The five w’s (all questions) seem simple to start with but they can help you to create content just by asking them. Either one per piece of content or as sections of one piece. Or any other way you choose to use them.
They’re child-like in their simplicity yet very powerful:
The question of where to start with your internet marketing usually applies to beginners but can also affect seasoned internet marketers when they want to branch out into a new area. Markets change over time and if you’ve been away from a market you used to make money from for even just a year or two it can seem as though the whole world has changed.
Do a litmus test
This concept is based on chemistry – you might remember it from school – where you dip a coated piece of paper into a liquid to find out whether it’s acidic or not.
The results are quick and simple.
Video marketing can appear to be quite casual. Videos can “go viral” with no advance warning if they catch people’s mood in the right place at the right time. Or they can skulk in a backwater with almost no views. Or anywhere between those two extremes.
What you need to include in your video depends on what your desired end result is.
If your desired result is a viral video that breaks almost every viewing record on YouTube then I wish you good luck but you’re probably better off looking through the most popular videos on YouTube and hoping you can use those for inspiration.
Running an internet marketing business is much like running any other business except that it is usually less tangible – there are often no premises or other physical manifestation of the business beyond what appears on screen – and it can often involve very little in the way of real (face to face) human contact. This sense of isolation means that finding a mentor to help you progress is one of the vital ingredients to moving your business forward.
When you’re first starting out, you can use forums and Facebook groups as surrogate mentors and some people find that these work well throughout their internet marketing career.
It’s far too easy to decide to change things because we’ve got bored with them. Even if our customers are still fine and would actually prefer that we didn’t mess with something they’re used to.
This might be a bit of a rant at first but it’s relevant to your internet marketing, I promise!
I’ve just been forced to upgrade Firefox (the browser I’ve used for a number of years). At the time of writing it’s now on version 29. Still behind Chrome (version 35) but well ahead of Internet Explorer which is “only” on version 11. Mainly because Microsoft still believe that incremental updates in their software are just that – increments that don’t deserve a new version number.
Choosing an internet marketing mentor isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. You’re going to be working with your chosen mentor for quite a few months, maybe even years. So you shouldn’t make a snap decision but equally you shouldn’t use choosing as an excuse to procrastinate and never take the leap forward to using a mentor.
It pays to be prepared whatever you’re doing for your business. That includes producing videos – they’re not as easy to correct afterwards as something like an article and – as a number of celebrities have found – they’re not as easy to recall as you might like.
Video presentations are important to get right. Your aim should be to keep your viewers watching your video rather than clicking away part way through. Whilst there will always be people who don’t watch the entire video, you’ll be able to tell from your stats how long people watch for and can tweak your newer videos to help reduce the number of people who click away.
Grab attention fast
Like most software, video creation software has got easier to use. But it can still be daunting as there are lots of things you can control or tweak with it. Not to mention terms like white balance and bit rates and video codecs and all sorts of other weird and wonderful terms.
Fortunately, for everyday use the out-of-the-box settings are fine. Mainly because software producers realise that we never read the manual or do anything much with the numerous settings they give us.
In my view, slideshow videos are one of the easiest formats to create for YouTube. They’re also useful for people to follow along – you can usually switch to a screen shot if you need to show how to do something on a web page. And they allow you to gather your thoughts before you take the plunge and create a video.