SiteSell Blog

What Makes a Good Video?

Social Media

There are specific factors which make or break the impact your video has on visitors. Try these tips...

Video Quality Factors

1) Comfort

Discomfort in front of the camera translates loud and clear. Try this fun technique to relax and act more natural in front of the camera...

Film a short video on a subject that makes you smile, even laugh. Something deliberately silly (like a special tongue twister report) is a good choice to take your mind off of the video camera. Do it speaking into the camera, until you can actually smile and feel at ease. Eventually, you will forget that you are nervous about the camera.

Enlist the help of a friend or loved one (someone you're comfortable with) to act as your audience. Seat them beside or behind the camera while you're filming.

Google's +1 and What It Will Mean for You

Social Media

by Help Elf

The Boss (Ken) sent me a few notes and asked me to blend with my own comments on Google's recent +1 release, just to get you started thinking on this. He'll be posting something more definitive when he's had a chance to absorb its meaning, short and long term. So here we go, my very first Elf post! :-)

Google recently announced its "+1" button, which will allow anyone reading one of your pages to "vote" for it back on the search results page (eventually, Google plans to make it available for you to add to each page of your site). This sounds like an experiment in social media, doesn't it? Well, it is, with one major difference...

Any +1 "vote" for your page doesn't go to a social media platform, like a Facebook "Like" does, where all of the friends of the person doing the Liking see a link to your Web page.

Google's first version requires anyone who enjoys your page and wants to +1 it to return to the search results page ("SERP") to do so. That begs the question, why would anyone return to the search results page just to click on the +1 button?

How To Use Twitter For Your Online Business Success, Part 3

Social Media

Now that you know how to build a following in your niche at Twitter, let's look at how you can take the concept of "Niche-Twittering" one step further, with Content 2.0.

Content 2.0 (C2) is SBI!'s Web 2.0 proprietary platform, which enables your site's visitors to add full content web pages with text, images, video, etc. to your site. These pages deliver long-tail search traffic, build community and spread virally.

How do you combine Twitter and Content 2.0? Easy... say, you have a Web site about Anguilla, and someone makes a tweet about a nice Anguilla hotel (which your RSS feed informs you about). Direct them to your Content 2.0 invitation on your site and ask them to share their hotel recommendation on your site!

Or be proactive and ask someone influential in your niche a question, "Have you ever gone out to Sombrero Island? I'm looking for a contact who'll take us there." Or ask it of all who are following you. That starts a conversation about your niche, and builds relationships.

How To Use Twitter For Your Online Business Success, Part 2

Social Media

The key is to find time-effective ways to use Twitter for your online business success. Remember, we only have so many hours in a day. Prioritizing that time is critical. And it's easy to lose lots of time at Twitter, 140 characters at a time.

 

The basic concept for niche-twittering starts as follows...

How To Use Twitter For Your Online Business Success, Part 1

Social Media

Whether you like it or not, social media plays an ever increasing role in achieving online business success. Depending on how you use Twitter, it can be a huge time waster, or make a valuable addition for your niche business.

What Is Twitter?

The best way to picture the "twitter-sphere" is a bunch of people conversing around a water cooler, except in this case, you can only communicate in text and you have a limit of 140 characters!

You can find those "conversations" through Twitter's search tool and other tools (more about those later). Search on your Site Concept Keyword and related keywords (ex., if your Site Concept is RVing, you'd also search for "motorhomes" and "RVs") and then scroll through the results until you find a comment that grabs your attention.

Next step? Follow the most niche-relevant "twitterers." Introduce yourself and share your own thoughts. Follow what's happening in your niche through RSS feeds. Anytime there's something new about your niche, you'll know.

Social Media Tip - What Do You StumbleUpon?

Social Media

Today's social media tip is about a service called StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site that became popular enough for eBay to purchase it. There are now (at the time of writing) over 12.7 million "Stumblers" voting on and reviewing Web pages that they find.

Once you're a Stumbler, if you find a Web page you like, you can vote for it (give it a thumbs up) to add that page to the millions already available through StumbleUpon. Or you can "stumble thru" those millions to find pages that interest you. You do both by adding a toolbar to Internet Explorer or Firefox if you use Windows, or Firefox if you use a Mac (StumbleUpon doesn't work with Safari or IE on a Mac).

StumbleUpon isn't just a social bookmarking site, though. It's also a simple social networking site. You create a page that lists your interests. The Web pages you like in StumbleUpon are added to a "blog" that anyone can view. And on StumbleUpon, if you like the pages that other Stumblers submit, you can become friends with them. Then you'll always be notified when they submit new pages, and they'll learn about yours.

Social Media Tips - How To Use Social Bookmarking for Viral Marketing

Social Media

The previous social media tips article covered the theory behind social bookmarking. Now you want to know how to implement this strategy, right? Let's look at the process, step-by-step.

Step 1) Choose which of these popular social bookmarking opportunities you want to use, and create an account...

http://www.delicious.com/

http://www.stumbleupon.com

http://buzz.yahoo.com/

http://www.google.com/ig (add the bookmarks gadget to your Google home page)

http://www.furl.net/

Step 2) Add your site's home page to your public bookmarks (if not already there) and perhaps one or two of your most important pages with solid content.

Do not add all your pages as public bookmarks. You'll likely be accused of spamming the site. You'll be banned, or worse -- people will start tagging your pages with the "spam" tag, which is the kiss of death in bookmarking circles.

Social Media Tips - Social Bookmarking, A "Delicious" Opportunity

Social Media

When sharing social media tips, social bookmarking often gets overlooked. However, when used properly, it is an effective viral marketing strategy.

Wikipedia defines social bookmarking, saying that users "save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks...."

Yahoo! believes enough in bookmarking that they bought del.icio.us (or Delicious, as it's now called), one of the first bookmarking sites...

http://del.icio.us/

Yahoo! also created Yahoo! Buzz, their own in-house version of online bookmarking...

http://buzz.yahoo.com/

Furl has a long list of the ways people use online bookmarks, like this one about recipes...

Social Media Tips - Become The Butterfly That Stings Like a Bee

Social Media

When reading social media tips, you might have heard the term "social media butterfly." But a butterfly that stings like a bee? Where does this originate, and - more importantly - how do you become one?

Do you remember prize-fighting boxer Muhammad Ali's slogan to "float like a butterfly and sting like a bee"? This slogan has become what many business people aspire to in terms of marketing. Precise expertise with a bit of flair is a one-two punch combination that moves beyond boxing and straight into the realm of online marketing.

What's more is that you don't even have to fight! Phew!

While Ali's marketing style was considered too brash and assertive by many, social media marketing requires you to be outgoing but with a much calmer approach.

Social media is an approach that lets groups create content they're interested in together and then share it with others. Social media marketing is about leveraging those sites for finding and keeping in touch with your customers and prospects.

Social Media Marketing and Link Juice

Social Media

In the rush to be on the cutting edge of social media marketing, many online business people continue to be misguided in their efforts to be relevant.

Pleasing Search Engine spiders is all about feeding them good content and offering them "link juice." Similar comments are written around the Web by well-meaning Webmasters, likely fresh off the plane and out of cash from the latest high-priced conference.

"Link juice"? The term is supposed to describe how much link popularity a page is given from any one inbound link. Getting more of it is supposed to be a Webmaster's main task online while taking part in social networks.

Please don't drink the Kool-Aid. ;-)

Off-page criteria are only one of the two main data-measuring sticks of a Web site. Plus, Search Engines look at so much more than just linking!

It's about tracking human behavior, starting from the results pages of Search Engines and continuing click by click -- even months later -- to gauge content quality.