Marketing with youtube

[Bob R]

Hi Mr Webmaster. I am a webmaster of another dating site. If you don't answer it is ok. I was wondering does youtube help you with marketing your site? I have not made a video but thinking about it. I have not learn youtube yet but not sure if I should or not.

Thanks Bob

[dan]

Bob, I don't mind trying to answer your question.

I do not track my logs as often as I should, but when I do I always notice a few members coming from youtube. Nothing earth shattering, but every little bit helps.

What is nice about these new memberships, a lot of them are lady members. I usually only market in the Philippines and the fact that some ladies are watching the youtube video is nice. I notice in my keyword searches with google, the video shows up on certain keyword searches.

Hopefully this answers your question. I need to spend more time investigating the whole youtube market, but time has been in short supply. If you put together a video for youtube, I would say it can't hurt. Don't expect thousands of visitors, but it may bring those visitors to your site that normally would not find you any other way.

Good Luck
Dan

[Bob R]

Thanks dan for answering. I may over extend my welcome by asking more questions, but here goes.

How do you get your lady members to join from the Philippines?

My website has been up for 3 months. In those 3 months I got only 20 ladies to join. I'm frustrated.

I put links to my site with link exchange and any place I can. I'm puzzled how to get lady members to join my site.

I would put a link to my site here but I don't think that would go over good or would it:

I cater to all asin ladies and not just the Philipines. Any wisdom would be appreciated.

Thanks Bob

[dan]

Hey Bob, no problem. If I list all the mistakes I made and you avoided them, you probably would be better off in the long run. Let me start off by saying the following.

1. Reputation and how long you have been on the internet does help. I use adwords and advertise in the Philippines, but I don?t use adwords as often as I use too. I may use it once or twice a week. Sometimes for the holidays I will use it more often. I have no proof of this, but when I use adwords, it seems to have an accumulative effect. In other words, if I use it and get 10 ladies joining, I may not use it again for 3 or 4 days. However, after I use adwords I still get ladies joining even when adwords is not active. I suspect that this happens because of one of two things: (1) when adwords is active, some ladies check out the site and bookmark it to join later and (2) those who do join through adwords, tell other ladies about the site.

2. Using adwords means you have to be concerned about a budget. How much can you afford to spend a day? If your site is not bringing in any revenue, you will be operating at a loss.

3. I?m not an adword expert, but you can adjust your daily budget whenever you like. The key to adwords is keywords. If you are not familiar with adwords, you may want to check it out. Google provides a lot of instructions and help. They also provide a 800 number you can call.

4. Also, checking out the different forums on marketing will give you some insight into adwords. Many people complain and suspect click fraud. I think it exist, especially in overseas areas where people are not govern by U.S. law. Monitoring adword is not easy (it can be done). If you have an ad in the Philippines and someone clicks it, how do you know if that person was legitimately interested in your site or if your competition doesn?t have some one working for them to click their competition ads. This happens a lot, catching them or proving that is the case is not easy. Consequently, when I run adwords I accept the fact that some clicks may not be legit and chalk it up to it being part of advertising. Until something better comes along, it is the best there is for now. By the way, if you do suspect click fraud, you can call google and they will look into it. Don't expect much unless you provided some kind of proof of possible click fraud. I have a program that monitors my adword and have had google reimburse me more than once for fraud. It also tells me which sites have click my ad. I forget where I got it, but search google and you will see plenty.

5. You already said you are using link exchange. Man, this use to be a hot topic. It seems to of died down quite a bit. When I visit the SEO forums the topic of link exchange is rarely discussed where at one time (over a year ago) it was a hot topic for quite some time. It doesn?t mean links are not important, it means that webmaster are finding other ways to getting links to their site. I think viral marketing is now becoming a trend (google and read the story of Plenty of Fish owner ? this is how he started out marketing his site). But things seem to go in cycles. Viral marketing may be the hot topic now, but I wouldn?t be surprised if down the road link exchange comes back as the trend for marketing.

6. If you don?t know what viral marketing is, I?ll give you an example. When we put videos on youtube, that is a form of viral marketing. The idea is to get people talking and by word of mouth your site gets recognized. However, just like link exchange it is hard work. To be honest, viral marketing may be tougher to do than link exchange. With link exchange you exchange links. It all was pretty vanilla with little variation ? a link was a link. However, lets take youtube as a viral market. Man, there are some outstanding videos you have to compete against to get your video recognized. In this case, a video is not a video when there is such a variety of styles and talent making them. A lot people are making videos not to market their site or product, but to show off their talents. This makes it much tougher to get your video recognized. It?s much tougher to promote yourself through viral marketing than link exchange. Some more examples of viral marketing (1) Write articles and submit them to article submission sites (2) Create a program and give it away free ? for example phpbb, smf, 4images, etc are all free php scripts that has a link to their site at the bottom of the script (3) Have contests (4) Have more than one site or affiliate and cross promote ? for example a lot of people will have blogs that talk about a subject to cross promote their main site (5) Promote your site though other sites ? in other words, you are not exchanging links with this site, instead you are promoting some kind of contest, video, photo, etc on other sites that gets your site recognized or talked about (6) Customer service ? by providing good customer service, word of mouth will happen.

There are more, but that should give you an idea. Bob, if you are looking for a shortcut, there is none. It is hard work. Getting any kind of publicity seems to help ? even negative publicity. You didn?t say if your site was FREE or not, but as an example if I said your site was trash on my forum or gallery, you would be surprised how many people will check out your site. Also, you may want to be sure you understand both the Federal and your State laws for running a dating site. There are some strict laws depending on how you run your site. Breaking the law is the only negative publicity I would not recommend. Even if it gave you a rise in traffic for a few days, if the feds come after you those days will be over soon.

So ? you asked: How do I get ladies to join my site? Most of what I said above applies. It is a roller coaster ride and unless you are one of the mega sites that has money to burn, you can expect an up and down battle. For example, right now I?m going through a site maintenance problem and things are down and probably will stay down until I get things turned around. But even when you have problems, there may be a silver lining that makes a difference. My current, and hopefully soon to be over with problem, has given me some ideas on how I can use my site to help promote it once the database is fixed. I would of never thought of or even considered any of these ideas unless I had to dig and research the current problem.

Good luck.

Dan.

p.s. this forum is designed so only the admin can put links in a post.

p.s.s. Some mistakes to avoid

1. Backup your site. I?m really mad that over the years I have lost many testimonials from members who met on our site. I could kick myself.

2. Clear your cache. I don?t know how many times I have gone to my site thinking things were ok. Than one day I get an email from a member saying there is a problem that I didn?t see. Usually I didn?t see it because my site was cached and every time I looked at my site I was seeing a version that is not real time. If you are dealing with sessions, you may not have this problem but I still clear my cache at least every 2 or 3 days. It doesn?t hurt.

3. Emails ? no matter how tedious, how cumbersome, how redundant they may be, answer them as best as you can. It is easy not to want to answer the same question over and over and over again, but you have to. Even with that said, there is still a small percentage of emails I don?t get or answer because I won?t risk opening an email I don?t recognize. Virus and spam is an issue that the average user doesn?t have to deal with. For the webmaster, it can be a problem. I created an email form to help eliminate some of the problems, but a lot of members don?t use the form and will email me directly. If the email looks suspicious or I?m not certain of its origin, I won?t open it.

4. Broken links. You have to check. You can check your server logs for error problems. I read somewhere that you can lose quite a few customers if you don?t fix your broken links. I?m amazed how many orphan pages I will accumulate over a year. I have seen sites who may get hundreds or even thousand more visitors a day verus another site. But the site who has less traffic is more productive because their links are not broken while the site with more traffic lose customers who click a link that goes nowhere ? consequently they leave the site without joining, buying or whatever the webmaster/site goal was. Your error logs for your server will help here. Every year I do an inventory and clean up my site?s waste.

5. Read and research. If you rely on what you know today as your long term goal for keeping your site at the top, eventually it will come back to haunt you. Things change often and sometimes fast and furious. You have to keep researching and reading what the latest trends are to keep your site up to date.

6. Search Engines. Probably still the number one way to get your site on the map. There is a whole art to search engine marketing that requires a lot of work and research. For example, many webmasters concentrate on keyword marketing only (don?t get me wrong this is important) and over look directory marketing. DMOZ is still important even if it has lost some of it?s luster over the years. There is much more and learning as much as you can about SEM is probably the number one marketing tool for any website. I could write pages on SEM, but I encourage you to dig in to the SEO forums to learn about marketing with search engines as much as you can.

Again, good luck!