YouTube Marketing Strategies

The book I read to research this post was YouTube Marketing Strategies by John Tighe which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle. The bulk of this book which is only short is anterview between John and a YouTube marketing expert David Walsh. David has a YouTube channel that has around 47,000 subscribers and a total of 4.4 million viewings. David started his channel in 2013 and this intwerview is about how it became so successful. David has a web design business and has only mentioned his business website once in a video but it gets loads of visitors as a result. He gets loads of business too. He does stress the importance of adding keywords to a video after all YouTube is owned by Google and it is added to their search engine as well as the YouTube one bringing it lots of visitors. He also releases free guides on Kindle which are normally only short but attract visitors to his site and channel. He only makes one video a week and stresses anyone can do what he does. I did really enjoy  reading this and do recommend reading it. I think his website is http://davidwalshonline.com. He lives in Ireland and is organising an event in LA for all his fans such has been the success.

 

Visual Social Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Visual Social Marketing For Dummies by Krista Neher which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. This book is about marketing your business through visual mediums like photographs, videos and presentations. Slideshare is the biggest social network devoted to presentations which most people do in Microsoft Powerpoint. Video is mostly shown through sites like Vimeo & YouTube although you can use mainstream sites like Facebook. There is a site called Instashare that lets you put on it up to 15 seconds of video. Of course many of these sites have pro packages you pay for and get additional features. There is also Pinterest where you get a tiny program which is a virtual pin that goes into your browser and when you see something you like you click it and it is embedded into your page on Pinterest. There are social bookmarking sites that work in a similar and it is worth bearing in mind a lot of what you see on the internet is copyright and you should embed it rather than copy it which infringes the copyright. This book is quite interesting but didn’t have that much knowledge I didn’t already know although I have read lots of similar books. I think most people would find it interesting. A lot of marketing is done with smartphones and there are apps like Vine for video editing & Photoshop Express for photo editing to help with this. Even laptops are a bit cumbersome so most people use a phone or tablet for this purpose. There is also sites like Google + and Twitter that are mainstream social media sites but have a very receptive audience for photos in particular. I did enjoy reading this book and I think it gives you the nuts and bolts for promoting your business. There is also in the Part of Tens lists of 10 types of photos and 10 types of video you can use for promoting your business. It would work equally well with promoting something like your charity or even song.

 

Marketing On Facebook

The book I read to research this post was Mining The Gold On Facebook by Kimberly Dubbeld-Deas which is a very good book which I bought on kindle. Kimberly has done a series of these books that includes Linkedin & Twitter as well as this book. They break down the process of marketing your company into simple steps that anyone can follow. She also tells you about apps and websites that can help in this process with many of them being free. I own all 3 of these guides and may re-read them so I can market my blogs more effectively. Anyway to market on Facebook you need a business and a personal page and the latter will mostly have interesting information about you and maybe a little about your company but not too much. Your business page can run apps like a social media calender or a like button which a personal page can’t do. You need to define your target market which is based on various demographics like age, sex, location etc. One part of your marketing is sending ads to these potential clients and you must work how much you can reasonably afford in seeking out these clients. With many the best you can hope for is they will click the like button on your page and maybe give you some referrals. There is an app called google calendar that will work with smartphones and let you plan your day. At http://quantcast.com they are specialists at defining the demographics of your potential customers for a fee. If you go to http://hootsuite.com they have an app that schedules your posts so they are being posted at different times to maximize exposure. At http://facebook.grader.com you can see stats for visitors to your facebook pages. At http://namechk.com you can check if your page name or business name is available on a variety of social media sites. At http://involver.com they have apps for your business page quite a lot of which are free. You need to define keywords for your business page so people can find you and check your competitors pages to see what keywords they use. Your business page needs 25 likes for you to own that domain. Facebook gives you a generic numbered domain until then. I found this book quite inspirational and very interesting.

Marketing On Linkedin

The book I read to research this post was Mining The Gold From Linkedin by Kimberly Dubbeld-Deas which is a very good book which I bought on Kindle. This is only a short book that presents in step by step form how you should be promoting your small business on Linkedin. This author has written similar books in the same series on Facebook & Twitter as well. Linkedin is the best B2B marketing opportunity on the planet and a must for a business to promote itself. Linkedin do let you advertise on their site with adverts starting at $10 each and there are 2 programs, one for businesses with a marketing budget of less than $25,000 and the other is more than that amount. When you join Linkedin there is a free basic option which is probably no good if you are promoting anything and business and pro accounts which you pay for but let you network easier with other people. Don’t forget on Linkedin if you contact anyone especially to do business you normally get another party to introduce and recommend you. There are groups on Linkedin and some are specifically for small business like Business Matters Magazine which is one of the bigger ones. There are also networker groups in general like Leading International Open Networkers or LIONS. You can write articles and answer questions to show off your expertise and become an expert in your field and win business. There are also 3rd party sites like http://lions500.com which are for linkedin networkers and charge a subscription. It is a good idea to start your own group when you get quite a lot of contacts. An interesting thing is often business pages with in Linkedin are ranked higher in Google than a companies website. This is an interesting book that I enjoyed reading and I think it is useful to anyone with a small business.

 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4

The book I read to research this post was Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 For Dummies by Joel Scott et al which was a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

Funnily enough I think this was the only version of this software they did a dummies book although there are lots of other books on more recent versions. This book was released in 2008 at a time when this program was software on a cdrom, so you need a server to run it on and SQL Server & Exchange Server to run it. More recent versions have crossed over to cloud computing & might be classed as Software As A Service or SAAS. Nonetheless I think this book is interesting and sometimes you can buy new software on sites like Amazon that are unused but old. CRM or customer relationship management software started out as something to help salesmen manage their customer details but although the name has stuck they now have branched out with many more features so it is quite relevant to employees like managers. Among the deatures is a product catalogue builder which is most useful to sales people. There is also a campaign which can be used for any kind of promotion and includes a mail merge feature so you can type a letter once and automate the process of adding clients details to each letter. There is a report builder which is a free download for budding programmers and is also included with Visual Studio which if you subscribe to the most recent cloud version is free to departments with 5 or less programmers. I did quite enjoy reading this book and I am sure the most recent version can’t be that different to this version of Dynamics CRM 4.

Mobile Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Mobile Marketing For Dummies by Michael Becker et al which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is a few years old so some of the technology in it might have been superceded like at the time of publication Windows Phone 7 hadn’t been released yet. Apparently in developing countries almost everyone who can afford it has a mobile phone because the infrastructure of a standard phone network just isn’t there. This book is about marketing your company for people with mobile phones and a lot of it’s geared towards the smartphone market. A lot of companies get a mobile marketing agency like http://www.constantcontact.com. An interesting technology is IVR or Interactive Voice Response where a customer phones you and is presented with a menu where they press a button or speak into the phone to activate an option an example is http://www.angel.com of a provider. Some banks like Western Union are allowing people to buy stuff direct from their mobile phone an interesting example is Amazon where you simply enter your password and your credit card details are entered automatically once set up initially. If you get a mobile website I have one at http://oldescratbag.com a good provider which I use is weebly or try

http://starcut.com .Some companies use a bluecast provider at shows or exhibitions etc where a message or photo etc is sent to people walking by your stand by bluetooth and they have the option of accepting it or not. An example is

http://www.aura.net . Also a website I recommend which is all the latest mobile technology news is http://engadgetmobile.com . I enjoyed this book and it has a lot of information about mobile marketing crammed into it.