How to Make Money Online (Part 9 of 10)
A very popular method for online marketing is called video marketing. I'm sure you have watched your share of YouTube videos, either for entertainment or instruction. If you have the patience and technical expertise to create a video, you can capitalize on it and gain increased exposure for your product or service.
Videos are no different than any other form of parasite hosting (for a full description of parasite hosting, please read the corresponding article in this article series). The only difference is you are required to upload a video in order to get your page indexed by the search engines.
Google (and other search engines) like to present their search engine users with a variety of relevant content. Let's say you perform a search for your favorite pop star. Well, Google is going to usually show several types of websites on the first page results. An example mix would be: youtube, myspace, squidoo, hubpages, gather, EzineArticles, a blog, etc. You will never see two or three of the top 10 results pointing to the exact same domain.
Google will always show a variety of relevant websites in their search results page (also called SERP). What Google doesn't want to do is show multiple pages from the same domain. So, while there may very well be 1, 000 different lenses on paid surveys at Squidoo, Google will always show only ONE of those pages in the top 10 results. For the other 999 lenses who don't show up on the first page, Google pushes them into the supplemental index.
What exactly does this mean? It means Video Marketing is a relatively unexplored form of marketing that can be used to rank in the top 10 results for almost any term. Business Process Modelling While this is very true for video marketing, you can take this same thought process and instead of creating a Squidoo lens for the next product you promote, you should create a parasite page on a rather unknown (but large) domain and you might actually rank quicker and with less work than if you created a Squidoo lens. This is particularly true if you already have extensive competition at Squidoo for your chosen product or niche.
Although Squidoo and other parasite domains are a great form of marketing that can easily rank in the top 10 search results for the keywords of your choice, a smart marketer will use YouTube and rank much quicker (and easier! ) for the exact same terms. Not too mention, there will be far less competition in the video realm than there will be in the normal realm of your typical “text” web page.
Creating a video is not as hard as it seems. You can use Windows Movie Maker to create your video, or you can use any number of free online video editing programs.
To find a list of free video editors that are available for instant download, visit the website Download. While every program is free to use (at least for a limited time), some will require that you make either a donation or purchase a license after a trial period. Usually their licensing fee is minimal compared to commercial products of the same type (most licenses can be bought for anywhere from $5 to $50 which is exceptionally cheap if you compare it to brand name software).
Video capturing and editing is beyond the scope of this article. However, there are plenty of free editing tutorials available on the internet. Just perform a search and you will find plenty of free information on how to capture and edit video footage.
While some marketers go to great lengths to create original marketing videos, there are many marketers who don't bother to create original videos. They simply download existing videos on YouTube (or elsewhere) and then stamp their name and web address into the video (called “titling”), and then they re-upload the video.
Downloading, editing, and then re-uploading videos that belong to other people is really a form of black hat marketing; you are using material that is legally copyrighted by someone else. Can you get into legal trouble? Most likely not. But your videos will be removed if the original publisher discovers them and submits an official complaint to the video hosting site.
If you decide to create a video and use it to promote your website or to drive traffic, just remember that there are hundreds of video sites on the internet – don't just upload your video to YouTube, also upload it to MySpace and as many other video sites as you possibly can. And don't forget to get back links for each video! (I recommend at least 10 back links for every parasite page that you create.