's in YouTube? What's the difference between categories and tags? I mean, a category is sort of like a real general, sort of like a how-to or is it an instructional video or is it lifestyle and then there's a few different general categories. Tags are you would add certain keywords you think might help people find your video. Your first approach is to try and put a bunch in there. But I just try go for certain set of keywords for each video, being a small group of five or ten, and tag those. And then the other key thing with YouTube is to you get a little community of friends, maybe you met them on YouTube or maybe they are friends like you and I are. Then say hey like the video then that helps you with your optimization. If you get links into that video or people embed that video then those are almost like backlinks for your video, right there. It is kind of like how Google, you know how backlinks help you in SEO for a web page, that's kind of how it is. So what I always do is I'll do my video and then I publish it in a blog post on expand2web so then I've got a blog post about my topic and then I have embedded the video right in there and so then I also use Twitter and FaceBook and stuff like that and syndicate the video. But I am just saying, you know that's a good starting point, just those basic things with YouTube. So you always start with YouTube. It's your starting point. You upload it to YouTube and then you syndicate it back to your blog. Promote it via Twitter, maybe Facebook. Yeah and what a lot of people do, I don't do a lot of this, I do some of it. Is that you can use a really nice service, like Tube Mogul. There's a few services where you can upload your video there and they will syndicate it to a whole bunch of different video sites. There's tons of others, there's Viddler and Blip.tv and there are so many different other video sites, I like to, I'm trying to build just the YouTube section off is where I focus, but I do syndicate to these other places. But everybody has different approaches for that. But the idea is you want to get that video out there so that you have additional chances to rank for the universal search results.
So if you get it out to all these other sites and include a link back to your blog and all those sites, that obviously will drive traffic if someone's interested in the video and learning more but it will also drive back links making your blog rank higher in Google. Is that how that works? Yeah. You know, in your YouTube page will get some rankings in Google too. Those YouTube pages, so it is kind of nice. If you get enough links in there it starts to build up over time. Right. So, you know, there's tons of things you can do with video and we are just scratching the surface here but there's a lot of different ways to create them. And then once they're created, they really help you kind of magnify, not only getting the word out and getting some rankings and additional chances, but once they come to your website, you have a better chance of them taking action. We saw another stat about that where I think we already talked about earlier where somebody comes in to the page or video they are much more likely to click through or take an action then without. Well, Don, I've taken a lot of your time, and I really appreciate you jumping on the webinar with us, and I think there's a ton of value that you shared today and what we'll do is we'll add some of those links at the end here, and maybe how to contact you, if anybody's interested in Expand2Web. Don, thank you, and I appreciate it again. Yeah thanks for having me, Bob. It's my pleasure. Okay, take care. Have a good one. Bye. Thank you. Watch the video or download the podcast at: http://www.expand2web.com/blog/online-video-tips-small-business-affiliates