Whenever we talk of marketing your videos online, the first name that is likely to strike you is YouTube. However, there are a lot of other websites that would give you great incentives if you make them a part of your online marketing plan. You would find a lot of sites which provide far greater control to the user while submitting the videos and handling the analytics as well. Let us explore some of these lesser known websites and how they can pleasantly surprise us!

a. Dailymotion – This is the biggest rival of YouTube in terms of the number of users. The best feature of the website is the Stupeflix technology – which would provide you a tool to create a video slideshow. All you need to do is prepare a set of 30 pictures and background music, and the tool would do the hard work to make it look like a super cool video. Moreover, it is not even flash that you see, but the MP4 video format, which improves the video quality to a great extent!

b. Viddler – You could not ask for a better website if you are looking for awesome features while marketing your videos for a social community. Once you start using their interactive service, you would feel the complete social experience. Right from tagging on videos, to commenting on and forming groups, it gives you the best platform to connect to numerous people at one go! The coolest thing about the website is the feature of timed comments and tags, which would let you record a video response, directly from your webcam! You can very well imagine how helpful would it be while interacting with your users online!

c. Metacafe – You probably would have heard of this website, because it has been on the market for quite a while, and has made its own distinct market. The thing about Metacafe that would surely attract you is that it has carved its own niche in this competitive market – the short-video entertainment segment. So, you would already know what your users would be looking for when they visit the site. You just need to keep it entertaining, while pitching in your message and the game would be yours!

Email marketing is a direct marketing tool which uses email as a means of communicating a marketing message. It became very popular in the early 1990′s as the Internet picked up steam and went mainstream. In fact, if you are anything like me, you probably have quite a few email addresses for personal and business use. Email is just an ‘accepted everyday part of life’ and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Well, for business owners, email marketing is absolutely critical.

Email is still the largest social network and it dwarfs social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you think about it, all those forwards of emails are people sharing content. The great thing is that technology has allowed email marketing to become highly sophisticated with tracking abilities that show who opened, clicked, interacted with the email and what actions they took after receiving the email. Having this kind of data available at your fingertips allows you to track and measure the success of your email marketing efforts.

Looking at email marketing in today’s world, several studies indicate business’s top priorities in 2011 are email and social marketing. There’s also been quite a few advancements to email. Social sharing tools are creating a renaissance for sharing opportunities via email meaning there’s the functionality to share the message on Facebook and Twitter, instead of the normal ‘forward to a friend’ functionality.

Everyone knows that the internet is a powerful tool that is being used by billions of people around the world to connect with others and to buy things. While online shopping and electronic commerce have existed in some form since the early 90s, they have now become much more prevalent. In fact, the majority of Americans have used the internet to either directly make a purchase, or at least research a product or service that they were considering buying. If you have a small business, having an online presence is essential if you want to stay competitive in the long-run. A Boston Internet Marketing firm can definitely help you do this.

Having a presence on the internet and attracting customers is not too difficult. You first should start out by building a website. This can either be done by yourself, thanks to easy-to-use tools which don’t require any coding knowledge, or you can hire a professional to build a website for you. A Boston internet marketing company can help build a site for you, or can optimize an existing site as well.

However, even after you have a website up, things don’t stop there. You need to attract people to your site. After all, if no one knows that it exists, a website will not give your business any benefits. There are various ways that you can get visitors to your business website. One of them is search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO involves helping your site rank higher in popular search engines such as Google, therefore increasing the amount of visitors that you get.

If you’ve looked into your website statistics using a tool like Google Analytics, you’ve almost certainly come across the words ‘Bounce Rate’.

But, you may be asking, what does bounce rate mean?

Incidentally, if you happen to be reading this and have never heard of Google Analytics, it’s simply a way in which to measure the stats for your site, enabling you to see what pages are working well and which ones aren’t, as well as your traffic sources, the keywords people are using to find you and a ton of other useful information.

If you haven’t installed it on your site, sign up for free and start tracking your site. There are good Analytics plugins for WordPress if you use that to manage your site or blog.

Bounce Rate Explained

According to Google Analytics, the bounce rate is simply the percentage of single-page visits to your site, i.e. where the visitor arrived at your site, looked at the information on the page they landed on and then left without going onto any more pages. It doesn’t have to do with the time they spend on the site. The visit can last a second or 10 minutes, but if they only visit one page before leaving the site, it’s considered a ‘bounce’.

Now, that said, it doesn’t always mean that the visitor left because of the content on your site. It may be that they stayed on that page to read the entire page, post or article, got the information they were looking for, then left.

Google algorithm is all about content. If you are designing a new website, or even if you have an existing site, now is a good time to revamp your content. Unique, high quality content is king. It’s what all of search engines look for. This means you probably shouldn’t assign writing web content to an intern. It must be awesome, and this means using a good, professional writer.

How do you hire a writer? Start by writing an ad as you would for an employment opportunity and post it on craigslist.comor a local job posting site, if you want to hire locally. But in this technological age you can go for a broader range of writers, in that case post to elance.com or guru.com.

As you start getting bids for the job, you’ll start weeding out candidates. You may get bids saying that they will charge $5-$10 per page, if you get those, RUN AWAY! No professional writer worth his salt will charge that low. Don’t select a writer based on the price, you could be sorry. You don’t want to deal with low quality work, potential plagiarism and unprofessionalism. Writers are professionals please treat them with respect. Find someone with experience, at least 2 years professional writing. Review samples of their work, get referrals, and find a writer that is a good fit for the project. Do not try to cut costs by hiring a foreign writer. If English isn’t their first language they may struggle in creating content that will be the quality you are looking for.

Once you have selected a writer, create a written agreement and ask the writer to sign to the terms prior to you paying a deposit. Professional writers ask for a deposit, this is usually 25-50% down, and they should have no problem signing the agreement before receiving the deposit.