Wednesday, June 23, 2010

SEO Your YouTube Channel to Bring New Business



Posted: 23 Jun 2010 09:30 AM PDT
This post is the latest in our Small Business series about entrepreneurship and the various Google tools you can use to establish and improve your business presence on the Internet. Here, you'll learn how, with only a digital camera and a small budget, you can use YouTube to drive sales and engage your potential customers. -Ed.

When you go to YouTube, you often see ads from big brand advertisers—a homepage ad or a display campaign running across the site. But many small business owners also use YouTube to reach their customers with videos about their products and services. While there are lots of different types of ads that small businesses can run on YouTube, sometimes the best way to show off your brand or product is to simply create a great video. Terrence Kelleman, founder of Dynomighty Design, has made YouTube videos the centerpiece of his company's marketing strategy, so I've invited him to share his thoughts about how he grew his business using YouTube.
In 2001, I was working my day job as a digital photographer for e-commerce at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) when I found several prototypes for a product that were being thrown out. The plastic elements had magnets inside them, and as I broke them open and put the magnets on my desk, they suddenly shot together to form a straight line. Playing with the magnets, I realized I could make jewelry that was held together by magnetic force alone. This chance discovery was the first step on the road to starting my own company, Dynomighty, which sells magnetic jewelry and other creative products.

My first YouTube video of a magnetic bracelet was supposed to be a video for my own website to help demonstrate the dynamic features of our products. I was in a hurry the day I made it because my wife Ingrid and I were staying late to wrap up some orders. I set up some lights against a white background, and shot the video with a small point-and-shoot Canon digital camera without any editing. (In the original video, you could even hear the honking cars on Broadway outside our office in New York.) It took me three or four takes to fit all the magnetic jewelry "tricks" in a minute-long video. I posted the video to YouTube, we finished up for the night and went home.



Sitting at my desk about a month later, I heard the "beep" sound that told me I had a new email message. It beeped again, then again, and again until I noticed that in less than a minute, I'd received 13 messages notifying me of new comments on my YouTube video. And they kept coming: when I turned on my computer the next morning, it took an hour for all my email messages to load! We were inundated with orders, comments, questions, offers and opportunities to expand our business. Three months later, we'd finally caught up on all the orders, and our total sales in that time—following that one video—were approximately $130,000. Today, the video has almost 3 million views and continues to drive a steady flow of customers to our website.

YouTube gives us the perfect opportunity to incorporate video into our marketing because you don't need advanced technical skills or expertise in online video creation or hosting. It helps us sell our product, learn about our audience and build a strong brand image. And as a small company with a limited advertising budget, YouTube has become our main advertising strategy. Not only are costs low with Promoted Videos, but healthy conversions also make YouTube our #1 referring site in terms of traffic and revenue.

We've made 146 other videos since our first one, and we've learned a lot. Most importantly, to make an effective video marketing campaign, you need to have compelling visuals and content. We often look to other popular videos on YouTube for inspiration, and ask ourselves "What do people like to watch?" Then we implement aspects of those videos into our own video work, and try to build a connection with our customers that pictures and product copy can't really convey on their own. For instance, seeing videos of time-lapse mural paintings gave me the idea to capitalize on a unique feature of our Mighty Wallets®. The Mighty Wallet has a writable surface that you can draw on with Sharpie markers, so I set up my camera and let our design intern go freehand with his unique drawing style. The resulting video now garners about 15 percent of our total views online and has generated more than 270,000 views in seven months. And because of YouTube Insight, we've been able to learn a lot about our viewers—like their demographics and how they find our videos—and to use that information to develop a loyal following on the site. Today many of our videos receive more than 100,000 views within the first three months of being uploaded.

Nine years ago, a chance discovery led me to start my own company, and another discovery five years later helped me further grow my business through YouTube. I don't know what's next for Dynomighty, but chances are you'll see it on YouTube.


Terrence (back left, in blue shirt) and the Dynomighty team

Posted by Tom Pickett, Director of Online Sales and Operations, YouTube
Posted: 22 Jun 2010 12:00 PM PDT
This month, Googlers around the world participated in GoogleServe—an annual event in which Google employees take a break from their day jobs to re-connect with local communities and give back through service projects. Over 6,000 Googlers from 65 offices in 27 countries spent time in activities ranging from helping the elderly get online and consulting with organizations on their social-media strategies to tidying up public parks and playing with dogs waiting to be rehomed.

GoogleServe began in 2008 as an employee-driven initiative and is organized almost entirely by volunteers. For the 2010 event, we partnered with hundreds of community organizations, schools and governments to help meet local needs around the world. Here's a taste of some of this year's projects:
  • We tilled soil and planted seedlings at Gaining Ground in Concord, Massachusetts
  • We packed food bags for families living under the breadline at Resala in Cairo, Egypt and delivered meals to the needy in San Francisco, California with the Salvation Army
  • We trained senior citizens in Dublin, Ireland and Santa Monica, California to engage more effectively in the online world
  • We cleaned kitty condos in Milpitas, California at the Humane Society of Silicon Valley and repaired a road leading to the animal shelter at Tier-Asyl Hübeli, in Zurich, Switzerland
  • We cleaned rooms, tended gardens and helped out on art projects at Singapore's Association of the Visually Handicapped
  • We repaired playground equipment in Hamburg, Germany, painted classrooms in Johannesburg, South Africa and folded 1,000 origami cranes for sick children in Tokyo, Japan
Check out our album below to see some of our employees and partners in action. And if you'd like to join us in service to your community, websites like All For Good can help you find volunteer opportunities near you.



Posted by Seth Marbin, GoogleServe Global Director
Posted: 22 Jun 2010 10:53 AM PDT
(Cross-posted from the Google Voice Blog)

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we're excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required.

Over the past year, we've introduced a mobile web app, an integrated voicemail player in Gmail, the ability to use Google Voice with your existing number and more. Over a million of you are now actively using Google Voice, and many of the features released over the past year (like SMS to email and our Chrome extension) came as a result of your suggestions, so thanks!

If you haven't yet tried Google Voice, we can't wait for you to try it out and let us know what you think. Check out our revamped features page to learn about everything Google Voice can do, and if you haven't seen it yet, this video provides a good overview in less than two minutes:



We're proud of the progress we've made with Google Voice over the last few years, and we're still just scratching the surface of what's possible when you combine your regular phone service with the latest web technology. It's even more amazing to think about how far communication has come over the last couple hundred years. To put things in context, we created this infographic to visualize some recent history of human communication and how Google Voice uses the web to help people communicate in more ways than ever before (click the image for a larger version):



Update 10:53AM: Just to clarify, though we've opened up sign-ups, Google Voice is still limited to everyone in the U.S. for now.

Posted by Craig Walker & Vincent Paquet, Google Voice Product Managers
Posted: 22 Jun 2010 08:44 AM PDT
In April, we invited young artists in 17 countries to create a Google doodle based on the theme "I love football." Since then, more than 35,000 children in Australia, Germany, Ghana, South Korea, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Czech Republic, Kenya, UAE and Israel have created original designs for this first-ever international doodling competition.


From footballs to goalposts, we saw some truly creative designs that prove just how much you can do with an "l," an "e," and a couple "o's" and "g's." In the past two weeks, the winner of each country's competition had their design shown on their country's homepage for a day. Now, we need help deciding which of these top doodlers' artwork will be featured on the Google homepage of all 17 participating countries on July 11. You can vote for the international winner from June 21 until June 28—visit this site to weigh in.

The winning doodler will receive a trip to South Africa for themselves and their family, offered by the South Africa Tourism Board. And the runner-up will win two VIP tickets to a Premiere League football match in the U.K. offered by Sports New Media.

So whether you're an art lover or a football lover—vote for your favorite doodle today!

Posted by Anat S. Amir, Head of Marketing, Google Africa
Posted by SEOLAWS.com at 4:54 PM 1 comments
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