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Google owns YouTube - need I say more?
Videos rank highly and through your profile, viewers can click through to your website. As in Hubpages, there are communities within YouTube and the possibility of subscribing to a person's channel. What this means as a marketer is that you have an on-going communication. The hardest thing is always getting somebody to come and look, to visit your site. Once somebody has subscribed, the content goes to them.
This is a principle that runs through all internet marketing - remove the need for them to act. Apathy, inertia and life in general get in the way of marketing. Establishing an on-going, automated relationship (that sounds romantic) overcomes these obstacles.
Finally on videos, they enable you to say things differently. The written word is very flat. The tone of your voice, a raised eyebrow can convey so much more. And, the very fact that people can see you, increases your credibility and their trust.
The web 2.0 sites include Hubpages, Squidoo, devHub and Weebly, amongst many others. They generally offer an easy to use interface for creating content, with easy insertion of modules.
The reason we are interested in them is that they rank highly in Google. Why - well, as I mentioned several times in Part1, they provide a guarantee of quality. You will have noticed at the bottom of this hub that you can give a thumbs up or down, leave comments
and generally act as a kind of moderator. Any content that is inappropriate or unduly self-promoting should not last long on Hubpages.
So Google trusts the content and hubs rank well. And if you link from your hub to another of your sites, then that counts as a 'weighty vote'.
The recommendation therefore is that you create some hubs and lenses!
Immensely powerful! Article marketing consists of creating articles (remember that they should be written around your keywords - see part 1) and submitting them to article sites. There are hundreds of article directories, but again - a recurring them in internet marketing - quality is more important than quantity.
You should aim for the top article sites first - Ezinearticles for instance. All articles are reviewed by human. Ezinearticles' success is built on quality content - Google recognizes this. So if your article is published there, the links to your site carry lots of weight.
Many internet marketers focus solely on article marketing - it is definitely something that you should build into your approach. If you are concerned about having to write lots and lots of different articles, don't be. You have the greatest infomation source at your fingertip - the internet and many tools that can help you to gather content and create new articles.
If you watch the video below on Finding Backlinks Through Commenting, you will see that Yahoo Answers is one of the sites mentioned. As the name suggests, it is a site where people ask questions and others answer! Answers are voted on by members.
Yahoo, like hubpages, functions through the active involvement of its members. Backlinks have to be earned! To quote from Yahoo Answers:
"Yahoo! Answers uses a points and level system based on trust. To protect all of the Answers community against malicious links and spam the ability to post active hyperlinks is only earned once an account reaches Level 2."
Social media - facebook, twitter, myspace - have become an essential part of the internet marketer's portfolio. They provide many ways in which you can quickly link to hundreds of people. If you need any motivation to get involved - how about the fact that these sites are sometimes exceeding the traffic of Google. And what's more, the traffic isn't come and go, as in a search query, it is persistent and involved.
Networking sites are similar in many ways to the social media sites, though with a different focus and definitely a different membership profile. If you are targeting business people, LinkedIn could be very useful.
However, don't charge in blasting sales messages at people - the rules are very strict. You need to adopt a softly, softly approach and provide value first.
Press releases can be distributed easily through free distribution services, such as freepressrelease.com. Journalists and content producers use press releases as information sources. If your release is picked up by a popular journalist or blogger, you can gain substantial traffic.
Your press release will also remain on the servers of the distribution company, providing you with backlinks.
Generally you will find more positive results by using a paid-for service, such as PRWeb.
Commenting on blogs and in forums is an easy way to generate backlinks - if you know what you are doing!
The important principle to keep in mind - quality before quantity. You want to achieve links from high ranking sites.
I would suggest that you use a tool like Market Samurai to help find these sites.
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