Business owners across the state (and nation) have embraced online video.  They are creating videos that provide information to potential customers and serve as educational pieces regarding their products and services.  These entrepreneurs have figured out that people are turning to video to find the answers to their questions and solutions to their problems.

Look At The Numbers
To say that Web video has grown in popularity is an understatement.  According to some of the latest figures, YouTube, the largest video site, receives about 96.1 million unique visits a month.  Every day, about 2 billion videos are watched on YouTube.  It’s hard to ignore the significance of online video.

Video Has Many Advantages
There are many reasons why video is a great marketing tool for small business owners.  First, it gives prospects the chance to get to know you, before calling your office or walking through the door.  Second, video gives people the opportunity to trust you and become familiar with your personality and mannerisms.  Video also allows you to show your expertise and knowledge.

Video is not hard to create.  You can do it yourself by buying the necessary equipment and software.  The other alternative is to hire a company to do it for you.  Both options are fairly inexpensive.

Find out where the smart Northern Virginia business owners are gathering, by visiting Glazer-Kennedy-Virginia.com.

There are many factors that go into an effective, profit-generating website.  Here is a sample:

1.    Informative content. You need to create content that is interesting and relevant to your target market. Don’t make the mistake of throwing a few pages together and thinking that it is enough, because it’s not.  You need to add content on a regular basis.  The content should be educational and informative and answer the questions going through your prospects’ minds.

2.    Free offer. Your website should be centered on a free offer.  Your free offer could come in the form of a book, report, DVD, CD…you get the point.  People should be able to order your free offer in exchange for their contact information.

3.    Video. The successful business owners have recognized the power of video and have harnessed it on their websites.  By adding video to your website, you accomplish a few things.  You are able to build credibility, establish trust, create a sense of familiarity with your prospects and encourage people to stay on your website longer.

Find out where the smart Northern Virginia business owners are gathering, by visiting Glazer-Kennedy-Virginia.com.

Social media is still confusing for many people.  While you might understand the usefulness it has in connecting with your friends and family members, you might not see the relevance it has on your business.  However, many entrepreneurs swear by social media and are using it to grow their businesses.

The Success magazine blog had some great advice on how you can use social media to thrive in today’s economy.  Here are a few of those tips:

Get to know your customers. You can learn a lot by reading blogs and social network updates.  In a way, social media allows you to learn how your customers think. It can even help you discover new opportunities to better serve your target market.

Share information. Write social media updates and blog entries or create Web videos that would interest your customers.  If you write interesting content or create compelling videos, people will share them, which can help you reach a pretty wide audience.

Build relationships. Social media sites, such as Facebook, give you a unique opportunity to show your personality and expertise to your potential customers.  They will feel like they know you and will be more apt to turn to you when in need of your products or services.

There are a lot of benefits of social media and it is definitely a marketing avenue worth exploring.  Read our blog entry, Social Media Could Be Good for Your Bottom Line, for more information.

Find out where the smart Northern Virginia business owners are gathering, by visiting Glazer-Kennedy-Virginia.com.

Part of the big draw to social media is not only the potential to get in front of a large audience, but also its cost effectiveness.  If done right, social networking, which includes using such sites as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, can be a great marketing opportunity.

Word of Mouth Advertising on a Larger Scale

Word of mouth has historically been one of the greatest ways to attract new business.  Think of social media as word of mouth advertising on a larger scale.  According to a blog posted on Mashable.com, How Small Businesses Will Use Social Media in the Future, “in-stream advertising, news feeds from Facebook, and user-generated content are all ways for a business to monetize a customer’s interaction with both their friends and the brand.”

Approach Social Media with a Purpose

You need to approach social media with a purpose – to increase the exposure of your business and to build relationships with potential customers.  That means posting interesting content and interacting with your prospects.  The trick is to share information without overtly promoting your business.  You need to build trust and show that you are the person to turn to when someone needs your particular product or service.

Will social media help your business? It’s worth giving it a try.

Find out where the smart Northern Virginia business owners are gathering, by visiting Glazer-Kennedy-Virginia.com.

After tracking the online activity of 200,000 users and comparing this information to the prior year, researchers discovered something that is rather interesting.  The social media audience is more mature and culturally diverse than most people realize.  Based on the study, twice as many people ages 50+ are using social media than individuals under age 18.  As a business owner, this demographic information is crucial.

Getting involved in social media doesn’t have to be a daunting task. It is easy to sign up for a free Facebook or Twitter account. Plus, it is just as simple to set up your profile.

If you don’t have online video on your website, you might also want to consider adding this feature.  According to Nielsen, there was a sharp increase from 2009 to 2010 in the viewing of online videos.  Web video is a great way to catch the attention of prospects visiting your website.

To stay competitive in this day and age, you need to stay on top of marketing trends.  Social media is one of these trends.

Find out where the smart Northern Virginia business owners are gathering, by visiting Glazer-Kennedy-Virginia.com.

It’s instructive to look at the language she used. Sorry, but its the language that 80% of the population uses. We call them “average” or worse.

• After four years of college I expected my life would magically come together– Comment: like in The Secret, where just by thinking of something it happens? Nope, that’s not the way it works. You provide something that someone else determines is of value to them. They trade you dollars for what you are providing. There is no magic out there there that says oh, a graduate…lets pay her.

• As a philosophy major, I thought that the critical thinking and analytical skills I acquired would be more desirable to prospective employers–Comment: they are if you can show an employer how they will profit by your skills. But smart thinking people are a dime a dozen and you are competing with folks just like you from around the world. It’s got to be something more–what makes you different?

• I have heard that there are stimulus jobs and I have applied for probably a dozen jobs with the federal government alone. Comment: You and millions others…The government’s job is to protect your right to use your gifts and talents to provide value for others, not provide you a job. One of the major flaws in the whole stimulus economy is that it encourages people to sit back and wait…thus becoming even more dependent on the other (this time the government) for survival.

• I fell as if I am being enterprising in my search, using Craigslist, Indeed, CareerBuilder and The Post: Comment: Enterprising would be tracking down the the CEO of a company you want to work with and sending her a shock and awe package that markets yourself, causes her to pay attention to you and makes her say I’d be an idiot to not at least interview Meredith.

• I went to college with the dreams of working on government policy, writing for a newspaper or serving a on a bioethics committee. Who knew that the economy would go into crisis when I was in college. Comment: sure, its tougher out there than it was a few years ago but there are lots of kids graduating from college who did get good jobs. Probably better to figure out what they are doing and model that.

• After sending what seems to be my millionth resume and cover letter, I am realizing that I might need to go back to school sooner than expected: Comment: first, every employer is getting resumes and cover letters. How are you making yours stand out? Why would you expect that an employer would choose you over the others or over the choice of doing nothing at all? Second, why in the world do you think that more school and more debt is going to fix your problem? That sounds like running away. Frankly, spending some time hanging out with winners/entrepreneurs in order that you can see first hand what successful people were doing would be far more valuable. I know lots of people who have no college degree, let alone any advanced degree, who are enormously successful.

• GWU’s online jobs site used to be a great place to look for paid positions but with the economic situation, jobs have been scarce: Comment–don’t blame the economy.. that just gives you an excuse. Take full responsibility for your success or failure. Winners don’t blame others or the economy or the government or anything…they figure out how to get things done.

• I’ve been checking my email, hoping for a job offer….I thought once college ended, all my dreams would come through. Comment: the four years you just spent are just the beginning. But no one promised that all your dreams would come true just by hanging out GWU’s writing center for four years. Life is not about hoping– its about planning out what, exactly, its going to take to be successful…setting goals….never leaving it up to the other.

Let me make a few book recommendations for you:

Think and Grow Rich–Napoleon Hill– a little hard to read the first time. Many, many successful people read this book once a year for its timeless principles of success

The Millionaire Next Door– what to the financially successful people in America really do…not just theory, but survey results…how do they think and act?? Who do they hang out with.

No B.S. Wealth Attraction: Dan Kennedy…more timeless advice about how really successful people really act and think.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel…you only need to look around at what made others successful and model that.

Get started.

“Remember that you are blessed — remember that in exchange for those blessings you must give something back,” Obama told the crowd. “You must reach back and pull someone up. You must bend down and let someone else stand on your shoulders so that they can see a brighter future.”

Wrong…that’s slavery to suggest that one MUST bend down to another.

I’d say to go out and produce something. Take your idea,  and in furtherance of your own self interest, go and produce or create something of value that someone else will want to trade the dollars they earn from their work to you for what you have produced. Then, help someone by hiring them. But hire them not out of any ethical or moral obligation to do so but because they have a skill to trade to you for your dollars.

That’s capitalism…something some in government are trying to erase from memory.

The top 20% of earners pay over 70% of all income taxes. We would not mind paying for those costs of government permitted by the Constitution. Essentially to defend liberty from threats foreign and domestic.

On the other hand, we hate it when the government takes our money and wastes it. This morning’s Washington Post has the perfect article about how our tax dollars are being misused by elitists. (surprising, I know, for the Post.)

They detailed they $200 million (yes, no typo) of the people’s money that the government has poured into a regional airport in Pennsylvania, at the behest of Congressman John Murtha.This includes a whopping $800,000 of YOUR tax dollars which is among the FIRST to be paid out in this silly “stimulus” package to repave a backup runway.

According to the Post, this airport three commercial flights a day (all to Dulles airport) and often has more employees milling around (doing nothing) than passengers. In fact, it seems that the most frequent user of the airport is Murtha himself. In essence, $200 million of taxpayer funds has gone to provide and airport and services that the market says “are not needed.”

This is why people protest. Its not so much about “our fair share” as it is “what the heck are you spending my money on?” It’s outright robbery and the people who work hard to be in that top 20% of earners should continue to scream loud and clear that this is “robbery without a gun.”  A scream made all the more necessary because fully 5o% percent of America workers pay little or no tax at all. So they don’t care and they have a vested interest in keeping it that way.

SEO is like advertising to the Google shoppers on the web.

A few of the main factors associated with higher page rank (a term which refers to where your business is
found on the search pages) are link equity, site age, and unique published original content.
Link equity is having other web pages point to your site as a source of information. The more sites that point to your site, the higher your page rank, and the higher you will rank with Google and other search engines.

Site age is also important since the longer the site has been on the web, it will be of more value than a site that has just been launched on the web. And the longer you have your domain name, the better. That means you should never let your domain name expire.

Unique published original content is a very valuable commodity. If you have the time and the energy and
enjoy writing, this is an excellent way to boost your page rank. If you don’t have the time, we can help!