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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 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.

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:

1. Start using it more
2. Get to know the ins and outs of it  (becoming a member of The 90-Day Marketer is a great place to start )
3. Add value to it
4. 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)
5. 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)

However, before watching, let me answer two important questions that will most likely arise in your mind:

Question #1: “Do I need to build my OWN marketing funnel? “

YES!

Why?  Because that will be hands down the best, if not the only way to build your primary network marketing business.  If you use someone else’s funnel, you run the risk of building their business and not your own.

Question #2: Does that mean I need to build my own funnel, which includes web sites, auto responders, affiliate links and so on all by MYSELF?

Absolutely not!

One of The 90-Day Marketer members, Faith Bernard., told me that she finally came to the realization that, and I quote, “Building web sites don’t make me happy.”  I thought that was interesting seeing as how she had a fantastic web site.  The she then told me that she splits the work with her husband.  She does the networking and content, and he does all the technical stuff.

Kudos to Faith!

That is a fantastic arrangement.  Because let’s fact it – we are network marketers, we network.  That’s what we do.  What makes a networker happy is 1) meeting new people, 2) giving them solutions to their problems and 3)helping them achieve long term success.  Am I correct in saying this is why you joined?  That you joined to help people, and not to build web sites.

Unfortunately, many gurus have taken this line of reasoning too far by saying, “oh, you don’t need a web site – just send them to my web site, I will sell them for you, wrap them up with a pretty little bow and hand them back to you so you can sell them into your opportunity.”  The big problem is since the gurus took over, your new found lead knows nothing about you, just the guru.  It’s no wonder your lead typically has no interest in listening to what you have to say.

Bottom line, if you don’t have your OWN funnel, your potential clients will go else where.

Yet building a funnel, complete with a blog, web site, auto responder, tracking software, social media links and so on is too overwhelming for the majority of network marketers!  So what is to be done?

Is there a big “easy” button that will build your own funnel so you can get back to work at doing what you’re good at – building relationships with people and building a massive downline?”

Now there is

The MLM Web Site Building Service.

This service will get your funnel up and running with instructions for you to add your personal touches to better stand out.  What makes this even more fun is that right now the MLM Web Site Building Service is nearly half the price for active 90-Day Marketer members.  Which means for under $300 you’ll have your own funnel to build your own list, and create your own following.

You’ll get your own working funnel with:

• Your own blog
• Your own web site on your own domain
• State of the art tracking software (you’ll know where people are coming from and what areas of your site they like the best)
• Your own auto responder opt-in forms
• Both your blog and web site fully optimized for Google’s search engines (and training on how you can increase it with each new post your write)
• Both linked to social media sites — which traffic sources are now even bigger than Google

90-Day Marketer members, click here to get started for only $295

Non-90-Day members, click here to get started for only $495

Not a 90-Day Member yet?  What’s stopping you?  Jump in and take a test drive with no risk for 30 days.  If the course doesn’t knock your socks off, you can get a full refund, plus you’ll get a steep discount on having your own funnel built for you.  With your foundation built, you can use the course to do the fun network activities that will help put the internet to work for you.

And if you the “do it yourself” type, The 90-Day Marketer course will walk you step by step in building every aspect of your funnel.

So here is the free video on setting up your own funnel.  Enjoy!

I came accross this video as I was doing some research for Twitter. It really hits home the power of social marketing and the incredible opportunity that we have in network marketing to captialize on this new shift. As you may remember, I have been talking about the urgent necessity of getting your “social site” built and using social marketing to drive traffic to it. If you want to get going but lack the confidence to get your social site / system up and running – don’t let that stop you! That’s why I created The 30 and 90-Day Marketer, to give you a step by step approach so you can easily do it yourself and just recently we altered the web site building service so you can have a fully optimized social site and MLM business site – both built for you and in lighting speed.

To get on the Social Marketing tidal wave quickly, click here and get started today

To check out solutions to using the internet with your network marketing business click here:

Have a great weekend!!!

McKay

I’m sometimes asked this question, usually by someone savvy in search marketing. After all, it’s expensive to create and optimize pages for search, so you’d want to amortize that investment over as many keywords as possible right? Actually, no. The number of organic search keywords I recommend you target per page is one.Search Engine Guide Blog, May 2009

I think there is a lot of good advice on this page to help you understand how to rank high on Google with your own blog posts.  

That Dag Burn Couch

And ya know, Annie getting konked on the head had nothing to do with the fact that she was sliding off the couch head first trying to do a handstand.  Nope somehow the couch miraculously tossed her off.  It’s sad really, Annie still refuses to accept the couches apology.

It’s crazy how at a very young age we’re conditioned so that when something goes wrong we look for the cause of the problem outside of ourselves.  Sadly most people maintain this mindset (to some degree) throughout their entire life.

And for most struggling entrepreneurs, it’s a key factor in why they continually fail.  So here’s the deal, if you want to be successful running your own business you have to be able to:

1. Think through and process ideas.
2. Implement a plan and…
3. Systematically execute.

And the most important part of the process…

4.  You have to be accountable for the outcome.

It’s too easy to fall prey to a ‘victim’ mentality where we conveniently place the blame of the outcome on external forces.  Long term success is found on the other side of accountability.  When you blame others you give yourself permission to give up, “It’s not my fault I wasn’t successful marketing on the internet because…”

Being accountable opens the doors for you to find solutions.  Commit yourself to be accountable and you’ll put yourself ahead of the game!

Here’s a quick quiz and depending on your answers, you’ll know if you’re flirting around with a victim mentality:

1.  You’ve interviewed for a promotion at your job and you didn’t get it, when you found out you:

A.   Knew that the interviewer didn’t know what they were talking about
B.    Knew that someone sabotaged you
C.    Knew that you could have done more to prepare

2. At the last minute you decide to invite a friend out to dinner, your friend says they won’t be able to make it, you react by:

A.    Thinking, “She always does this; it’ll be a long time before I ask her out”.
B.    Thinking, “I’m sure she had something important, no worries, I’ll catch her next time”.
C.    Thinking, “Fine, I didn’t want to really go out to dinner with her anyway”.

3. You’re driving down the freeway and a car cuts you off, your first thought is:

A.    “I hope that guy gets in a wreck!”
B.    “Wow, that guy must have something really important to get to.”
C.    “Blasted (Insert State Here) Drivers!”

-Matt Schaugaard