Transcript:

We want to connect our networks together so that anyone who visits us in one place can find us at all of our other networks.

Some sites, like Friendfeed, allow us to connect all our networks in this one place, others, like MySpace DON’T allow us to do that.

We’re going into our Friendfeed account to use a widget they have available to do this.

Click on Tools, at the top of your Friendfeed homepage.

The widget we want to use is the Embeddable Widget, so click on that.

Here there are a few different ones to choose from.

The Feed Widget will show the actual content you’ve posted.

The FriendFeed Badge  will display the different sites you’re a member of and show your FriendFeed activity.

We’re going to use the Badge, which allows people to connect directly to the sites we’re active on with the buttons being displayed – so click on the FriendFeed Badge.

You can see that the widget is fairly wide, so let’s check whether the default setting fits our blogsite.

Otherwise we have the option to change the width.

Copy the html

Now log into our WordPress Admin panel and click on Widgets in the Appearance section.

Add a new text widget and paste in the code we just got from FriendFeed.

Click done.

I’m moving that text widget to the top of the text widgets so it appears above the privacy policy on my page.

Refreshing the page, I scroll down and I find my FriendFeed widget.

Now people can click to view my feed or subscribe to me or visit me on Twitter or YouTube, for example.

Add this functionality to Facebook.

At my Facebook Juice Cleanse page, I select Edit Page.

The application we’re looking for is called Static FBML, so at the bottom of the page, I click on Browse More to see more applicatons.

At the next page, search for static using the search box at the top of the page.

Now find and click on Static FBML

Click on Add to Page

If you’ve got more than one page it will give an option for which page you want to add it to.

You’ll be brought back to your page, where you need to click edit page.

Scroll to the bottom and you’ll find Profiles – FBML. Click on the icon on the right hand side and select Edit.

This time we need to select Image from the Format choices, because Facebook won’t allow javascript.

Copy the html.

Take that html and paste it into where you are editing your FBML.

Give it a relevant title, as I have, then go back to Juice Cleanse by clicking on the text link at the top of the page.

Click on Boxes to see your widget.

Click on the icon on the right and select Move to Wall tab to add this widget to your wall.

It’s a little wide on my site, but I can live with it.

If you really don’t like that you can click on the + at the top and select Juice Cleanse on the Web.

That will give you a tab at the top of the page that you click on to find the widget has its own tab for Facebook.

MySpace uses the same settings as Facebook

 In the About Me section of MySpace, we’ll paste the same html we put in Facebook into the About Me box, in front of what we have already written, so it appears at the top of our MySpace page.

To make a space between the widget and the text that follows, you need to add <br /> at the end of the html script.

Save changes.

Our profile’s been updated, so we can go to Edit Profile.

And see how it looks.

If you are crazy over this niche and are going to be working it hard, I suggest you add this FriendFeed widget wherever you can (Squidoo, Blogger, WordPress … any of the sites you used in the link building section of the training)

This just helps our network to grow, for people to consume information in ways most convenient for them.  That’s what Web 2.0 is all about.

That’s it for the networking module.

Get out there and connect to people in a friendly and curious manner and they will find you to be an interesting person to connect with.

Transcript:

What social networks do you need to be on?

The top social networking sites aggregated by compete.com in their once a year survey from January 2009 are

• Facebook
• Myspace
• Twitter

Other top sites may target certain interest groups.  Fixster is for photographers and film types. Cafemom.com targets a particular demographic.

Blackplanet.com and Asiatown.net target particular ethnicities.

Not all of these top sites will suit your niche, but we need to get on the top 3.

Linkedin.com is ok for a business link.

Ning.com is very interesting because they create a whole social networking site around the topic the users are interested in.  It is more of a forum, with some social networking capabilities.

How to use Facebook for marketing.

This is my main Facebook page, this is my feed, these are the people I’ve categorized under work (left hand sidebar) and the things they have posted on Facebook.

The big thing we need to understand about the new Facebook is you can now have pages, as opposed to your regular profile, and those pages will appear in your fans’ streams, just like this.

Anyone who I’m a fan of will appear in my regular stream, like it’s their profile.  Status updates will appear here, just like they do for one of my friends.

This used not to be the case.  Fans of people had to go check profile pages to get updates of people they were fans of and that’s totally useless from a marketing perspective.

That being said, if you’re not producing any content or information, then you can’t expect people to become a fan of yours.

My juice cleanse site, for example, is based on a pseudonym and Facebook only allows me to have one profile; the profile I currently use is for connecting with my friends and family and with people within the internet marketing niche, where I use my real name.

I’m assuming you are in a similar situation and already have a profile that you can’t build a social marketing network around for your niche because it doesn’t fit with your existing profile.

Since it’s difficult to get people to become fans of a site that doesn’t have much of a personality behind it, we’re going to create a Facebook  page based on our main topic, rather than on our site.

I’m not going to create a juicecleansenow.com fan page, I’ll create a juice cleansing fan page.

The nice thing about Facebook fan pages, is that they do use the name you create in the url, so that creates some link juice and when you put up links to your main page as well, that creates even more link juice.

At the bottom of this Facebook page is Applications.  Bring that up and click on Page Manager.  If you don’t see it, click on the Find More button on the top right hand side of the box.

In page manager, click on pages.

Then click on Create Page (top right hand side)

If you don’t already have a page in Facebook, the sequence will be kinda different for you, but as I can only have one Facebook page, that’s how I have to show it to you.

When you create your new page, if you are branding yourself as yourself, then select Artist, Band, or Public Figure at this point.

If, like me, you’re using a pseudonym, then select Brand or Product here, then select the category that best suits your niche.

When they ask me the Name of Food and Beverage, I type in my keyword phrase.

Click create page.

Now we need to edit our page information.

For Basic info, I put founded in 2009 and save my changes.

Then I click on detailed information.

Here we put in website url, some information about ourselves in relation to juice cleansing and how we want to spread the word around.

I mention the Master Cleanse Guide, which I’m selling.

Then save changes.

Click done editing and you’ll be able to see what your page looks like.

Now head over to edit page (left hand sidebar)

To change some settings here, go to notes and click on edit.

Now on the right hand side, you’ll see the message You are not importing notes from an external blog.

Click on Import a blog.

This will push our blogposts into our Facebook page.

But rather than import our blog, we use our Friendfeed RSS, so we copy that.

And we paste it into Facebook

Check the box under that agreeing you have the right to let Facebook reproduce this content.

Then click on Start Importing.

Here’s a preview with all our items going in.

Now click on Confirm Import.

Now go back over to your main page in Facebook you’ve just created.

You can see that everything from Friendfeed is being imported to Facebook, creating links from here.

We need to add a picture, so hover over the left hand side ? and Change Picture will pop up.  Click on that then click on upload a picture – use whatever you’ve been using on Twitter or Friendfeed.

Head over to settings (right hand side)

We want to change our default view to be posts by page and fans.

That means we can publish posts by fans on our wall.  This gives people the opportunity to see what they post straight away on your wall and gives you credibility with new visitors.

Now we want to get a status update, so we write something in the box.

Once you’ve written something like I have, click share then click on publish this page (top tab bar)

You can jump start the promotion of your page by clicking on Become a Fan (tab at top)

BUT that will be published on your main profile site, so if you DON’T want to be connected to this niche personally, DON’T click on Become a Fan!

Now you go to Facebook.com/pages

Yours might look a little different from this one.

This one’s showing me pages that my friends have been active on.

I want to see what’s out there for juice cleanse, so I do a search (top right hand side)

Here’s the page I just created and here’s another one, My Juice Cleanse.  We’ll take a look at that one.

This turns out to be one of the people we found during our Becoming a Sponge research.

So I’ll add this to my Page’s Favorites. (click on left hand sidebar)

If you’ve got more than one page, you need to select which one you’re adding it to.

Then you can personally become a fan, by clicking the Become a Fan button on the left hand sidebar.

Again that will associate your personal account with your niche account and you may not want to do this.  It means that when you put a comment on anyone’s page, your association with your niche will come up.

That’s when Facebook can become difficult to use, when you’re working in a niche you aren’t personally associated with.

Try a different keyword to find more pages

If like me you didn’t come up with a whole bunch of pages, try permutations of your keyword to search for more

I found a Master Cleanse page and added it to my favorites.

What you’re hoping for is that the administrator of this page sees you’ve done that and adds you to their favorites as well. Maybe you can pull some traffic from them that way.

We now want to go to groups.

If you don’t have groups showing in your Applications box, click on find more to get it.

Groups are only useful if you don’t mind having your personal account associated with the page you’ve created.

You can search for groups using your main keyword and join them.

If you choose to join a group, your profile picture (not your page picture) will appear and you can post comments either on the discussion board or on the wall.

Siphoning traffic off an existing group to your page can be kinda spammy if you don’t go about it the right way.

These people are talking about a specific juice cleanse, so if I post here and say Hey nice page, I’ve got a page up about juice cleansing – and give a link to that page – it might put people off, it might not.  You need to calculate the risk for yourself in your niche.

I’m not going to try that with such a specific page selling a particular product.

I’ve gone for a group that is just talking generally about the Master Cleanse.

I won’t show you how to post to such a group because it will show up in my own profile and because people follow me in internet marketing and what we’re doing in Crowd Mountain isn’t public, I don’t want to do that.

Back at the Groups page, we can also Create a New Group.

I’ve filled in my information (below).  I’ve chosen a Global network, though depending on your niche, you may choose Local.

In my description, I’ve given a bit of a call to action with talk of what will be happening in my group.

For Group Type, I’ve chosen Common Interest to encourage the type of people I want.

For Recent News, I’ve said I have a Facebook fan page and encourage people to click through to that.

Then click on create group.

I upload my usual picture and check the box saying I have the right to use this picture.

Then I click on upload picture.

For website, put in your url and the rest of the settings can remain at default.

Click save.

At this point you’re able to invite people to join your group and again this depends on whether you want to be personally associated with the group.

Otherwise, skip it and go back to your main page.

You can see this has me as a member.

Now I want to post something welcoming people to the group.

You can also use the discussion board to start a forum discussion where people can talk about things related to your niche.

You can upload photos and videos and links as well.

You already have your website url at the top, so you don’t need to add that as a link, but you might like to add your Facebook page link.

So on Faaebook, we’re creating a fan page and using our groups and other peoples’ groups and comments we make and respond to, to drive traffic to our own Facebook fan page.

Now for MySpace

At MySpace, you can have multiple accounts, so click the sign up page and create an account specifically for your niche.

I’ve put in the relevant details for me (below)

The first thing we need to do is add a picture and here you can also add a caption.

Now I go to edit profile.

I like to use the new 2.0 version, so if you get that option, click on it and upgrade.

One of the nice things here is that you get some premade themes.  I’m going with a natural style that suits my niche, bamboo.

You get a preview, like this.

Directly in your profile you can edit things as you see fit.  For example, if you don’t want a music player, you can delete that here.

For interests, you can go ahead and add your interests by clicking the edit interests button.

Just add some interests directly related to your niche and save changes.

For about me, I’ve put in information directly about juice cleansing (below)

Go into Details and fill in a few things.  We don’t have to fill in everything, just enough that our profile isn’t blank.

The last one we need to go to is Networking to say what type of people we want to network with.  I’ve filled in mine below.

Close your edit section.  You can preview your page and check all the stuff you’ve just put in.

Then we want to go to Groups and find a group or two related to our niche.

We can also find people in those groups to add as friends. So we do a search for our keyword and see what comes up.

I got no matches for juice cleanse, but several for my master cleanse search.

Where you see (private group) it means you have to be approved to join, so for the purposes of this demonstration, I’m going to look at The Master Cleanse: 10-day Troopers as it’s public and we won’t have to wait to be approved.

You want to join the groups that have the most members in your niche and that are related.  I would join the Raw Foods group, but not now as a demonstration.

Here’s our group.

I’ve found someone to reply to and I’ll just post something nice to her.

Once you’ve posted a few nice replies to people go ahead and add them as friends and see if they’ll accept your friend request.  Some will and some won’t – it depends how they’re running their MySpace account.

You can create your own group.

Just click on Create Group.

Now MySpace has been around for a long time and they probably have a group for your niche, so I’m not going to go through this creating groups process.

Your goal at this point is to

• join existing groups,
• communicate with the people in those groups,
• add people from those groups as your friends and
• establish a presence on MySpace.

The final thing that you want to do is go over to your homepage once you have established a presence and make your url more user friendly.

MySpace gives you a long and unwieldy url and we’re going to change that to a keyword rich url.

On your homepage, click on Pick your MySpace url.

Enter and confirm your main keyword for your url.  These are often taken so you may need to add now or 01 to get your keyword in your url.

You’ll get a couple of warnings that you can’t change this, so check the spelling!

Check out your page at that url to make sure everything looks lovely.

Now all you need to do is

• join some groups,
• add some friends and
• start connecting with people.

It’s not rocket science and there’s no guru trick to it.  Just start connecting with people.

Again, if you are not super interested in your niche, DON’T do it.

Just create a profile and link to your site with that profile and that’s enough.

If you are super interested in your niche, you want to choose 2 to 3 social networking sites to participate in.

As for the other social networks that target specific groups like moms, if your niche fits any of those, they may well be a better choice to focus on than the more general social networking sites, like MySpace.

Not knowing your niche, I can’t tell you which sites you need to be on.

You should have a Facebook profile, you should have a MySpace profile, but where you spend your time is entirely dependent on your niche.

Friendfeed for social networking

Go to your Friendfeed home page and click on Rooms (left hand sidebar)

Now click search for rooms (link at top of the page).  Of course you can create your own room if you don’t find one related to your niche, but let’s see what we can find.

Friendfeed is newer than MySpace and Facebook and the Rooms section is underutilized.  I haven’t found any rooms for juice cleanse and master detox, but when I try raw food, I get something.

None of them have many members, but we’ll join ‘em, what the heck!

Click join room.

Because there is nothing exactly related to my niche, I’m going to go back to Rooms and create a new  room.

We use our keyword for both the room name and the nickname, put in a suitable description and keep permissions public.

Then click on create room.

Change your picture from the default

Then we need to Import an RSS feed so this room actually gets populated with some content.

It would be really cool if Friendfeed let us import our main Friendfeed RSS into our rooms, but they don’t, so we have to import our blog and our Twitter account and our YouTube account and any other custom RSS feeds that we’ve added to our Friendfeed account, like our Squidoo RSS feed and our Blip.tv RSS feed and so on.

Then on your group page, you’ll see content from all these feeds appearing.

How to get people to post comments in your room

You can go into other people’s rooms and make comments to reach out to them.

Notice the Raw Food Living Room is not really active at all.  It simply has a Google News feed and very few members, so it’s not great use of my time to comment here.  Because I have few options, I’ll make a comment by posting a link to my room.

Click on link at the top of the page of the room you want to link to and a box will come up for you to fill in, like I have below.

Then click post.

Now go back home and do a search for your keyword.

I don’t have any friends currently so I’m going to search the whole of Friendfeed for people.

This searches for people who have mentioned juice cleanse.

There’s lots of my stuff because I just put it on, but I’m looking for people who have something to say in this niche.

When I find someone suitable, I subscribe to her feed on Friendfeed to make a connection.

Don’t bother subscribing to the automated stuff – we’re looking to find real people and get networking with them.

We’re looking for posts as interesting as can be and as related as can be to our niche.

Other things we can do with these people

• Make comments on their posts
• Like their posts

When we like what someone writes, this gets added to a section that says you liked this and that will link back to your page.

You can also add a comment like what I’ve done below.  That comment will link back to me.

Like the other sites we’ve been working with this is a matter of

• finding people interested in your niche,
• talking to them,
• making comments,
• asking questions,
• saying nice things and
• just getting to know people.

It’s a matter of spending the time to make those connections.  If you don’t choose to do this, it’s a matter of getting the link juice by setting up profiles.

Friendfeed is a great place to make connections, because everything connects back to your main Friendfeed url and from there to your other urls.

For an active profile that contributes to the community, you need to check in and do some work here twice a week.

Transcript:

Video marketing and in particular viral video marketing has had a lot of lip service.

Truth is, if you try really hard to make a viral video to get 800 000 views, it’s not going to resonate with people.

You need to forget this and concentrate on making a video that resonates with the people who find it because they are looking for what you are talking about.

If you are in a niche you are super stoked about you can go out on video sites and start networking with people – but it isn’t necessary.

Videos are good at bringing traffic.  They tend to rank high in the search engines. They can also give you clickthroughs to your site.

Right now YouTube is the #2 site in the world, after Google.

What will you make a video about?

The link below takes you to one of the coolest marketing videos I’ve ever seen.  I wrote a blog post about it.

This is an “unboxing” video, where a guy opens up a product that he gets delivered and draws you in as he opens the box and talks about the product.

You can do this type of unboxing video or a demonstration video.

Don’t be worried about camera quality.  I’ve got a new Flip Mino HD that cost about $200 and before that I used an old Kodak digital camera on the video setting.

You can do a testimonial video if you’re selling a digital product and can’t really do an unboxing. Your testimonial could cover the product in this way:

• This is what it is
• This is what it did for me
• This is why I love it
• Go to my site to find out more information on it

You can do a walk through of your own site using screen capture software like Camtasia.

Just open up your site and talk through some of the features, like

• Over here we’ve got information about master cleanse
• And here’s some recipes
• If you’re looking for this type of information, head on over to my url

The point here is just to get your videos up on the sites because they can rank highly on the search engines. People will search for keywords on these sites and find your videos and hopefully click through to your site.

We are not looking for storyboarded masterpieces.

Don’t worry at all about whether your video is good or not.  Just get something out there.  Seriously!

To see my JuiceCleanseNow.com video you’ll need to play the video that accompanies this text from the 5.15 minute mark forward.

Tips to help a video gain traction

The first thing to note about the video is I use the JuiceCleanseNow.com url and that displays throughout the video.

I’ve given a call to action.  You can subscribe using this link up here… letting people know they can consume my content by RSS feed and also telling them about my podcast option.

I call my site a one stop shop for juice cleansing information.  I’m giving them a reason to come to my site rather than anywhere else.

At my site, I tell them they’ll find the best stuff from all over the web, not just the stuff I publish, but the best stuff from the entire internet.

That’s because of our Shared Items Post plug and that we are aggregating information from all over the place on this site.

I give another call to action, telling them to visit the site.

Telling them they will look good and feel great is telling people their goal, that they want to feel better and be healthy.

I’m parroting back to them what they will achieve if they visit my site – it’s a little psychological thing where I remind them what they want to achieve.

Their end result is not to do a juice cleanse, it’s to look good and feel great and I’m telling them that.

That’s how simple a video is. 

I didn’t even walk through the site because I haven’t been posting regularly (I’ve been making content for you guys)

I just told them what they’d find there

• You can subscribe to the RSS feed
• You can listen to podcasts (there’s different ways to consume my information)
• Here’s why you want to subscribe to this site as opposed to other sites
• What their end goal is, their problem, what they need a solution or answers for, telling them the answers are at my site.

The video was 52 seconds long.

It was not a masterpiece of editing or production as you can tell.

But it is enough.  It is all that you need.

Make it simple. Don’t overthink it.

At tubemogul we can distribute our video to multiple sites at once.

Go to tubemogul and sign up.

Where they ask you for your company, I put my site url.

Once you’re in, go to the top left hand tag and click upload a video.

Use the browse button to find the file on your hard drive and upload it to the site.

While your video uploads, you fill in the information that will appear on all the sites we send it to.

The title is your main keyword.  You can add some other words, but your main keyword should be the first thing in your title.  e.g. Juice Cleanse information or Juice Cleanse NOW!

In the description, you need to have your url first, then a space, then your description with your main keyword and a permutation of your main keyword in it as well.

I’ve told people what they can get from visiting my site, because the main goal of this video is to get people to my site eventually.

For tags, you use your main keyword, plus your category keywords and add a few permutations.

You’ll notice as you type that your keywords will appear for each of the video sites listed below the tags box.

And you’ll see some variation. In YouTube for example they only allow a word to appear once and they have no commas between words.

Yahoo will allow whatever I type in.

Tubemogul will take care of that for you.

Then just pick a category most appropriate to your niche and click on upload.

Although my video has by now finished uploading, we need to click on this button to get all the information we just typed in updated for tubemogul.

In the next screen you need to type in your username and password for each of the sites where your video will be uploaded, so you do need to have created an account at each of these sites.

There’s also a more sites button you can click on to access more sites that may be appropriate for the kinds of video you’re doing.

Click on the red apply button to access them.  You need to apply so that they can ascertain whether your video is appropriate for their sites.

For each of the sites tubemogul offers, there is a more options button where you can click on a more accurate category for each site if your original tubemogul choice of category doesn’t exactly fit.

Check in each of the sites through clicking on their more options buttons to make sure you have been placed in the most appropriate category.

Now check the box for Yes, store them and launch your video.

Here you’ll see your video is in the process of uploading and after a few minutes, you can check your status by clicking the refresh tag.

And now you’ll see I’ve had a problem with some of my uploads.

If I click more info on the ones I had problems with, I’ll be able to go and fix it.

It says I need to log in to my Veoh account because this account lacks privileges.

I log in to Veoh and it says they need to send me an email to confirm my registration, so I click on send.

Once that’s fixed up, I refresh my video upload status and there are no more problems with Veoh.

You can see that some of the sites have finished loading my video already.

Now we need to add the feeds to our Friendfeed account.

These are the feeds from the sites we just sent our video to.

Over at Friendfeed, click on Add/edit

Click on see all 57 services, then select YouTube, enter your YouTube user name, then click on import youTube.

Now our new YouTube video is appearing in our Friendfeed.

It will be published anywhere else we’re publishing this RSS feed, such as at a Squidoo page or at your Twitter account.

On some of these sites, like Metacafe and Blip, you’ll get an RSS feed.

Here at my Metacafe video, there is no RSS feed on this page.

But I click on my Submitter name (username) on the left hand sidebar I find an RSS feed at the top of my profile page.

I copy the link location.

Then I go back to Friendfeed and put that feed in clicking on the Add/edit button, then on the Custom RSS/Atom url, then click import.

On Blip.tv, the RSS feed is available at the bottom of the page where your video appears.

Add that to Friendfeed in the same manner as we did for Metacafe.

Now look at our main feed on Friendfeed.

And we can see our videos from YouTube and Metacafe and Blip.tv

These are all now being fed through our Friendfeed to our other channels, like Squidoo and Twitter and anywhere else we’ve been able to put an RSS feed on via our Friendfeed url.

Once your video has finished uploading, click the tab Launch and Promote a Video.

This will give you information about your uploaded videos and some options.

One of the things you can do is promote the videos you have already uploaded.

You can go through the process of bookmarking each site where you’ve put your video on Digg and Stumbleupon and all the other bookmarking sites seen here.

Now anything that you have an RSS feed for, you should have submitted to the Crowd Mountain Bookmarker Tool so you DON’T have to go through this time consuming process.

Submit your Friendfeed RSS feed to the Crowd Mountain Bookmarking Tool, but also submit any feed that exists where you have content, like with Blip.tv and Metacafe (as I showed you above).

You can also Track Videos (tab at top of page) so you can track where your video has been uploaded to.

Here are my statistics.

Tubemogul adds their own statistics, which we don’t need to see, so we can delete that by clicking on the X to the right.

Because they’ve just been uploaded, my videos have no current statistics, but you can check on how they are going over time.

In the Bookmarked Video section, you can bookmark videos of your competitors to see how popular they are and what they are doing.

That’s a handy little tool that really isn’t available anywhere else and that’s one reason I like Tubemogul.

When you are using this site, to get the most reach, you really want to apply to as many of the video sites as you can through Tubemogul.

Videos rank well with Google, so the more you get your video out there, the better Google will see you.

Networking via YouTube

Click on the Account button at the top and we’ll customise this section.

Then you go to profile setup

You can’t add a picture until your account has been open 25 hours, but then, do add a picture.

Describe yourself in an interesting way and put in your website url.

The rest you should fill in selectively.

If you work in an area related to this niche, you might want to put that information in, for example.

With interests, put your keywords in, but in a way that doesn’t look like keyword stuffing.

Save changes.

Now we’re going to look for people who are already publishing videos in our niche by doing a search on “juice cleanse”

Our first results come back under videos, but we want to click on Channels.

In Channels, I’ve found one person.

We click on her username and find that all of her videos are about her doing a juice cleanse.  Very cool.  We’ll add her as a friend (left hand sidebar)

She’s someone very closely related to our niche. That’s perfect.

Since I only found one person with this method, I’m now going back and clicking on All.

Now I look through the videos to check out people who are right into juice cleansing.

We don’t want play lists, we want videos people are making.

I’m checking out FreshandAlive by clicking on his username.

I find this gentleman is talking about supplements and cleansing and raw food.  I’ll add him as a friend as well.

Conversely this person (below, who’s page we can hardly read) is into weight loss and running a marathon and isn’t a close enough match for us.

The gentleman at FreshandAlive has a video with over 5000 views.

We’re going to leave a comment on his video page and it’s a good idea to actually watch the video before you leave a comment, otherwise you’re going to look spammy and we don’t want that.

Any comment you leave will be linked to your profile, which will bring more people to your videos and in this way you can network on YouTube.

Here is my comment below.

Notice I try to engage him to encourage him to answer my question.  He may well do so, because he seems really active in his own comments and he and his visitors may visit and view my video and add me as a friend.

We’re just reaching out to people and trying to make connections as with all of our social networking sites.

Search a few permutations of your keyword – I also tried juice fast and got some results to check out.

Just go to their videos and add comments and add them as friends if they are close enough to your niche for it to make sense.

You can subscribe to people as well and get updates when they post new content.

You also have people who allow Channel Comments at the bottom of their video page.

The aim here is to find the most popular people but anyone who’s publishing heavy duty in your niche is worth putting a channel comment on their page for more links to you.

To get new videos in our niche sent directly to our Google Reader, we use Referd.

We’re doing this so we don’t have to go back to YouTube every day to find out if there are new videos in our niche.

Place your keywords in the search box (commas aren’t supported here) and click Go.

Here’s the RSS feed it created for me (you may need to be patient, it can be a little slow).

I copy that link location with a right click on the feed

And paste it into my Google Reader.

Having a look at this, you can see the actual video is included in the RSS feed.

Of course we can publish this with our Google Shared Items Post plugin and we can Share with note as we did in a previous section.

Do keep up with your networking on YouTube.

It isn’t quite as fast paced as Twitter, so once a week checking in to put comments on new videos and seeing what your competition is doing, subscribing to a few new videos and using the shared item post is fine.

That will keep your YouTube account looking active and interesting.

Making your videos just a little more interesting

Go to your My Videos section in YouTube and click on Annotations.

Here you can add call outs to your video.  It’s also useful for adding your url if you don’t have the type of software that lets you add that url to the bottom of your video.

Having said that, Camtasia is great for this and you can get it for a 30 day free trial.

I’m going to add an annotation on my video to call attention to my RSS feed, so when I get to the part in my video where I talk about that, I pause the video and click on the + button at the bottom left.

A set of buttons come up and I choose the speech bubble, clicking on it to add my annotation.

We can add a note, a speech bubble, a spotlight or a pause annotation using these buttons.

I’m going to add a speech bubble annotation that gives the url of my RSS feed.

Because it doesn’t fit in the box, I just stretch the box, then I point the arrow up to my RSS feed in the video because that’s what I’m talking about.

I can also change the color here to make it stand out more on my white background.

Over on the right hand side, you can change how long it displays for and I’m going to change that, but I then need to check the video again to make sure the duration fits the video.

You can add an annotation at the bottom of your video to advertise your url (but again, Camtasia will do that for you) and you can scroll through and put in other annotations as they suit.

When you’re done, you go ahead and click publish.

This is just another way to create a call to action in your video.

Another annotation I like to make is one that emphasises your call to action at the end of the video.

You should have said something at the end like visit my site.

That’s where I like to put an annotation with the address on it.  I know you have the site url at the bottom of the video, but this annotation being a pop up, captures attention.

This gives us a call to action with our site name as well as our earlier one with the url.

That’s how to draw attention in your video to things you want your viewers to take notice of.

And that’s all for video marketing!

Transcript:

As far as must have social networking sites that you need to be on, Twitter is the #1.

Everybody’s talking about it.

It’s all over TV.

You need to be there.

It’s the #1 referring site

People who use Twitter are engaged.

They visit your site.

They’re buyers, they do convert highly.

Let’s take a look at how to set up and use Twitter and a couple of little tools to make it more effective.

Create a Twitter Account

Whether you use an existing Twitter account or set up a new one depends on whether you are using your real name in your niche and whether it’s your main niche.

I’m in a lot of niches, but I use my real name in internet marketing but for Juice Cleanse, it’s a sub niche so I’m going to set up a new account.

I don’t want to send out all my internet marketing stuff to my juice cleanse account and I don’t want my internet marketing people to be getting all my juice cleanse stuff.  It’s not what they signed up for.

Go to the sign up page of Twitter

Put in your name or pseudonym, then for your username, try to use your keyword (you may have to add now or 01 or something like that to claim an available name)

You can see underneath that, what your url will be in Twitter and that’s why we want the keyword in our username.

Your Password is up to you and use the email you’ve associated with this niche, put in the captcha text and click continue.

Skip the next step regarding finding your friends on Twitter.

Click Continue.

Then you’ll be given a list of potential people to follow on Twitter.  You don’t need to do that, but of course you may.  Click Finish.

Then we go up to Settings. (Tab at top of page)

We’re going to change our profile settings.

One of the biggest giveaways of a spam user is if you keep the default avatar and have no other information in your profile.

See how I’ve filled my profile in (below).

Note the More Info url is going to be your website.

For your One Line Bio, you need to put something about “yourself” in – what I’ve put tells people I’m enthusiastic about health and healthy living.  You want to be congruent with your bio and the topics you are going to be posting about.

DO NOT check the Protect my updates box.  You want all your stuff to be available for everybody to see.

Click save.

If you really dig your niche and you’ve got one of those fancy phones, you can click on Devices.

Enter in your mobile phone set up and you can tweet from your phone.

I don’t recommend this unless you are really into your niche and want to send and receive messages from your phone.

On the Notices tab, you can set up what kind of notices you want to receive from Twitter.

For @ Replies, you should select Show me all @ Replies, so you see what everyone is saying when they make reference to your tweets, not just the people who are following you.

Check for new follower emails and direct text emails, then save.

Now, under the Picture tab, you select a new avatar.  I’m using the same one I used for my Friendfeed.

Under Design, you change your theme or background to a set theme or put up your own individual image.  You can also change color design if you know something about that.

So long as you choose something that isn’t a default, that’s ok.

Twitter will tell you that your profile customization has been saved and you can click on Home to go back to your home page and see what it looks like.

Getting your blog posts to appear in your Twitter feed

Head over to your Friendfeed account

Here we added our blog and other RSS feeds from accounts like Squidoo where we put up a lens.

First let’s click on add/edit

Now click on Twitter (if you don’t see Twitter in your short list, click on see all 57 services and you’ll find it in the big list of services that Friendfeed supports)

Enter your Twitter username for the account you just created and click Import Twitter.

Now Twitter has been added to my services.

We need to click on Account.

At the bottom of your Account page, there are some options about publishing Friendfeed on Twitter.

Check the box for Post my Friendfeed entries on Twitter.

You’ll get a pop up where you have to enter your Twitter username and password.

Now check Link to source site instead of Friendfeed conversation – this creates a link directly back to your blog or Squidoo lens or wherever you’ve created the content rather than just to the Friendfeed.

Check to include

• Entries I post in public rooms
• Comments that I make on public Friendfeed entries
• Public Friendfeed entries that I “Like”

If your Twitter stream gets too cluttered, you can always come back and uncheck these.

Then you want to check Post entries from All services (except Twitter)

This means that any time you update one of the services on your Friendfeed account, it will post that to Twitter based on that update.

Click save changes.

Now any time you post to Twitter, it will be brought into your Friendfeed and any time you post to your blog or any of the RSS enabled sites that you publish articles on, that will automatically be published into your Friendfeed and your Friendfeed will push that onto your Twitter account.

We’re creating a network here of interlinking and also giving people who visit your Twitter page an opportunity to get to know you and what you’re doing in the internet world in your niche.

Just to get some content on our Twitter feed, let’s go over to our account and post something to get started.

Make sure you’re on your home page in Twitter.

It’s your very first entry.  You don’t have to link.

Twitter users are casual as you can see from my first post (below)

Then I click update.

If you’ve done your Becoming a Sponge research and found some people on Twitter in your niche, then you can absolutely follow those people.

I found someone in juice cleansing.

Let’s go to her blog because she’d be a great person to have conversations with.

Here’s her website below.  I’ll click to follow her on Twitter.

Once we are at her Twitter account, just click follow under her avatar.

Now anything that this person tweets will show up in my Twitter account and I can respond to them as I see fit.

Back on my Twitter homepage, it shows I am following 1 person.

How to search for people on Twitter

If you know of people who are talking about your topic and you know they’re on Twitter, follow them.

If you don’t know anyone, then go to Twitter Search.

For the most basic search, enter your keyword in “quotes” and click on search.

Here’s all the people who’ve tweeted with the words juice cleanse.

We want to look around and find the people who are approaching the topic as experts and follow them so we can engage in conversation with them.

Then we can gain some of their followers, who seeing this person engaging in conversation with us, will be induced to follow us as well.

Here’s a good one for me to follow, reading her bio, she looks really interesting.

By contrast this young lady below who says she’s starting a juice cleanse is just tweeting about random stuff and is not one I would follow.

If we just update and send out tweets without actually following anyone it can look a bit spammy, so choose a few people to follow at this point.

The whole point of social networking is engaging with people.

If you are in a baseball niche, you can follow someone who’s into softball.  Or with me, following a raw food person is fairly close to a juice cleanse.  There are things you can talk about.  It doesn’t have to be spot on.

The first thing I do when I select a few people to consider is check out their bio.

You’re looking for people who post as much as possible within our niche or close to it.

Once you’ve got a minimum of 5 to 10 people to follow, go back to your search and start directly talking to the people in your niche.

Here’s a person who just finished day two of a juice cleanse with a product I found in my research earlier, so I know something about it.  That’s good.  I’m clicking on Reply.

So what do I say to this person?

Do I drop a link and get them to come to my site?

NO!

That’s not what social networking is about.

One of the best things you can do is ask a question.

When she checks her @ replies, she’ll see this post that came to her.

Just find a few that you can reply to with a question (see screenshot below)

Don’t be tempted to drop a link.  You’ll build followers as you ask questions and engage with people on Twitter.

Your links will come through with your Friendfeed.  There is no need to tell people Oh, go to this link and find out more information.

These people weren’t asking for your help and to push links when they haven’t asked for advice isn’t really good etiquette.  You just want to talk to people like normal.

Before people respond to you, they may check you out, so it’s important not to say the same thing to different people.  It looks spammy.

We want to say something new to each person we’re engaging with.

We also need to keep in mind that Twitter is a social site where people just post things that they’re doing or that they’re interested in.

We need to use other permutations of our keyword phrase to get a look at the entire marketplace of people talking about our niche.

I’ve found a question when I search “juice detox” and I’m going to reply to that.  Remember, no links!

I’m going to answer this gentleman with some of the common symptoms one experiences on a juice cleanse and I mimic his terminology (juice detox).

Talking back to people in the language they’re used to can make them more receptive.

The more questions you answer, the more you have opinion, the more that you say this is the way that things are, the more people will look at you as an expert in your niche and this is exactly what you want.

When I try “juice fast”  it gets a lot more results than “juice detox” and so I know this is a more popular phrase for this niche.

That’s something to note for later on.

Again, I just look for people asking questions or talking about this topic and reply to them, either responding to their question or asking a question to encourage them to respond to me.

Of course if you find people who are deep in your niche and talk about your niche all the time, you want to follow them.

If you click on the Profile tab, you can see the history of your own tweets all in a row.  You can see here that my tweets are mainly @ replies to people I don’t know and you don’t want your tweets to be all the same like this.

I’m going to add a tweet that is just a statement.

That means I have just said something for myself instead of just going after what other people have said.

More Advanced Ways to Use Twitter

In our Twitter Search screen on the top right hand sidebar we see a feed for this query (below).

We can enter this feed into our Google Reader and get updates on our topic in Twitter when people tweet about it.

But there’s a better way to do it

Rather than entering in, say 5 different searches with different keywords and permutations, I’m going to show you a search operators that give you all the information you’re looking for in one RSS feed.

Enter in the keywords you want to search with (space)OR(space) between them, as I have below.

“juice fast” OR “juice cleanse” OR “juice detox” OR “master cleanse”

This is how you create an RSS feed that is very specific to your topics.  (I could have also used permutations like “juice cleansing” as well if I wanted to).

You can also go to the Advanced Search (top right hand side) and filter your search for things like people within a certain physical distance from you.

For now, let’s copy the location for our RSS feed by right clicking on it and clicking Copy Shortcut.

At Google Reader, we select the Add a subscription button and paste in the RSS feed url from our Twitter search, then click Add.

If you’re using folders, you want to move that feed to your niche folder.

All the feeds that come in contain a link to where they appeared on Twitter so if you want to see more details you can go there from this feed.

These items are also great to share, by using our share button or share with note (at the bottom of each entry) and then they’ll appear on your blog, which is another neat way of putting content on your blog.

You just need to use your RSS Shared Items plugin.

Twitter is a site that’s about activity.  You need to be active on it to gain followers and therefore clicks to your website.

You can use a Twitter client to keep up to date all day long on your niche. I keep my Twitter client open all day so I can keep an eye on the internet marketing niche which I really love.

If it’s not a niche that you want to be checking up on all day long, just check your RSS feed in Google Reader once a day and pick out 3 or 4 to reply back to that resonate with you.

TweetBeep will send you an hourly update email on where your Twitter account is up to.

If email is more convenient for you, you can fill out the sign up form for TweetBeep and receive that hourly email.

You’ll get a confirmation email and once you respond to that, you’ll fill in a new keyword form, just like the Twitter advanced search.

Using a Twitter Client

A Twitter client, like Twhirl, makes using Twitter a lot easier.

You do need to install Adobe Air to use Twhirl and other Twitter clients.

Click the install now link (see below) and all you need, Twhirl and Adobe Air will be installed for you.

If you don’t already have Adobe Air installed (and you should because you’re using Market Samurai), you’ll get this message (below)  Just press YES to continue.

To set up your account in Twhirl, select Twitter then enter in your Twitter screenname that you created.  Then click the + button.

The interesting thing about Twhirl is that if you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can run them at the same time using Twhirl.

Other Twitter clients don’t let you do that.

That’s why we’re highlighting the Twhirl application first.

Once we’ve entered in our account, you click on connect.

You’ll get asked for your password (I always check the remember my password box) and you’ll be logged in.

Sometimes at the bottom, Twhirl will have a little status update to let you know what’s going on with their and Twitter’s services.

This way we see the tweets of everyone we’re following, we can do replies and also search from here.

If I click here on this little magnifying glass (see position of arrow icon below) and do a search then we can enter in our keyword phrase and work out what people are posting today about that keyword.

If I hover over people, I get the options to reply to them, to retweet (send their message on to my followers), send them a direct message or save what they’ve written as a favorite.

To send a direct message, they need to be following you.

Mostly you’ll be using @ replies.  These @ messages will appear in their @ replies and also go to your followers.

I still like to keep an RSS feed going, because I can’t monitor everything on Twhirl 24/7 to catch things I missed.

On Twhirl, you can also look at your @ replies by clicking on the little @ button at the bottom.

If I go to the Home page, I’ll see the tweets from my own tweetstream.

If you want to use a second account, you just click on Twitter and enter another screen name from a separate account.

Here I have both my internet marketing Twitter account and my juice cleanse account open so I can work on or observe both at the same time.

Twhirl takes up very little screen space, so it’s easy to have it open all the time.

Tweetdeck, a more powerful option

Tweetdeck also requires Adobe Air.

It defaults to show you 3 panes.

• All friends: your main Twitter stream

• Replies: shows anyone who tweets @ your username

• Direct Messages: any messages sent specifically to you

You can see everything at once.

Tweetdeck has one great feature I love.

You can run a search in real time.

Click on the magnifying glass icon to bring up a new search for you.

Your parameters can include “  “  and OR, just like we did in Twitter Search earlier.

This will open up another pane in Tweetdeck.

This will show what people have written about any of those terms recently.

It updates in real time, so as people talk about it, it will appear on this pane.

That means I can reply to these people straight away.

Like with Twhirl, I just hover over the picture and click the reply button and say something to the person posting the Tweet.

My reply, that I ended with a question, will appear in my main Twitter stream and also in Katiana’s @ replies.

Which Twitter Client Should You Use?

• If you really need to manage more than one account in real time, use Twhirl.

• If you only have one account you want to follow, use TweetDeck.

• If you don’t want to be checking your Twitter all day, just use the Google Reader RSS feed or your daily TweetBeep alerts.

The key to Twitter

• Be active.

• A dead account won’t get followers

• A dead account won’t get clicks

• You need to be there.

If that’s not what you want to do, as I pointed out at the start of this module, that’s ok.

Just send your feeds through Twitter as I showed you and you’ll get some link juice, but you can’t expect people to follow you.  It’s called social media for a reason.  If you aren’t going to be social, this human aspect of Twitter won’t work for you.

Ideally, you need to use Twitter and your searches to identify people who are in your niche who are possibly interested in what you have to say or that you can answer questions for or those you can ask questions of and engage in conversation with.

You’re being a real person here and there’s no marketing trick or tactic to that.

You just want to talk to people.

Get out there on Twitter and get to know some people, get some followers and become an expert in your site.

Don’t use it primarily to send out links, use it properly and social networking on Twitter will work for you.

Transcript:

Power Networking: Here we’re going to be talking about social networking.  That is going out on all the web 2.0 connecting type of sites and generating interests in ourselves and our brand.

The Networking Module (6) is different from the Link Building Module (5)

In link building, you will have used some of the social media type of sites.  Sites like eHow.com that have social media facilities as well as giving you the ability to simply post a link on them.

Some of the sites we are talking about can be used either way

• Creating some content on the site and posting a link back to your own site.

• Delving into a site and making connections with people who are part of or interested in that niche.  That’s the networking part – getting to know the people.

YouTube is another site where many people who enjoy making content can build links and generate interest in their product by interacting with other users.

They’ll spend time on a site, not just uploading a video, but adding and communicating with friends and networking to bring traffic back to their own profile.  YouTube can be used either way or both.

In this module, we’re really going to be getting into the nitty gritty and creating connections with other people interested in our niche.

For a very thorough overview of the differences between link building and networking, I’m going to refer you to my Social Media Myth.

This free document I wrote tells you about how we use social media, which ones are more effective, the differences between sites, which sites are the most important … I want you to read that before you continue with the rest of the lessons in this module because the information contained in it is absolutely imperative to understanding how we’re going to be using the social networking type of sites.

Before we start with Social Media sites

Social media sites may not be where you want to focus your time.

If you are in a niche that you don’t really care about or have much of an interest in, you probably don’t want to spend a lot of time on social media sites talking to people about it.

The problem here is that in social networking, you’re jumping into an already established community. People who are talking about you niche and have a certain way of talking to each other. Who have certain resources that they refer to over and over again. Should you just jump in as straight out marketer mode with links and surface level conversation, without passion or true interest, they’ll see straight through you.

If your niche is something you are not passionate about, you would be better served to focus on link building exclusively.

You can use some of the sites we’ll be talking about for networking just for link building alone.

YouTube is such a site.

Twitter is another one.

You can network on Twitter, but you can use it just to build links as well.

But if you’re going to go out and start reaching out to people in your niche, you either need a real passion for it or be able to fake it really, really well.

Remember the links I built for juice cleansing? 

I really don’t have a super deep interest in juice cleansing – while I think it’s an interesting topic, I’ve never done it before.

So while I’m using juice cleansing in this networking module because it’s the example I’ve chosen, it’s actually going to be kinda difficult for me. I don’t have the deep knowledge or passion for it that some of these people who have been doing it for years really do have.

Assuming that I can get past the gatekeepers and establish myself as someone who’s really interested in this niche and can provide valuable information, I then have to maintain that.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see I tweet darn near every single day about internet marketing.

I’m passionate about internet marketing and it doesn’t take any effort for me to post about it because I really like it.  I can just jump into conversations and throw things around.

Juice cleansing,,, it’s going to be on my To Do List.  I’m going to have to go back to whatever Twitter or YouTube account I use for this niche and participate with people.  We don’t want this to be a chore.

I’m saying, in your niche if it’s not something that you wake up to every day and want more information about, then just focus on link building.  That’s ok.

If it is something that you really love and you want to share with people, absolutely do EVERYTHING in this module.

Another thing to consider is that there is not enough time in the day to be present on every single networking site out there.  I can barely keep up with the 4 or 5 in internet marketing that I attempt to be active on and I LOVE internet marketing and I really want my presence to be out there in it.

We need to find the sites that have the most people talking passionately about your niche than anywhere else and focus on those.

We are NOT going to attempt to blanket every single site out there.

A little tip: You’re going to chose just 3 or 4 sites that give you the best ROI (Return On Investment.) but you will also create a presence on other sites which you don’t go to often. (I talk about this in The Social Media Myth)

Say you decide MySpace is not where your customers are, you still create a profile and say Hey, here’s what I do and here’s the information I talk about, here’s a link to my website. You’ll find I’m active on Twitter and Facebook (for example).

Then give your Twitter and Facebook links and say I’d love to chat with you there.

This way you create a type of feeder profile so you don’t have to be thinking, Oh, should I be on this, should I be on that….

It doesn’t matter.

Just put up a profile on these sites so people can find you

That way when people look you up on any of these super network sites, they are able to find you, they are able to get your message and where they can get in touch with you more or learn more from you.

So we’re going to focus on the top 3 or 4 networking sites and also create profiles for you on significant other sites that link to the sites where you are active.

Those somewhat inactive profiles turn out to be link building profiles – just creating more backlinks for us.

Now before you go on, download the Social Media Myth and learn more about networking in social media, some of the details of which I have just glossed over.

You’ll need to do this to understand what we’re going to be talking about next.

Transcript:

You know how to build links now – we’ve gone over tons of ways to do it for our main keyword.

We also have category keywords on our sites.

So we will rinse and repeat the processes we’ve gone through with our main keyword phrase for our category keywords.

 

This is the linking structure to use

For your Main Keyword, you use your main url.

For Category Keywords, it works like this.  Let’s use Master Cleanse, one of my category keywords.

Before I build links, I would need a keyword optimised post with the title: master cleanse, with the keyword: master cleanse and in the category: master cleanse.

Then I would build links to this category post, just like I did for my main keyword.

But instead of linking to my main url, I would be linking to that individual post url that I am attempting to rank for with that category keyword phrase.

To wrap up the whole link building process

The Process is ongoing.

Depending on the competition within your niche you may have to do more or less work than other people.  I can’t tell you when to stop.

I can tell you that Blog Carnivals are a pretty easy thing to do.  They are regular and the content is already on your site.

You’ll use the Snooper tool to check out other sites – which ones are ranking highly, which ones are you yet to build links to?  Build those links.

A Brief Word about Automation Tools

Tools such as SEO Nuke and Brute Force SEO are out there and they help you to post to different social media sites and build links to them.

These tools are not as hands off as I’d like them to be (and they do tend to be a bit “buggy”). You still have to interact quite a bit to actually build links with them and sometimes it seems almost faster to do it manually yourself.

However they are useful in building links to the hub pages you create.

In our earlier example, we created a Squidoo lens.  I would use the automation tools to build links to my Squidoo lens to lift the ranking and the link value of that page itself.

I DON’T use the automation tools to build links to my site url or any of my individual posts.

I feel that sometimes those tools leave footprints that can be seen and it’s not worth my while to lose my domain over a tool like that.

You don’t have to use automation tools by any means, but it is something I’m often asked about and I want to answer that question in this Module before we move on.

How I feel about automation tools

Use them to build links to your satellite or hub sites if you want to but don’t use them to build links to your main url.

That’s it for the link building Module.

Remember

• it’s an ongoing process

• the Snooper tool always has the answers for you of where to build links next

Whenever you have a spare 10 minutes, use the Snooper tool and visit a site you haven’t put a link on yet.  Use your Jetspinner articles to populate those sites with content.

Always add your RSS feed if the site lets you pull in content via an RSS feed.

If the site produces an RSS feed, you always add their RSS to your Friendfeed account to continue to build those automated links to you for your main site and your hub sites that you’ve created.

I hope you enjoyed this module.  I really enjoyed creating it for you.

Thanks so much.