After learning how to pin pages without images, we realized that an entire campaign could be built on Pinterest – not previously imagined.
Users of our Marketing Calendar Blueprint product know that the marketing of a campaign is only part of the overall business marketing calendar. Determining when that campaign should start and stop, integrating that campaign with SEO, buyer mindset and 3 other factors were important as well.
The addition of Pinterest to that matrix provides additional traffic, insurance against SEO changes, a method of capturing user intelligence like never before available. and the ability to repurpose images one more way.
Taking cues from Chapter 3 in the Marketing Calendar Blueprint, let’s look at Google Trends to see when we should start and end a campaign for “4th of July Party Ideas”. You can see that 4th of July search starts in June and ends on July 5th or 6th. You can also see Continue reading “Creating a Pinterest Campaign”
Everyone seems to ask how to monetize YouTube videos and it seems to me that most people are asking the wrong question. I think what people want to know is how do you derive income from posting YouTube videos. And the difference between those two questions is all the meat.
I thought it would be hard to figure out how to make photos go viral on Pinterest, but I was wrong. It’s fairly easy. I’m not about to tell you that this is the only way to make an image go viral, because you’ll surely be able to point to another way someone else made their photo go viral on Pinterest. But you can check the “most popular pins” on Pinterest category at any time, you’ll find they all follows these rules:
Pretty
This rule is going to sit all by itself because if it’s pretty, people are going to repin it. That’s everything from a tree lined street to a fabulous bow window. But pretty doesn’t mean viral. It will certainly be repinned, but it takes more than “pretty” to get 30,000 repins.
Clarity
The image needs to clearly be about one thing. Not only that, but the caption needs to be in sync with that one thing. A beautiful sunset overlooking the harbor is great. But that won’t go viral if the caption is “I would love to be drinking a smoothie”. Cute, but that clarity isn’t there.
Take a look at this summer-y sangria looking drink. Beautiful picture of the drink. And the caption makes it even better. You look at the picture and say “that looks awesome” but then you read the caption and say “ooh I gotta pin this so I can make this later”. Continue reading “Make Photos Go Viral on Pinterest”
Video marketing is fun and easy. I say it’s fun because rarely does anyone pay $10.50 at the theater to sit and read a magazine for two hours. Nope, people like video.
Did you know that you don’t even need a video camera to start video marketing? I mean you don’t even have to rent one or hire someone or anything like that. You don’t even have to have pictures.
Now, I guarantee you’ll get yourself a video camera after you start doing this, perhaps you’ll even get video editing software. And the only reason that will happen is because video is fun. Once your customers comment that they liked the video you e-mailed them, or saw a video about you on Facebook – there will be no turning back. Video just creates fun positivity.
So how about the easy part? Well, I’ve got some tips for you to make this SUPER easy. If you’re able to be found in Google for your keywords, head over to YouTube’s Search Stories site and make a video of your company. All you need for that is to know which keywords bring up information about you. That’s it. And it’s FREE!
Then, find some marketing photos of your company online, in your camera or elsewhere and load them up to Animoto. Animoto is a service that will turn photos into a video complete with music, a bunch of fun graphics and fancy stuff. Oh yeah, that’s Free, too.
(along that same lines is a service Trip Advisor put together called TripWow. It’s designed for travel videos, but I’ve adapted it to many things. And it’s FREE).
YouTube, of course, is the ultimate video tool. It’s the #2 visited search engine every day. If you don’t have video editing software, that doesn’t mean you’re without options. When you load one of your videos up to YouTube, you get instant access to free tools to edit, add titles, add music, frames, captions and even “Links” to other videos. There’s no cost for that either – and it’s pretty fun at that.
Here’s a great example of a video that links to other videos. What kind of ideas does that put into your mind? You can watch the video from the beginning, but if you just want to see the “magic”, start watching it about 3/4 of the way through.
Now, when you really want to get creative, and I mean creative! – watch these two videos. These are browser based videos and are really going to blow your mind about what is possible. These are “fun”, but not so “easy”.
[stextbox id=”info”]1. The Tostitos video on Vimeo (a YouTube type site)
2. The Bear Movie on YouTube. There’s a few bad words in this one, so get past that and see what this video can do.
3. Finally, Animal School on RaisingSmallSouls.com. Not only is the video beautiful, but she’s embedded a way for your customers to sign up on your mailing list – right in the video itself. Very creative. [/stextbox]
Optimizing marketing videos for small business is not difficult – but we’ll leave that for another lesson. The point is . . . video marketing is fun and easy. Not only can you do it without anything, but with a little time you can create endless opportunity.
Video is powerful. Did you know that people watch more internet video these days than they do television? Did you know that Google indexed video as it does everything else and will place it on the first page of results ?Did you also know that 95% of people watch internet videos to the end? They don’t stop in the middle.
That says 1 thing quite clearly – video is powerful!
So, why not use that to your advantage? If you’re a small business, why not have a contest challenging your customers to make great videos about your company and putting them on YouTube. Tell them what the title needs to be (like Nashville’s Best Pizza) and let them know if you can find it, you’ll judge it and award the winning video a free pizza or Cadillac or something. . . Make it valuable and your customers could very well start marketing your business for you.
To make it even sweeter, if you use WordPress (or could build a site using it), you could display all the videos in the same place using the TubePress plugin. All it requires is that you log-in to YouTube, add all the videos you’d like to a playlist, then tell TubePress the playlist ID. That’s it. It will create a page with all the videos on it – no code necessary.
Consider that! It’s a great way to get some marketing help from your customers.
Silly bands are ridiculous. If you don’t have a kid under 10 years old, you might not know what these are. So, let me describe these silly bands. Picture a rubber band. Got it? It’s round and rubbery. Now, instead of round picture one in the shape of a giraffe. Thats it! That’s a silly band.
Now, these bands come in packs for 20 for $6. If you go to Staples, you can buy 2500 rubber bands for $4.50 – but Silly Bands – they command a premium. Similar to Talking Elmo and Cabbage Patch Kids, every kid has to have 20 of these bands on their wrist at all times.
So how do you translate this Silly Bands phenomenon into your next viral marketing strategy? You can’t. There’s no lesson to make this one of the great viral marketing examples. Why these rubber bands have gone completely viral among kids is beyond me. It’s beyond everyone actually.
If you’re the guy that created Silly Bands, please tell us what kind of revenue you projected to make when you came up with the idea. I doubt it was 1/100th of what you’re making now. If there’s a reason these things have gone completely nutty – please let us know.
It can’t possibly be marketing. First there was the pet rock. Then there was the hula hoop. And now – Silly Bands. I may just go outside and glue grass to kiwi – maybe that will sell.
So my kids and I made a video at Animoto.com this weekend. When I told them about a contest I’d gotten via e-mail, they got excited to do it. So we took some photos, made a few videos with the Flip Video Camera and that’s about all the knowledge we really needed.
There are several video services, like Animoto.com, that take photos and video you upload and turn them into a pretty cool video.
In the case of our holiday video, Animoto.com did all the video editing, added the music soundtrack and created the transitions between segments. Very easy.
What’s even easier is services like that (including the software on the Flip camera), will then upload the video directly to YouTube for you. You can now be taking simple video, shooting a few pictures and in the matter of minutes you can have a cool video with links to your site on YouTube helping to draw traffic.
Why would you walk around without a camera for that matter? You can always be teaching, advising or just goofing off showing your personality. Either way videos build trust and a relationship with your contacts.
