From this article, you will learn:

• Why incorporating video into your marketing efforts is vital for your business’ goal of more engagement.
• About essential tools and services that can help you create compelling video content that appeals to viewers.
• How you can choose the right avenue or channel for your videos to reach your target audience.

Video Marketing

Video marketing has become a fundamental part of an overall marketing plan. Not only is it suitable for entertaining and capturing attention, but it’s also an effective tool that can lead prospects through sales funnels. According to technology corporation Cisco, 82% of all consumer traffic will be in video format by 2022. The same notion is supported by Facebook’s EMEA VC Nicola Mendelsohn who predicts that by 2021 all their content will be in video format. This is mainly the reason why more and more businesses are incorporating video into their marketing strategy in a bid to not be left behind.

Video production is becoming more cost-effective than it was before. According to HubSpot research, what matters most to the audience is the authenticity of the videos and not the quality. Viewers prefer raw and simple videos. Therefore, anyone with a high-quality 4K-enabled smartphone can record a video and viewers won’t mind. Moreover, the options available for marketers are endless. There are onboarding videos, support video calls, knowledge-based videos, customer review videos, etc. Let’s dip into some of the avenues you can leverage to reach out to your target audience.

Video Email Marketing

According to Syndacast, the mention of the word ‘video’ in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19%, increases click-through rates by 65%, and reduces unsubscribes by 26%. eMarketer reports that 50% of marketers who use videos in their emails have better click-through rates, increased time spent reading through the email, and social shares. This is because video emails tend to stand out from other forms of email communication. They tend to capture the audiences’ attention and imagination in a way that text doesn’t. Moreover, most people would rather watch a video than read through a long email.

Social Media Video Marketing

Social media is an excellent place for more engagement and brand awareness. It’s where your business can find the next prospect, lead, or customer. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources, options, and channels available today. Each channel has its advantages when it comes to engagement. However, it’s essential to find out how you can utilize each channel for maximum results. For instance, about 100 million hours of videos are watched daily on Facebook, a billion on YouTube, and a video tweet is six times more likely to get retweets than a photo tweet. The goal is to choose one or a few sites that fit your budget and business.

Video Content Marketing

Video content marketing is merely the creation and distribution of online videos that are both educational and informative. The goal is to convert video audiences into prospects while also providing information that can convert current customers into repeat buyers. Video content marketing is a powerful and effective way of creating a deeper and more meaningful connection with people. Although it takes time and effort, done correctly, you can capitalize on its ability to tell a brand story and encourage more engagement with your audience. While the video content marketing process might be daunting at first, clear goals should make the whole creative process simple.

SEO Video Marketing

SEO video marketing is all about making your videos discoverable online in video and social platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, and on search engines such as Google. SEO in videos is still fresh as not many SEO practitioners have exploited it fully. Therefore, you have more chances of ranking with an optimized video than with an optimized webpage. According to data from Forrester Research, it’s 53 times easier to rank with a video on Google than it is with a webpage. This goes to show that videos are no longer exciting add-ons but important aspects of SEO and brand recognition.

Marketing Video Maker

Now that you know video marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract free and targeted traffic to your business, you need a quality marketing video maker. Fortunately, there are many video marketing makers online that you can leverage to create high quality and interactive videos. With these video creators, you can create professional videos minus the high price tag. Moreover, you gain access to vast libraries of animations and scenes for you to use as you please. The only downside is that free video makers come with limited features and functionalities, or even watermarks. Upgrading to paid services unlocks some of the more advanced features and removes watermarks. Some of the best marketing video makers include:

• Wideo
• GoAnimate
• Adobe Premiere Pro
• AVS Video Editor
• PowToon
• VideoScribe
• Wirecast
• ScreenFlow

Video Marketing for Business

Businesses are facing much more competition than they did before. The biggest problem is capturing the attention of potential customers. Although there are numerous marketing tactics in existence today, none prove as useful as video marketing in today’s age. In fact, a whopping 64% of online video viewers make a purchasing decision after watching an online branded video. Coupled with some great SEO tactics, videos can get your business the engagement that it needs. You can even monetize these videos (usually) and actually earn some extra revenue. Moreover, with the right kind of setup, your business can save on costs that would otherwise be channeled towards advertising.

Conclusion

Although video marketing can seem extremely challenging at first, the rewards, in the end, can be incredibly huge. One of the main reasons is because video marketing enables the establishment of an emotional connection with your audience. This level of engagement plays a significant role in the buying decisions of most people. Therefore, it would be a great benefit to your business to invest in video marketing.

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Advantages of Backlinks in SEO

First things first. Let’s talk about why it is advantageous to use backlinks to improve your SEO process. Backlinks provide a few things for you:

An improvement of organic rankings

By using backlinks, you can get better results and be able to improve your search engine rankings. Keep in mind that you need a goal, which is to create backlinks leading to your homepage plus individual pages. Google will also give more credit to websites with quality backlinks.

Faster indexing

Backlinks help the chances of your website being discovered more effectively and efficiently by search engine bots. This way, your site is recorded faster in the online world, making it easier for people to notice and visit.

An increase of traffic (through referrals)

Traffic to your site also increases, especially through the use of referrals, and is usually targeted with a low bounce rate.

With all these factors in mind, we know that backlinks can really help with the development of your business. Now, let’s get on to the types of backlinks – decide which ones suit you the best.

Fundamentally Two Different Kinds of Links

A link is a link, right? Not so. Right off the bat, there’s a major difference in links that you should know about: NoFollow links and DoFollow links. Basically a NoFollow link tells search engines not to count that link for any pagerank qualities, these links get no love from search engines. People may see them and decide to click on them, but search engines will ignore them – at least that’s the general belief, but it turns out it’s not so simple. What you really want is DoFollow links, which allows not only people to see them, but also for search engines to give them credibility, but don’t get mad if someone gives you a NoFollow link, it’s still useful so be grateful. And you don’t want all of your links to be DoFollow. You want a mix, because all DoFollow links may make it appear that you’re doing something fishy.

Backlink Categories

Backlinks can be classified into at least 3 different categories, and these categories are the ones that you should focus on, especially with Google’s ever-changing algorithm that penalizes websites for posting spammy/low-quality links. Here they are:

Editorial links

These links are “natural” in the sense that they come from other website owners linking to your content. For example, you’ve created a good article that receives a lot of attention and you’ve seeded it with a few key bloggers… as time goes by, more and more people (including other online influencers/other businesses) are sharing it, and some put it on their own websites. The links to your website will then become more qualified, as it stands true through the test of time, and has proven to make people interested in visiting your site. As a result, this type of link is usually deemed valuable.

Manual links

Also referred to as outreach building, this is one of the most common link-building strategies. It’s done by contacting other website owners and asking them if they could place links to your website or pages. Of course most won’t just do it for free: you have to convince them why it would be worth it for them to post backlinks leading to your site. Also, contact people who are relevant. For example, if you’re selling beauty products, establish a relationship with beauty bloggers.

Self-created links

Self-created links can take many forms, such as those found in non-moderated blog comments, an article directory, a guestbook, or even a forum signature. While these can be the easiest ways for you to post backlinks, be advised that if you’re doing it too much, you can be viewed as spamming, and instead of getting many quality visits to your site, you can be banned from certain search engines.

Creating Quality Backlinks – The Do’s

How then, do you create quality backlinks that ensure an increase in the measured performance of your site?

Make relevant backlinks. This means that relevancy needs to be the primary focus in your backlink strategy, since search engines are all about relevance. Mainly, take note of the following:

• The general content, or the “theme” of the linking domain.
• The content itself on the linking page.
• The relevancy of the backlinks that are hitting the domain.

Make the right friends. Create and establish friendships with authoritative websites in your field. By doing this, search engines will tend to put you in the same bracket as these popular, highly-qualified websites. Generally, the stronger the site is, the better the results will be.

Focus on quality websites. Post your backlinks on trusted sources only. Forget the mediocre ones, don’t go spamming as many links as possible – because, again, what’s more important is the quality, not the number.

Intelligent use of anchors. Be creative. If you’re providing a mortgage advice service, don’t go repeating the same phrase over and over again. Try its variations, such as “advice on mortgages” and “mortgage guidance”.

The Don’ts

And what are the things that you should really avoid?

Purchasing backlinks. This is against many search engines’ terms of use, including Google, so avoid this at all costs. Think of it this way: would you vote for a politician that pays people to vote for them in an election?

Exchanging links. This can lead to a decrease of reputation in the search engine indexes, especially when you don’t know the quality and content of the partner site.

Selling backlinks. Much like purchasing, selling is also ranked at the bottom of the “most desirable backlink practices by search engines”.

Websites suspected of being involved in some of these activities can be penalized and suspended.

More Specific Methods

Here’s some more specific methods to build backlinks – after taking into account all the information previously stated above:

The “broken-link” building method. Just as the name suggests, you create backlinks by “fixing” related broken links on other websites. If you find a broken link on a website, the broken link being related to your content, then contact the owner of the website and suggest it be replaced with a working link of the same relevance (which can be your site).

Guest-posting method. Some websites accept guest posts, so try writing one for them and include a backlink to your own site while doing so.

The donation method. Simply by donating, maybe to one of your favorite causes, you can sometimes get your site linked to on a charity website.

There are actually many other approaches, but you would need to spend some time and do your own research, because every website is different. The bottom line is: remember quality comes first, and relevancy comes second. Happy back-linking!

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