Joint Venture Lightning

One of the most powerful ways to drive targeted traffic to your web site is through the use of video.

As I mentioned in my welcome video, I would be discussing web video in future posts. Well that time is now. One of the first things I do with every single one of my clients is to discuss how we can convert their content into a visual format for video.

The obvious answers are:

• testimonials
• product reviews
• demonstrations
• welcome messages
• call to action ie: subscribe to my mini course or newsletter

The less obvious answers can include the main content that we plan to sell. Most people tend to think in terms of text content like e-books, white papers, and special reports. Customers almost always prefer video content for the following reasons:

• testimonials and product reviews are much more believable
• demonstrations are more easily understood
• welcome messages are more personal
• calls to action become more powerful
• perceived value of content and its quality goes up
• video is more fun to watch
• customer gets a sense of time and urgency

Once I have the basic videos shot and edited, I upload to the web with an awesome FREE video tracking and uploader service call TubeMogul. This service lets you upload your videos once then distributes them to 12 different video hosting services on the web. An added benefit is the powerful tracking feature built in. You can see what kind of results your videos are getting after they are online.

To use TubeMogul, register for a free account and click the upload tab at the top of the page. Here you will find a page with the 12 different video hosting services. You will need to go to each and register for their free accounts before you can load your login and passwords to TubeMogul. I have listed each site’s registration page below for your convenience:

• YouTube
• Yahoo
• MySpace
• MetaCafe
• Google
• Revver
• DailyMotion
• Blip
• Brightcove
• Veoh
• Crackle
• StupidVideos

It takes a few minutes to get signed up on each site but once you have done that and confirmed your accounts on each then you can load your login and password for each into TubeMogul. Then you only have to upload videos once, hit launch and TubeMogul sends it to each video hosting site for you. This saves you TONS of time.

There is a more powerful version of this type of service… if you can afford the fees. It’s called TrafficGeyser. It uses the same concept of upload once and distribute to many. The difference is that TrafficGeyser can send your videos to over 50 different web sites where TubeMogul only goes to 12.

When should you use TrafficGeyser? When you know your landing pages are converting well and the sales you generate will more than cover the costs of the monthly fees. I start my clients off with TubeMogul to test video response and conversion rates then when we start making money, we boost it up to TrafficGeyser.

I’ll cover more on this subject in future posts. I hope that helps get you started.

Well, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks since my last post. So I thought I had better give you an update on what’s been going on.

Pam over at FitClub4.com had to go to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. She was conducting a class when one of her clients who works at the doctor’s office came down to the club and told her, “You need to get to the hospital right away.” Turns out that Pam’s appendix needed to be removed before things got worse.

So, she’s been out for a couple of weeks recovering from surgery. This set-back has put us behind on creating her e-course fitness program. However, she is much better and is able to lift small weights and lead classes again. She still has a few more weeks before she’s allowed to go back to her full workout schedule. You can read more details of her experience on her web site.

The author Geoffrey Zimmerman has been keeping me very busy with updating content on his new site. We finally got all of the first 29 chapters loaded into the auto-responder and set to go out every other day. In case you didn’t know, Geoff is also a screen writer who has had success in the television industry back in the 1980’s writing episodes for the hit show Miami Vice.

He just sent me a copy of a short comedy film he made in the early 1980’s called “Somewhere in Southern California.” It’s 30 minutes long and needs to be broken into chunks so it can be loaded onto Youtube. We’re going to use these video chunks as a tool for driving traffic to his site. I should be done with that this week.

I have been re-packaging George Schaefer’s weekly horse training tips into a mini-course and working on re-writing the sales copy to build the value of the course and increase subscription rates. He’s getting traffic and now I’m working on increasing conversion. This is great because we haven’t even started actively marketing the site yet.

Our next immediate goal is to get at least one basic course on video that will sell for $14.95 as a download complete with the written transcripts.

Last week I met with Matt Lee, owner of The Record Depot. He’s unhappy with his current web service and he’s getting no traffic at all. This means he’s not getting any web based sales, so the site is costing him money because he’s paying the monthly merchant account fees. I’ll see what I can do for him in terms of updating his site, increasing traffic and sales.

I also met with his wife about helping them set-up a non-profit autism support group to help families with children suffering from autism.  Initial research shows that this is a huge market with real potential for growth. The idea would be to help them create valuable information products for free download and for sale.

The free content will help families, doctors and others with the essentials. The for-sale content will be very detailed and valuable in helping families accomplish specific goals regarding autism. The idea is that the sale of content will help run the organization. I like the idea and their mission, so I’m looking forward to getting started on this project.

To wrap things up for today… I spent a very happy Thanksgiving with my wife and kids in Raleigh, N.C. with my wife’s side of the family. Lots of turkey, ham, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, cranberry relish, stuffing, gravy… mmmmmm. I’m feeling hungry and sleepy just thinking about it.  Tomorrow, we do it all over again at my house here in Virginia for my side of the family.

I think I’ll go make a turkey sandwich.

Have yourself a very safe and happy holiday season.

Geoffrey Zimmerman has been busy working on his trilogy called Love Never Dies.

The challenge is to get readers interested in his first book so that we can build a market interested in buying books II and III. The approach that we are going with first is to offer the first few chapters online to draw the readers into the story.

Then we offer the reader the chance to subscribe to the novel in a twice per week e-mail where they continue getting the next 29 chapters as downloadable PDF files.

That’s nearly half of the book.

The first few paragraphs of each chapter are included in the body of each e-mail as a short teaser to draw the reader into the story. Then they can choose to download the entire chapter to finish reading until they get the next installment.

Geoffrey is currently working on gathering photos to include with each chapter as a visual element to enhance the reader’s experience. One photo is to be included at the beginning of each chapter to help set the mood or tone.

A word of caution here. Do NOT include photos in the actual e-mail as this will bog down servers and wreck your deliverability. We are including the photos in the PDF download file and simply e-mailing the link to the download.

The rain was pouring down and had been for two solid days after three months of severe drought.

George called to reschedule the video shoot. We met this past Monday at a beautiful horse ranch in Forest, Virginia to spend the entire day shooting videos for his new web site www.TrainingMyHorse.com.

We managed to get plenty of video for his free “Horsemanship Tip of the Week” subscription content. I have been spending the week editing, formatting and uploading the videos as well as posting his content to the new site. Check out his free samples posted on the front page to get an idea of the type of tips he’s offering for FREE in order to build his subscription list.

Once we get a list going, we’ll poll the subscribers about their most burning questions and work to create a great product for sale.

You might be wondering how we settled on “Training My Horse” as a domain name instead of something like “Natural Horsemanship.” The answer is RESEARCH.

I spent hours looking for available domains that use top searched keywords. Here are the results:

• Natural Horsemanship - 1,328 searches per day… not bad.
• Horse Training - 23,458 searches per day… Much BETTER.

The competition is also much bigger with these two words which means that the most likely combinations are already registered to other owners. We managed to acquire Training My Horse dot com. It’s short, easy to remember, straight to the point, focuses on the mind of the customer, and uses to the two biggest key words. Perfect.