The Video Call to Action – Keys to Getting Them to Take the Next Step
You can produce the most compelling, interesting video online, but without a clear call to action, your video is just pure entertainment. Whether you want a viewer to buy your product, sign up for your list, or take another action, you have to tell them what you want them to do.
A call to action can take many different forms. Do you want the viewer to click on a link, click the “buy now” button, watch another video, or take some other step? Know what you want from your viewer before you even create your video so everything you do points to that desired end result.
Some people believe that if you push your message on your audience, they will resist any kind of “sell” and turn away. While you want to avoid the used car salesman approach, remember that when you have the solution to your audience's problems, you're doing them a favor by sharing it with them.
Your call to action can take many forms. Here are some examples:
- Click here to download your free report on X.
- Click here to visit X and sign up now for more information!
- Enter your name and email below to sign up for the free teleseminar now.
- Fill out the form below to request your free consultation.
- Enter your information below to apply for this special program.
The logistics of creating a call to action within in a video will vary depending on the type of video you use, the location of the video and the rules of the site where you are hosting your video. Here are some ideas:
Mention in Video – You can include a call to action within the video itself. Create the video to capture the attention of your audience, give them the information they need and then tell them what action to take next.
Text on Video – Another way to tell your viewers what move to make after the video is to add it across the screen of the video. This text can be a link to your website or an explanation of any other action you'd like them to take.
Clickable Video – By using 'Flash' software or YouTube's video tools, you can create video that, when clicked on, can link the viewer to the desired page.
Video Descriptions – You can add a call to action within your video descriptions. If you have uploaded a video to a hosting site, check the rules as to how you can link to your site and how promotional your videos and descriptions can be.
The most important part of your call to action is ensuring it fits with what your audience needs. When the call to action matches the exact needs of your audience, taking your recommended next step will be a natural next step for your viewers.
SEO Mistake #6 – Obsessing Over PageRank
If you’re new to this search engine optimization business, you probably have no idea what PageRank is.
PageRank: This is Google’s link analysis algorithm that measures the importance, relevance and value of a web page based on the quality of the pages linking to it.
Basically, PageRank will tell you, on a scale of 0 to 10, how important your site is in the overall scheme of the Internet. It will not tell you how well your page will rank for the keyword phrases your customers are going to use to find your page.
What does this mean?
In a nutshell, this means that you’re wasting your time if you spend more than two minutes on your page’s meta tags or looking at your PageRank.
Meta tags are not going to ensure that your page ranks in the top 10 for your keyword phrases. And PageRank is not an accurate measure of where your page appears in the SERPs for your keyword phrases.
You’re better off spending your time writing quality content, developing relationships with the owners of high ranking sites in your industry or relevant industries and making sure your site is search engine friendly.
Even better, spend time getting to know your customers or site visitors and find out what terms they use to search, what they are looking for when they arrive at your site and what they think you can do to improve their experiences while browsing your site.
This information will be more valuable to you than your PageRank and the content you put on your site in response to your customers experiences will go much further in advancing the goals of your website than a meta tag or twenty hastily tossed on your pages.
Article Submission Directories – Why Should You Use Them?
Article submission, or the placing of various articles related to your business or website on article directory sites is an easy and effective way of getting your web site noticed, thus increasing the traffic flow to your business site and bringing a steady flow of customers who are purchasing your product or service.
Article submission is one of the SEO services we provide for our clients, but if you are on a tight budget and have more time than money, this is one of the things you can conceivably do yourself.
Search Engine Spider Magnet
Search engine spiders are those tools that look for keywords and links on the internet. They process and collect and identify the individual websites that are the most useful for the seacher. Through directory submission, you can add many keyword rich articles to lots of well-ranked sites across the internet that will then provide a back-link to your site via the article's resource box.
The major search engines each have ways of tracking and quantifying the value of the keywords you use as well as the links to your site. Visitors to your site strengthen the importance of your web site, thus bringing even more visitors and by extension - customers for your product or service.
Web Site Index
Indexing your web site is a process of ranking it or listing it so that it is noticed by the search engines. Article directory submissions makes it possible to speed up the indexing process (because there will be more links to your site on the web and a better chance that the search engine spiders will follow those links) and once indexed, to improve the ranking of the site. Each search engine have different algorithms to measure the level at which the web page meets the defined standards for quality.
Economics
Many directory submission websites will allow you to submit your article for free, though often you can choose preferred placement on the site for a fee. Both options can be effective as long as the site has a good page rank, so if you choose to pay, pick only a few top-quality directories to submit a fee and use the free option for any others you submit to.
Beating the competition
If you have been concerned about the fact that your competitors seems to be doing better than you in pulling customers into their websites or selling their products or services, using directory submission is a way to get one up on the competition. Revamping your web site helps ensure that you are presenting an image of your business that will attract customers to your site. Presenting information to articles directories is also going to help get you noticed on the internet.
For more ideas to increase traffic to your website, check out our recent blog posting - SEO Strategies To Raise Your Small Business' Ranking
Save Your Small Business Marketing Budget With Google Analytics On Your Website
Google offers a free statistical tool to analyze your website visitors. It is called Google Analytics and it can save your small business marketing budget. It is very easy to use. Once you sign up with the service and add the URL of your website, you get a snippet of Java Script code that you add onto every web page you want to track (they tell you exactly where to copy and paste it, so it's simple enough for beginners even).
The key to this is that Google Analytics tracks visitors from all sources, including display ad campaigns, PPC (pay per click) campaigns, organic searches from search engines, email marketing, bookmarks, websites that have your inbound links, and other digital sources like URLs embedded in PDF files or Power Point slides.
Why would you want to do this, you might ask? If you know that the last local flyer campaign that cost $25 inspired 32 people to visit your website, and your postcard campaign which cost $125 inspired only 7 people to go to your website, you might make different decisions with your marketing budget, wouldn't you?
You want to know if your marketing campaign is going in the right direction or not. For example, if you are doing article marketing to drive traffic to your site, you want to know the article directories that are the most effective in sending visitors to your website.
You don't want to waste your time submitting articles to directories that are not sending you any traffic or a very low amount of traffic. You can write more articles and submit to only those directories that are sending you a good amount of traffic.
If you are using a pay per click (PPC) marketing campaign, you can use split testing to test the effectiveness of different ads. You want to know which ads are performing better than the others in terms of conversions. If you integrate Google Analytics with your AdWords PPC campaigns, you will be able to track the effectiveness of each ad you are using in your PPC campaigns.
Using data from Google Analytics, you will be able to find the pages that are getting the most traffic from search engines, bookmarks and inbound links. Knowing this information helps you spend time on optimizing only those pages that are getting the most traffic and, if necessary, change the navigation of the site so your most important pages get the number of visitors you would like.
You can work on providing improved user experience of your site on those high traffic pages. Make it easy to navigate those pages from anywhere in your site. Place a "What is new" about your site on those pages.
If you're selling ads on your site to advertisers directly, you need a visitors portfolio of your site. This portfolio contains information about the number of monthly unique visitors to your site, visitors' geographic locations, the number of page views per visitor, the bounce rate of visitors, etc.
Google Analytics will help you develop a visitors portfolio, or even help you flesh out the details of specific personas for your site. The more information about your visitors you have, the easier it is to make decisions about how to increase your business.
At Starfire Creative, we use Google Analytics on every new site we build to give us as much information as possible. After all, knowledge is power.
Even if you are not going to use the power of Google Analytics immediately, you can still sign up for Google Analytics and let the tool start collecting visitors data about your site. When you need the data, you will have it in your Google Analytics account.
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