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Montville, Queensland - Overlooking the Sunshine Coast

This is the time for great holiday pictures so why not start to think in terms of creating videos from your digital photos?

Content creation for social media marketing is becoming increasingly important and videos are a key element in content creation.  They are great for livening up your Squidoo lenses.

If you have any doubts about the power of video marketing, check out these January 2009 stats (yes one month only!) from ComScore:

Since August 2008, I have been using Animoto as a way of turning my digital photos into video.   It’s easy, fun and rewarding.  You can upload the resultant animated, music video to YouTube and then insert it into your lens via a YouTube module (my preferred way because of the PR9 backlink created).

I have created a Squidoo lens that displays my Animoto videos and explains the four basic steps involved in making videos from your digital photos.

The Squidoo lens includes the latest video that I developed from a recent weekend stay at the Montville mountain village on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.  Montville overlooks the beaches at Noosa, Maroochydore and Caloundra:

Promo videos: easy way to create promotional videos from photos

Animoto has a number of levels of membership. You can make as many short videos (less than 30 secs) as you want. Alternatively, you can get an All-Access Pass (discount link) which lets you make as many movies as you want of any length.

There are also business level memberships where the videos are being used for purely commercial purposes.

A cool feature of Animoto videos is that you can make a DVD quality version of your video for a small fee. Then you can burn it on a CD and send it to friends or family.

I have just listened to a webinar on video marketing by Pam Brossman which was superb.  You can access her website here for heaps of resources on video marketing:

http://www.profitablesocialmarketing.com/

Pam recommends Animoto and Camtasia (free version) for video production and highlights the value of the free (and superb) video distribution service, TubeMogul:

http://tubemogul.com/

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Frequently I’m asked, “Why aren’t I making any sales?”  The inquirer then goes on to say how many Squidoo lenses they have built or blog posts they have made.

This question has exercised my mind for some considerable time.  One of the problems is that the Gurus tend to tell you about only one part of the overall success formula, whether that be the use of video, the design of lead capture pages, building a list, using Web 2.0, etc.  However, they omit to tell you the the overall framework for sales success.

For my own purposes, I have come to express sales success by this formula:

SALES = F (visibility X credibility X demand X presentation)

So sales success is a function of a number of key aspects that have a compounding and synergistic effect that leads to sustained sales.

Visibility without credibility will not get you sustained sales.  The credibility also has to be in an area related to the product or service that you are marketing.  Hence the emphasis on transparency, honesty and sharing expertise – highlighted in my earlier post, Google is Watching You.

Without visibility, no one will know what you have to offer.  Visibility experts suggest you need to:

1. use multi-media marketing (to line up with the universal search emphasis of Google and Bing)
2. get in front of the traffic related to your product/service – join their conversations wherever they are held (Ning, wikis, blogs, forums, etc)
3. use Web 2.0 technology extensively such as Squidoo, blogging, social networking and social bookmarking (e.g. RedGage)
4. take sustained promotion action – persistence pays (literally and metaphorically speaking)

If there is no demand for what you have to offer, then there will be no sales.  Hence the emphasis on keyword research, Google Insights for Search and overall market research.

Finally, the way you present your product or service will have a profound effect on sales conversions when people actually get to see what you have to offer.  Hence the emphasis on creativity, humor, sales page copywriting, pre-sell, bonuses, drip-marketing via autoresponders, testimonials, product reviews, examples and evidence (the ubiquitous ClickBank screenshots!).

I now use this sales formula to reflect on my own sales success or to plan the development and marketing of a new product or service.

As to answering the inquirer, where do you start?  The formula gives you four questions that you can use to respond to the inquiry, “Why aren’t I getting any sales?”:

1. how are you building visibility online?
2. what credibility do you have in relation to the product or service?
3. what level of demand is there and is it growing or declining?
4. what have you done to enhance the product presentation and elicit conversions?

These questions help the inquirer understand the dynamics of selling online and enable them to identify areas in which to take further action.

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In the BlogTalkRadio session on Monday 18 August, we discussed a range of things including how to promote Squidoo lenses on RedGage, indexing of Squidoo lenses and long tail keywords.

Towards the end, Joan asked an important question, “Is it possible that the longer that you are on the Internet and the longer that you write articles and the more lenses you create and the more blog posts and e-books that you write…Google is interested in indexing you quicker?”  I answered with an unequivocal YES (provided you have a focus).

The reality is that Google is building a profile of you every hour of every day.  Just picture those little Google bots flying around and scanning websites, blog  posts, comments, lenses, social bookmarking sites, social networking sites…and feeding them to the central repository where Google is building a profile of you via the associations it develops between your name (or brand name) and the information the bots have gathered about you.

Google is not only interested in what you write about, but also what people write about you (the buzz about you!).   It becomes increasingly important that you provide depth of focus so Google (and others) can build the image of you that you want.   You want Google to see you as an authority on certain topics…then you get indexed faster and your comments carry more weight.   Google starts to take notice of you when you write in the areas that it recognizes as areas in which you have established competence.

So if you want to see what the bots are collecting about you,  just search on your name (or brand name) in Google and see what Google has collected about you…what articles, Squidoo lenses, comments, etc it has associated with your name.  I did this for Chef Keem and I was astounded by the endless pages Google has accumulated about our beloved Chef – articles, slideshows, videos, squidoo lenses, tweets, comments, Birthday wishes, etc.  Chef Keem has obviously kept Google busy!

Now the really interesting bit…here you learn how Google sees Chef Keem (today at least!).  If you go to the first entry under the results listed under the search for Chef Keem, you will see a button above it, “show options”.  Click this button and a menu appears on the left hand side giving you lots of ways to view Chef Keem – e.g. his videos, forum comments, results over the past day-week-year, etc.  Go down a bit further and click on Wonder Wheel.   Here is the profile of Chef Keem that Google has developed from all that content – it reflects the associations that Google has developed about Chef Keem from all that information collected by the busy Google bots.

Google Profile: Chef Keem

…and hence you can see that Google (rightly) accords Chef Keem authority status in areas such as Squidoo lens, Giant Squid,  free cookbook and recipes.

So the question for you the reader is, “What Google footprint are you leaving and how deep is the footprint?”

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Well I just participated in another great Blog Talk Radio session conducted by Joan Adams, Kate Loving Shenk and Chef Keem.  The focus of this session (10 August) was very much on keywords for Squidoo lenses.

One of the topics I raised, via the simultaneous text discussion, is the fact that Google deep indexes Squidoo lenses (i.e., Google Bots look right through your lens and the comments to index your lens for search term purposes).

I first wrote about this in an article some time ago when I noted that SEO experts were turning cartwheels to get Google to deep index their websites.  I pointed out  that Google automatically deep indexes Squidoo lenses.

I have just done a test to check this deep indexing out again.  Here I have used my Squidoo lens on Digital Storytelling as an example.  I did a search on the term- digital storytelling primary school (no quotations marks) – and my lens came up as No 5 in Google search engine results (out of 2,510,000 results).

The descriptor shown for my lens in the Google results is not my Lens Description nor an excerpt from my Introduction Module, but rather a collection of relevant terms from various parts of my lens – the tags,  the table of contents, a module heading and descriptions of links within a links module:

“Primary school digital stories: Digital stories by primary school children. ….. Primary School Photo Stories. These digital stories are drawn from Focus …”

You can check out how Google has indexed the lens in relation to the entered keyword search term by clicking on the “cached” button below the search term results for my lens.  From this you can see that Google is highlighting words like “stories”, “school”, “digital stories”, “primary school”, etc. as being relevant to the search term.

An interesting observation is that while “primary school digital stories” and “primary school photo stories” are listed in my tags, the searched keyword term – digital storytelling primary school – is not in my Squidoo lens tags…and my lens still ends up on the first page of Google results!

So Google indexes the whole of your lens and is looking for content (words and phrases) that relate to the searched keyword term.   Google does this “in context” – so it’s still guided by your primary keyword and lens description to test relevance.  So irrelevant keyword stuffing will not work.

So I’ll let a true SEO expert, Aaron Wall, enlighten us on this process of Google’s indexing of word and phrase relationships in the context of your lens:

• search engines such as Google do try to figure out phrase relationships when processing queries, improving the rankings of pages with related phrases even if those pages are not focused on the target term
• pages that are too focused on one phrase tend to rank worse than one would expect (sometimes even being filtered out for what some SEOs call being over-optimized)
  
• pages that are focused on a wider net of related keywords tend to have more stable rankings for the core keyword and rank for a wider net of keywords

I could not say this better myself…and I read it three times to try to appreciate the deep meaning and insight in these comments.

A simplistic translation for the Google ranking of Squidoo lenses might read like this:

What will work is to use a variety of terms related to your primary keyword and do so throughout your entire lens…but whatever you do, relevance to the lens focus is of utmost importance.

BTW – I would strongly encourage the reader to participate in the The GiantSquid OpenMike Radio Show.  Here Giant Squids and other Lensmasters freely share their insider information and experience and we all learn together in the Squidoo spirit of collaborative marketing.

Image credit: Digital Storytelling by sridgway on Flickr

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I was watching a TV show, Random Acts of Kindness, that featured Sarah Garnett, the founder of the Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library.  Sarah lost her friend, Benjamin Andrew, when he was young and she decided to dedicate herself to making a difference through helping the homeless.

One night while feeding the homeless, Sarah noticed a man standing under a street light reading a book.  She had a chat with him and decided to supply him with some books which she did on a regular basis.

Other homeless and disadvantaged people started gathering around and the Footpath Library began.  The Footpath Library, now with 6 dedicated Directors, is in Sydney and Melbourne and expanding to all States in Australia.  It supports numerous hostel libraries and donates in excess of 1,000 books each week to the homeless and disadvantaged.

When I heard this story I did what we all do.  I told myself, “I must make a Squidoo lens about this”.  And so my 85^th Squidoo lens was born, The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library.

As I was building the lens, I heard Seth Godin’s “voice” ringing in my ears.  Of course, Sarah has created a Tribe, she has become a tribal leader by connecting people who share a common idea or mission.   Seth’s book, Tribes: We Need YOU to Lead Us, challenges each of us to do the same – “With Tribes flourishing everywhere, there’s a vast shortage of leaders. We need YOU!”

We may not yet be ready to “Lead a Tribe” or we may have done so already, however, Squidoo itself challenges us to make a difference.

Seth Godin, like any Founder, has embedded his beliefs, values and assumptions (about people, the world, competition and marketing) in the Culture of Squidoo itself.  The Squidoo Culture is embodied in its policies, systems, processes and procedures (What other organization has Angels acting as quality controllers?  What other organization has a Founder who encourages members to become ‘Purple Cows’?).

Seth has stated on interview that his driving goal in building Squidoo is to be able to donate 100 Million dollars to charity.  So when you look beyond the Squidoo platform itself and see The MAN, you hear a challenge to use the Squidoo platform to help charities.

And the challenge reads like this:

• What percentage of your direct Squidoo earnings from Squidoo lenses are you going to donate to charity?
• How are you going to use your acquired lens building skills to promote the work of charities?
• What charity are you going to help to become an official charity recognized by Squidoo (so they can share in Squidoo’s charity donations)?
• How are you going to use the Squidoo platform to create or support a Tribe?

I know for a fact that some readers here have taken up these challenges but there is always more that we (and certainly I) can do.

If you have any doubts about the power of a single book (or even a single Squidoo lens), listen to Chef Keem’s RadioBlog interview where he talks about the influence of the book, The Quiet Mind, on his life…and what a contributor he has become!

If you have any doubts that a single person, YOU, can make a difference then watch this TV video which shows how Sarah helped transform the life of a professional artist (but make sure you have tissues handy!).

Thanks Seth for being the inspiration that you are and helping us to make a difference.

Thanks everyone who shares on this blog and The BlogRadio (and builds creative, original Squidoo lenses) for keeping this inspiration alive.

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