An important aspect of cash on demand marketing is knowing how to use written articles to draw traffic into your web site and therefore to put people in the top of your marketing funnel.
But there are other traffic generation angles cash on demand style marketers have used to get hoards of new visitors to their little web sites, one of which is by using simple VIDEOS and putting them on YouTube!
Now I’m sure you know about YouTube but if you don’t let me first talk to you a little about it and to explain why this is something you really need to get into as a cash on demand marketer yourself.
Online advertising in the UK alone INCREASED BY 73% during 2005-06, taking ad revenues to a COLOSSAL £1.13 BILLION POUNDS.
Far bigger in fact that other media such as consumer and business magazines, radio, outdoor and cinema. It is also believed that Internet shopping will GROW FIVE-FOLD to make up one third of British consumer spending by 2008 (Office for National Statistics).
And it is VIDEO which continues to play an increasing part of this growth. Video online is now literally reaching the eyes and ears of a HUGE NUMBER of highly targeted potential customers, ignore it and you are throwing away a fortune.
So, firstly, what exactly is YouTube?
YouTube is a FREE online video sharing website where any visitor can upload, watch, and share video clips. To see what I mean go to www.youtube.com now.
You can then do a search on anything and you’ll find video clips for it. For instance, suppose you wanted to see this years FA Cup Final winning goal at Wembley (the first FA Cup goal scored at the new Wembley).
If you typed in the keywords:- “Goal FA Cup New Wembley” in the search box, you’d be presented with a number of related video clips
The Growth of a 21st Century Phenomenon…
YouTube was started in 2005 and has grown at a rapid pace, incredibly going from ZERO to over 4 MILLION monthly visitors to their site within 3 months!
And is still growing by leaps and bounds. In 2006 Google acquired Youtube for $1.65 BILLION!
That’s £883 MILLION POUNDS!
Its just phenomenal! Think about it. Bought for a massive £883 MILLION POUNDS only 20 MONTHS after the company was started!
That’s some return for the founders of YouTube, and good news for the rest of us too because in doing this the BIGGEST force in search and internet advertising … i.e. Google …. has combined with the BIGGEST force in online video.
And that means a golden opportunity for a cash on demand marketer to make some serious money. Look at some of the facts & figures and you’ll see why everyone’s so excited…
• In 2006, YouTube won TIME Magazine’s “Invention of the Year”.
• Online video is projected to be the BIGGEST ONLINE TREND this year: YouTube has a huge amount of growth left in it yet – particularly as the savvy marketers find ways to use it to build their businesses.
• YouTube features videos made by thousands of internet users, and has already made many people famous. In fact, more than 65,000 NEW VIDEOS are uploaded EVERY DAY and the site serves up over 200 MILLION CLIPS DAILY!
• YouTube streams all sorts of video content including movies, T.V. shows, music videos, commercials and probably most importantly, a HUGE AMOUNT OF AMATEUR CONTENT contributed by an enthusiastic and thriving community.
• The major advantage of YouTube’s technology over the other various forms of internet video is the video playback technology which is based on Macromedia’s FlashPlayer 7 which is present on over 85% of computers connected to the internet.
YouTube has become one of the largest innovations in internet history…
Why? Mainly because while online video has been around for quite some time, prior to YouTube, there was really no easy or practical way to share video on the internet.
Videos were long and slow loading, and required separate software to view them. If you ever tried watching video prior to YouTube, you may know how frustrating it was.
YouTube has revolutionized online video by developing a technology that easily allows people to watch videos in their web browser, as well as embed YouTube videos into their own websites (more on that in a moment!!).
Unlike it’s predecessors, the video from YouTube actually streams fairly well from the internet, even on a wide range of internet connection speeds.
Video play starts almost immediately (unlike other videos which require either complete download, or take up to several minutes to load) and videos can be paused and re-winded for careful viewing.
So What Does All This Mean For Me As a Cash on Demand Marketer?
A great deal because for a start Online video will probably be the BIGGEST AND FASTEST GROWING ADVERTISING MEDIA for the next few years. You need to take advantage of it.
While the majority of videos on Youtube are posted by amateurs looking for laughs, notoriety, and their 15 minutes of internet fame, a savvy Cash On Demand marketer will find that this online service can be used to:-
Drive traffic to websites…
Get sales messages to potential buyers…
And to market products and services…
Also, traffic from this source is relatively inexpensive. In fact, its almost FREE!
For example, I have one cash on demand business that uses online streaming video. Now because of the ‘broadcast quality’ images required, I pay my streaming video provider around £3,000-4,000 EVERY MONTH, just for bandwidth (the delivery of the footage to people’s computers in a constant stream that is almost as good as TV quality).
Sounds a lot, but its part of a MULTI-MILLION POUND project I’m working on.
BUT for most normal Cash On Demand projects we DON’T need broadcast quality video delivered. That’s where YouTube come in.
Online video sites like Youtube PAY for all of thebandwidth for the videos that they host, and most sites host the videos as long as you want to keep them up.
That means that if a video is played ONCE OR ONE MILLION TIMES you DON’T get a bill for the bandwidth.
It’s like a gift from the Gods!
So once you’ve covered the initial cost of making your own video clip, there’s NOTHING else to pay anyone for the privilege of people being able to view it 24 hours a day seven days a week.
It can stay online for months or even years WITHOUT additional fees! This is SO different to the early days of the internet when if you wanted even a simple banner ad you had to pay each and every month.
In fact, videos get more views than banner ads, and they tend to increase in popularity due to the ranking systems of video sites which tend to favour videos with high view counts in their rankings.
Due to the ‘newness’ of this great advertising medium, you can gain a sizeable advantage before this method of promotion becomes competitive.
This is a great time to be experimenting and testing the use of video in your business…
Getting in on the early wave of popularity of anything new online is a great way to get attention and to get new visitors to your site
Take for example Search Engine Optimization.
When this was the new buzz word in the mid to late 1990’s, you could just add a keyword title to your webpage, maybe add some keyword meta tags to the HTML code, and within days, you could have a page that ranked at the very top of some of the search engines.
If you look at the search engine optimization field today, it has become a very expensive and very difficult task, and is an area full of hassle, frustration and scam artists selling less than effective submission services for an up front fee.
It is extremely difficult to get top rankings based on particular keywords and results often ‘hit and miss’ and by no means guaranteed, even after spending a lot of money on SEO experts.
Learn from this.
Which is why it is a good idea to take action early when new technologies like Youtube come on the scene…
I remember my early Mentor telling me that “…the people who get to the theatre early tend to get the best seats … while the people who get there late may not get a seat at all…”
He had a good point. You need to act fast when something is just gathering pace. And this is no more relevant then with YouTube Videos.
Especially as it is EASY to get many people to view your videos on almost ANY KEYWORD YOU CHOOSE!
Indeed, it is possible to get a TOP 10 RANKED VIDEO in YouTube’s search results with LITTLE EFFORT (even, with horrible cheap looking little video clips).
And despite the huge success and growth of online video since Google’s much publicized acquisition of YouTube, there is still a HUGE TIDAL WAVE OF GROWTH coming from this relatively new technology. Its a cash on demand goldmine … use it!