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Greg Narain and I had a long discussion with the Jive Live team at BarCamp San Francisco. They take high quality video of all sorts of live events, from art openings to the Pride Parade here in SF, and then post it to their website. In some ways they think of themselves as a daily video newspaper.

We talked about using blogs and RSS and existing video communities to spread their content everywhere, to get traffic going to their site. They currently host their own videos, and Greg and I were of the opinion that as soon as they actually got significant traffic, their video costs would start going through the rough. The difficulties of success when it comes to video content on the Internet today...

A large part of the discussion centered around what we all would and would not do on the Internet, including talking about who subscribes to RSS, uses tags, etc. As I have said time and again, feel free to ignore the small part of the population that uses these tools directly....just stick the functionality on to your site, and the structured nature of RSS, the tag glue, and the automated tools and aggregators that are in place will blast your content around the Internet, which has the net effect of raising your Google ranking, which is really how everyone finds stuff on the Internet today. RSS = higher search ranking, enough said.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Asian branding expert, Jonathan Holburt - CEO of Holburt Consulting.  Jonathan has spent 21 years in advertising after a career start as an English teacher in Tokyo. He has worked on such major accounts as Procter & Gamble, AT&T, Kraft, Hewlett-Packard and Pepsi Foods while at Saatchi & Saatchi, Young & Rubicam and DDB. A native Californian who graduated from UCLA, Jonathan has spent 19 years in Asia, having lived in Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. He started his marketing consulting company, Holburt Consulting, in June 2005 and has clients in Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. He has written a novel (which is in the process of being “optioned” for the movies) and numerous articles for the Asian Wall Street Journal.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative two-hour discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Susanne Lyons, CMO of Visa USA. Susanne is responsible for all aspects of brand, advertising and marketing services for one of the world’s most successful payments companies, and serves on the company’s Executive Management Committee as Chief Marketing Officer. She has held senior marketing and general management roles at some of the largest financial services companies in America. She also served as Chief Marketing Officer for Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. In her ten year career at Schwab, she held various marketing and general management positions, including Enterprise President of Retail Client Services, where she was responsible for 4000 customer service employees.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Lance Still, Executive Vice President of National Promotions for New Line Cinema.  Still has been instrumental in expanding the company’s relationships with a number of blue chip partners. She has set up recent promotions with such national brands as Anheuser-Busch, Chrysler, Quiznos, Cadbury Schweppes, and Samsung.  Founded almost 40 years ago, New Line Cinema is the most successful independent film company in the world.  In addition to the production, marketing and distribution of theatrical motion pictures, the fully-integrated studio has divisions devoted to home entertainment, television, music, theater, merchandising and an international unit.  Still is currently developing promotions for New Line’s theatrical releases of Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny, Hairspray, Snakes on a Plane and Mimzy.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Jeff Diskin, Senior Vice President of Brand Performance for Hilton Hotels.  In his position, Diskin is responsible for providing strategic brand direction for the Hilton full service brand, targeting market share growth, meeting revenue targets, overall brand positioning, brand marketing, and establishing and maintaining brand standards. Prior to his appointment as Senior Vice President, Diskin served as President, Chief Operating Officer – Hilton HHonors Worldwide, and was responsible for the worldwide marketing and operations of the award-winning Hilton HHonors hotel guest loyalty program. He joined Hilton Hotels Corporation in 1989 as Manager of Business Programs, and later was promoted to Director of Business Programs for the company. Prior to joining Hilton, Diskin held a variety of account service, customer service, and creative management positions at Marketing Performance & Innovation (MPI), a subsidiary of United Airlines.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative two-hour discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Karen Jones, Vice President of Advertising, Brand and Promotions for DHL.  Karen Jones is Vice President, Advertising, Brand and Promotions for DHL and is responsible for building the DHL brand through advertising, sponsorships and brand identity. Ms. Jones’s expertise and experience lies in global brand building. She joined DHL from Hewlett Packard, where she spent 15 years developing the HP brand, working in a variety of marketing and communications capacities. She created a universally consistent brand image by transforming and unifying HP’s advertising and communications campaigns. Most recently, she served as the director of worldwide brand advertising at HP. Prior to her impressive brand building responsibilities at HP, Ms. Jones held several positions at Compaq Computer Corporation, including Director of Marketing for the iPAQ products. She has also owned her own marketing communications company, Ballast Communications.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative discussion.

According to HitWise (via Jeff Clavier), MySpace recently surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet Users.

To put this in perspective, this means that 4.5% off all US Internet traffic visits MySpace! It also means that their traffic increased 4,300% in two years and 132% over the last year. The chart below shows the traffic growth of MySpace over that of Google.

Another interesting statistic is that besides being the top search term, myspace-related search terms like myspace.com, my space, etc., take up 5 of the top 10 search terms!

Related article:
Fear of social networking sites like MySpace may be overblown...

[UPDATE] Later this afternoon I got an email from Yahoo!'s PR company - trying to clear up some confusion around the numbers. Their point is that the HitWise stats are really comparing apples and oranges - and to a certain large extend I have to agree with that. Here is the statement from Yahoo!

Yahoo! Statement:

The report that Hitwise released today with the headline “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites” is misleading. The Yahoo! network is made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare MySpace.com to just Yahoo!’s mail.yahoo.com domain. When taking into account all of Yahoo!’s domains together as an entire network, Yahoo! clearly remains the number one property in terms of audience share, duration share, page view share and days visited per month.

In the U.S. alone, Yahoo! attracts 129 million unique visitors per month, which represents 74 percent of the online population; in comparison, MySpace reaches only 30 percent of the online population with an audience of 52 million unique visitors. In addition, Yahoo! has the largest share of online time spent than any other property: Yahoo! accounts for 13 percent of users’ online time, while MySpace has only 3.2 percent share in users’ online time.

Yahoo! maintains its leadership position as the world’s most trafficked Internet destination online, with a community of more than 500 million unique monthly visitors from around the globe.

(These statistics are according to comScore Media Metrix, June 2006)

Also check out Jeremy Zawodny's entry on the subject

[Tags: myspace Yahoo! social networking web 2.0]

Tina Valiedi is the Executive of Marketing and Chief Editor of MPStrategies Firm,a company whose breakthrough service unleashes the power of the internet to drive hidden potential clients to your site. For more marketing how to information visit: http://www.mpstrategiesfirm.com

Search engine marketing, internet marketing, google, yahoo.

It seems everyone is jumping into the "traffic domain name" game - either purchasing them for their own use or purchasing traffic from others who own these domains. For those that don't know, a traffic domain is one that has either expired and still receiving traffic, or one that is being typed into the browser url location (type-in traffic) by users looking for a particular website. These are hot little properties but often abused as some register typos of an existing popular domain - such as Google for example. Yes, Virginia, there is a lot of traffic in those typos.

I own a number of expired and type-in traffic domains and have overall had good results. The worst one gets about 10-15 visitors a day but manages to earn anywhere from $5-$20 in revenue through a pay-per-lead program I use. Combined, all my traffic domains pump out a nice chunk of change without me even having to host them, look at them or even think about them.

On the other side of expired domain and type-in traffic is services which allow you to purchase traffic from domain names which they control and manage. Now you would think this sounds pretty good after what I reported about my own traffic domains, but the sad truth is that the majority of these services are complete scams.

Oh yes, they'll deliver the "targeted" 5,000 or 10,000 "hits" you purchased, but the reality is that the actual traffic from their domains either doesn't exist at all (generated by software to create an illusion of unique visitors) or comes from sources like auto-surf sites. And it's not like you can really monitor and evaluate this traffic to know if it's real or not, and you certainly have no way of knowing if it's targeted or just junk hits. You're basically putting all your trust in the site offering the service and since none offer any guarantee that the traffic will bring you sales, they're off the hook.

Look at it this way - let's say a service is offering 100,000 premium targeted visitors for the very low price of just $49.95. Think about it. If you had 100,000 targeted real visitors at your disposable, would you sell them off for essentially pocket change? Of course not. If you were selling a product for $29.95 and only 1% of those 100,000 visitors made a purchase - then that would be 1000 sales totalling $29,950. Can you really believe that they would let that amount of money slip through their fingers just so that they can do you a favour?

Do yourself a favour - If you're thinking of purchasing traffic from one of these services, keep your money to invest in more reliable and proven options or learn about finding and registering expired domains (an article on this topic coming soon) and register them for yourself.

About the Author

Carole Nickerson has been a web developer and internet marketer since 1998. Visit http://www.thenetter.com for more free articles, tips and software.

Google Video, iFilm, MySpace, Current TV, YouTube and all the hundreds of similar video sites all have one thing in common - making it difficult for you to archive the movies they host on your local machine for later playback. In some cases this is by design, but mostly it’s the nature of using Flash for video playback. There have always been ways to download these movies and store them for personal use later, but…

YouTube video Flash Google Video iFilm

Direct and Related Links for 'How To Download Movies from YouTube'

Myth #1 - "It's easy, just put up a website and you're set for success"

Many perceive the sheer numbers of people online equates to enough of them coming to your site and making it consistently profitable. It doesn't quite work that way because if your site is out of sight, out of mind, then nobody knows it even exists.

Remember, when you search for something online, you go to a search engine, type in your phrase and you get pages of results. This is exactly what your customers do! Not only do you need to register on search engines, you need to be prominently registered - aiming for top ranking or at the least, second page results. Anything less will considerably diminish your chances of being found.

Now if you don't even register on the search engine radar, how will your customers find you?

Myth #2 - "Anybody can do it"

Very few people can do it right.

Attempting website promotion services on your own is disastrous. It is extremely time consuming and will greatly frustrate and disappoint if not done correctly. A lot is involved - the entire website promotion process is composed of several components that must fit together in a synchronised way in order for it to work properly.

Let's take just three of the many aspects of website promotion to illustrate this myth:

1. Keyword research
2. Copywriting
3. SEO Marketing

These form the backbone of any website promotion strategy, but how will you devise effective techniques for each of these when this area is not your company's expertise? Where will your company begin to research for keywords? Are they the correct ones? At what optimum density levels should they be used?

Your copywriting is crucial as is your SEO marketing. Who will write compelling and effective content to capture search engines, rankings and sales?

These are just three of the many components. All it takes is just one aspect to be done incorrectly and it can retard the whole process.

Myth #3 - "Presentation Is Everything"

In website promotion services, this couldn't be further from the truth. Content is what makes or breaks a site's effectiveness. If you put up a site with nothing except amazing graphics and flash, you have zero chance of selling anything. But if you put up a site with nothing but sales-pulling copy and rich content, you have every chance of securing business.

Presentation is part of the process; it's not the process itself. There's a fine balance that must be struck between visual appeal and effective copy. Professionals know how to integrate the two at just the right levels.

Myth #4 - "Sending Your URL to Thousands of Search Engines Is A Good Way To Get Business"

It's actually a good way to have your site banned or de-listed from search engines. Any company that offers to blast your site to thousands of search engines is a company worth putting on your blacklist. Unfortunately many businesses register thinking this technique works. All you are doing is spamming the search engines and they don't like it at all.

The best way to get business is having a results proven company put together a well planned website promotion campaign using the best experts available.

Myth #5 - "Website promotion is fast and yields quick results"

Whilst some aspects of website promotion are relatively quick, most of it is an extended process that takes time to research, develop, test and implement. It's not about getting a quick sale. Building trust and credibility with your customers takes time and often results in longer term relationships. Results are always contingent on the quality of the website promotion program. Naturally, profitable programs will yield much higher results over the same time period as mediocre programs.

The Author has put together a resource website strictly to educate potential and current business owners about website promotion. You can visit it at http://www.1web-site-promotion.com.