One of the frequent complaints I hear about video-based traffic generation via YouTube is that conversion rates can be be in sub decimal range ( significantly less than 1%), but if you look at some of the leading lights on the network and how they’ve parlayed their popularity into opportunities (and new income), you might want to give YouTube a second look.
First the bad news. As interesting as your internet marketing technique or product is, most YouTube visitors will only be too happy to slap it down with a low rating because it’s disrupted their entertainment schedule. It might’ve been because you tagged your SEO video with “Miley Cyrus” or “Lady GaGa”. So tagging your video correctly is a function of getting qualified traffic, not just pure traffic numbers alone.
You’ve probably heard of some of the headliners at events like SxSW and BlogWorld such as Lisa Nova and iJustine, but unless you’re actively researching the tween/teen market, you might not be aware of some of the up-and-coming YouTube posters.
Savannah Outen
Oregon-based 16-year-old Savannah first started posting videos of herself singing in March 2007 and posts under the username Savannah7448.
Parlaying her online popularity of 122,000 channel subscribers and (more…)
I was hanging out at an internet chatroom listening to the latest buzz on the internet and the name “Magibon” came up.
Like iJustine (aka Justine Ezarik), Magibon is a young American woman whose videos on YouTube have generated quite a bit of interest, especially in Japan.
With 3.3 million views, it’s a little difficult to fathom the appeal where a young girl looks back at you for all of 30 seconds to about 4 minutes.
BUT the fact is that some of her videos have garnered between 1 million to 3 million views, she’s also appeared in a recent issue of Japan’s Playboy magazine (a non-nude pictorial) and been featured on a Japanese internet TV station GYAO.
I think her appeal has to do with the fact that she looks like a Japanese schoolgirl or anime character (maybe both), and appeals to the techie/net-savvy/Japanese manga-anime reading/watching audience.
And she’s a partner of the YouTube partner program too.
What do we learn from this?
The fact that she’s being discussed in internet chatrooms suggests that rich media beyond text is being actively discussed in chatrooms. Subtle content is hammering its way onto YouTube viewers (especially in the tween/teen demographic), more so than overt content-based ads.
Is Magibon being sponsored by a skin whitening or skincare company? If not, it’ll just be a matter of time.
Video literally gives “face time” to everyday spokespersons (think of the Benetton or Dove print ads given the video treatment).
One way innovative marketers have bounced off the successful platform of video broadcasters like Magibon has been to (more…)
One of the strength and at the same time, weaknesses of social media is it’s social nature.
Because you are able to broadcast your message across multiple platforms and multiple social networks, you can reach a huge number of people in a very short time.
A recent incident (nowhere near conclusion now) bears this out.
About a week ago, Jim published a blog post “Twitter Marketing Experiment – TwitterMeThis” where he’s pay $5 to the winner of a trivia game played on the Twitter micro-blogging (similar to SMS text messages) platform.
But I’m not so keen to talk about the discussion as to look at how it took place.
Far beyond a one-to-one email exchange, the issue has escalated to the point of seeming disagreement and the potential departure of Jim from the Geekcast team.
In the non-social media world, it would have just remained a private exchange of emails.
Within the social media context, the communication trail has gone through several blogs (many of which are highly trafficked), and re-syndicated or referred to by other blogs.
It has also been twittered about (with many of the protagonists in this exchange having followers in the high hundreds.
Add to this the number of Youtube and other video responses being generated, and you can see that a minor disagreement has blown up to probably most of the affiliate industry knowing or at least hearing about this.
Mark Wielgus, or just “Mark” from 45n5.com (right) is one of those marketers whom you sit up and take notice of.
I found his site when he first launched his eBay-Amazon-Youtube mashup script, which lets you build an affiliate site easily. Mark has already done the API (application programming interface) work for you, so you can skip around the techie aspects and get round to the business of generating affiliate commissions.
He followed that up with his 19pages.com application, which lets you build a niche site easily, and the best thing about it doesn’t require a MySQL connection, so you can transport it from one webhosting account to another easily. If you’re into site development/site flipping, it can be a handy tool to add value to a site (and increase it’s monetization and asking price too).
He’s since gone on to launch his Top100 “make money online” blog rankings (he developed the code) and it’s generated a fair amount of buzz in the internet marketing blogosphere.
So naturally I had to have him on the Friday Podcast to pick his brains about developing software applications to boost your internet marketing efforts and to directly monetize.
We talked about the building blocks of application development, as well as monetizing your application once it’s good to go.
You can hear our thorough discussion (weighing in at more than an hour long) and hear about his latest project ShowYourAdHere.com in the latest edition of the Friday Podcast accessible below:
Here’s an interesting item from WebProNews, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince (or is it Prince now that the copyright hold on his name has been dropped…) is trying to take action against the big kahuna of file sharing Bittorrent sites – The Pirate Bay, Youtube and eBay over alleged copyright infringement of his name and intellectual property.
Already the Prince video clips are going up faster than older ones are being taken down at Youtube. Is this really a battle worth fighting for?
When products were physical – in the form of a CD, DVD, book, manual – it was easier to maintain copyright. When Prince distributes his CD free with the UK paper, were the CDs imprinted with “Promotional CD – Not for Sale”? Did they say “Resale Rights granted”?
And if you give away media and content free in one channel, how do you enforce pricing in another channel, whether it’s a iTunes store or in a CD store?
The moment something can be digitized, whether it’s an MP3, PDF, DOC, JPG or other digital media file, you can have legislature like the DMCA (digital millenium copyright act) and DRM (digital rights management) infrastructure in place. You can even password protect your files, but eventually these protective measures will be overcome.
If you’re to believe the hype, the future of traffic generation lies in video.
Beep!!! Don’t believe everything you hear!
In this edition of the Friday Podcast, I compare various channels like text, audio and video and you’ll see that there’s still life in the other channels.
Friday Podcast Episode 18: Tweaking Your Traffic Channels For Maximum Profit[ 8:47 ]Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (724)
Mark Wielgus, or just “Mark” from 45n5.com (right) is one of those marketers whom you sit up and take notice of.