With so many forms of online marketing now available to you the key to making the most of everything that you do is to fully harness the potential of each and every piece of material you produce.

Keep in touch – the power of RSS
Make sure that everything you produce has an RSS feed link so that anyone who wants to be kept up to date can get the information they want automatically. This applies to all social media (blogs, social networking sites) as well as your website information. Don’t make people have to find you again. Make it easy for them.

Effective Keywords
Choose the most effective keywords and key phrases to use accross all your online marketing. This will make all your efforts more targeted and effective. Who are you audience? What have you got that they want the most at this moment in time? This is the basis for your keywork search and online marketing campaign.

Social Networking
Are you a member of social networking sites? It is very easy to send information to social networks. For example if you write a blog post you can easily send a link to Twitter and Facebook to let your contacts there know about the new information.

Do you have easy links on all the marketing material that you produce so that people can pass your name on to others in their social networks?

Press release
Announce your press release on your website. Make this the link back target so that when people read about you on other sites they link back to your company website or blog.

All information
When you produce a piece of marketing allow people to follow you in the way that best suits them by having all your contact information available: your website, blog, Twitter, Facebook and site information.

Break it down
Think creatively when using multi-media. Your time and money investment can go further if you look at all the options. For example, if you create an online video, then break it down – use the script as a pdf download, use the audio as a podcast on your site.

Conventional Media
If you use conventional media marketing whether its print, radio or TV advertising, add your online details. People like to look you up.

Video is currently big business on the internet. A recent study by Nielsen found that people are spending 25% more time watching online video that they were a year ago. Its a powerful medium which is helping large companies to spread their message and increase their global brand awareness.

Goviral, a video-content distributor, produces a top ten list of viral videos every month. This month and last the videos chosen show an international flavour to the video techniques used. This reflects marketers increasing desire to market globally with one hit. October 09 produced the following:

1. Volkswagen – The Fun Theory
2. Google Wave Cinema – Pulp Fiction
3. FIFA 2010 – How big can football get?
4. Rio de Janeiro – Olympic Games 2016
5. Diesel – Quique The Head
6. Canal+ – A Great Story
7. ReThink Breast Cancer – BoobyBall
8. Evian  – More than a bottle
9. Sony Ericsson – Hopper Invasion
10. Cadbury – Zingolo feat. Tinny

Goviral gives some commentary on each video and discusses why its viral or likely to become so. This is a useful site for businesses who are thinking of implementing this kind of online marketing technique.

Viral Marketing is just as useful for large global brands as it is for small start-ups who needs to get on the map. It can be applied to various online marketing mediums including video, email and texts. In a recent campaign to raise awareness of search engine Bing, Microsoft launched a video competition. The video that won was so amusingly poor that it did the viral rounds and created a lot of publicity for Bing.

It would have been Michael Jachson’s 51st birthday on 29th August and Google created a new logo to commemorate it. This pleased many fans. For Google, Michael Jackson fever helps to increase their coiffures as thousands flood onto YouTube to watch the controversial icon’s online videos.

The point is that online video is big business and there has been no bigger business than Michael Jackson at the moment over the last few months.

YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. It is now part of our social landscape, particularly amongst the young and is used by individuals as well as businesses to share information and entertainment. It was bought by Google in November 2006 and is now run by one of its subsiduaries.

YouTube sells advertising space on its pages and will be making a lot of revenue from the high viewing figures that Michael Jackson attracts:

Thriller – 75,230,680 views
Beat It – 55,694,580 views
Billie Jean – 48,607,244 views
Smooth Criminal – 45,874,905 views

How can you benefit?
As a business you can use YouTube in a couple of ways:

Place your own videos
Publish your own videos to promote your business.  This increases awareness of your brand and encourages people to find out more about you.

Advertise
Advertising can be paid for by the number of clicks to your site that come from YouTube pages. The more views a video has the more chance that your site will receive more visitors from people who visit YouTube.

An important point to mention is that online video is becoming more and more important. According to a survey from comScore, Video Metrix nearly 9 million Google site videos, 99% of them from YouTube, were viewed in July. That has will have produced a lot of revenue.

It’s a win-win situation as the Michael Jackson example shows. Everyone gets more business: the advertiser, YouTube and the Michael Jackson music producers.