Video Marketing Archives | Cindy Ratzlaff

3 Low-Cost Marketing Strategies for Self-Published Authors

By Cindy Ratzlaff January 10, 2015

If you’ve dreamed about becoming a published author, you are not alone. According to ISBN registration figures from Bowker, “self-published titles in 2013 increased to more than 458,564, up 17 percent over 2012.” What the vast majority of those new authors don’t know is that they are now the Chief Marketing Officer of their own personal publishing company. They’ve also taken on the role of Director of Sales, Operations Manager and Publicist.

Very few authors bring all of those skill sets to the table and while bestseller status may not be in the cards for every author, finding and promoting a book to those who are most likely to want that book, is possible and getting easier all the time. Social media levels the marketing playing field for the self-publishing author and helps authors find their reading public through direct to consumer marketing.

Every author may dream of writing a bestseller. But writing the book and dreaming isn’t enough.

YouTube Adds Easy InVideo Branding | Entrepreneurial Toolkit

By Cindy Ratzlaff October 8, 2012

*Editor’s Note: The video you feature must be hosted on YouTube.

YouTube quietly added a new feature to the platform that will help small businesses, cash strapped start-ups, entrepreneurs, authors, speakers and coaches promote their brands, in just a few simple steps, across all of their YouTube videos.

InVideo Programming allows users to insert a branded logo or even another video into the corner of all currently uploaded videos on an individual’s YouTube Channel, all at once.

Branding With a Logo or Video

Imagine that as a small business owner you are creating short informational videos and posting them to YouTube. Next you share them through e-mail or through Facebook and even your business website* (your video must be hosted on YouTube, even if it’s featured on your website). Now with InVideo Programming, you’ll be able to embed another video into the corner of your informational video–say an announcement about a big launch, sale or special event–and ever consumer facing touch point for the original informational video now becomes an invitation to view the special announcement video in just one click.

4 Great Marketing Ideas Your Business Can Use Now

By Cindy Ratzlaff July 31, 2012

Every day thousands of fantastic articles and marketing ideas for entrepreneurs and small business owners come streaming onto the web, and throughout social media. What’s a busy entrepreneur to do. You can’t read everything. You can email yourself great links to articles you want to read later or save the links to a private circle on G+ or even bookmark them for handy reference. I use the G+ strategy most of the time and add sites that regularly deliver to my Google Reader account.

For those who haven’t yet figured out how to scan the headlines and save the best for later, here are a few ideas are so creative and useful that I want to make sure you don’t miss them. I’ve added short introductory paragraph to tell you why they’re worth your time to click through and read and possibly save. But all of these have ideas that you can use, right now, to amp up the action on your marketing.

Branding in Business | Tips for Video to Increase SEO

By Cindy Ratzlaff November 3, 2011

Update 2015: Since the writing of this post, the Google Keyword Search Tool isn’t available to use in this way. All of the other information in this post is still accurate.

Many business owners, authors, speakers and entrepreneurs are simply stumped about how to rank well in search engines so that potential clients and customers can find their services and products. The answer, for most, can be creating video content that informs, engages and attracts clients while building your business credibility.

Shifting your thinking from how to rank to what to rank for can be a valuable exercise in creating a solid digital marketing strategy.

Five Simple Steps for Determining Video Content

1. Content Tools: Use the Google Keyword Search Tool to find out how clients and website visitors are currently landing on your site. While this tool allows you to search keywords and find out how many people are searching for those terms, you can also enter your own professional website URL in the “Find Keywords” feature at the top of the page and Google will show you the keywords others have entered before your site was recommended to them.

2. Research Technique: Using a spreadsheet or a word doc, keep track of the phrases or keywords that have local monthly searches of 2,000 or more and where the competition for those searches is medium or low. The reason for staying away from high volume, high competition words is that an entrepreneur or small business will most likely not have the financial resources to rank highly in these areas during their building phase. But if you were to rank on the first page of Google for a relevant keyword with lower competition and convert some of those searches into clients or buyers, without advertising, activities that caused this would be worth the investment of your time, right?

3. What to Search: I searched my own website URL and found that 18,100 monthly searches are being entered for the phrase “Tools for Twitter,” and Google tells me that the competition for this is “low.” Now Twitter marketing and Twitter Tools are right in my business sweet spot. I lecture on Twitter Tools and write about them often. So I will put “Tools for Twitter” onto my list of videos I may want to create for my website and my YouTube Channel.

4. How To Interpret the Results: Next, click on the link within the Google Keyword Tool and Google will show you a search page with the number of entries for that term in gray at the top of the page. In this test case, “Tools for Twitter” has 1,560,000 results. That’s a heck of a lot of competition for me to go up against in landing on the first page of searches for this term. But I’m considering using video to demonstrate my expertise in this area, so now, I’ll go to the left hand side of the Google results page for this search and click videos. Instantly, I see that the competition for this term in videos is significantly less, 180,000, but still steep.

5. Claiming Your Spot on Top: Next, I’ll scroll down the page and see the dates when each of the ranking videos on the first two pages were created. I can see that for this term, not all the ranking content is fresh. This encourages me and I’ll place this “Tools for Twitter” title on my To Create list for videos. I may create several and roll them out as a series. Google values fresh or new content above other content and so I have a better chance of ranking for this phrase because not all of the content on page one or two of Google (for this phrase) is new.

That’s it. I’ve used this strategy to rank on page one for many terms including a video I created for parents about “Facebook and Kids” where I rank in the #1 spot for this phrase.

I’d love to hear about your searches and the titles of videos that you’ll create. Please share your findings and I’ll be glad to watch your videos and comment, which can also help ranking. Remember to always give viewers a clear call to action, which may simply be “Please let me know what you thought of this video.”