If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that everybody wants traffic. Website traffic, store traffic, social traffic (see our detailed guide on LinkedIn Marketing), and the list goes on. The problem is, nobody wants to buy it – at least not if there is no guarantee for a return. Today I’m going to show you how to hack video marketing to generate lots of free website traffic.
Okay, that’s cool. Free traffic is awesome. I’m awesome. Therefore, if anyone can teach you how to get real website traffic, it’s me. And just so you know, this is not one of those “obvious tips, general ideas, vague articles” about how you can grow your website overnight. The internet is full of those. I’m here to teach you some real stuff, so buckle up.
Video Marketing for Free Website Traffic
One of the big crazes that have swept the internet is video marketing. Nobody wants to read anymore. It’s always a lazy user on YouTube looking for a 3-minute video on how to make money online. Sites like Youtube get hundreds of millions (if not billions) of users streaming content and watching cat videos – literally.
So where does that leave informational websites like this one? We are stuck with SEO and hopefully some social traffic. I’m not saying SEO is bad, but the success of online videos has slowly phased out the thrill of reading and research.
The good news is, out of all those thirsty users streaming online videos, there’s a very good chance that you can find a few to buy whatever you are selling. So if you know how to make good videos that appeal to your market, you can use them to drive free website traffic over time.
Here are some tips for getting free traffic from videos, just for you:
Keep videos useful, but incomplete.
The inner-filmmaker in everyone wants to deliver their magnum opus to Youtube. Screw that. Keep your videos short – two minutes max. Give away some good info your prospects will want, but at the end of the video, tell them to take an action (ie: visit your own website) to get MORE information.
Let’s say you are doing a product review. In your video, you can spend the whole two minutes talking about how you got this product, and it made you $5,000 in two weeks, doing a total of 90 minutes of work. You can show people the checks you got, the product itself, etc. Then, at the end of the video, you can say: “If you want to learn more about the tactics this course taught me, visit my website at…” whatever.
So you show the benefit (useful) and tell the viewer to take an action to find out how you got that benefit and how they can do it too. (incomplete).
Plaster Your Website On That Dang Video.
Don’t wait to show people your website. Put it on the bottom of that video and keep it up on there the WHOLE DANG TIME. I believe video geeks call this the “bottom third” where you take the bottom third part of the video and display your website address on there. If any novice with iMovie can do this, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be too.
Piggy-back off popular videos
Find videos on Youtube that are getting lots of traffic, and create a video response for them. This will show up beneath the video, and you’ll get to siphon off some of that massive traffic and redirect users to your own video and ultimately, this will result in free website traffic.
Trick The Public. Because, why not?
If there’s a super-popular video on Youtube, did you know you can totally trick people into watching your video because they think they’re going to be watching a super-popular video? It’s a very easy trick. First, you need to know that Youtube takes a screen capture of your video 30 seconds in (or in some cases at the halfway mark of your video) if you did not specify one yourself, to be shown next to that video in its results listings.
So what you do is this… take a screenshot of the popular video that is the same as the screenshot that shows up next to it on Youtube. Then, you insert this picture as 1 frame of video, 30 seconds into YOUR video (or halfway through). Then you upload it to Youtube using the same title, description, etc. as the popular video.
So when people go searching for that popular video, and they click on your version of it, instead of seeing what they want, they’ll see YOUR video.
Is this sneaky? You bet. Is it underhanded? You bet. Will most people click away and leave once they see it’s not what they’re looking for? You bet. But if even a SMALL percentage of people on a video that’s being searched for 1,000,000 times a DAY decide to watch your full video, you’re going to make some sales. It’s that simple.
Get Listed In The Search Engines
Did you also know putting up a video on Youtube can get you top rankings on the search engines for keyword phrases in a matter of hours? It’s true. You just need to know the tricks for writing your YouTube descriptions properly, and how to keyword-load your title. Not stuff, but load.
But taking it a step further, you can also get an RSS feed for your Youtube account and ping that sucker at pingomatic.com, and have search engines from all over crawl and index your video. So not only do you get listed on Google really fast, but suddenly your video is on Yahoo, MSN, ASK, and all those other search engines people use.
Each Youtube user has its own RSS feed, even though YouTube doesn’t advertise it. The format is:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/username/uploads
Just replace the part where it says “username” with your own username. (simple, yes?)
Now, you might be thinking “Wow, you are so smart! This info is worth serious cash!”
Well, you’d be right. And to be honest with you, I wouldn’t say no to any act of “generosity” at this point. But in the spirit of “Knowledge is free”, I wanted to share this with you. Hopefully, it will help you generate some free website traffic and perhaps make some sales too.
See you on the other side!
