Did you ever want to make a change to your Web site but it’s ten past five on a Friday and your developer has left the building? Have you ever wished you could make that small text change rather than paying a developer? Have you ever wanted to easily add pictures or video to your site?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions then I may have a future as a sales letter copywriter. Oh, and you might be ready to upgrade your static Web site to a content management system (CMS) platform.
Since the beginning of the Web, site owners have wanted to be able to update and manage their own Web sites, but without having to learn HTML or additional programming languages. Early WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors added a lot of bulky code to Web pages that resulted in slow load times and vastly different user experiences depending on the Web browser the visitor used.
Today, by comparison, you can build or rebuild your site on an open-source CMS and have nearly complete control over your site with elegant code that works well in all modern browsers.
Why Upgrade to a CMS?
Control Your Web Site. With a CMS you’ll be able to make most changes to your site: add, edit or delete a page, update an events calendar, add photos or embed a video, update the navigation, the list goes on. You can easily take your email newsletter and create a Web page archive. You’ll never again be at the mercy of a Web developer’s schedule.
Control Your Costs. There are some excellent open-source CMS platforms out there like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. That means the software to build the site is free, although you’ll probably still need to hire a professional to design and develop your site, or convert your current design to a CMS.
Since you’ll be able to handle your future updates inhouse, there’s an obvious cost-savings there as well. Many features that take extra time to develop in a traditional site—such as a site search or a blog—often come bundled in a CMS. If they don’t, there’s always a free or low-cost plug-in that provides the desired functionality.
Finally, because of the way CMSs work, design changes can be completed in a fraction of the time of a traditional site; that means that your future redesigns should be considerably less expensive if you’ve built your site on a CMS.
Control Your Search Engine Visibility. Early content management systems weren’t known for their search engine friendliness, but times have changed. Many CMS platforms use CSS instead of tables, which most experts believe helps with search engine visibility because of the cleaner code.
In addition, most CMS platforms now give you control over your title tags, meta-descriptions and can even create site maps for your SEO pleasure.
Finally, search engines rank Web pages, not Web sites. This means that the more quality pages you put out, the more opportunity you have to rank well for a wide variety of keywords. Since you can create your own Web pages for no additional cost, there’s no reason why you can’t target desired keywords to your heart’s content.
Control Your Membership. OK, “control” may be stretching it. However, many CMS platforms have membership features built in so you can offer member benefits in the form of password-protected content on your site.
A Control Center for Your Social Media Presence. Most open-source CMSs offer some a blogging tool—in fact, WordPress is a blogging platform that has evolved and matured into a full-fledged CMS. Why does this matter? A blog is the hub of your social media presence as it provides a specific place for people to visit that is interactive and allows feedback and conversation.
Beyond the blog, most CMS platforms offer other pillars of social media, such as RSS feeds and built-in tools that allow site visitors to bookmark and share your content, enabling viral marketing on your behalf.
In Conclusion
There are few Web sites out there that wouldn’t benefit from being built or rebuilt on a CMS platform. Take control of your Web site and Internet marketing by making the move today.
If you’d like to talk to someone about whether a CMS makes sense for you, or which platform would be the best fit for your business, contact flyte today.
--Rich BrooksPresident, flyte new media
Saturday, March 21, 2009
HOW TO LEVERAGE WEB VIDEO FOR FUN AND PROFIT (MOSTLY PROFIT)
You know videos on the Web are compelling. You’ve watched them on YouTube, shared links with friends, maybe even posted one or two to your Facebook page. You’ve seen them returned as page one results on Google and heard people say that video is the new killer app.
With high-speed Internet available throughout the US and beyond, video delivered over the Web is a powerful sales and marketing tool.
But is creating a video and uploading it to YouTube enough? How can you maximize the potential impact of your video?
This article’s aim is to show you how to leverage your video through blogs and social media to reach the widest possible audience.
1. Create your video. It could be a tour of the factory floor, a product demo, an interview with employees or customers, or a screen capture that shows how to use a piece of software. In short, anything that would be useful, interesting, funny or, in a word, compelling to your customer base.
For example, I did a series of how-to videos about Twitter, the popular microblogging platform, which targeted my audience of small business owners and entrepreneurs. This in turn got me a lot more “followers” on Twitter that further extended my reach.
Don’t worry about making your video long enough; worry about making it short enough. Two minutes is perfect, five minutes is long and ten minutes is an eternity. People don’t have the time or patience to watch a long video on the Web.
Your video can be saved in a number of different formats, including mov, avi, wmv, mpg, mp4, flv and m4v. Since many video sharing sites limit video size to 100MB you should, too.
Make sure you include contact information in the video such as your URL so people can make contact with you.
2. Upload your video through TubeMogul.com. TubeMogul allows you to submit your pièce de résistance to multiple video sharing Web sites such as YouTube, Howcast, Vimeo and a dozen others. TubeMogul saves you time and provides metrics for all these sites.
3. Blog it. Write a blog post about the video topic and embed the video within your post. You can use the embed code from any of the video sites, but I tend to use YouTube. YouTube counts views wherever your video is shown and this can help the general “findability” of your video, especially since Google seems to favor YouTube as a video source.
4. Create a HubPage. HubPages.com is a site where you can create hubs (pages) on any topic you like, embed videos, and create outbound links. After you have created your 3rd hub your outbound links carry link juice, so be sure to link to your Web site, blog, Twitter account, and more.
Use HubPages as another channel to distribute your video, but don’t use the exact same content that you used on your blog; instead, mix it up a bit. This will give you more opportunity to rank well for your best keywords.
5. Tweet it and update your status. Using your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media accounts, update your status with a link to the video, blog or HubPage so that your friends and followers know about your video and can easily check it out.
You may also want to post the video directly to your Facebook profile or your business fan page.
6. Create an “Ultimate Guide” of all your related videos at Squidoo.com. Squidoo is a lot like HubPages except your pages are called “lenses” here. In fact, feel free to use Squidoo first and HubPages now. The point is by placing your “ultimate guide” on another network, you’ll be reaching a new audience.
Put all your related videos on “dog training”, “fly fishing” or “levitation for beginners” on one long page at Squidoo. Search engines (and people) love focused content.
7. Tweet your ultimate guide and update your status, redux. Don’t worry that some people may have already seen your videos when you released them individually; it’s unlikely anyone saw all of them. If your videos provide value people will want to see them.
In Conclusion
Videos are a compelling part of any online marketing campaign, and can be created for any budget. Just make sure to leverage your hard work by following this road map for maximum exposure.
If you’d like to talk to someone about how to use video or build a online marketing campaign for your business, contact flyte today.
--Rich BrooksPresident, flyte new media
With high-speed Internet available throughout the US and beyond, video delivered over the Web is a powerful sales and marketing tool.
But is creating a video and uploading it to YouTube enough? How can you maximize the potential impact of your video?
This article’s aim is to show you how to leverage your video through blogs and social media to reach the widest possible audience.
1. Create your video. It could be a tour of the factory floor, a product demo, an interview with employees or customers, or a screen capture that shows how to use a piece of software. In short, anything that would be useful, interesting, funny or, in a word, compelling to your customer base.
For example, I did a series of how-to videos about Twitter, the popular microblogging platform, which targeted my audience of small business owners and entrepreneurs. This in turn got me a lot more “followers” on Twitter that further extended my reach.
Don’t worry about making your video long enough; worry about making it short enough. Two minutes is perfect, five minutes is long and ten minutes is an eternity. People don’t have the time or patience to watch a long video on the Web.
Your video can be saved in a number of different formats, including mov, avi, wmv, mpg, mp4, flv and m4v. Since many video sharing sites limit video size to 100MB you should, too.
Make sure you include contact information in the video such as your URL so people can make contact with you.
2. Upload your video through TubeMogul.com. TubeMogul allows you to submit your pièce de résistance to multiple video sharing Web sites such as YouTube, Howcast, Vimeo and a dozen others. TubeMogul saves you time and provides metrics for all these sites.
3. Blog it. Write a blog post about the video topic and embed the video within your post. You can use the embed code from any of the video sites, but I tend to use YouTube. YouTube counts views wherever your video is shown and this can help the general “findability” of your video, especially since Google seems to favor YouTube as a video source.
4. Create a HubPage. HubPages.com is a site where you can create hubs (pages) on any topic you like, embed videos, and create outbound links. After you have created your 3rd hub your outbound links carry link juice, so be sure to link to your Web site, blog, Twitter account, and more.
Use HubPages as another channel to distribute your video, but don’t use the exact same content that you used on your blog; instead, mix it up a bit. This will give you more opportunity to rank well for your best keywords.
5. Tweet it and update your status. Using your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media accounts, update your status with a link to the video, blog or HubPage so that your friends and followers know about your video and can easily check it out.
You may also want to post the video directly to your Facebook profile or your business fan page.
6. Create an “Ultimate Guide” of all your related videos at Squidoo.com. Squidoo is a lot like HubPages except your pages are called “lenses” here. In fact, feel free to use Squidoo first and HubPages now. The point is by placing your “ultimate guide” on another network, you’ll be reaching a new audience.
Put all your related videos on “dog training”, “fly fishing” or “levitation for beginners” on one long page at Squidoo. Search engines (and people) love focused content.
7. Tweet your ultimate guide and update your status, redux. Don’t worry that some people may have already seen your videos when you released them individually; it’s unlikely anyone saw all of them. If your videos provide value people will want to see them.
In Conclusion
Videos are a compelling part of any online marketing campaign, and can be created for any budget. Just make sure to leverage your hard work by following this road map for maximum exposure.
If you’d like to talk to someone about how to use video or build a online marketing campaign for your business, contact flyte today.
--Rich BrooksPresident, flyte new media
Friday, March 20, 2009
The internet has many different Affiliate opportunities that can be taken advantage of, but not all affiliate opportunities are genuine or profitable. Some so called affiliate programs are outright scams and fraudulent. It is worth comparing entering the internet with the entering a mine field full of scatter bombs. On the brighter side however there also are some treasure troves waiting to be exploited. The secret is in knowing where the treasure is. Take my hand let’s walk through together.
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