If you’re wondering why you don’t really see anyone rollerblading any more then we have the answer for you. Well not quite, but the Dos Equis most interesting man in the world sure does. I just love the ads this company puts out and I honestly don’t think they will ever get old! While the Old Spice company is falling flat on its face with Fabio handling the summer ads, the ad agency behind the Dos Equis commercials keep bringing the LOLZ.
There are an endless stream of commercials out there, some good, some bad. Some are so bad that they’re amazing and that brings us to my commercial post of the day. My Spanish isn’t so hot, but Chip was kind enough to lay down the English words for this one of a kind computer store commercial. Thanks to Reddit and our marketing team, we hope to bring some more attention to Chip’s talents and his knack for the craziest tech gear south of the border!
Vivident is a company that lets their advertising people go with the flow, and this clearly shows strongly with this crazy commercial. It’s getting harder and harder to create a commercial that shocks, so prepare for the weird. While it’s not going to be for everyone, there is no real nudity here, but some fuzzed out naughty bits that will surely leave you with the no feeling. While it’s perhaps not the most clever ad, it has done great job of getting people to talk, share and upvote!
I was watching my beloved Canucks last time take down Nashville for the second time when I saw this new Heineken commercial air. This is a company that definitely is insanely smart about who and how they do their branding and marketing. I like this commercial enough to remember to blog about it this morning. I like how they’re mixing in The Asteroids into the mix which is great cross branding, and overall the commercial is so well done. Other beer companies out there should take note, especially Old Milwaukee who’s latest ad makes me want to NEVER buy their product.
While the auto world has been chatting up a storm over a video put out by the fine folks at Hennessey Performance, they’ve been lapping up the exposure. While you folks are in for another motorsport marketing example from me, and this won’t be the last but I’ll at least keep it short. They pitted their latest beast of a creation, their Cadillac wagon vs my personal favorte, the Nissan GTR. They ran the car on slicks against last years Nissan which is what has most people bickering about all over the web. Moral of the story? A little controversy that pits people against people will always drive traffic and branding your way. The story has been picked up on Autoblog.com and Jalaponik, two of the biggest auto industry blogs there are. Not to mention that, but Twitter and just about every related car forum is linking and chatting up a storm. All I can say is, way to go Hennessey and keep up the great work! Our CEO is saving his pennies for your Venom GT and he has very sexy dreams about that car every night!
A lot of people have already done amazing blog posts on video SEO, and I’m hoping to go a little deeper with this post and give you folks some great resources for not only ranking a video, but distributing it properly. It’s no secret that you can get a Youtube video ranked very easily for very competitive keywords, but there are a whole slough of options you can use to market your video beyond that. There are also ways you can use social media sites to make sure your video gets more views, and hopefully is decided upon by Goolge that it should rank well. Sometimes you can just luck out and name the video after the keyword you’re targeting and hit hold, otherwise you might have to work at it a little. 
Doing Video SEO is pretty much the same as link building, at least the mind set and thought process. When I take on a link building campaign for a client who’s site is authoritative in their niche it allows me to attack on a whole other level. Because that site -most likely- has great content, I can hunt down places that would want to link to it. The same principles are in play here, great content should attract links so make sure you’re producing a quality video. If you’re pushing a product, either your own or via an affiliate campaign, the person is going to judge heavily on how your video comes across. This could make or break your campaign, and let’s face it, it won’t have any chance of going viral if it stinks.
Getting Your Videos Out There:
There are hundreds of video sharing websites already and there’s no real need to get your video out to all of them. Keeping track of the top video sharing websites wouldn’t do you any harm, and I usually only submit a clients, or my videos, to the top 10-12 places available. Since there are a ton of them, you can most likely find a few that are based solely around your niche. Thanks to the good folks at Reel SEO, you can find their most awesome and recently updated list of video sharing websites. There’s no need for me to list any here because that will take care of all your video needs, as well keep you busy for hours!
Ok so I’ve got my video ready, now what? Well uploading your videos is the first step, but this can become a very tedious task if you’re doing it a lot. I’ll go into a couple services that might help you with that before going into optimization.
Hey!Spread is my top pick for mass video uploading for a variety of reasons. Now this is not a free service, but that’s fine because it isn’t cheap to run this kind of business. With Hey!Spread you can easily upload your video to the top 20+ social video websites on the net. You can either choose to pick which ones to upload to, or have it automatically grab your videos from Youtube and download them and then proceed to get up to the other video sites. Hey!Spread is also a very well designed site with an interface that a child could use, so you shouldn’t have a problem getting things figured out. Prices for this service are very reasonable and are based on a credit system that you can pay as go, or get billed at the end of the month. A single credit costs .05 and this is the pricing chart from their website;
Tubemogul is another great video distribution and stastical analysis web app that can save you oodles of time. They also have a free version which is defintely worth checking out because you can do up to 100 video deployments a month. This should give you some idea of what this tool can do for you before diving into a larger campaign.
TubeMogul’s analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched, track and compare what’s hot and what’s not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with colleagues or friends.
There are a few things to remember to help target the keywords you’d like your video to rank for such as title, keywords and the description. I know I may be insulting your intelligence with that last sentance, but I just had to make sure….The one thing you might not have thought about when naming and tagging your video properly is that services like Squidoo, Hubpages and other social media sites can pick these videos up. I’ve noticed with a few clients that with the right tagging their videos started showing up all over the place. This really did wonders for their views as well I noticed the videos started showing up in the top 10-20 SERPs.
Social Video Marketing:
There are other ways of attracting views your your video content beyond just uploading to the tube sites, optimizing for SEO and sending to friends. There are a whole stream of interesting and niche video sharing communities that let you showcase your work, build niche channels and spread the good word. All this helps build up your videos and provide them with an edge over your competitors while reaching the top of the SERPs. Just remember that your video content is going to have to be top notch to really make it above and beyond. Let’s take a look at a handful of cool social video sites that can improve your videos stats;
Squidoo of course is a great place to make unique content pages and I sometimes like to make them just to showcase my video work. As well, I mentioned earlier in this post that if you title and tag the video correctly it might show up on other peoples Len’s. This same general principal goes for the other social content creation sites like Hubpages.com and Gather.com. If you’re hitting a hot niche you’re most likely going to have that video picked up.
MeFeedia is a online video sharing community that allows you to submit your embeded videos from other video sites. This is the type of 2.0 site that can help a great deal in getting your video to go viral, or at least get some more hits. You can also network easily by joining groups related to your niche and making sure your video gets added.
Vodpod is a cool video sharing community site that has been growing at a rapid rate and is showing no signs of slowing down. They have embeded videos from over 6000 sites….yes you read that right. The reat thing about Vodpod is not only can you promote your videos, you can also get a link back to the RSS feed providing the content. If you use this wisely you can snag a nice juicy link back to your original content page, whether that be the video itself or your blog. One last little great feature is the ability to create blog widgets with selected videos for your blog, or to share with anyone else!
Videosift is a social video site that takes in popular videos and they’re voted on like Digg or Reddit. The site offers a bunch of features like channels, playlists and a section called Beggar’s Canyon which allows new good videos to get a better chance at votes. This site is also great to push a good video because they receive a large chunk of traffic daily.
Gawkk is another social video site that you allows you to vote popular videos to the frontpage as well share videos with friend and members. All the usual features are there such as channels, groups and user profiles. This social video site is not as popular, and seems to be half a year old but it has been showing growth.
VidsLib is yet another social video site which allows users to vote videos to the front page. There’s nothin too special about this although it used to be ranked sub 10k on Alexa but has seen a massive drop in traffic. I’m not sure if a different site used to be on the domain, but judging by the content that was on the frontpage there’s not a whole lot of user activity anymore.
Yidio is a very cool and relitively new video search engine that is full of only the top quality videos under every niche. They have just dipped under the 10k mark on Alexa so well promoted videos will get your content a good chunk of views. Another great feature of this site is that it is an Adsense sharing social video site, so it never hurts to get the extra cash.
Video Bomb is the last social video voting site I’ll mention before I exhaust my readers. It is pretty much the same as all the rest, has a lot of traffic and has stayed at a steady growth rate over the past year. The only thing I would warn you folks about is there is usually a decent amount of “sexy” videos promoted to the front page. Not really a problem for me but some of you folks might not want to promote on this site.
Paying Your Way In:
This eventually might fall under the Google slap someday but I feel its fine to talk about it because marketing is war! This only works, usually, if you have a really good video to promote so don’t bother trying it otherwise. There is no trick or secret, just hunt down popular users on $insertvideosite and ask them if you could pay them to showcase your video on their channel. Some users have so many followers it’s an easy way to start off the campaign. You could also hire these popular users to create a video for you or do some sort of company review. If you have a product, why not ask if you could send it to them to review. Statistics recently out have stated that 81% of consumers read reviews online about a product before buying…that number will rise so why not have a viral review video going around?
Where To Go From Here:
Well the above list of places to also try and get your video noticed is just a small amount of really popular sites out there. I highly recommend keeping an eye on Mashable, Feedmyapp and Killerstartups for new and upcoming video sites you can promote on. There are also a plethora of options still listed on those sites I didn’t have time to dig out.
If you’re a company or indivual with smaller budget video marketing can be a little discouraging at first, but do your best to keep refining your content and creating powerful social accounts. After a few months of video promotion and adding friends you will start to see when video marketing becomes a very powerful tool. I’ve made so many videos that took days to finish to only have a few hundred views in the end, and others I’ve made goofing off and collect over 2 million views.
Video Marketing Resources:
Reel SEO – The leading blog on video marketing and SEO with so many resources it will make your head spin!
Matt SEO – A leader in the viral video marketing ranks who has been doing online marketing since 1994. If you haven’t heard of Matt, you haven’t been looking hard enough!
Single Throw – If you need a viral video created and distributed to the masses you should probably check out these folks.
