Content is the foundation of the internet and a few years ago that meant writing content.

It also meant articles, blog posts, reports, case studies and so on but today video content is growing.

And as a business owner you can take advantage of this visual medium to grow your business.

Of course the more professional your videos are the better your results!

So to help you get started with creating a professional video here’s some things you need…

Great Lighting

The lighting in your video is extremely important.

If your viewers cannot see you clearly, then they won’t watch.

To avoid shadows and a too dark video, don’t sit directly in the light of a window so instead have a soft light directed toward your face.

Be Prepared!

Preparation is key so write or outsource your script first because winging it is a sure way to an unprofessional video.

Make sure you know what you want to say and how you want to say it before you hit the record button on your camera which leads me to my next point…

Write Well

By all means, make sure that your video is interesting!

Any good video will be a lot like a good article or blog post.

It’ll focus on a specific topic and it’ll grab your viewer’s attention right away.

Your video will also offer value and include a call to action.

Make sure you have a purpose for your video before you write it.

What do you want to accomplish and what action do you want viewers to take once they’ve watched your video?

Practice, Practice & Practice Again!

Do a practice run first before you record.

Read your script aloud a few times and consider recording it so you can test the lighting, sound, camera angle and content.

Practice using note cards or bullet points as your cues.

Editing

Edit your video and add any background audio.

You will likely want to trim out the end and the beginning and add a watermark with the URL of your website.

Ideally, you’ll have no more than eight minutes of video when you’re finished.

Shorter videos perform better than the long ones.

Include A Call To Action

The call to action is one of the most important parts of a YouTube video.

Make sure your call to action supports your goal.

Don’t hesitate to mention it half way through the video and also at the end.

Dress Appropriately

Finally, don’t forget to dress the part.

Make sure you’re dressed appropriately and professionally.

Think about your audience and how they will respond to your attire.

Also take a look at the things they can see in your video.

Personal mementos, knick knacks and artwork may not seem like much to you but your viewers may have an opinion.

Don’t distract them by the background.

Help them focus on you and your message by eliminating any background items.

Creating a professional video isn’t difficult however, it does require some time and advance planning.

Are you currently using videos to market your business?

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne

Out of everything you could do for your website in terms of on-page SEO, there’s nothing more important than the title tag.

If your title tag isn’t properly written, you won’t get ranked.

Even if you did get ranked, with a poor title tag you won’t get very much traffic.

Here’s why the title tag is so important, as well as instructions on how to write an effective title tag.

Why The Title Tag Is Important

The title tag plays two main roles.

First, it’s the most important keyword indicator on your website.

When Google comes to you site, it needs to be able to ascertain what your site is about.

It uses a number of “clues” to do this.

It has its robots read your website. It looks for keywords, as well as sets of words that when put together helps Google figure out what your site is about.

It looks at the people who link to you, as well as your images.

But most importantly Google looks at your title tags.

Your title tags should have your main keyword(s) in it, so that Google can quickly and easily identify what your site is about.

Having your keyword in the title tag is the number one most important on-page SEO factor.

Make sure you have your main keyword in your title if you want SEO traffic.

Attracting Clicks

In addition to rankings, the title tag plays an important role in getting people to click on your site in search results.

Your title tag is what appears in the search results. It’s the headline of your search listing.

If you have an attention-catching title tag, you’ll get more people to click on your ad.

On the other hand, if your title isn’t enticing, people won’t click on your ad.

It’s not just how highly ranked you are in the search engines that matters.

It’s also how many clicks you get from those rankings.

At the end of the day, the goal isn’t rankings – it’s traffic.

Writing a good title tag will help you get that traffic.

How To Write A Good Title Tag

Start the writing process with keyword research.

What keyword(s) do you want to put in your title tag?

Place your keyword in the beginning of the title tag rather than the end.

If you want to place your site name, do it after a separator.

For example, if your keyword is “investing strategies,” your title tag might be:

“Investing Strategies for the Middle Class | My Site Name”

Write several titles before finally choosing one to use on your website.

The title tag isn’t just a sentence, it’s a headline that needs to draw attention, as well as a technical indicator for search engines.

Time spent optimizing the title tag is time well spent.

Are you currently optimizing your title tags? If so I’d love to know if you’re getting more traffic from it.

Leave me a message below. Thanks!

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne

Getting other websites to link to yours is perhaps the best way to increase the amount of traffic you receive over time.

Not only will you gain more traffic when people click on those links and come to your site but as more websites link to yours the ranking of your website will improve on Google and other search engines (which will lead to additional traffic).

Realize That It Takes Time

It’s important to recognize that proper link building takes time – but this shouldn’t scare you away from the process.

In fact it should probably be viewed as a positive and rather than disrupt your other business tasks by requiring you to focus exclusively on building links for a day or week or more, proper link building will require you to dedicate a small amount of time to the process on a regular basis.

Identify Your Targets

The first step is to identify where you want to build your links to.

Do you want to build traffic to the home page of a single website to different articles within your website or to your professional profile?

Your professional profile is whatever you use as your main point of communication and contact for your business; this might be your Facebook page, your Google+ profile, or perhaps a website you maintain yourself (something like “www.[myname].com”).

Do It “Naturally”

One of the best ways to build links is organically.

To do this you need to become active on other websites that relate to your business.

Identify the blogs and community websites that have active discussions and to which you can substantively contribute.

When you’re commenting or making other contributions, avoid the temptation to promote your business or products directly – a “soft sell” approach is usually more effective in the long run.

Whatever your strategy, make sure your links go to a page that exists (and will exist into the future) on your website.

This is important because if you change the way that you structure your website, the URLs or web addresses for your existing pages might change.

The last thing you want to happen is for someone to click on a link to an article on your site, and instead get a “File Not Found” error.

Chances are they won’t make the effort to try to find that article by searching your site – they’ll simply leave your website with a bad impression of it.

If you do restructure any of your websites or switch to a new blogging platform, then make sure that you have redirects in place so that old links will be forwarded to the new location automatically.

Make Sure Your’re Social

Also make it easy for your readers to share links to your website by ensuring that each page of your website has appropriate “Share,” “+1” and “Retweet” buttons for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter (and any other sharing buttons for other social networks).

Be skeptical of (and consider avoiding altogether) services that offer to sell you dozens, or even hundreds or thousands, of new links to your website.

Many times these links will come from spam websites or spam blogs that will generate very little (if any) quality traffic.

In addition, it doesn’t take long for Google and the other search engines to recognize the “spammy” nature of these link farms, so there is a distinct possibility that your ranking will actually be punished if you are listed on too many of the sites.

Are you currently using link building for your blog or website?

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne

If you are a business professional then you want to network with other like-minded professionals.

One place where you can make that happen is LinkedIn.

What Is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is the premier site on the Web for business professionals.

Here you can find and network with others in your field as well as meet new people.

You can also share business tips and techniques while offering some of your own to assist others.

Make a strong online presence here to help grow your business.

If you are not on LinkedIn, you might want to reconsider.

The site is free to sign up and they offer plenty of site support for you to get started.

Learn what you need to know about navigating the site through the LinkedIn Learning Center.

Now that you know what it is, it’s time to get going.

Creating A Profile

The first thing you will want to do once you sign up is complete your profile.

On LinkedIn there are searchable areas in the profile that can increase your ranking on the site and by association, your business website(s).

It is best to complete your profile 100 percent but as long as you are above 75 percent you will get ranked and noticed.

So what needs to go into your profile? On the page, several fields are required, but like we said, filling them all in is your best strategy for attracting other business professionals.

Name And Tagline

If you own an online business, what is that catch phrase that helps to complete your brand?

Enter that after your name as your tagline. If you don’t have one, then don’t worry.

Remember, your email address doesn’t qualify.

Resume

Who are you professionally? If you have a recent copy of your resume handy (most professionals do) then it will be easy to populate the required fields.

Since this is online make every word count.

Shorten lengthy phrases to simple but effective keywords that imply a directed action that you have taken.

For instance, type “managed five marketing teams” instead of “responsible for five marketing teams.”

The second is more ambiguous so let everyone know what your qualities are.

Add A Photo

The internet can seem like a cold place so posting a photo gives others a face to put with the personality you are trying to create here.

Choose a professional print that highlights your best features.

For the sake of continuity, use the same photo on your other social networking profile pages.

Affiliations

What awards have you won? How about prestigious societies or boards you belong to?

Here is the place to let your accomplishments speak for you.

Websites

Include your professional business website that you own, or your company’s site. Include any other sites you may be affiliated with, along with active links.

Recommendations

Even if you aren’t looking for a job on this site, you can increase your credibility with varied recommendations from other professionals with whom you have worked.

There are other fields but we have highlighted a few. Your LinkedIn profile is the first glimpse others will get of you.

So if you haven’t already joined, put your best foot forward and join today!

Do you already use LinkedIn to build your business?

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne

Pinterest is the latest social networking craze to take over the country.

The concept behind Pinterest is to share photos and images.

Users create boards with themes and categories and then “pin” images to their board.

It’s a fun site for personal use and also a great way to build your business.

As a business owner you can create a Pinterest account and use it to drive traffic build awareness and connect with potential customers.

Once you have a Pinterest business profile it also makes good business sense to integrate Pinterest into your blog or website.

That’s as easy as adding a Pinterest button to your website.

Here’s how:

Step One: Sign Up For A Pinterest Account

This may actually be the most challenging step because you cannot simply go to Pinterest and sign up.

They’re still in Beta, which means that membership is limited.

You can sign up in one of two ways:

Way #1: You can get an invitation from someone who is already a member.

Once you have that invitation you can sign up immediately.

Way # 2: You can also request an invitation from Pinterest. Simply visit Pinterest.com and request a membership.

Sign up with your business email address and create a username that reflects you and/or your business.

Step Two: Add A “Follow” Button

Once you’re logged into Pinterest, click on “About” in the upper right hand corner.

You’ll see a drop down menu and that’s where you’ll want to choose the “Pin It Button”.

You now have a few choices you can add a “Follow” button to your website but there are three button choices.

Choose the one that you like the best, then simply copy the html code and paste it where you want the button to appear on your website.

If you’re adding a “Follow” button to a WordPress blog get into your editor and add it to the code.

Alternatively, if you use widgets then you can simply add a text widget into your sidebar and then cut and paste the code.

Step Three: Add A “Pin This” Button

You can also add a “Pin This” button to your website.

This encourages people to add images from your website to their Pinterest boards.

It’s a fantastic way to drive traffic and potentially boost your SEO.

There are also some truly wonderful plug-ins for WordPress that allow you to integrate Pinterest into your blog.

And as Pinterest continues to grow in popularity you can bet that there will be more developers creating ways to capitalize on Pinterest.

Pinterest also links to your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Each time you post a pin on Pinterest you can also link that post to your other networking sites.

It can be a very powerful tool to grow and build your business.

Are you currently using Pinterest? If so do you find it beneficial?

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne

Before the television was invented most products on grocery store shelves were generic products.

You had “soap”, “toothpaste” and “cooking oil”… not too many name brand products.

And once the television was invented advertisers were slow to jump on board.

Radio advertising worked for some brands but not for others.

A few pioneering advertisers decided to try running commercials on television.

These commercials exploded the success of their brands.

Brands promoted on television quickly became household names and outsold all their competitors.

Ever since television advertising has been a fierce battleground for marketers of all sorts.

Video is one of the most powerful mediums you could tap into as a marketer.

The invention of the internet and cheap electronics has made video marketing available to everyone, not just Fortune 500 companies.

How can you use video to show your personality? How can you use it to build warmth?

Way # 1: Having A Human Face Builds Warmth

Having a human face to put to a brand website or concept can really help build trust.

Gary Vaynerchuk gave a face to wine.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz gave a face to SEO.

Ronald McDonald gave a face to McDonald’s.

It’s hard to build a relationship with a brand and it’s hard to have a conversation with a brand.

On the other hand people easily and naturally build credibility with people.

Way # 2: Production Value Can Build Credibility

Another way to use video is to build credibility.

Your content is critical for building credibility but so are your production values.

A video that’s extremely well made will build credibility all on its own.

If you have a killer intro, high quality video, high quality audio and a video that looks like it was professionally made, that alone can build a lot of trust.

Way # 3: Use Video To Convey Excitement

Emotions like excitement are conveyed through body language and voice tone.

When you’re around a friend who’s excited it’s only natural to get excited as well so likewise video can have a similar effect.

No matter how excited you get about your product if your medium is the written word there will be a limit to how much other people will get excited.

On the other hand if your medium is video once people see how excited you are about your product, some of that excitement will transfer over to them.

Way # 4: A Variety Of Ways To Convey Information

Video gives you a large number of ways to transfer information to your customer.

Here’s some suggestions:

- You can convey information through just talking at the camera as if you were having a one on one conversation.

- You could use a PowerPoint presentation.

- You could use an animated mindmap.

- You could use a variety of special effects to spruce things up.

- You could use a slideshow.

- You could use stop-motion.

The list of different ways to use video to build trust, excitement and connection with your customers is almost endless!

What are some of the ways you can think of the ways you’ve used video to build trust using video? Leave me a comment below.

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne

Public speaking is one of the most powerful ways of improving visibility, getting more traffic and increasing your connection with your customer base.

People often underestimate the power of public speaking because after all, isn’t it better to spend your time trying to attract 5,000 online visitors through paid traffic or SEO than to speak in front of 500 people?

While that line of thought is understandable it misses the point.

When you get on a public stage several things happen.

First of all your company is instantly legitimized.

You get instant credibility and you get instant expert status.

Furthermore, you have an uninterrupted block of time with which you can sell yourself and your company.

The people in your audience will generally either be potential business partners or ready to buy customers.

So there are are multiple reasons why you should be doing public speaking but I’m going to give you 3 that I think really matter.

Reason # 1: It’s Not Coincidence…

Numerous studies have shown that people who speak regularly in public earn significantly more than those who don’t.

Is it because public speaking causes people to earn more?

Or is it because once you’re earning more, people expect you to speak? It’s probably a little of both.

It’s not a coincidence that public speakers are some of the most professionally successful people in the world.

Reason # 2: It’s One Of The Best Ways To Build A Connection

Imagine meeting someone who could help your business for the first time. Let’s say they’re a potential investor.

You’ve got 60 seconds to pitch them on your proposal and land a second meeting. How do you feel?

Now imagine this exact same scenario except you’ve just gotten off stage.

While speaking, you gave a hard-hitting speech about one specific problem and how you’re solving it.

You got a standing ovation. Now, you have 60 seconds to land a second meeting with this potential investor.

How do you feel? Likely much more confident.

When you speak in public, making important connections becomes much easier.

Often times you won’t even have to try and make the connections yourself – they’ll come to you.

Reason # 3: Allows You To Increase Your Visibility And Transparency

Speaking in public is a great way to increase transparency and visibility.

If you want more people to know about your company and if you want more people to trust your company, speak in public.

LifeLock, the identity theft monitoring service, had trouble getting customers before their CEO went public.

Then, one day they came up with a brilliant campaign: for the CEO to publically state his social security number as proof of how confident he is in his service.

Visibility and transparency went up and sales instantly skyrocketed.

If you’re not in public light, people will only see your company, which is very hard to build a connection with.

However, if you’re speaking publically regularly people have the opportunity to get to know who’s running the company and who’s behind those products.

They can come to trust you first then your product and your brand.

Have you used public speaking to grow your business?

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne

One way to look at writing copy is as the art of creating motivation using the written word because the written word carries profound power to persuade.

So how do you use this powerful tool to motivate clients to take massive action?

By mastering and implementing the five principles below.

Principle # 1: Benefit Driven Language

Most business owners focus a lot of attention on telling consumers why their company or product is the best yet at the end of the day, that’s not what consumers care about.

Consumers care about what you can do for them!

They don’t care that you have the biggest company but they do care that you’ll always have their product in stock.

They don’t care that you’ve been in business longer than anyone else but they do care about reliable service.

Translate statements from “about me” to “about what we can do for you.”

Principle # 2: Use Power Words

Power words or action words are words that pack an emotional punch so instead of saying your product saves energy, say it “slashes your energy bills by 40%.”

Instead of saying your product helps bring in leads, say “new leads will be flooding in your inbox.”

Power words create mental imagery and have an emotional tone that helps sell your product.

Principle # 3: Proof, Proof, Proof

Prove every claim you make because people today are extremely skeptical and rightly so.

There are so many people making bold claims that promising a benefit simply isn’t enough anymore.

Prove what you’re promising then prove it again and throw some proof on top.

It’s much better to solidly prove that you can help someone lose 15 pounds than it is to loudly proclaim that you can help them lose 40 pounds without proof.

People won’t feel motivated unless you can prove that you’re the real deal.

Principle # 4: Remove The Risk

Doing business with a company for the first time is very risky for consumers. Why?

- They don’t know if you’ll fulfill your claims.

- They don’t know if your product is good.

- They don’t know how good your service is.

- They really don’t know much at all about you!

That’s why risk removal is such a powerful way to get people to act on their motivation.

Risk removal doesn’t actually create motivation. Instead, what it does is remove barriers to getting people to act on their desire for your product.

Add a powerful money back guarantee to your product to reduce and remove risk.

Principle # 5: Urgency

When people think they’re going to miss out if they don’t act, that’s a powerful motivator.

It’s called the “Fear of Missing Out” or FOMO for short.

Learn to leverage FOMO in your copywriting and you’ll be able to motivate and generate real action.

Use it to take people from wanting your product to actually buying it.

What are some of the things you do to get clients to take massive action?

Let me know by leaving me a comment below.

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne

Any search engine professional will tell you that in order to succeed online you’ll need the right tools.

Tools to evaluate keywords, tools to gauge your competition and tools to get backlinks.

Without the right tools, even the best SEO professionals in the world won’t be able to get very far.

So what are the most important tools you should know about?

Well below I’ve listed some of the most important tools that you need for Google search engine optimization.

First:  Backlink Checking Tools

Backlink checking tools allow you to figure out exactly how strong your competition is for any given keyword before you begin a campaign.

It also allows you to reverse engineer strategies that are already working for other people in your industry.

If you can figure out what’s already working and do it even better than your competitors then you have a very good chance of success.

Two great backlink checking tools are Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO.

Both of these tools have free versions that give you quite a bit of data, along with a paid version with even more data.

You can also use Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools to check backlinks though both of these tools have serious drawbacks.

Second:  Submission Tools

If you’re doing mass backlinks using a social bookmarking website or article marketing that you’re going to want to have a few programs that do it for you.

For example if you’re regularly submitting content to social bookmarking websites you’ll probably want to use a tool like Bookmarking Demon or Ping.fm.

These tools will submit new content to a wide array of social media websites all at the click of a button for you.

If you’re doing article submissions, you’ll either want to use a submission program like an article submitter or use a service like iSnare.

Third: Market Research Tools

There are several market research tools on the market that offer stellar keyword research and niche research capabilities.

For one Google’s own Google Keyword Tool is still the best tool out there for raw traffic data.

If you’re just trying to figure out how much traffic certain search terms get, it’s one of the fastest and easiest places to get data.

Another tool that’s been taking off rapidly is Market Samurai.

In addition to search volume Market Samurai will also evaluate the competitiveness of each keyword you type in and give you a rough gauge of how much you can expect to earn in that market if you successfully rank.

How Much Of SEO Is In The Tools?

Though not having the right tools can prevent you from succeeding, having the right tools doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll succeed.

You need to use the tools in the right way to get the results you’re looking for.

If you want to get ranked tools can help you get there faster but they can’t do the bulk of the real work for you!

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne
 

Blogging can be a rewarding business model because it allows you to earn money in a variety of ways.

From affiliate sales, to selling your own products or services and even selling advertising space.

The only this is it does require you to create a consistent flow of content which means that you need to have a steady stream of blogging ideas.

Sometimes this may feel like you’re just rehashing old topics over and over again and when this happens you lose interest in your blog and if so then your readers do too.

So to help make sue you don’t fall off the wagon, I’ve put together  five proven ways to find exciting blogging ideas.

If you use these ideas you will keep the money flowing in!

Way To Find Exciting Ideas # 1: Get Your Readers Involved

Ask your readers questions, publish a survey or ask for feedback.

Often one of the most exciting blogging ideas come from being able to offer real value to your readers and audience.

So ask them what they want and need to know! ;o)

Way To Find Exciting Ideas # 2: Ponder And Then Contemplate

Ask yourself what lessons you’ve learned and make a list of things you’ve learned about your topic along the way.

This list of lessons learned is a great blog idea list. Keep it handy and use it when you’re feeling stumped for topic ideas.

Way To Find Exciting Ideas # 3: Do Some Trend Analyses

Many social media and networking sites are valuable blogging tools.

You can use them to track topic trends. For example, on Twitter you can do a hashtag search.

A hashtag # is a keyword identifier and trending tools use hashtags to sort topics and identify what’s popular right now.

Way To Find Exciting Ideas # 4: Use Google Alerts

Google has this marvelous tool that lets you automatically receive daily or weekly notifications on keywords.

For example, if you have a blog about ghost hunting and you’re running out of topic ideas, you can set up an alert for the keyword “Ghost hunting.”

Google will send you a list of blogs, websites and news feeds with that keyword in the content.

It’s a fantastic tool to keep up on industry news and it’s a very effective tool for generating exciting blogging ideas.

Way To Find Exciting Ideas # 5: Subscribe And Read

Subscribe to leading industry magazines and newsletters and read them.

If you don’t use “reader” technology, consider installing it on your computer or mobile device.

Then you can sit down once a week and catch up on all the industry news and headlines.

You can also create folders in your email and send all of your subscriptions to that folder.

Once a week sit down peruse the newsletters and create your blog topic list for the week or for the month.

You’ll be surprised how many exiting ideas are generated by reading.

My best advice is to keep a notebook full of ideas as they come to you.

This is what I actually do and have done for many years!

Embrace these five tips and use them to create a lengthy list of blog topics.

Write on the ones that excite you right now and save the others for another day.

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne