Work Yourself Up!

A Great Time for Viral Videos

If it works in your niche, this is a great time to release a video which makes a political statement.  For example...

Social Bookmarking to Grab Attention Online

Social bookmarking is the electronic version of leaving a breadcrumb trail. After all, you can have a great product, but without enough traffic, it’s just another nice site.  Even if you have a faithful marketing list, you constantly want to reach new online viewers.

The options for connecting with social bookmarkers are exploding.  That’s why you need to surf around and see what’s out there, then set up a series of “regular” social bookmarking accounts to use.

StumbleUpon is one of the leading social bookmarking sites that’s both easy to use and powerful. Once you create an account, you can add the toolbar interface.  Then all you do is click the Thumbs Up icon to recommend a site.  You can do this for your own sites, or ask your friends to submit a Thumbs Up rating for you. Besides the rating, you can add comments about the site.

Can you Digg it? That’s not just a line from a 70s movie - it’s a widely used social bookmarking site. Digg functions much like Stumble Upon with raters given the chance push the ratings of a site to the front page. Making it to the front page of Digg gets your information in front of thousands of viewers and it helps traffic flood in to read your newsworthy submission.

Clipmarks describes itself as “scissors for web pages.” As with other social bookmarking sites, you can submit items that are sent to the web - including to Facebook or to an iPhone. As a one stop service and huge time saver, sign up with OnlyWire.

You begin by installing a plugin for your browers, and then you only need a single click to submit your item to multiple sites. To make this work, you still need to sign up at bookmarking sites that you plan to use. After that, you can use OnlyWire to handle the multiple submissions.

Make sure your site viewers know how to rate your site. You can’t reward or bribe them for bookmarking your site. That’s the social bookmarking version of stuffing the ballot box at voting time.

You can put links to the bookmarking sites on your sites as a gentle reminder. And don’t be shy about submitting your new information to the networks yourself – just make sure you also submit other sites so that you don’t appear spammy. Let people know what you’ve got and where to find your site and they’ll share that information with others.

If You Could Do a Video Like This...

You'd probably get a lot of people passing it around...

YouTube, Politics, and Viral Marketing

This isn't a political blog, but I feel this video is a great example of what can happen when you have something that gets passed around.

It's going to be an interesting election...

Over 1,000,000 people have seen this video.  It's currently #1 on the YouTube viral video chart and the #2 story on the Digg Election 2008 page.

To give you an idea of what this means, this video has reached more people than the average cable news show.

And this is just one example.  Check out the YouTube charts for more.

Social Media Daily - Free Web 2.0/Social Media Traffic & Promotion Guide

Looking to get a handle on "Web 2.0" and social media stuff?  Need more web traffic?

"Social Media Daily" teaches you how to use Web 2.0 and social media to drive traffic to your website in an easy to implement step-by-step format.  FREE!

The thing I love about this is that you can easily outsource most of it for just a few bucks.  Definitely take a look.

Get the report.

Politics and Viral Marketing

Last week, I talked about the how "Will It Blend?" is a great example of using current events in marketing.

One current event, which people are ALWAYS talking about is politics.  But many people stay away from it.  They think it's "too hot" or will isolate people.

And it may...  But it will also work for you like crazy, if you can pull it off.

For example...

The Speed (and Creativity) of Good Marketing

"Will it Blend?" is a video series developed by a blender company, where various things are blended to show how powerful the blender is.  Things like...

• An iPod
• Guitar Hero III
• Halo 3

There are dozens of videos in the series, most of them dealing with very timely topics.  Such as this one...

Who would have thought blenders could be so exciting?

This series works for a number of reasons, but one of the big ones is that it deals with stuff which is hot now.  People are talking about politics today.  A few months ago, they were talking about the iPhone.  Halo 3 was hot.  Harry Potter was hot.  When "Will it Blend?" deals with these topics, it captures momentum which is already there.

My question for you...

How are you using current events in your marketing?  Post responses below.

Book Marketing Exposed - A New York Times Best-Seller

NOTE: This is part of a series I am doing here, which explains how I am marketing my new book, Ask, Believe, Receive - 7 Days to Increased Wealth, Better Relationships, and a Life You Love. If you enjoy this kind of "behind the scenes" info and feel the book would help you, please purchase it. :)

This doesn't have anything to do with my book, but these guys are doing something cool to promote their upcoming book, which I think you can learn from...

First of all, they're buying a ton of their own books in order to guarantee the title gets on the New York Times book chart.

Taking that into account, if somebody buys their related training program, they get mentioned in the book. Then they'll be able to say, "I was involved with a New York Times best-seller."

The concept would probably work with or without the NYT thing, but it certainly helps to have it.  Books are a dime a dozen, so this is something that sets this one apart.

But I've got to wonder what the final deal will be... 

I've worked with bands and musicians who have used a similar "donate a few bucks to help me record a new album and get mentioned in the liner notes" with good results, but the thing they have going for them, that this promotion doesn't, is a "starving artist" persona which makes people feel that the thing wouldn't happen had it not been for their donation.

And the movie Clerks 2 had a similar promotion, where people were mentioned in the closing credits...in a very small type.

So I'm hoping this will be more then a bunch of people listed in 4 point font...

Too early to tell though.  It might be cool, or it might fall flat.  But it's definitely going to be interesting to watch.  And again, definitely something you can learn from when it comes to your own book marketing.

The book isn't due for another 11 months, but they've already started to get the word out via a report and videos which talk about the concept. 

More info...

Wow! - The Biggest Launch of 2007

I get approached with a lot of offers each day and see even more.  It takes something really special to get me excited these days.

Well, this did it.

This is such a great way to get people excited about your product, get folks talking, get folks promoting, and more.

This one is going to be big!

5 Social Bookmarking Techniques

Social bookmarking is one of the hottest ways of easily generating traffic to your website.

Primarily, bookmarking refers to individual reference but social bookmarking has gone to another level: you add bookmarks to ensure that others visit your page. Social bookmarking, ultimately generates more visitors to your page.

Follow these tips when launching your own social bookmarkeing campaign.

1. Decide on a network

Decide on a popular social network for bookmaking to make more users visit your page. Invest quite some time in deciding the one to join.. It is best to go for a popular social network that has lots of members.

2. Join the network

Become a member of the social network. Read their terms and instructions. Getting yourself familiar with how it works will prevent you from making a nuisance of yourself.

3. Use tags

It’s impotant to increase your popularity within your network. You can do this by tagging other relevant websites to offer important information to the network.

4. Link the bookmarks to your website

Add the link of your social bookmarking site to make visitors to your webpage go to the bookmark. Similarly, add the website links to your bookmark. This reverse linking will get more traffic to your site.

5. Popularize your bookmark

Always bookmark quality information. Information that you know others will love. You are bound to attract readers and ultimately visitors. Remember this is a networking site and sharing is very important.

Use these social bookmarking techniques and you will start gaining popularity in no time. Not only that, you will be attracting targeted visitors to your website quite easily.