From their article:

Every real estate agent and developer is different, and each one believes one form of marketing works better than another. Word of mouth, or viral marketing, represents just one method of marketing. Others include print, radio, television, Web sites, and blogs. This marketing “to-do” list can grow, and it would take a ’superperson’ to take advantage of every marketing situation - let alone to use each one to its peak performance.

This is where marketing bloggers can come to the rescue. The list below includes bloggers who focus on general and online marketing, including blogs. More specifically, the list below focuses only on real estate marketing, a necessity that can prove both very expensive and time-consuming unless you learn how to get around those obstacles.

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On one hand we have marketers believing their “unique selling proposition” is as interesting as the “Numa Numa” kid. On the other, we have today’s ADHD-prone video viewers demanding short entertainment whether it is promotional or not.

So the rules are fairly simple: Keep your promotion short, interesting, edgy and give us a surprise that makes us want to forward your clip. After all, it’s not a “viral video” if nobody wants to share it.

Lesson One: Tap Video Creators
We online-video creators and watchers are a community that’s not shrinking and not growing slowly. Your customers are among us unless you’re targeting the maybe 10%-20% of people that haven’t watched an online video.

And here’s the best kept secret. Some of us will promote a brand for a modest fee. While some YouTubers are certifiably nuts, others can be your spokesperson and a way to connect with large audiences. And some video creators will make a promotional video for less than your agency bills you for that lunch meeting; others will do it for free product samples.

Although the scalability of these programs is currently limited (unless you create one of the extremely rare viral sensations), the return on investment is often better than paid search.

Lesson Two: Quality Doesn’t Mean Popularity
My most popular videos are far from my best. Almost every day my videos rank in the “highest rated” section of the comedy category, and yet I’m far from the funniest creator on YouTube.

When I featured a 14-year-old using a fart machine in a public library, I never dreamed “Farting in Public” would get nearly 4 million views. Though popular videos tend to be short, funny and shocking, there are other variables that have as much influence on getting the video seen.

Many second and third-tier sites will give entertaining sponsored videos preferred placement for relatively small amounts of media spend. Got $10,000? Use the money to help get a clever sponsored video seen instead of pouring it into a black hole of unseen banner ads.

Lesson Three: Try Product Placement
While some clever advertisements (with surprise endings, humor or sex) do become viral, most ads don’t translate online, and it’s a rare promotional video that gets millions of views. The smarter play is to sponsor popular video creators to create entertainment with product placement.

This requires brands to let go of overt marketing messages and trust the instincts of creators to please their audiences.

Lesson Four: It’s Not Just About Contests
While contests are pervasive tools to engage online video creators and audiences, they’re just one tactic among many. Smarter brands are connecting directly with prominent viral video creators. These folks have huge subscriber bases and fans, and are often delighted to get paid relatively small amounts for a sponsored video.

Lesson Five: ‘Tagging’ Video Is Just a Start
Keywords may get your video to rank in searches, but there are far more effective ways to get your videos seen, such as title and thumbnail.

A short funny video with a surprise ending will be exponentially more viral. That said, well-tagged videos can help brands in search. Do a Google search for “Healies” (a misspelling of the shoe called “Heely’s) and you’ll find my “Poor Man’s Healies” videos near the top of the results page. Meanwhile, Zappos and Dick’s Sporting Goods are bidding against the keyword and paying for each click.

Lesson Six: Video Views Don’t Mean Sales
I learned this the hard way. The conversion rate from viewing a video to visiting your site is not much better than the low-single digits of direct response. That means you either need metrics for the “worth” of a view or hope your video is seen millions of times so the direct-response metrics aren’t embarrassing.

Lesson Seven: The ROI Disconnect
A $250,000 production cost makes a return on investment difficult. Since fewer than 2% of people will visit a Web site after a video, a good ROI requires a low production cost and the highest number of views possible.

Lesson Eight: Not All Portals Are Created Equal
The vast majority of online viewing occurs on YouTube. Putting your videos on a bloated-product.com site is the online equivalent to running television commercials on a kiosk hidden in an abandoned cemetery.

Lesson Nine: Conservatives Welcome
Conservative legal and public-relations policies have prevented many marketers from entering into a dialogue with prominent video creators. Most marketers have seen at least a few videos that mention their own brands or those of competitors, but some brands remain squeamish about something as simple as an online-video contest.

Doritos, Dove, Heinz and Mr. Clean were just a few of the brands that invited consumers to submit to contests to win cash, prizes, fame or a chance to be on TV.

Some brands fear running a contest because they don’t want to be ridiculed. But brands will be bashed by disgruntled consumers via online video whether or not their companies dabble in the space.

Quietly watching from the sidelines is no insurance policy and certainly won’t grow revenue. So refraining from online video in fear is no smarter than those companies that were afraid to market online back in 1998.

Lesson 10: The Medium Will Be Measured
As it matures, video will become as measurable as search. But for the time being, the most controllable variables are cost of production and total views.

Kevin Nalts is a career marketer (formerly with Johnson & Johnson) and now is a consumer-product director at a Fortune 100 company. A self proclaimed ‘Viral Video Genius,’ Nalts writes about the convergence of marketing and online video at WillVideoForFood.com. He is authoring a book titled ‘The Prophet of Online Video’ and creates sponsored videos for such brands as Mentos, GPSManiac, and DoMyStuff.

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It is no wonder, therefore, that video advertising is fast becoming a major internet marketing tool for selling products and services.

Advantages of Internet Video Advertising

The main advantage of Internet marketing videos over the traditional text format approach is that videos can get to the point much faster. Even a static visual is worth a thousand words, it is taught in graphic design schools. Imagine what a moving visual, or the movie, can do in delivering your message to the viewer.

The viral edge is another advantage Internet videos have over other traditional marketing channels. There is no better marketing strategy than ‘word-of-mouth’. Websites continually share and serve popular content driven by user choice. The speed at which videos are picked up, shared, and distributed is unparalleled to any other.

Internet Video sharing sites like ‘youtube’ are a rage today, and this is a reflection of the choice of internet surfers. New sites like LeadsbyVideo are coming up with video sharing innovations which are great for online marketing.

A video ad can actually demonstrate a product’s usability, so don’t just say it, show it!. A nicely produced visual message with a human touch can do wonders in reaching out emotionally to the customer. Does the quality of the video matter? Yes, of course. Like in other marketing tools, there are experts available who can produce the right movie to suit your product, and budget.

A Few Tips

1. Use the videos on the first page. It’s like handing out your business card. The first page recommends you, and the first impression is a lasting one. Don’t tuck your marketing video away, on some inside page. Make it visible.

2. Always have a ‘call for action’ – something that the customer will feel like doing immediately, like clicking on a link, or filling up a form.

3. Search for the tools that can tell you how much of your video was played before the visitor closed it, how many prospects actually decided to pay your site a visit after watching your video, how many of these visits converted into sales, and so on.

4. Today you can track traffic on the website and analyze results. Make an extra effort to measure the impact that your videos have had on the prospects, and to measure their performance.

5. Use Search Engine Optimization techniques to generate leads. Remember, videos are a gourmet dish for search engines, so give it proper time and prepare it with extra care. Use the right ingredients, so to speak.

Go ahead, share your video!

Thanks, Mac Craig, for contributing this article.  He is an internet professional who has been serving several firms as an online marketing consultant. He counsels on internet video marketing and video advertising.

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It is often said that network marketing is the perfect business. It seems logical that many people in the business say this, since a statement like that could draw new people into the business. “This really is the perfect business!” could be just what your prospect needs to get the courage to make the decision and join your network marketing company. But is that all it is? Just a great statement to be used in an attempt to close people, or is there actually any truth to it? Of course not everybody shares this positive image of the industry. Many people think quite the opposite of network marketing. Busloads of people would laugh when someone would refer to it as ‘the perfect business’ because they don’t even consider it a business in the first place. They might still have the picture of a bunch of housewives gathering around the kitchen table to sell each other plastic cups and lingerie as a hobby. Obviously not everybody evaluates a business by the same criteria but with global revenues exceeding 100 billion dollars it just doesn’t fit the description of a hobby anymore. It’s serious business.

Fortunately a lot has been written on the subject over the years, by people outside and inside network marketing. Robert Kiyosaki is a good example of a successful entrepreneur and best selling author, who has not made his fortune in network marketing. He isn’t even in the business. But he is a strong advocate of the industry because of its power and potential. He also explains why, in his opinion, this industry offers the best chance of success for an individual that wants to start a business these days. He claims that network marketing companies have a system in place, much like a franchising formula, that have proven to produce results if you stick to the system.

So if we have established that network marketing is indeed a business, the question still remains: “How perfect is it?” To answer this question let’s look at this from the perspective of someone that wants to go out and start a business.

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A great article on newteevee.com, they stated that Forrester has the most bullish estimate yet for online video advertising spending in the U.S.: $7.1 billion by 2012. That’s after a 72 percent compound annual growth rate for the next five years, building on total spending of $471 million this year.

That tops eMarketer’s July estimate that online video advertising would be worth $4.3 billion in 2011 — by Forrester’s growth curve (see chart above), revenues would already have already passed the $5 billion mark by then. Another contrast: eMarketer’s estimate depended on monster growth early on — an 89 percent growth rate to $775 million in 2007 — followed by 40 percent growth through the next five years.

Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk praised the emergence of “customer-centric” ad formats like the overlays used by VideoEgg, YouTube and others, which, rather than forcing an ad in their video streams, allow viewers to decide if and when to pause a video to watch an ad.  She wrote, Vanguard marketers and brand mainstreamers, including Nike, Disney, and Nestle, are already advertising with VideoEgg — and with good reason. YouTube tests show that video overlays generate five to 10 times more clicks than banner ads.

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