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The internet has practically turned press releases into a form of direct marketing. Before the only way for your press release to get published was if an editor deemed it newsworthy. But now with the Internet, anyone can submit a press release online and get it pickup by news search engines like Google News and Yahoo News. With more and more people turning to the Internet to get their news, online press releases are now an effective way for companies to communicate directly with their target audience.

Web friendly press releases

More people get their news and information about products and services online than ever before. Regularly submitting online press releases is a great way to create news about your business, communicate directly to your consumers and build link popularity for your own site. But to make sure you get the most from your online press release and that it will rank well in the news search engines, it needs to be web friendly and search engine optimized.

Here are a few quick tips for optimizing and writing web friendly press releases:

• Use important keywords that your audience is likely to search for in the title of the press release.

• Repeat those important keywords a few times in the body of your press release, especially in the first paragraph or summary.

• Link those keywords back to your own website, but not just your homepage. You’ll get better link popularity if you can link them to an internal page or landing page that deals specifically with that keyword phase.

• Use images; insert your company logo, photos, video and graphs to show your reader what you’re talking about.

• Structure your press release just like you would any other piece you’d write for the Web with headings, subheadings, bullet points, bold and italics.

The Internet has changed the way we communicate in so many ways and now has even changed how we communicate with press releases. However, it is still important that your press release remains newsworthy. When using online press releases to communicate with your consumer, it can become easy to forget the actual news story and write one long advertisement. This could hurt your credibility and the reach of your release. I hope you find these tips helpful as you begin utilizing online press releases as a way to communicate directly with your consumers.

Physical Dimensions

Bitrates aren’t the only factor involved with determining quality and file size. The physical dimensions of your outputted video have a direct relationship with the file size. Read that again. This means that a video displayed at 640×480 is going to be much larger in file size than a video displayed at 320×240. Also, a video at 640×480 will require a higher bitrate than a video at 320×240.  This brings up something new to think about. What dimensions should your video be displayed at?  Again, this comes down to a lot of trial and error.

Let’s look at two extreme examples:

1)    A video containing highlights from a football game, recorded in DV (720×480.)
2)    a software tutorial screen captured at 1024×768

First, let’s analyze the football video. We know there’s going to be a ton of movement and motion graphics highlighting the plays. Therefore a high bitrate will be needed. Also, since there will be graphics to highlight the players along with a commentary, displaying the video at large dimensions probably isn’t necessary and by lowering them, we can help decrease the file size. I’d probably aim for 400×300 or 320×240 using square pixels and a bitrate somewhere around 600-900kbps as a starting point.

Second, let’s look at our tutorial video. We’ve got a 15 minute tutorial on using Microsoft Excel containing lots of highly detailed graphics and small text. Since the ability to read the small text and graphics is crucial, shrinking the dimensions of the video isn’t a practical method for keeping the file size down. Our best choice is going to be the bitrate. As a software tutorial, the video contains very minimal movement. Other than some mouse movements, typing and a few scrolls, there isn’t any real motion involved.  I’d start with a bitrate around 900-1000kbps as a starting point and go from there.

So that’s a couple of the extreme scenarios you might face. Regardless of the video content and dimensions, I always try to keep my videos under 5mb per minute. For broadband users, this seems to be very tolerable. Again, play around with the settings and get to know the relationships they have with each other.

Other Tricks

The bitrates and dimensions of your video are your bread and butter for determining the quality and file size of your video. There really isn’t any special tool out there that’s going to magically give your video better quality with a smaller file size. If you’re willing to spend a bunch of bucks, you can buy fancier encoders that can contain some better codecs, but it’s usually very hit or miss. Instead, when I’m stuck with a large video file, I like to trick my audience into thinking it’s a smaller file size. What I mean by this is there are some methods that can be used to make it less painful for your audience to wait while your video downloads.

Before I get into these, keep in mind that I’m speaking about a video that’s embedded in a flash player on a webpage. This does not apply to videos that are downloaded onto the user’s hard drive.

• More than Less - This one is kind of a no-brainer. If you’ve got a very long video, say a tutorial, demonstration or presentation, break it up into sections. If it’s a 60 minute video, try breaking it up into six 10 minute segments or chapters. Most people have an easier time with multiple shorter segments, than one long video. Plus, they will be more inclined to sit through it and can easily jump through the video since it’s in convenient sections.

• The Preload - This one’s my favorite and I use this “trick” all the time. Most flash/player encoding programs have an option to use a “preload movie.” What this does is adds a little graphical progress bar to display as your video loads. Generally, you can set the amount of video to load prior to playing it. For example, when I have a longer video or one that’s very large in size, I’ll set the preload to something like “5%.” This means that when a viewer clicks play (or if the video automatically is set to start), they’ll first see a logo or graphic with a progress bar, stating that the video is loading, and when the video has downloaded/loaded 5%, the video will begin playing. The big benefit here is that now there is a little cushion of video already downloaded so the viewer should be able to watch the entire video smoothly without the play bar catching up and causing the video to halt. I mean, let’s face it. About the most annoying thing that can happen while watching a video is having it stop playing because more of it needs to download! This gives you that insurance without losing your audience.

Last Notes

Some of you may be wondering what specific software and settings I use. Well, while I can’t get too specific (since each project differs), I can give some general settings I use on average. Most of my projects are natively recorded in DV (720×480) and brought into my suite as DV AVI files. My projects are edited in the same format and then rendered out as 640×480 QuickTime .mov files (using square pixels) using the “animation” (or sometimes “photo jpeg”) codec. From here the QuickTime (.mov) file is brought into my flash/player encoding software. I use a program called Camtasia Studio. It’s a program I use for screen capturing and recording tutorials, but it also contains a very nice set of tools for creating and encoding flash videos and players. This is where I set the bitrates and dimensions of my videos as well as the preload (if I decide to use one.)  As an example, a recent project I did resulted in a video that was just over two minutes. The video contains lots of detailed motion graphics with text so I only shrunk the dimensions to 500×375 and set a video bitrate at 900kbps with an audio bitrate of 64kbps. I set a preload of 2%. The result was a high quality product video under 15MB. It’s still a little larger than I’d like, but the size was unavoidable due to the detailed graphics and text, which is why the small preload in front comes in handy. That’s just one example, but hopefully it helps!

As always, I hope these blogs provide some insights and useful information. Again, it’s going to take a lot of trial and error to get familiar with how these settings work. I encourage you to experiment and play with each setting until you know it inside and out. I’d recommend taking several short, 10 seconds clips of various content and toying with the settings. Trust me, you’ll save yourself tons of time in the long run (and make your videos look better too!) Good luck!

The plethora of blogs to choose from is amazing!  We can post blogs about dog training, health care remedies, shoe trends, business advice and pretty much anything you can imagine.

Blogs are great for keeping up on the latest and greatest in the world and can also be beneficial for link building and driving traffic to your website. Regularly posting accurate and interesting subjects to your blog is the key to having a healthy blog life.  Once you create and generate readers you are bound to succeed.

Blogs can be created and utilized by anyone.  If you know how to turn on your computer and search via the engines online you can create a blog.  Very little technical knowledge is needed which is great for small business owners to large business owners or you and your friends.

Here are a few links to some user-friendly, free blog sites to help you get started:

• WordPress
• Blogger
• blog.com
• thoughts.com

If you’re new to the whole blogging craze and just aren’t quite ready for your own blog, you can start by posting on other people’s blogs. Find a blog that’s related to your business in some way, but that’s not a competitor, and start by replying and commenting on its posts.

Remember the most challenging part of a blog is posting creative and accurate information to capture an audience.  If you know who your audience is, what they like and what their interests are, then you are set.  If you are unsure you may want to do a little research or test market your idea’s before you start the posting process.

Turn your business on and start blogging.

Setting up a website isn’t nearly as difficult or expensive as it was just a few years ago.  According to a 2008 study by Barlow Research, it’s estimated that roughly 49% of small businesses already have a website, with another 13% planning to launch a site within the next 12 months.  With so many businesses having websites and more on the way, you might want to raise the question of how yours will stand out from your competitors’ and meet your business objectives.

The mere act of “having a website,” doesn’t guarantee success.  But make no mistake about it; the Internet is here to stay; which means that you need to plan your website’s future.

What is Search Engine Fuel?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or search engine fuel is the continual practice of making your website easily found by the search engines and your target audience.

As an online marketing consultant, I’m often asked, “What would I do?”

It’s important to note that your website should never follow what someone else does.  Your personal brand, reach, customer demographic, etc. is unique and therefore your marketing strategy should never be cookie cut.

Marketing your company on the Internet should be viewed no differently than how you have marketed using traditional media.  The only component that has changed is the medium.  For that reason, I’ve found that success with your website can be attributed to two things:

• Sending The Right Message- Clearly communicate, with words and design, how your company will meet your target audience’s needs.  Overall, your site should be equal to or better than your competitors’.
• Receiving The Right Traffic- Use your website to attract qualified sales leads so that your marketing objectives can be met.

Crafting the Message

Features and benefits mean nothing, unless they address the greatest “pain point” of your target audience.  The important thing is to address your target market’s emotional buying motive.  Customers will judge your brand and your company’s strengths and weaknesses from the way it is presented on your website. Here are just a few questions to help focus your efforts:
• How does your company compete?  Better services or products, best price, etc.
• How do you define your target market?  Are they young, middle aged, or senior citizens?
• Do they exhibit similar behavioral traits?
• What should your brand look like to potential buyers?

Driving in the Right Traffic

How do you to get potential customers to visit your website and help you meet your business objectives?  The answer:  A strategic search engine optimized campaign.

There are two components to the campaign:
• A properly search engine optimized website and
• Link popularity (getting related websites to link to your site).

In my next post I’ll discuss these two components in more detail.

As 2009’s recession sets in, this humorous cartoon depicts one way to make room for your online marketing budget.