Sound Solutions: North Bank Audio Solutions

So, you probably know by now that you should be submitting articles to article directories by now, so I won’t bore with you why. I’ll just let you check out Article Marketer to find out more on that topic - they’re the experts. What a lot of people aren’t doing though is effectively linking their work together. What do I mean by this? You should have your body of work (your blog, podcast, articles, videos, and social media etc.) all refer to eachother. Here are a few examples:

1. When you create a blog post, include a link to a relevent vidoe that you posted on YouTube.
2. When you post something to Twitter, link to a related podcast, blog post or article you submitted to ezinearticles.com.
3. Post the videos you put on YouTube to your Facebook account.
4. When you upload videos to YouTube, include a link to your free report or teleseminar recording opt-in page for lead generation.
5. Link your blog to your social networking sites. Like Twitter, MySpace, Linkedin and Facebook.

The reasons for doing these things are two fold:

1. You want human beings to click on these links. This is pretty obvious, but remember, the more ways you can display your information, the better. Some of your prospects and clients might love to read blogs, but others might do better with video or audio.
2. You want search engines to know where your stuff is online. The logic goes like this - if you link to your YouTube video on your blog, then you are letting Google and Yahoo know that the video exists, thus pushing that video up in order of importance. The same goes with your articles, blog posts, social media, podcasts, etc.

One more tip - for those of you who are blogging (and I hope that’s all of you) may I make the suggestion, that you go a step further with these suggestions? If you take a look at my blog, you’ll notice that my Twitter updates are syndicated on the lower right hand side. This is done for a similar reason as I explained above. People might click on my updates and go to my Twitter profile and because search engines like fresh, new content, my blog site is constantly changing each time I post to twitter. You’ll also notice that I’ve integrated my podcast in a similar way. This is a slightly more advanced way of linking your blogs and social media, but all the more effective. You can actually do this on your static websites as well with a tool called Feedburner. If you’re not using Feedburner, shame on you. No, but seriously, check it out. It’s free. I’ll probably include some video tutorial of how to do these things in the near future, so make sure to subscribe to my feed so you get them as soon as I post them.

So, I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert on the topic of SEO, but I’m learning. I’ve stumbled upon a great tool that you should definitely take advantage of.

It’s HubSpot’s Website Grader. You simply input your website and it tells you what’s good and bad about your site, with suggestions on how to fix it.

I don’t buy into the idea that SEO is everything when it comes to online marketing, but it is a piece of the puzzle that should not be overlooked.

Once you have made some adjustments to your site based on the feedback from this tool, I suggest using Google’s very own solution: Google Webmaster Tools. It will tell you what’s wrong with your site, help you gleam important info about your site directly from Google’s database and share info about your site with Google.

I’m not asking this question from a political perspective in any sense. I am a Barack Obama supporter, but by no means do I assume that all or even most of the readers of my blog, listeners of my podcast, my clients and colleagues are.

What I do expect from you, regardless of your political sensibilities, is to learn from the success of his political campaign from a marketing perspective.

Here is a few of things I noticed and admired about his campaign from a marketing perspective. If you have anything to add to the list, please add a comment with your thoughts. I may come back and add more as I think of them.

1. The consistency of the message and the brand.
   Everything from catch phrases to the typeface he used to the color schemes and imagery. Take a look at any of his YouTube videos of campaign events. They all start off with the same, simple black background and white text.
2. Everything funneled back to Obama.
   Even though he had a team of people working for him, everything the campaign did came back to him. His campaign was uniquely unified.
3. He used many forms of media - both traditional and new:
   This is the first major political campaign to really focus on online marketing. Their new media tactics included email marketing, online video, social networking, blogging and podcasting. Their campaign efforts became viral and many of these new forms of media are quite inexpensive. Of course, they also employed traditional tactics of canvassing, TV, radio and print ads and phone banking.
4. He got his supporters involved:
   The Obama campaign’s biggest strength was in their humongous list of donors and volunteers. This can be partially attributed to his understanding of his target markets and how well his message resonated with them.

I’m sure I’ll think of dozens of things to add to this list, but feel free to help me out by posting comments on this post. You can also include what you learned from a marketing perspective from other political campaigns as well. Feel free to include things you learn to do as well as things you learned not to do.

Podcasting is big these days and I get a lot of questions on this topic. One of them is how to get your podcast to show up in the iTunes directory. The iTunes directory is the most obvious place to submit your feed. It’s the biggest podcast directory and being in it is a definite legitimizer and a good way to get some visibility.

All-in-all, it won’t likely get you a ton of new subscribers, but from a position perspective, there’s no reason not to be on this network.

I’ve created a little tutorial on how to submit your podcast feed to the iTunes directory in about two minutes. It’s straight out of my product Repurposing Essentials.

If you like the video, but aren’t quite ready to purchase Repurposing Essentials, I’m guessing you like free stuff. If I’m right, make sure to check out my audio program and transcript, Leveraged Marketing Basics and learn how to turn one hour into a successful marketing plan.

Many people are turned off by how fast technology moves. I recently got a question from someone who wanted to get into using video more to market her business and monetize her knowledge, but was puzzled as to how to get started.

She didn’t want to spend a bunch of money only to have her gadgets become obsolete a few months later. We’ll call her “Technophobe” for the purposes of this post. I don’t use this term in a degrading way. I think her anxiety around fast-moving technology highlights a common thread through the psyches of many people who want to get into info marketing, but aren’t sure how to get started. It’s also something I’ve noticed is very common with people who aren’t quite young enough to have grown up in the age of 1,000 mile-per-hour computer technology.

Here was my advice to her. I hope you find it helpful as well.

Dear Technophobe,

Don’t be discouraged by fast changes in technology. Much of that is simply marketing tactics to create perceived obsolescence so that people will buy more products. (The ironic thing is that this kind of marketing often discourages people like you - and myself - from buying anything.) The truth is, if it does the job now, it’s probably going to do the job just fine for years to come. It mantra doesn’t always work for things like computers, but now that we’re in the digital age, I wouldn’t worry too much about making a bad investment in a camera. Now is a good time to buy one.

I would go to an electronics store and try out a few cameras and just pick which one you like. I don’t have a specific suggestion. Simply find one that fits within your budget. Generally, with cameras, I would say don’t buy the very cheapest one available, but maybe a step or two up. You can find very decent video cameras for around $200.00. The cool thing about technology moving so fast is that these same cameras were five or ten times more expensive a few years back, so you’ve actually saved money by waiting.

Some specs to look for are:

* Buy a camera that uses miniDV tapes. I would avoid the cameras that export to a proprietary format because you can run into problems when you try to edit and produce them.

* Make sure it has an external microphone input. Audio quality is at least as important as video quality. This way, you can always upgrade the audio without buying a new camera.

* Pick a camera that isn’t too noisy. It’s always a bummer when you play back your recordings and there’s an annoying buzz or hum over the whole take.

Probably more important than the camera itself is that you have proper lighting when you record and that you use a tripod. Natural light looks the best, so if you can record in a space with lots of windows, that is ideal. You can supplement by placing lights (sometimes household lamps will work just fine) behind the camera as you record.

To edit your video, it all depends on your level of tech-savvyness. If you use windows, sometimes the free Windows Movie maker will work just fine. If you use a mac, iMovie will do the job. A step up is Sony Vegas Video Studio (about $100 I think) and if you want to use what the pros use, go for Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. I use Adobe Premiere, but going that way will set you back quite a bit.

If you’d rather delegate the editing, there are lots of people who can do that for you. My business offers video production (http://northbankaudio.com) but we are by no means the only show in town. Shop around locally and online or ask colleagues for a recommendation.

To get your stuff online, there’s a nifty tool called http://tubemogul.com/ that will help you upload to about a dozen of the top video sites (including YouTube) in one swoop, for free. This is one of my favorite tools.

I hope this helps. Let me know if I brought up any other questions or ideas along the way.

~Caleb