1.Target Audiences That Like Sharing

When strategising about who you’re writing for, consider that audience’s ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in evangelizing the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles and content types regularly play better than others on the web.

2. Participate in Online Communities

Advertisers have spent billions researching and determining where consumers with various characteristics gather and what they spend their time doing so they can better target their messages. They do it because reaching a group of 65+ year old women with commercials for extreme sports equipment is known to be a waste of money, while reaching an 18-30 year old male demographic that attends rock-climbing gyms is likely to have a much higher ROI.

3. Make Your Content SEO Friendly

Search engines are a massive opportunity for traffic, yet many bloggers ignore this channel for a variety of reasons that usually have more to do with fear and misunderstanding than true problems.

4. Use Facebook, Twitter and Google +

Twitter just topped 465 million registered accounts. Facebook has over 850 million active users. Google+ has nearly 100 million. LinkedIn is over 130 million. Together, these networks are attracting vast amounts of time and interest from Internet users around the world, and those that participate on these services fit into the “content distributors” description above, meaning they’re likely to help spread the word about your blog.

5. Install Analytics and Monitor the Results

At the very least, I’d recommend most bloggers install Google Analytics (which is free), and watch to see where visits originate, which sources drive quality traffic and what others might be saying about you and your content when they link over.

Five Easy Ways To Increase Blog Traffic by Imagine

Super Bowl XLVI (46) stopped America. It’s the biggest sporting event on the US calendar, and the most expensive. These days however, the entertainment isn’t just limited to the football field. The TV ads have gained a reputation as some of the most creative, humorous and talked-about. Their appeal is so widespread that in 2012, a 30 second TV spot sold for a cool $4 million. With that kind of pull (and hefty price tag), most agencies go all-out to make the commercials as effective and momorable as possible. Celebrities are commonly included; this year it included William Shatner, Matthew Broderick and Jerry Seinfeld.

With those kinds of prices, advertisers have gotten creative and sought to cross-media market their TV advertising to generate additional exposure and hype. The solution: social media marketing.

Twitter

The Super Bowl had it’s own hashtags like #SuperBowl and #SuperBowl46. So did the Patriots and the Giants. Thousands upon thousands of people followed the live play and commentary from the phones all around the world. Not everybody got the chance to watch it live. But everybody was able to know exactly who got hit, when they got hit, and how hard they got hit.

Facebook

The New England Patriots have over three million Facebook fans. But the New York Giants are one of the most active teams in the world when it comes to social media. In the weeks leading up to the game, they had players film behind-the-scenes footage. But required 10,000 new Facebook fans to unlock the daily footage. Add to this a live video stream with fans where players answer questions from fans on Facebook, and it certainly created plenty of extra buzz and support.

Google Plus

The folks at Google really ramped it up this year. Both teams – the New York Giants and New England Patriots – had very active Google+ accounts. So Google decided to provide fans with lots of information to keep them occupied  – statistics, analysis, and streams of conversations by fans.

Live video streaming

Super Bowl XLVI was the first in history to be streamed live on the internet. This is a massive shift in broadcasting. Especially when you consider the cost of advertising on Super Bowl TV ads. With millions of viewers no longer switching on their TVs to watch the action, a lot of the advertising was simply not seen on TV. Instead, there has been a marked shift to watching the commercials on video sites.

YouTube

It is common now for advertisers to release their ads before the Super Bowl to generate early hype and awareness. Millions of views are generated and so much content gets re-tweeted, Facebooked, blogged and shared around the workplace. Last year, Volkswagen’s “Darth Vader” commercial reached over 50 million views on YouTube. This year’s Super Bowl advertisers have been looking to emulate that success this year.

Blogs

With millions of fans posting on blogs around the world, the online chatter reached epic proportions this year. For those who have succeeded – and those who have failed miserably – this is where the magic happens. There is so much scrutiny surrounding Super Bowl marketing campaigns, that blogs are inundated with articles, critiques, thoughts and feelings before, during and especially after the game. There’s no hiding from it. If you want to be in the action, you have to cop the commentary that goes with it.

The Super Bowl 2012 Social Media Marketing Revolution by Imagine

Here is a simple guide that explains how to optimise your video content for high visibility in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

There are typically three ways a consumer will use a search engine to find your video content:

i. By adding the word ‘video’ or ‘videos’ to their search query,
ii. By undertaking a regular search and finding a video within the search results page (Universal Search),
iii. By using a video search engine, such as Youtube.com

Each of these types of search can be influenced by the following ten factors, which are our Top Ten Tips:

1. Use the word ‘video’ on the page: People are increasingly using search engines to search for videos. It is imperative that the actual page your video resides on is optimised for the word ‘video’ so it will stand the best chance of ranking if a searcher uses a search query that includes that word.

2. Optimise your Page Meta Tags: As with the above tip, you should ensure that your meta title, description, and keywords  include the word ‘video’, ‘videos’, and any other important search terms that describe that video.

3. Optimise your URLs: All video content should be placed in their own folder named ‘videos’ and you should ensure you have one video per URL. The URLs themselves should include the appropriate keywords to communicate to the search engines what the video is about.

4. Video Sitemaps: Create video-specific sitemaps that link to all your videos. This will ensure that the search engines can find all your video content and that there is a permanent link to that content at all times.

5. Links! Internal and external linking should promote the videos and the pages that the videos reside on.  Anchor text, as ever, is incredibly powerful and should be manipulated internally and externally to confirm the worthiness of the video to rank. If a video is about ‘Michael Jackson’s Thriller’ it should be linked to with those words by you and ideally by other webmasters.

6. Optimise your In-format Meta data: Video files typically allow data about them to be stored within the video file itself. This is called In-format meta data. In-format meta data is typically stripped out of the file if the file is converted or edited so it is important to ensure that you operate a strict process of video tagging so that video files have optimised and descriptive meta data embedded within them before they are published and promoted.

This in-format meta data is also useful as it can be used to build page-level meta data and on-page optimisation dynamically and quickly.

Future in-format meta data will allow a user to add tags to different parts of a video and not just to the file as a whole. That way a search engine could index ‘scenes’ within a video file and then allow a searcher to search for, retrieve, and automatically play a specific part of a larger video file.

7. Use Media RSS (MRSS): In a similar fashion to conventional RSS, MRSS allows you to create an XML feed that specifically details the key information and location for your video files. Yahoo has been one of the key proponents of the format – the full specification can be found here: http://search.yahoo.com/mrss.

MRSS is important as the resultant feed can be submitted to any video search engine that accepts the feeds; Blinkx and Truveo are good examples.

8. Video Format Governance: Use conventional video formats, such as MPEG and AVI, for your videos as opposed to file formats that require specific video players or operating systems.

9. Branding: You should consider adding your brand name, URL, and/or logo to your video files as a discrete watermark on the bottom right of your video content. This ensures a degree of brand visibility when the video is syndicated across video search engines, such as YouTube or Blinkx.

10. Make them Compelling: Ensure that any video content you are creating is compelling viewing!

Video Optimisation Tips by Imagine