The Click Depot Blog

Archive for the ‘SEO Tools’ Category

The concept behind viral video marketing is simple. You create or hire someone to create a video about your company, product, idea, concept, organization, band, movie, book, or whatever you want to promote, and then you upload it to free online video sites like YouTube, Yahoo Video, and Google Video. The hope is that thousands and millions of people will then view your video and be motivated to take additional interest in whatever it is you are promoting and hopefully follow a link back to your website and become a client or purchase your product.

Orchestrating a viral video marketing campaign is not quite so simple. In fact, as this technique like many other forms of marketing online has become more popular and prevalent, the competition is fierce and it takes ever more time, money, and creativity to generate the results you want from this type of marketing. Still, it can be effective as long as you follow a few guidelines when you decide to go this route.

First, before you even embark on creating a video to upload, you need to know exactly what your goal is with this video, who your target audience will be, and how much money you are willing to spend to achieve this goal. In other words, have a plan, a budget, a target market, and a definitive way you can determine whether your campaign is successful or not. Like any other business decision, you need to know if you will be able to generate a good return on your investment (ROI).

While getting a million views can be a goal, more importantly, determine what you are really trying to achieve with this. If you are simply trying to show a million people that your organization exists, then this may be a legitimate way to achieve that goal. But if you really want to get 100,000 of those people to go to your website with the ultimate goal being that 10,000 people will purchase your product, then the video you create and the way you promote it are going to be different.
For instance, a funny video clip or spoof could accomplish the first goal of getting a million visitors, but that same video is not likely to drive 10 percent of those people to your website and then prompt 10 percent of those viewers to buy.

Many experts classify videos as going “viral” when they are viewed by 100,000 to 1 million plus viewers depending on who you ask. Others define “viral” as a means of distributing the message meaning it is spread through interaction with others (kind of like the flu). By the first definition, you may not have a snowball’s chance in you-know-where of achieving viral marketing success with your video and your goal. But by the second definition, you definitely do. Depending on how you get your message about the video out there and depending on who views the video and the results you get from those viewings will determine the overall success of your campaign. You could be able to achieve your goal such as to promote a local business to local viewers seeing your video clip with far fewer than 100,000 views if you get the word out to the right people. So you need to know how you will determine if your video viral marketing campaign is successful.

Second, you need to be able to promote your video successfully to this target market. This, then, is the real heart of viral video marketing determining the best way to spread the word about your video and get people to actually watch it. You will need to get educated and become your own PR person to effectively do this or hire a company experienced in doing this if you really want to get the word out and generate views. And this will take time and technique. Common ways include using email, social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace, and commenting on various blogs, but the companies that really get results with their videos have entire teams devoted to plugging their videos online to engage viewers. You can utilize these same techniques, but it will require a sizeable investment of your time to do it, and this relates back to the first point: will you get the ROI you need? Only you can decide.

Image Courtesy : http://www.d3webdesigns.com/viral-video.html

Okay, so you’re spending a lot of time searching for various keywords, but the SEO just isn’t coming out the way you hoped. It happens all the time and no matter how you put it, the truth of the matter is you just aren’t using the right keyword research tool. Most people don’t want to spend the money on an expensive software tool, so they’re left with the free versions.

We decided to take a little time out of our day and tell you about the top 5 keyword research tools out there. Obviously you’re going to have to put up a little money, but you should expect to, considering everything you’ve done up to this point hasn’t made you hardly any money at all. Plus, all the time you’ve had to spend for basically nothing.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

If you’ve tried to take on the pay per click arena, you came across this keyword tool a time or two. It doesn’t cost you anything to use it, but just remember that you have to spend the time doing it yourself. Finding the right keywords can take hours, even days depending on the criteria you’ve put in place.

Word Tracker

You’ll find that most people turn to the Word Tracker when they don’t want to spend money on a true keyword research tool. The only problem with Word Tracker is it isn’t entirely accurate. In fact, if you compare it to Google Adwords, there are several contrasts between the two of them. Plus, it only gives you the searches, and they’re on a daily basis instead of monthly.

Utilizing Others

When we first started to give out the top 5 keyword research tools, we planned on listing all of them. Unfortunately, the more we thought about it, there isn’t #1-#5 and all of them have pretty much the same benefits and downfalls. Well, all except one. The only difference is it’s not your average keyword research tool. It’s a place where you can find all the best ones in the same place.

What they do is offer you everything from Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Word Tracker, SEODigger, and all kinds of other tools for your marketing pleasure. Sometimes it’s just a lot easier to look in one place for all the answers, then try searching all over the place. When you get to this point, we highly recommend looking into the Click Depot. It should help you get what you need from the top keyword research tools.

Image Courtesy : http://www.kortia.com/keyword-analysis.html

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but did you know that it is entirely possible to get it wrong? Lots of people love the idea of RSS feeds and of getting their information right to the interested people on a daily basis, but if you do it in a way that other people consider inappropriate, you will lose more people than you stand to gain! When you are thinking about doing RSS the right way, take some time and really consider how you are going to get the effect that you need. Appropriately enough, it is simple, but you need to pay attention to certain things.

For instance, if you are just getting started with RSS feeds, remember to choose a web based aggregator. Especially when you are a beginner, you will find that this interface is going to be the most straightforward for you to use. There are many other options open to you as well, but keep in mind the fact that you are going to need to think about maintaining it. At the beginning, simple is much better, and there is less that can go wrong. Fancy can come later.

The second thing that you need to consider is whether RSS feeds are really for you. It is true that more and more people are getting involved with RSS feeds, and that is definitely important to get your foot in the door, but is your target demographic really going to be what you need? What are your options when you are thinking about getting the results that you are after, and what can you do to make sure that you are not shouting out into the darkness?

Finally, remember that unless you have strong copy, you are just wasting your time. Unless you are putting something out there of value and unless you are making it worth their while to continue looking up your information, you are going to get forgotten. At the end of the day, content is still king and if you are lacking in this place, you are going to find that there are some real problems that you can run in to. Take some time and really consider how you are going to get good content out there.

If you are ready to take on the world of RSS, you are not alone, so remember to stay sharp and to stay competitive. There is a lot going on, but if you just remember these basic thoughts and guidelines, you should be fine. It’s all the content; after that, you can worry about how to present it and what needs to be done.

Image Courtesy : http://comingupforair.net/2008/01/rss-icons/

Sometimes when you try something new, it’s completely overwhelming. Autoresponders are no exception, and because of the various facets involved you can find yourself struggling for the reasons behind it all. However, it doesn’t take much to figure them out. All you have to do is get a better understanding for the anatomy that revolves around it.
 
The objective goal for using an autoresponder is to keep in contact with your subscribers. This can be through customer support, daily or weekly newsletters, mini-courses, and several other reasons. Whatever the case may be, it allows you to get on a more personal level and give your readers a chance to trust the fact that you are helping them as much as possible.
 
Customer Sign Ups
 
In the beginning stages a potential prospect will be drawn to your sign up area. This could be due to a free report, gift, or contest, but anything that can help them for free is always a good start. Once they have signed up, your autoresponder will automatically send them their free gift (outside of a contest). This is your starting point to the anatomy of autoresponders.
 
The Feedback
 
Once your new subscriber sees the material and “thank you page,” you can set up your autoresponder to send out a feedback email. This asks your prospect to give you feedback about the free information they received. Now, you can have them email you or your can set up a poll, but this will depend on the amount of subscribers you gain. If you are emailing hundreds of people throughout the day regarding feedback, you’ll want to use a poll.
 
It’s important to send this out about 3 days after your initial email. In doing so you will allow your readers to actually go over the material and let you know how they feel about it. What you don’t want to do is bombard them with constant contact because most will feel as though they are being spammed and will eventually unsubscribe. Using this approach will get them back to your site more often.
 
The Special Offer
 
Once you let about a week go by, it’s time to use the autoresponder again. This time you are going to associate a special offer with it. It won’t be a complete sales pitch, but links will be provided to whatever is you are trying to sell. Basically it brings them back to the website, which of course is the main goal. This should only be done once, then all you can do is wait.
 
The Upcoming Months
 
After you have given out your special offer, the autoresponder should start to dwindle off the progressive emailing. Once you’ve put the sales email out there, you should wait to weeks before sending out another call of action. Then it will be once a month. Eventually you will stop sending out your series, and begin working on something new.
 
During this time you will be able to keep in touch with your prospects and help them along the way. The anatomy of an autoresponder is important to maintain in order to get the best results. In the end you will find yourself with better conversion rates and more subscribers then you ever dreamed. However, it’s the ability to gain their trust that will be the most important achievement for later down the road.

Image Courtesy: http://www.squidoo.com/ultimateautoresponderpro

We work with people from around the world - customers, vendors, freelancers, partners, colleagues, trainers, Etc. In the past, communicating with people over the Internet was limited. Email and phone only goes so far. But recently, screen sharing applications have really reduced this communication gap. And what does this have anything to do with SEO? It doesn’t. Except that if you have a website and are trying to hire an SEO or a freelancer to do your work, you should be considering the use of one of these tools and ask them to explain what they are doing on your website.

Often times, SEO’s do work that is cryptic to you as webmasters. These tools will help your SEO’s explain what they are doing to you. It will also ensure better accountability.

So what are these great tools that I am talking about?

1. http://www.Webex.com - Bought by Cisco recently. They are THE best screen sharing application. Period. They are miles ahead of everyone else in this game. Their screen/application/desktop sharing is almost realtime and their features are the most advanced. Ease of use is amazing. Interface is really well thought out. However, they are the most expensive one too. As you add more meetings, the cost of using Webex can pile up. Starts at $35/month.

2. http://www.GoToMeeting.com: Like Webex. just a little less sophisticated than Webex though. In Screencast software, the compression/decompression algortihms are the key. GoToMeeting is second only to Webex in this case. Slightly cheaper than Webex as well.

3. http://DimDim.com - FREE: Now, this is my favorite. They were launched in late 2007 in Beta and recently launched themselves fully. Actually, one of the senior members of this team is a good friend of mine. The best part about this software - It’s FREE. Yes, they are the only ones that offer this functionality for free. They are still behind the paid users as far as features are concerned but their screen sharing seems to be flawless. I had some trouble using the audio and the screencast at the same time. No big deal. I used Yahoo Messenger Chat for Audio and DimDim for desktop screenshare. Smart huh?

On the same lines, another great software tool is Camtasia Studio. It helps you create quick videos of your screen activity. I can totally see this become the standard for documenting user manuals/guides in the future (already I see video demos of most software) everywhere.

Good luck sharing your desktops and collaborating with your team. Now you have no excuse not to try them out!

Thanks,

Srini

Whether you do SEO for your one website or manage an entire portfolio, you know two things. 1 - Quality backlinks are the number 1 way to achieve a higher search engine rank. 2 - You need tools to quickly identify quality backlinks and rapidly implement your link building campaign.

Now there are hundreds of SEO tools out there. I am not going to try and cover everything, just the top five seo tools that will get you everything you need to get started on a link building campaign without spending a penny.

5. Mike’s Free Search Engine Rankings Tool

If you don’t have a tool yet, please get one. It is way too time consuming to keep going back the the search interface and search for where your site shows up on the results. There are several free and paid tools out there that can make your life easier. This is one thing in which the paid professional tools do seem to offer much better functionality than the free ones. The paid ones like IBP 9 and Web CEO provide the ability to run the rankings at one shot for over a hundred key phrases and then compare today’s results with results from the past. This is very useful. Mike’s rankings tool does offer limited ‘memory’. It remembers your last 20 key phrases and their rankings. Anything beyond 20 is forgotten. Also, the memory comes from cookies. If you clear your cookies, the history is lost. Despite that, this tool provides the best of the free ones. I usually take snapshots of the results using SnagIT and so I can compare with results from the past.

4. Onlywire.com

Social Media sites are THE in thing these days. Between social networking sites (like myspace.com, http://www.facebook.com, http://www.orkut.com, http://www.linkedin.com) and social bookmarking sites (like http://digg.com, http://del.icio.us, http://stumbleupon.com, etc.) that’s where people hang out. For most niches, you will benefit immensely by participating in these networks and intelligently using them to your advantage. Onlywire.com allows you to submit to 15-20 of these sites at once. That saves you a ton of time and is a really useful handy tool that comes for free. Hats off to them. They have been able to scale as well. The tool has been on for months now and still performs, each and every time.

3. Brad Callen’s Article Submitter and Directory Submitter

Brad Callen is almost a celebrity SEO consultant. He has been around for almost 5 years now. His products are widely used. His paid tool SEO Elite is ranked as one of the best SEO tools around. His free tools, however, Article Submiter and Directory Submitter, make it into my list. Article Submitter allows you to submit your article to hundreds of article directories and directory submitter submits your sites to link directories. These can help you get much needed backlinks to prep up your page rank. However, remember that the overuse of this technique can actually hurt your SEO campaign. Only about 10-20% of your total backlinks should be from Article and lInk directories.

2. Yahoo SIte Explorer

This is a great tool, period. Google is a great company. But one thing I don’t like about them is that they don’ reveal search stats to you as openly as Yahoo does. This site basically shows you the number of backlinks pointing to a specific website. A great way to gauge the progress your link building campaign and to see whether your link building campaign is getting results.

1. Aaron Wall’s Backlink Analyzer Tool

This is my #1 seo tool. This is a brand new tool and it’s totally crazy that it is available for free. It allows you to look at the backlinks pointing to a site, and then look at their anchor text. You can also enter a keyword and get all the top sites for that keyword and then appraoch them for backlinks or link exchanges. A great great tool that you should be using.

At http://www.theClickDepot.com, we use all these tools and several other paid tools to optimize your campaign for you.