The intuitive website blog

I am writing this for the benefit of my intuitive-website.com and goffgrafix.com clients. Already I have spent hours on the phone with several of you, sharing in excitement some of what I have been listening to during the Social Media Telesummit hosted by Leesa Barnes. More to the point, you called me for other reasons and I just couldn’t contain myself. Before my observations become robotic from too much repetition, I am going to jot some of the them down here.

One thing that really caught my fancy was Kate Trgovac’s presentation last night about Second Life. I had never heard of Second Life before, so the idea of using it for business profit or for garnering business to business relationships and leads had never crossed my mind. Second Life, and this is what I understood from the conversation last night, so it might not be 100% accurate, is a virtual world where people can create avatars to represent themselves, usually more than one. It is not a game. It is an actual world, with currency, where you can buy land, lease property, set up shop, create things and sell what you create.

I started to think of my clients - the life and business coaches - I imagined them entering this virtual world and hanging out a shingle - offering advise to gender bending avatars trying to get their virtual and real lives in order. I thought about the virtual assistants and how they could be the “girl fridays” for avatars, researching the best location in Second Life to set up shop, being general contractors for construction, or handling the daily communications and maybe video recordings of an avatar’s enterprises.

This Second Life appeared to me as a foreign country that you don’t have to take a plane to get to - where you can exchange your US dollars for Second Life currency, and then if you make a profit, exchange the Second Life dollars back into concrete US dollars in your paypal account. Kate mentioned three case studies of how people are using Second Life to build their businesses - from testing out new products by creating virtual versions of them, to garnering good will by hosting a virtual sailboat race, to creating training videos with avatars acting out case studies.

It all makes me wish I had 24 additional hours in the day so that I could go and explore the possibilities - it makes me wish that I had a second life!

This morning I listened to the audio recording of Travis Greenlee’s presentation from the 1st day of the telesummit. Boy, am I happy that Leesa is recording all of the sessions for later playback. My notes from Travis’s presentation are jotted frantically across sticky notes that now strew my computer. Travis offered such great advise and concrete resources! Kudos to him! I want all of you to click on his name above and check him out. His topic was “Using the Power and Simplicity of Video Marketing to Attract Tons of Awesome Clients”.

Like the other presenters, Travis talked about knowing what/who your niche is, identifying what are the problems that they are having, and what are the solutions that you can provide to them. He also talked about keeping your videos and marketing super simple, citing a statistic that because of all of the “noise” on the internet, the reading level is 7th grade. He recommended, unless you are making training videos, to keep the videos around 90 seconds.

Later on, when he was taking questions, an attendee asked him how, just how, can you create an effective marketing video in just 90 seconds. Could he give an example? And Travis shared with us a marketing syntax that we can use for videos, audios and for other marketing material. This checklist is worth the entire telesummit, in my opinion. Here it is:

1. Identify your target market
   (Hello such and such market, I am addressing you from such and such a place - let them know that this message is for them - it makes it personal right away.)
2. Talk about a problem
   (I was just talking with a client of mine, and they have been losing sleep over this one problem and so we brainstormed how to solve it - now I thought if they are losing sleep over it, you might be too so..)
3. Give a solution to the problem
   (Here is the great tool, resource, action that we came up with to solve the problem)
4. Include a CALL TO ACTION
   For more free resources to help you save time and build your brand, check out my website at…

By following these four steps you can create effective marketing material.

The importance of a Call to Action was stressed several times. Give people something tangible that they can do after viewing your video, listening to your podcast or reading your blog. Also, give them something tangible in your video, audio, blog.. Give them real solutions.

Why use video? Video gives people an immediate and personal connection with you. It is a means of building trust and credibility. Greenlee stated that often a video is indexed by the search engines within 10 minutes of being posted. However, Travis also pointed out, to be successful using video for marketing you need to post your video with frequency and consistency. He listed four more important ingredients to success with video marketing.

1. Frequency (post once a week at least)
2. Consistency
3. Tangibility
4. Visibility

How does one create video? Travis Greenlee answered questions about that as well. He suggested we all go to flipvideo.com. The Flip Video is a nifty little camcorder that you can plug into your USB port and upload video directly to your youtube.com account - well, it might not be quite that easy, but he made it sound that easy. So guess what yours truly did while listening to his advise? I went on-line and bought one! So, my dear clients, get ready for me to approach you with ideas on how we should film you at work and post it on your websites! because I have the means now to assist you in using video to help promote yourselves. I even bought a waterproof case, in anticipation of all the locations on and near the ocean, or in inclement weather - that I might be called to film.

Another resource that Greenlee mentioned was trafficgeyser.com. He said that with a trafficgeyser membership - which runs $90 or $100/month, you can have unlimited submissions, and trafficgeyser.com will submit your videos to hundreds of places, do the tagging of your videos (SEO term), strip the audio from the videos and submit the audio to audio directories as well.

One of the listeners also mentioned tubemogul.com where you can submit your videos for a reasonable charge, or even for free - I don’t remember, and they will disseminate them throughout the internet for you.

Software for editing your video? Windows Movie Maker comes with a lot of computers and it used by many online video marketers. Cyberlink Power Director was another product mentioned, as was Camtasia Studio for recording your desktop - (if you are on a mac, an alternative to Camtasia is SnapzX Pro - which is my comment as a mac user).

Finally, combine your traditional email lists with social media, and always include a call to action.

And here’s mine: check out my growing list of (mostly) free resources at http://intuitive-websites.com/resource-links.php