Welcome
Hi , this is McKay Earl, owner of The 90-Day Marketer, this site is designed for entrepreneurs seeking to take their business online. Whether it be a brick and mortar, network marketing or even if you just entertaining the idea – this site’s purpose is to give you the solutions you need to get the internet working for you.
You Tube – should you bother? May 18, 2010
Video marketing is an extremely popular marketing strategy right now, but is it good for you?
If it is — when should you or your downline start utilizing it?
Before jumping into this new marketing sensation, let’s talk about the pros and cons.
Pros:
- Currently video marketing is the hottest, most effective marketing media available. Google and other search engines LOVE video and will rank them higher than web sites and will display video submission in a matter of minutes as opposed to weeks with a well crafted web page.
- Video has become substantially easier to use, especially with the user friendly enhancements and software helps that have become available in the past couple of years.
- People love to watch videos! Text will never die, but video is something that really pops, and gets attention. The majority of web viewers will always look at video more than the text around it.
- Cheap, cheap, cheap. Creating videos yourself has become so widespread that in many cases you already have all the technology right now to start making one. Almost all laptops come standard with a built in camera, microphone, and editing software. If you don’t have any of these things, you can spend a few bucks and get a top notch studio. And if you want to go super fancy you can get the new Kodak Zi8 for $150 (full HD quality), a wired lapel mic for $30, and a super easy to use HD video editor like Sony Vegas for $50. This means you can have a full fledged High Def image, with crystal clear audio and edit it all together like the pros for a little over $200 – that’s it!. Of course, you could go more fancy and spend 20 to 30 thousand, but it would be overkill. Your videos aren’t going onto big screen TVs – they just need to look great on a computer screen.
Ah, but there are some drawbacks that you need to be aware of . . .
Cons
- It can be very time consuming: Unless you do a ton of them and develop a system, it will take a long time to start churning out your videos. Expect delays as you start out. Then once you get better at it, you may even take longer because you’ll want to fancy them up. Either way, video takes a long time.
- Not for the beginner: While it’s true that video production has decreased in difficultly, it’s still complicated. And if you tap out at e-mail and web surfing, you may want to skip video marketing altogether.
- Will your videos stand out? I think you’ll agree that with the explosion of internet videos has come an abundant of mediocre to down right horrible marketing videos. These videos are so amateurish and low quality that they do more harm than good. Experience is a great teacher, so bad videos can be put to good use as they help tutor you to become better, but if you want to speed things up, I would encourage getting the training you need so you can STAND OUT from the beginning.
- Is it necessary? In many cases video is not necessary. Videos are great as icing on your marketing cake, which means that there are many other foundational things you need to have in place and once you have them in place, video can vault your marketing to a high level. However, if you do video first, your foundation will be so weak that all the hard work of video production will do very little good to your bottom line.
**There are some mid-range applications that are easy for the beginner, are quick to create, take no equipment, yet look great. Such applications, for a monthly fee will take your text, images (which they provide a library to choose from), and music (with their library) and put together a compelling, interesting video in very little time. A super advantage! But. . . they do have limitations. These videos are designed to be short and will not work as a consistent stream of information. Excellent for a message that you want to punctuate - but not a great platform for regular content (but this could be a matter of opinion – I welcome any comments that think I’m crazy on this point).
My advice to you
Before video, make sure you have a strong foundation:
- Get the Big Picture of marketing
- Set up your blog or web site
- Get your marketing tools in place
- Develop your copy writing skills
- Create a marketing plan
- Build a following
- Have a sales process in place
- Have a retention strategy ironed out
When it comes time to hit video hard – you will want to make the most of it. And with a solid marketing foundation, you’re sure to come out a winner!
Your friend in the internet / network marketing world,
McKay Earl
To get your marketing foundation built on solid rock – get started with The 90-Day Marketer course today!
The 90-Day Marketer for Network Marketers
The 90-Day Marketer for Small Businesses
The 90-Day Marketer Has Closed it’s Doors . . . April 30, 2010
Okay – not for good – it just made for a fun headline.
The doors are closed to new sign ups for both the The 90-Day Marketer courses for the next few weeks while we make some pretty substantiation (no . . . more like Rock Your World Amazing) changes.
If you would like to keep posted on the progress, which includes some free videos and goodies, just add your name and e-mail below.
Facebook’s Takeover of the Internet April 23, 2010
Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, delivered a keynote on Wednesday where he outlined where the web is going and how he plans to take over the world (okay . . . he didn’t actually say that, but he did say the web is moving more ”social” and I see Facebook as the clear leader of that movement).
Finally, Google has a real competitor - and it's CEO is still in his 20s!
So what are Facebook’s big plans? As reported by PC World:
Facebook has revamped its application development platform to make it possible for the social-networking site and other Web sites to mesh what they know about their end-users and automatically personalize the experience people have online.
For example, a visitor to a participating news site or a music-sharing site could be served up content upon arrival based on previously stated preferences on Facebook or participating sites. The visitor could also see a list of Facebook friends who are already registered on the other site, and even what comments they have posted there.
“People can have instantly social and personalized experiences everywhere they go,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, during a keynote speech Wednesday at the company’s F8 conference for developers.
To read more, just type in “Facebook Keynote” in Google News.
In other words, the world wide web is going more and more social and if you want to succeed as a business owner, you will need to better utilize the king of social media – Facebook.
My Facebook recommendations for you:
- Start using it more
- Get to know the ins and outs of it (becoming a member of The 90-Day Marketer is a great place to start
) - Add value to it
- Learn how to effectively, confidently and yet respectfully introduce your Facebook friends to your USP (Unique Selling Proposition or put another way, giving prospective customers a good enough reason why they should buy your stuff)
- Don’t waste your time
In other words:
Use Facebook more, learn the ins and outs, add lots of value, be professional when selling, and lastly, be careful to spend your time wisely.
Okay, so with that – get out there and be more social!
(if you would like to join my Facebook profile, make sure when “friending” me to put a little comment about this post or The 90-Day Marketer. I get a lot of friend requests each day, so this will help me sort through them a bit faster)
Find Great Images on a Budget! February 14, 2010
A few weeks ago I showed you how to find a ton of free or inexpensive sites to get clip art and photos on your blog or videos. Today I will be highlighting two great sites that I recently found out about. I think you will be blown away with how easy and cheap getting great looking images as become!
My Marketing Secret Sauce February 2, 2010
Learn my marketing secret sauce that helped me go from struggling to get 8 distributors in a year to over 8 a month.
