I know the concept of video email is quite new. Imagine receiving a birthday video email, information on a property you were seeking, or advanced notice of a new car model with a video of it in the email. Certainly providing links to videos on emails is becoming common, and many marketers do that. So why not take the next step?

What You Can and Cannot Do

First, right now, embedding a video in an email is not possible. One day it might happen, but right now email servers don’t have the necessary software for this. This means text links or graphics.

Research suggests that using a graphical representation of your video and then providing a direct link to the video email is the best way to achieve video emailing right now.

The Case For Video Emails

In an article by Mark Brownlow, “Video email: current practices”, he discusses the research on video emailing. There are some interesting statistics.

Looking at this statistic, it is obvious that video is now acceptable to most Internet viewers. “According to comScore, US Internet users viewed 14.8 billion online videos in January, with YouTube alone scoring over 100 million unique viewers in that same period.” Finally video has come of age, and we are all conditioned to use it.

Comparing emails with or without a video link – “When not linking to video his clíck through rate is between 20-27%…when linking to online video it’s consistently between 51-65%” says Anna Yeaman. We know that a video link receives a much better open rate than a simple text message.

With an image in the email, views are 5-10 times as many!

Campaign Monitor reported that: “the screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link.”

Mark Brownlow says of his own email campaigns: “In my own newsletters, a video image attracts between two and ten times the clicks that the accompanying text link gets.”

Do you get this? If you have a properly constructed image in your email, 5-10 times more people will clíck on the link and view your video. If you are in sales, information dissemination, or advertising what would you pay to have 5-10 times more people view your message?

Direct Video or Video With a Link

When considering video email, there are three possibilities;

1. A text link.

2. A video thumbnail.

3. The video plays within the email.

Video Text Link

We are all familiar with text links pointing to videos. These are common in emails now. The challenge is that the link is usually a bunch of numbers and meaningless symbols and not very sexy! The author puts a catchy headline in there to entice you to click. Now you get about double clíck through rates when you direct your emails to a video, so it is pretty good compared to sending them to a text blog entry for instance.

Video Thumbnail

A Video thumbnail is where you get a picture to click on in order to play the video email. A really well produced image looks like a play button. When you click on the image it opens up a browser and plays the email seamlessly. When using a video thumbnail like this, the research suggests a 5-10 times better response than a standard text link! This is huge.

It is not intrusive, as you only see the video if you click on the link. We believe this is the best way to use video email right now, and the research backs us up. Compared to an email with a simple text link to a blog post, you are likely to see a 10-20 times greater open rate. This is phenomenal.

Video Within the Email

There is an email company or two around now that will send an email with a video in it. While this seems great, imagine receiving 20 emails and every time you click on one a video starts paying! I think this is intrusive, and many are likely to get angry at the invasion of their personal space. As well, with most of them you need special software or plug-ins to view them.

Because of this in your face aspect, I would suggest that the best form of video email now and into the future will be the thumbnail version, where with the click of a mouse a high quality video plays seamlessly.

What Video Email Service Should You Use?

I think by now you can see why I am so excited by the concept of video email. It is exciting, new and I believe in the same space as TV was when it first appeared. Right now video emails are not that common. This means sending a message this way is very likely to get opened. As people become more familiar with the technology, expect even better response to video emails and reduced openings of more traditional text links.

After I was Introduced to Video Email, I did my homework to see what was available.

COMF5

Formerly hello, hello, this company has been around for a while. The cost is $39.95 for up to 5,000 email addresses and bandwidth is limited to 40GB. There is no commission payable at this level and to earn residual income you need to pay $99.95 a month.

Their video templates are fairly ordinary and in my opinion, unattractive.

Deliverability is fine. There is no mention of free autoresponders.

EYEJOT

This is a free service if you want to send videos less than 1 minute long. You can upgrade to a 5 minute service for $99.95 a year with tracking. No referral commissions are payable, and there are no autoresponders.

Once again, the actual video template is fairly ordinary and not eye catching. Nevertheless, for a free service, providing you only want to send short messages to people you know, it would be okay.

There is no video conferencing and the basic service can’t be loaded onto YouTube, etc.

About The Author
John Gaydon is an marketing and internet entrepreneur. He currently operates 4 profitable businesses. He has a University Marketing Degree and many years of corporate experience. You can read more of John’s articles on his blog at www.johngaydon.com or contact him direct at john@pems.com.au

Test by webmaster, to see if ShadowBox settings work… Click Here To View Video in Shadowbox

Zi8 and ME67test

What Is Right For Your Business?

The correct or most successful strategy required for each business will vary tremendously which is why most SEO professionals will not even conduct a web marketing campaign without some form of initial consultancy or competitive market assessment.

If time is not one of your assets or your budget is tight, then a generic link building campaign may be all that is affordable to you, but if you are in a competitive market and serious about your on-line business then it simply does not make good business sense to second guess your requirements.

Bite the bullet and employ the services of an SEO consultant even if only for initial consultancy as the advice you receive more often than not will be highly beneficial to the success of your on-line venture.

About The Author
Author: Dave Talbot: Search engine marketing and website promotíon is an essential ingredient for any on-line business. For affordable SEO marketing and link building services visit… www.advancedwebmarketing.co.uk

This is a guest post by Mark Pack. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Knowing when and why to use paragraph breaks is something that most of us were taught at school and, if it doesn’t come to us instinctively, is frequently got wrong. However, it is a key skill to ensure your posts are easy to follow and retain your readers through till the end. So if your instincts aren’t working well, what should you do?

Traditional advice to journalists was to write stories in such as way that they carry on making sense each time you slice a sentence off the end of the story. This was suited to the pre-electronic era where stories had to fit the size of the paper, but it often wasn’t known at the time of writing exactly what the size of that space would be. Moreover, the manual manipulation of text meant that any editing other than trimming words from the end could be slow and cumbersome.

This writing style is still frequently used and still has many merits – such as by catering for both the busy reader, who just reads the first part of the story, and also the more interested reader, who reads on and gets further detail.

It isn’t that well suited to online writing, though, both because usually there isn’t the same constraint on the number of words and also because the increasing trend towards conveying messages via telling stories means you cannot structure posts in the same way. The narrative arrangement of a story is not amenable to editing away from the bottom up.

The traditional way of writing is, however, an approach that still works well within paragraphs. The first sentence of the paragraph is the main point, with the other sentences then clarifying, substantiating or expanding as needed. When you get on to a new point, it’s time for a new paragraph.

So when you’re done, there are two checks for your paragraph structure. First, the post should still make sense even if you only read the first sentence of each paragraph. Second, you should be able to in turn chop off the last sentence of any paragraph (that is more than one sentence long) and for the post still to flow.

Finally, remember that as with all rules about writing, all rules are there for the breaking on that occasional moment of genius.

Mark Pack is Associate Director, Digital at Mandate Communications and blogs at markpack.org.uk.

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1. Keep a notebook by the bed.

This is for flashes of inspiration – not for working on new posts when you should be sleeping. Have some discipline!

2. Maintain a sensible schedule.

Work time. Home time. Play time. Blog time. Sleep time. Set aside time for each activity, and don’t let things overrun. Stick to your schedule as much as you can.

3. Ban all questions after a certain time.

Does your significant other show an interest in your blog? Great! Just tell them to button it when it’s time to sleep. Make sure you button it, too.

4. Pretend you don’t have a laptop and wireless Internet.

It’s just too convenient to hop into bed, go online… and stay online. It might be fun, but don’t do it if you have to get up in the morning. Or if you feel like sleeping anytime soon.

5. Don’t go coffee-crazy.

I like a cappuccino in the morning. Not every morning, but every now and again. I avoid coffee in the evenings though. Too many coffees will keep you up all night. Unless you’re immune to the effects of caffeine.

6. Don’t hide your ideas under the bed.

Notebook? Sure. Anything else? No! It’s fine to jot down an idea to make sure you don’t lose it, but don’t get carried away and start developing some of your post ideas. And don’t go thinking you can hide things in the bed, either. It’s not going to be a comfortable night for you if you try that one.

7. Sit in the bath.

I’m not expecting you to use the bath as your bed. Having a bath is a great way to relax. Do keep a notebook fairly close by, but be careful not to drop it in the tub. Whatever you do, don’t bring your laptop or mobile phone into the bathroom – leave them outside where they won’t electrocute you. Seriously. Be careful!

8. Set a cut-off time for snacking.

Blogging can be hungry work, but eating doesn’t usually help you sleep. Separating food from blogging and sleeping can make the difference between getting a good night’s sleep, or losing track of time and having to pick the crumbs out of your bed, laptop and clothes.

9. Resist the urge to blog if you wake up early.

Do you have a tendency to wake up in the middle of the night? It’s best to try and get back to sleep – don’t go and start writing a new post. Of course, if you do have an idea, jot it down… but leave it at that.

10. Don’t be too good at it!

Whether you’re basking in the glory of blogging, or you’ve convinced your perfect partner that you really are all that… if you don’t want to be up all night, be mediocre! (Maybe staying up late isn’t such a bad thing…)

What do you think? Does blogging keep you up at night? What do you do about it?

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For better or worse, your blog’s theme is the first thing most people notice about your site when they visit. Even before they’ve read a word they’ve made judgments about your site, its appearance and its professionalism that can not be undone easily.

With that in mind, many bloggers obsess over their themes almost as much, if not more, than their content. Considering how easy themes are to change out in most blogging platforms, many have taken to changing themes the way others change socks.

This is, however, a very bad idea. Changing your theme is an important part of your site from time to time, but doing it too often can greatly hurt your connection with the readers and even your search engine standings. It is important to use caution when creating your theme and try to pick/customize one that will last you quite some time.

The Importance of Consistency

The problem with changing your theme too often is that your theme is part of your site’s branding. It represents your site the same as your name, logo and domain do. The same as you wouldn’t change your site URL lightly, you should change your blog theme either.

My main site, Plagiarism Today, just celebrated it’s fourth anniversary. During the those years it has had only three themes. The first was a starter theme that only lasted a few months, the second a more traditional blog theme and the third, current theme, that use a magazine-style layout.

The first theme was just to get started, the second was used to make the site look more professional plus make the theme more relevant to the content, the third was to provide better organization for the new kinds of content I was creating. Each theme had a purpose and the move from one to the other was planned.

However, with each update came problems. Though technical issues were common, even with thorough testing on a dummy site, the bigger issues were with readers. This is almost certainly true for virtually every other blog out there that has any form of regular readership.

Consider the following issues when debating whether a change in theme.

1. You Are Changing Your Brand: People who read your site associate a certain color scheme and layout with it. Changing it forces them to readapt. This not only means learning how to use your site again, but also to connect it with your new theme.
2. Change is Polarizing: No matter how overwhelmingly your audience loves the new theme, some will hate it and may stop visiting. Expect to lose at least some readers every time you change your theme.
3. Many Readers Likely Use RSS: If your blog has a high number of feed subscribers, they won’t be affected by the theme change until they stop by and it could be a big surprise for them, especially if they haven’t come by in some time.
4. SEO Issues: A simple theme change can affect how well search engines are able to see your site, especially if you switch from a a standard blog theme to a magazine layout or vice versa.
5. You See Your Theme the Most: You probably visit your site every day. Most of your readers don’t. If your theme is performing well but you feel like its “old” or “tired”, it may just be you.

However, the biggest problem for many is that changing your theme too often looks unprofessional and indecisive. Constantly rotating your theme makes your site look amateurish and like you are not dedicated to it.

It’s much better, in the long run, to take the time and set up a theme that will last you a long time than it is to bounce from theme to theme.

Tips for Changing Themes

If you still feel compelled to change your theme, here are a few basic tips to make sure that the change goes over well and lasts a long time.

1. Let Your Readers Help Test: Create a test version of the site if possible and let your readers test and comment on it before taking it live. Not only can they help spot technical issues, but it helps them familiarize themselves with it and be a part of the process.
2. Don’t Change Your Everything: Changing your theme doesn’t mean starting over, if you keep your colors, logo or other elements, it makes your site more recognizable despite what is new. You can also change a lot in your theme without actually changing your theme, such as adding new widgets or tweaking the CSS.
3. Use a Spider Simulator: Use a search engine spider simulator on your test site to make sure that the search engines can see your content adequately.
4. Announce the Change in Your RSS Feed: Let your RSS readers know about the change so they aren’t surprised when they go to leave a comment. Granted, it’s not an on-topic post but every site has at least some “housekeeping” posts.
5. Take Feedback Seriously, but Not as Gospel: Once you’ve made the change, no matter how much public testing you do, you’ll still get feedback. Take it seriously and make appropriate changes but don’t feel that you have to or even can win over everyone. Some people will be upset, that’s a fact of life when you change a theme.

In the end, changing a theme isn’t a particularly difficult task, but it is an easy one to mess up.

Bottom Line

Content is king on the Web but your theme also makes a big impression. A professional, appropriate theme can put your content in the right context and start the reader off with a good impression that stays with them as they read on. A bad theme can be overcome with great content, but it acts as a weight on your writing in the eyes of your readers.

This highlights the importance of finding a good theme, making it yours and sticking with it until it no longer looks good. A good theme can last you several years with only minor changes, if you are constantly rotating themes more often than that, you need to take a look at what is going on to make you change out so frequently.

Failure to do so can cost your site drastically, both with the search engines and your readers, but with so many good themes out there and so many great tools for manipulation, there is no reason it should be a problem.

You would be surprised with the amount of bloggers and webmasters out there who believe that their sites get way more traffic than what they really do. And I am not pointing fingers here, as I have been there myself.

The reason for this is probably connected with the popularity of cPanel hosting, as the two web analytics programs that come with cPanel, AWStats and Webalizer, grossly overestimate traffic levels. Beginners often use one of these to get the stats for their sites, and they end up believing in a fairy tale of visitors and page views.

Around two years ago I was doing the same mistake. By that time this blog was probably getting some 100,000 page views monthly, but Webalizer was reporting 350,000 page views or so…. Needless to say that I wanted to believe in the latter number, but after a while a realized that it couldn’t be right.

Take a look at the traffic levels that Webalizer reported for this blog in August:

If you sum that up you will get 1,081,959 page views. I wish that was true! The real number is closer to a third of that.

So why is it important to get real about traffic levels? For several reasons. First of all it is the only way to know the popularity of your site and to compare it with the competition. Secondly, it is essential to know the real numbers when you are trying to monetize the site. Imagine selling banner ads on your site and claiming that you get 300,000 monthly page views when in reality you get 50,000…. Advertisers would get pissed and you would also hurt your credibility.

At this point you might be asking: “OK, you convinced me, but how do I get the real traffic numbers for my site?”

In my opinion that are just two ways to get the real traffic levels on your website. The first one is by using Google Analytics, which is the analytics software that most accurately interprets traffic data (it is free also). The second way would be to run third party ads on your site, like Google AdSense or ads from a CPM network. When there is money involved you can bet that people will track the numbers as accurately as possible.

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“A change I’ve noticed from the ‘old days’ of blogging – people don’t link when they quote you as much as they used to.â€

The replies to my tweet were quite varied – some agreed while some disagreed – some argued that a link was not necessary while others argued that it was essential. The replies highlighted just how much diversity of opinion there was on the topic so I thought I’d put together a few thoughts on the topic.

But before I share why I DO link to others from my blogs when quoting or borrowing ideas directly from others I thought it might be worthwhile sharing some of the reasons people gave yesterday for why they thought links were becoming LESS used in this way.

1. Competition

The most common remark to my tweet was that people thought it was mainly to do with a change in the way that bloggers viewed other blogs in their niche.

The theory is that in ‘the old days’ of blogging the blogosphere was more about sharing ideas, networking, communal learning etc – but that these days it’s more about ‘getting ahead’ or ‘empire building’ in some way. As a result other blogs are less seen as an opportunity to network or have mutually beneficial opportunities – but that they’re more seen as ‘the competition’.

Of course there are plenty of examples where this is not the case – but I suspect it’s one of the reasons that some bloggers don’t link out to others.

2. PageRank Sculpting

The other main theory that people shared (and a few admitted it was why they didn’t link out) was that they saw links on their blogs as valuable and wanted to use them in ways that benefited themselves by ‘sculpting’ the link juice on their sites.

This is an SEO (search engine optimisation) approach to linking – the theory is that the more links you have on a page the less weight each one of them carries in passing on page rank to the sites you’re linking to.

The idea is that you link to fewer sites so that the few that you do link to (your own internal links, links to your other sites, links to partners sites or those paying for links) have maximum benefit. The practice is to limit links and/or use nofollow tags on any link that you don’t want to pass page rank so that those that do pass it pass the maximum.

I know that most bloggers probably don’t page sculpting in mind when they’re linking to other blogs – but it was the 2nd most mentioned explanation that people mentioned to me on Twitter yesterday.

3. Laziness and/or Forgetfulness

The third theory shared on why people don’t link is that they either forget to or that they’re just too lazy to do it.

I suspect that most bloggers at one time or another have inadvertently forgotten to link to another page when quoting them or bouncing off something they’ve written. I know I’ve done this a number of times over the years (I fix them when they’re brought to my attention).

4. Ignorance

The last theory that some of my followers shared is that they thought that some people simply where not aware of the etiquette when it comes to quoting others (or that they simply didn’t believe in it).

This was highlighted to me in a couple of the DMs that I received after my tweet from people who admitted that they didn’t link to other sites that they quoted because they’d never heard of the practice. They did not do it maliciously, they had no ulterior motives – they’d just never thought to do it or been taught that that was what should happen.

5. Or Have Things Just Changed?

As I pondered the topic yesterday it struck me that perhaps things had simply changed and that I was ‘old fashioned’ in my approach.

Perhaps this ‘ignorance’ could also be explained by a change that is happening in the unspoken etiquette of the web? Perhaps there’s a transition in belief and behaviour happening here and I just need to get with the times?

After all times are changing – people of my parents generation are always telling me how things that they used to think were unacceptable are now common place…. social interactions change don’t they?

I really hope that this last theory is not the case – you see in my experience linking to other sites from your blog is actually something that is very powerful. In my experience it improves your blog to do it but also makes the web a better place.

Which leads me to an exploration of why I link out to other blogs and websites from my blog.

Why I DO Link to Other Sites

Let me start by saying that when I say I link to other blogs and websites that I’m talking about doing so as a way of giving credit to those sites. For example when I’m quoting someone or when I’m directly taking an idea that someone’s written about on their site and am extending it, reacting to it or bouncing off it some way on my own blog.

As I said above – I’m sure there are times when I’ve inadvertently not done this (you’re welcome to point them out to help me rectify this). Enough disclaimers – here’s some reasons that I do link:

1. Etiquette/Manners/Courtesy

At a base level I think it’s important to acknowledge the work of someone else when you use it.

When someone has written something that you’re quoting – that person has taken time to craft those words, they’ve gone to some effort to make the impression that they have on you. You in turn are using their words (and the effort that they went to to craft them) to improve your own blog in some way – as a result I think it’s important to acknowledge that.

You could of course do this without a link – but I think a link shows a little extra spirit of generosity and appreciation that is simply good courtesy in my mind.

2. Usefulness

Linking to your sources makes your content more useful to your readers.

Good content is useful content. I’m constantly talking about how to build a successful blog you need to be producing something that is useful in some way to those reading it. By linking to the page where you take a quote or idea you’re providing your readers with the opportunity to read more on the topic or see the quote in it’s original context.

Your reader may or may not click the link – but it does give them the opportunity to explore further or learn more.

I know that as a blog reader when I’m reading a quote that I find particularly interesting that I want to learn more about who said it. If there’s no easy way to do this I think have to go to the effort of researching myself. I actually find this annoying and it creates the impression to me that the author of the content is too lazy or stingy to go to the effort themselves.

Giving readers other things to read around the web adds depth to your blog. Yes it sends people away from your site to read someone else’s – but if it’s a link to something good they’re more likely to come back because you become a trusted source of information.

3. It Makes the Web Better

Links are what makes the internet what it is.

I still remember the first day I got online. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I connected on my brand new dialup modem but I do remember looking at my watch later that day and realising that 7 hours had passed and that I’d barely moved much more than the index finger on my mouse as I surfed from one page to another.

I was caught in the ‘web’. One site led to another which lead to another which led to another – the web inspired me.

I had a similar feeling the first day I visited the first blog that I had ever read – it linked out generously to other blogs in it’s niche which in turn linked to others. I was immediately hooked into this community of websites – but particularly to that first one which got me going.

Perhaps this is a little naive – but for me the
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Some people employ certain methods in acquiring a high page rank in search engines, even if these are considered to be deceitful in the sense that they are designed to trick the search engines – one of these methods is actually duplicating web content.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content in SEO is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to improve site’s search engine page rankings.

A lot of people think that by creating multiple but similar replicas of their web pages or content, that they will be able to improve their site’s page rankings since they will be able to get multiple listings for their site.

Since search engines are now monitoring these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of improving their ranking.

What are considered as duplicate content?

There are a couple of duplicate content types that are being rampantly utilized by a lot of people, each one a bit different in their use, but all of them employed for the same purpose, which is to trick search engines to get better page rankings.

One way of getting duplicate content is by having very similar websites or identical web pages on different sub-domains or domains that offer basically the same content. This may include landing or door pages aside from the content, so make sure that you avoid using this if you don’t want your site to become vulnerable to search engines’ duplicate content filter.

Another method of creating duplicate content is by simply taking content from another website or page and reorganizing it to make it appear dissimilar to its original form, though it is actually the same.

Product descriptions from many eCommerce sites are actually being utilized by other sites as well. Other sites simply copy the product description of manufacturer’s utilized by other competitive markets as well. And add the fact that the product name, as well as the name of artist, manufacturer, writer or creator would be included, a significant amount of content would show up on your page. Although this is much harder to spot, it is still considered to be duplicate content, or spam.

Distribution of copied articles by other sites other than the one that distributed the original article can also be considered to be a duplicate content.

Unfortunately, although some search engines still deem the site where the original article came from as relevant, some however, do not.

How do search engines filter duplicate content?

Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analyzing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites and catalogues these sites by reading and saving information to their database.

Once this is done, these robots then analyzes and compares all the information it has taken from one website to all the others that It has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site’s content is relevant, and if it can be considered as a duplicate content or spam.

How to avoid duplicate content?

Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to improve your site’s page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content.

One way that you can avoid this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too much similarities with another page’s content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn’t considered to be spam.

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About the Author: Craig Edmonson – The Google Top 10 offers SEO Services to U.S. based companies. Stop by for a free web site analysis.

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