There are lots of ways to generate traffic to your website, but today we’ll just discuss one method:  using YouTube and viral videos.

What exactly is a viral video or viral marketing?

Well, just like a flu virus, it’s something that gets passed around.  Obviously with the flu, it’s not such a great thing.  But when it’s your marketing message, you want that getting passed around as much as possible.

The idea with viral marketing is to make something that really grabs people’s attention and entertains them in some way, to the point that they feel the need to share it with their friends.

So then you’ve got lots of people passing around your marketing message for you, reaching far more people than you might have been through your own marketing efforts alone.  Once it starts spreading, it’s all free publicity.

There are various types of viral marketing formats.  It could be an e-mail that keeps getting circulated, or an e-book, etc.  But let’s focus on videos.

Videos on the Internet have really exploded in recent years.  Many people spend more time watching videos online than they do watching television.  Sites like YouTube are extremely popular and many people spend hours each day watching videos and passing along their favorites to their friends.  Popular videos can receive millions of views in a fairly short time period.  Clearly, there is potential there for lots of exposure.

What makes a video viral?

In a nutshell, it has to be entertaining and unique.

As to what is entertaining, that varies from person to person, and the type of things one person would pass on to their friends, the next person might not.

Videos that get passed around might be funny, odd, shocking, provocative, sad, thought-provoking, surprising, and so on.  But it also has to be at least somewhat unique and has to stand out as something that’s worth remembering and sharing.

The best way to get an idea of what types of videos are viral is to stop and think about what your friends have sent you.  Have your friends told you you need to check out such-and-such video on YouTube, or have they sent you an e-mail with a link, or posted a video on Facebook?

That’s the kind of stuff to pay attention to.  Then stop and think about why people are passing it around.

Another place to look for ideas is commercials from “The Big Game”.  Yeah, you know the biggest football game of the year that everyone watches.  I’m not using the actual name of it because it’s trademarked and they don’t allow anyone to actually mention the name.  That’s why stores and places usually just refer to it as “the big game”.  Kind of weird, I know.  And I’m not sure who all that applies to so I’m just being on the safe side.

Half of the people just watch the game for the commercials.  Which ones stand out in your mind?  The things that make those memorable and make you talk about them with your friends are the things you need to include in your video if you want it to be viral.

For me personally, the videos I usually hear about, as well as the ones I usually pass along to friends, are funny videos.

Sometimes the videos were not even intended to be funny.  Sometimes the person shooting the video was serious, but something about the video is funny to other people.  Sometimes it’s funny because it’s just really odd or unusual.  Sometimes it can even be annoying.

Examples of Viral Videos

Below are a couple examples of videos that have been passed around a lot.  These are ones friends have told me about and that I’ve told others about.  Oddly enough, these are both for furniture stores, and they are both commercials.

A lot of the viral videos being passed around are not actual commercials, but are just entertaining in some way. If they are intentionally made to be viral, somewhere the person’s website or business name is mentioned, maybe at the end of the video.  But these are actual commercials.

My assumption is that the first video was not necessarily created with the intention of being passed around on the Internet, but the second one was.

Flea Market Montgomery

This video is both funny and annoying.  You find yourself with the song stuck in your head the next day.  “It’s just like, it’s just like… a mini mall”.

As of this writing, this particular video has had over five and a half million views!  Talk about exposure!  And it’s really more than that because other people have put the video in their own accounts and have lots of views as well.

I really don’t know what that’s done for this business.  I’ve heard they have done really well but I really don’t know.  I do know that the guy in the video has been on national TV as a result of that commercial.

I do know I’m not going to drive to Alabama just to go to that store.  But what if they had a website?  Who knows, if they listed their website in the commercial I might have gone there just out of curiosity.  And if their website was well done and their prices were good, I might have even clicked around to see what they had.

I really don’t know if they had any idea that video would be viral when they were shooting the commercial.  One way or another, it definitely has the whole poor-quality local commercial feel to it.

Red House Furniture

This video was intended to look like an amateur local commercial.  And it does have the real employees in the commercial.  But it was made terrible on purpose.  The guys that made the video are doing something similar for some other small local businesses.

Again, I don’t know for sure what impact this has had on the business, but I’ve heard they have done really well.  As of this writing they’ve had well over 2 million views.

They were smart and included their website address in the video.  They don’t actually sell any of their products on their website, but they do sell t-shirts that are related to the video.  That’s a great idea.  Many of the people watching the video and passing it around are going to be teenagers, who would be interested in buying a t-shirt that they find funny.

How To Do It

As you can see, a properly executed video can get millions of views.  That can mean quite a few people will be seeing your name, brand, or website.  But how do you convert those views into dollars?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, you’ll want to mention your website in the video.  It should be clearly visible on the screen, spelled out so there’s no doubt about the spelling.  Along with just listing the website address, you need to give people a reason to go there.  Just knowing what your website address is doesn’t mean they’ll go there.  You might get a few curious people, but if you give them a solid reason to visit your site, you’ll get a lot more.

It could be that you have more videos like this one there, or maybe something they can get for free, or maybe you don’t tell them specifically what they’ll find but make them curious about what they’ll find there.

You’ll want to put a link to your website anywhere else you can, such as in the info section about the video and about you.

However, having your website address in the video itself is really the most important step because if it really does become viral, other people will often copy the video into their own account or playlist, and then people won’t see any links you put in your account, but only the video and whatever is in the account of that person.  Also, some people will post it to their blogs and things like that, so unless your website address is on the screen in the video itself, you’ll be missing out on a lot of exposure and you won’t get the full benefit from your video being passed around.

Now, I think you can probably see the benefits of having a viral video that people pass around for you and spread your marketing message to all their friends.  However, you need to be aware of a few things if you’re going to give it a try.

First of all, it’s hard to predict what will be viral.  Sometimes things you’d never expect to be viral get passed around like crazy.  Then things you would think would get passed around aren’t.  I wouldn’t recommend investing a lot of money into something purely on the hopes that it will become viral.  Not unless you really have a solid plan and you’ve run it by a lot of other people first.

Keep in mind that just because you think something will be funny doesn’t mean everyone else will.

Also, don’t go overboard with the sales message.  Unless the entire thing is meant to be a commercial, such as in the examples above, then the marketing part of the message should be pretty short in comparison with the video.  Maybe it would just be a few seconds at the very end of the video where you mention your website.

If you study some of the videos that have been passed around the most, you’ll find that many are not high-quality, professionally recorded videos.  Many have a very amateur nature to them.  So you don’t necessarily need to invest a lot of money into recording your viral video.

You might be able to just get a simple camera that can record video, such as a Flip camera, which makes it easy to not only record the video, but also upload it to YouTube.

You might need to do a little editing of the video.  If it’s really simple edits, you might be able to do this using software that’s already on your computer.  For instance, Windows comes with Windows Movie Maker, which has some pretty nice basic features for editing video.  Some of the features might seem kind of cheesy, but who knows, maybe that’s just what will help make your video viral.

Have you enjoyed this article?  You can leave comments below.  Also, I’ve included some additional resources in case you’d like to read more on this topic.

Additional reading on this topic:

TubeTraffic:  Discover the Little Known Secrets of Getting Free Traffic From YouTube

Viral Video Research

One simple little mistake knocked me off of the front page of Google and basically killed my site as far as the search engines were concerned.  In fact, it wasn’t really anything I did wrong, but one thing I didn’t do that caused these problems.

It started when I decided to install WordPress on the main site of my business, ServeSense.com.

Don’t get me wrong, that wasn’t the mistake, but that’s where the problem started.  Just so we’re clear, I’m a firm believer in WordPress.  It has changed my business.  In fact, soon I’m going to write a post about that in more detail.  But suffice it to say for now that I love WordPress and use it every day.

So what went wrong?

Well, I always used to install WordPress manually, by uploading all the files via FTP, creating a database and database user and password, then running the install script.  However, this time I decided to go the easy route.  Not that the manual route is hard, it just has a few more steps and I’m all about saving time where I can and wanted to try this other route to see if it really would make it easier.

The easy route I’m referring to is by using something called Fantastico.  And again, I’m not knocking Fantastico.  In fact, now I use it to install WordPress whenever I can.  It speeds up the process quite a bit.  But if I’m not mistaken, when I installed WordPress on ServeSense.com with Fantastico, I believe it was the first time I did it that way.  Fantastico is just a tool found in most cPanel installations that makes it easy to install quite a few different open source applications, including WordPress.  Even if you’re not very savvy when it comes to web stuff, you can probably install WordPress this way.

The Danger of Installing WordPress Through Fantastico

While Fantastico is nice and saves a lot of time, there is one significant difference when you install it this way.  In fact, it’s the only difference I’ve noticed.  As far as I can tell, everything else is the same.  But this one difference that I wasn’t aware of at the time is what caused these problems for me.

There is a setting in WordPress, under Settings -> Privacy that allows you to choose whether or not you want search engines like Google and Yahoo to be able to follow links on your site and index your site in the search engines.

When you install WordPress manually, you are given a choice of whether you want search engines like Google to be able to see your website.

Here’s what that screen looks like:

Ok, see that little checkbox that I have the red arrow pointing to?  Well, as of this writing, you don’t get that option in Fantastico.

While WordPress has that option pre-checked by default, assuming you do want your site to appear in search engines, Fantastico, for some reason, assumes you do not want your site to appear in search engines.  I have no idea why, since I’m sure most people do.  But by default, when you install WordPress through Fantastico, it’s as if they uncheck that box for you.

It’s not like it’s impossible to change or anything.  It’s a quick, simple fix (I’ll show you how in a few seconds).  But that’s assuming you know it did that.  In my case, I didn’t realize that.   I had always installed WordPress manually before that and the default setting was to have your site show up in search engines, which is what I wanted 100% of the time, so at that time I wasn’t even familiar with the options panel where you change that.  But believe me, I am now.

So if you’ve installed WordPress through Fantastico, here’s what you need to do.

Just go to Settings -> Privacy.

Here’s where to find that:

After clicking on Privacy, here’s the screen you’ll see:

See that red arrow?  It’s pointing to the default setting if you installed WordPress through Fantastico.  Obviously, all you have to do to change it is select the first option that says you’d like your blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines and then click Save Changes.

Very easy, assuming you know you need to do it.

But in my case, I didn’t realize Fantastico had set it up that way.

So months went by and I noticed my pages that were previously in the #1 spot on the first page of Google for certain keywords were no longer showing up there.  They kept dropping lower and lower until they were no longer on the first page at all.  And even the listings that appeared didn’t look right.  Instead of the page title and excerpts from the page like Google usually shows, all that showed up was my business name and the URL of my home page (instead of the page that was optimized for my keywords).

Obviously I was wondering what in the heck was going on.

I looked at my pages and I did notice one problem that I thought might have been the reason.  Before I switched my site over to WordPress all my links included www. (as in http://www.servesense.com), but after installing WordPress, the www. was missing.  As far as users are concerned, it’s not a big deal.  If someone types in www. in the address, WordPress just redirects them to the non-www. version.  But it’s better not to have those redirects going on if you can help it.

This isn’t normally much of an issue, but I had an existing site with existing pages indexed by Google and Google had indexed them all as having www. in the URL.  Now all those URLs were redirecting elsewhere (to just http://servesense.com – without the www. in the URL).  So that’s easy enough to fix.  You just go under Settings -> General and you can add the www. and then all your links include www.

So I did that and things just continued to get worse.

I don’t actually remember how much time passed (months, though) or the exact sequence of events, but at some point along the way I had a client come to me with this exact same problem.  He was using some of the web tools Google provides for webmaster and it was telling him there was a problem with his robots.txt file on his new site.  I took a look at his site and within a few minutes found the problem of the privacy setting and fixed it… problem solved (for him).

I talked with him a little and found out he had used Fantastico to install WordPress.  So now I knew to watch out for that.  But it didn’t click that I had used Fantastico on my own site.  Since then I’ve installed many WordPress installations for clients using Fantastico and one of my first steps after installation is to go into the privacy settings and make sure it’s set to be listed by the search engines.

However, for some reason, I didn’t think to check my own site for that setting.  In fact, I forgot that I even installed it through Fantastico.  So today I was thinking that my site needs some work.  I’m always getting my clients’ sites setup where both users and the search engines love them, but my own sites are often neglected.  I was just going to install a plugin for myself that I install for my clients that generates a site map and notifies the search engines so they can properly index the site.

Well, I have to give thanks to the developer of that plugin (Google XML Sitemaps).  I installed it and it gave me a message at the top of the page that said my privacy settings are currently blocking the search engines.  My jaw dropped.  Could I have had my site set to block the search engines for the past however many months, after checking that setting almost daily on clients’ sites?  Yes, yes I had.

I clicked Settings -> Privacy and there it was staring me in the face.  Obviously I quickly corrected this and sat there for a few seconds in disbelief.

In a way, it was a relief.  I was wondering why in the world my pages had been dropping out of Google ever since installing WordPress.  I knew if anything Google should have liked my site more.  So I was really puzzled as to why that was happening.  Now I had my answer.

Just in case you’re interested in what exactly this setting does on a technical level, it does a few things.  It adds a “nofollow” meta tag, it generates a virtual robots.txt file that returns a “Disallow: /” (which tells search engines not to index anything at all on the site), and also disables the pinging function that normally notifies pingomatic that you’ve updated something on your site.  For a little more detail, here is the WordPress page that explains the Privacy SubPanel.

So that’s what happened to me and why it happened.  Besides all the pages that were previously getting great ranking dropping out of Google’s search results entirely, the pages also show no Google PageRank anymore.  I’m curious how long it’s going to take for things to get restored.  The site has been around for a number of years, so I’m sure that will count for something.  But I also unknowingly had it blocking the search engines for months.  So we’ll see what happens.

I decided the first thing I’d do after fixing this setting and generating a sitemap is to write a new post so the search engines can get pinged and hopefully Google will start indexing my site again.  And what better topic to write about than how this happened?  Hopefully it will help someone else who is wondering why Google suddenly stopped liking their site after installing WordPress.  As I mentioned, it has nothing to do with installing WordPress, but just using Fantastico to install it.

Did you enjoy this article?  I’d love to hear your comments.

A good email autoresponder system should do two things primarily:

1. Give people a way to get more information from you automatically (without any work on your part)
2. Give you a way to contact all your prospects, customers, or clients at once by sending only 1 e-mail

Aweber does those things well. They make it easy to create an e-mail mailing list and create code you can put into your website to allow people to sign up to receive more information, whether that be in the form of a free report, newsletter, etc.

And whenever you want to send out an e-mail to your entire list at once (called a “broadcast” e-mail), Aweber makes this very easy.   They also include Spam checking so you can make sure your message won’t be mistaken as Spam.

While there are some services that may be a little cheaper, you have to be careful about who you use for an email autoresponder service.  One important factor is deliverability.  What I mean by that is basically whether your e-mails make it through to people’s inboxes.

An e-mail autoresponder / follow-up service sends out many thousands of e-mails every day from their server and all the major e-mail service providers (like AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Verizon, Comcast, etc.) want to know why all these e-mails are coming to their users.  They try to do their best to protect their users from Spam (junk mail) and when they see lots of messages coming from one server, their immediate conclusion is that it’s likely Spam.

A good e-mail autoresponder / follow-up service usually has people dedicated to doing nothing other than maintaining good relationships with these e-mail service providers and Internet service providers.  If there are complaints, they have to handle them.  If a particular user is getting lots of spam complaints, they may put restrictions on the user’s account such requiring the user to use e-mail verification (double opt-in) on all their mailing lists.  This protects all the other users of the autoresponder service.

I’ve used some e-mail autoresponder services that didn’t focus enough on maintaining good relationships with the different e-mail service providers and they would get blacklisted by a particular e-mail service provider.  Let me give you an example of what this means and what impact it has.

Let’s say lots of AOL users complain that they’ve received Spam e-mails.  AOL looks into it to see where these e-mails came from and lots of them are traced back to a particular server on the Internet, probably all from a certain IP address.  From AOL’s perspective, this looks like whoever owns that server is a Spammer, blasting out junk mail.  But in reality, it may be an e-mail autoresponder service.

Let’s just make up a name for this autoresponder service.  We’ll call them XYZ Autoresponder.  If XYZ Autoresponder had maintained a good relationship with all the major email providers such as AOL, then AOL would know why so many e-mails were coming to them from XYZ’s server.  In reality, it’s not just one user sending out all these e-mails, but it’s lots of different users sending out the e-mails.

So if XYZ Autoresponder service didn’t have a good relationship with AOL, AOL is going to assume it’s a spammer and they will add XYZ Autoresponder’s server to their “blacklist”.  What this means is anytime an e-mail comes to AOL from XYZ’s server, it is automatically rejected and whoever it was sent to will never see it.

This is a serious issue because it means any user of the XYZ Autoresponder service who tries to send out an e-mail to their mailing list wouldn’t be able to reach anyone on their list using AOL.  This could potentially be hundreds or thousands of people on your mailing list that you’ve worked hard to get there that you can no longer contact.

So e-mail deliverability is very important.  If you go with a company that doesn’t have the resources or knowledge to maintain good relationships with all the major ISPs and e-mail providers, there’s a good chance your e-mails won’t make it through.  And if you’re e-mails aren’t making it through to people, what’s the point of sending them?

Aweber is one service that I’ve never had issues with when it comes to e-mails getting through.  Of course, you have to be careful with the wording you use in your e-mails so they’re not mistaken for Spam, but that’s a topic for another day.  So you have to do your part, but you need an e-mail autoresponder service who will do their part as well.

All in all, Aweber has been very reliable.  Their pricing structure has changed, which I’m not crazy about, but they’re still reasonable.  Their service, at least as of this writing, starts at $19/month for up to 500 subscribers.  Then it goes up from there depending on how many people are on your list.  The good thing about it is that if you’re properly monetizing your list, the more people you have on your list, the more money you should be making.

While there are several autoresponder services that are decent, I feel like Aweber is about the best when it comes to e-mail deliverability, and that’s really one of the most important things.  So for a while now, they’re my top pick when it comes to an autoresponder service.

Sign Up for Aweber