Jason+: A Blog about WordThink

Having a custom URL on YouTube like http://www.youtube.com/jmgrp is an important part of marketing. It makes your YouTube page easy-to-remember and find, and makes your brand look cool. But how do you create a custom URL on YouTube? YouTube has a nifty help file, here . It says: Make sure you're signed into YouTube, and go to your advanced account settings . Under Channel Settings, click Create custom URL . You'll then be able to choose the URL you want. Note that you can't choose a URL that someone's already chosen. Once you've chosen your custom URL, it will appear like this: But oops.  It ain't always so .  In many situations you will NOT see the "create custom URL" feature!  How do you then create a custom URL for your YouTube channel? I'm not completely sure, but here's one work-around I have created if you are creating a NEW YouTube channel.  I'm not sure if it will work if you have an existing channel without a cu...

Marketers love lingo, and one of the phrases marketers really like is this: the "sales funnel." Aristotle taught us long ago that metaphors matter ... How we think about a problem conceptually will guide our actions. So think about the concept of a "sales funnel." What does it imply? It implies that your customers are passive little marbles that can be "driven" down the "sales funnel" as if the "gravity" of your marketing pushed them along. So we start thinking about customers as "passive" rather than "active" and we act accordingly.   Lazy: as if we can "drive traffic" to our website (another phrase I really hate). Are customers really passive? Can you "drive traffic?" So think about yourself on the Web for a moment.  Are you passive? Are you "driven" to a website "as if" you were a marble?  Or are you active: reading, scanning, clicking, thinking, clicking back ...

Geraldo Rivera , that shameless publicity monger, has done it again! And, not in a good way. Last night, he tweeted a picture of himself shirtless . (He can teach us marketers a thing or two about viral marketing).  Now, the tabloids of the Internet (e.g., Huffington Post and the like) are picking up on it like wildfire, and it even shows as top trending search on Google: Geraldo Rivera (Google Search). Google Trends - Currently 'Geraldo Rivera' is trend #1. If that doesn't work, just Google 'Geraldo Shirtless' to "see" what the fuss is all about: a 70 year old man, shirtless.   What's Going On, Geraldo? Teach us to Viral Market. As marketers...  we want to look behind the scenes as to who is creating publicity, why and how.  #1 - Geraldo is "stupid like a Fox." Here's a guy who's campy self-image is a man-on-the-street yet he seems to hang in there, year after year as someone on the publicity circuit. So he tweet...

Sometimes when I go to church... people have this funny phrase: their " Prayer Life ." What they mean is that they have an organized ritual of praying and being spiritual much as many of us have an organized ritual of going to the gym, or to Starbucks, or watching Mad Men . So by "Prayer Life," they mean a systematic rigorous method of connecting with God or being spiritual. Your Share Life Whatever your religious inclinations might be, you can learn from this idea. For example, what is your "Share life?" Sharing is huge on Social Media; no one can be an expert on everything. Most of us "share" cool stuff with our followers... But do we do this in a systematic way? I am an expert on SEO, for example, and on Social Media, but not on WordPress, not on taxes, not on politics, and not on pop culture. But I follow others on those topics, and I share myself on SEO, Social Media and AdWords. Having an Organized Share Life Each morning, ...

Goals matter ! Not just on websites, but in life itself. Remember that annoying question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Adults were asking you then about your goals. Now, there are many twists and turns on this road of life, but still goals matter. The same goes for SEO and Social Media: what are your goals? Are they: Brand buzz - generating positive buzz about your business or organization? Direct sales - do you sell something on your website? Sales leads - is your sales process necessarily complex, and therefore your sales staff "follows up" with prospects by email or phone?  Perhaps even in person? And then how does your website, Facebook page, Twitter page, YouTube channel... you name it impact your goal(s)? If you rank on Google do you rank for the "right" keywords? And are you getting traffic from Google, and is that traffic converting ? Or, looking at the issue in terms of social media marketing, do you have many "l...

"Going viral" on YouTube is the ultimate "holy grail" of YouTube marketing. A viral video, of course, is a video that gets shared at a factor high enough to replicate ( > 1, so to speak). Let's take a look at one of my favorites on YouTube: Mike Tompkins , and reverse engineer some of his YouTube promotion strategies. Step 1: Identify a Video Theme Already "Going Viral" Such as a New Pop Song Tompkin's third video is a "cover" of Miley Cyrus' pop song, "Party in the USA." If you've never heard it, you can read about it on Wikipedia, here .  "Party in the USA" was released on August 11, 2009 and was a huge hit. Tompkins released his cover on December 2009, about three months after Miley Cyrus.  (Timing, as they say, is everything !).  This video currently shows 3,462,470 views - not bad, Mike Tompkins, for your third video! Step 2: "Hijack" YouTube Searches So how does this work? Pe...

What is negative SEO? I am getting this question more and more. So here's a quick primer on Negative SEO. Google has launched two big "updates" to the Google algorithm of late: Panda (focusing mainly on 'keyword stuffing' and low quality content) and Penguin (focusing mainly on low quality inbound links, especially the overuse of embedded phrases). Along with this, Google seems to have increased its awareness of manual spam complaints . All of this is creating some unintended consequences. Unintended Consequences of Panda and Penguin I doubt that Google meant to increase the availability of negative SEO tactics. Negative SEO is the use of faked or aggressive tactics by your competitors to make your own site look "as if" it is doing something against Google's terms of service, or just as bad, to call Google's attention to something you are doing that many other competitors are doing as well. So think about it this way: Panda = low...

Reddit , of course, is one of the original social news sites. People vote "up" articles and Reddit acts as a sort of crowdsourced news reader.  Much of Reddit can be very dumb, and very pop culture-ish but sometimes it is amazing. For example, their: Ask Me Anything series. Ask Me Anything is an example of marketing authenticity . Authentic , interesting interactions between people of all types. It's becoming very popular among actors and pop stars, and can teach us a thing or two about marketing buzz and about how authentic sells in the new world of Internet marketing. Ask Me Anything on Reddit The AMA series gets real people to ask usually famous people, anything. What's cool is that it often creates an authentic dialogue between a famous person and real folk like you and me. Here's an example from John Malkovich, who has to be one of my favorite actors. Being John Malkovich is an awesome movie BTW. Read the AMA by John Malkovich, here . View his ...

Review Marketing is All About Reviews. Most of  us worry (a lot) about reviews - reviews on blog sites, reviews on social media sites like epinions.com, and of course reviews on sites such as Yelp or Google+. What are the issues? Review Quantity and Review Quality First, you just need quantity. Does anyone care enough to review you at all? Usually you have to encourage, solicit, cajole, beg, prod... your customers to review you. Just getting a few reviews on a site like Google+ and/or Yelp will make a huge positive difference in your SEO performance. Not to mention whether you show up on an internal search engine like that of Yelp or Amazon. Get reviews! Second, you need to worry about quality. You can have reviews that are poorly written, or reviews from people whose profiles are so weak that they get filtered out. Even worse, you can have negative reviews. Bad Reviews!  Uh-oh! Bad reviews can come in a number of ways. First and foremost, the very unhappy cu...

One of my frustrations with Google+ has been the (ironic) lack of visibility of Google+ posts on search results. So after some investigation, I found out that you can link your Google+ account to your blogger blog. My experiment is to create a blog for my Google+ postings, and then post directly to this new blog rather than directly to Google+. Then with a little help from SEO, get the new blog (which will be populated with Google+ postings) to show up on Google. Why? Benefits of Blogger and Google+ Integration Ease-of-use . Using the blogger platform will give me lots of flexibility in posting, and the ability to have longer posts. Integration with Google+ . The new posts will appear both on my Google+ feed and on my blogger blog - so the "short read" will exist on Google+ and the "long read" will appear on the blog. SEO Visibility - posts will appear in Google search and therefore pull in some new people who will find me not through Google+ di...