Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Ahh… Here it finally is! My favorite day of the entire year; Christmas Eve Day! It’s full of so much excitement and anticipation! This year I tried to stretch it out as long as possible. I think I started listening to Christmas music the first week of November! It seems Google got in the spirit this year too. Has anyone noticed any of the fun effects they have added to their search results over the past month?

• By far one of the most fun toys I’ve played with this season; brought to us by Gmail, you can send a call/video from Santa! I highly recommend checking this out!
• Type “let it snow” in Google’s search engine, watch the snow fall, and then scrape the snow using your mouse (only works in some browsers).
• I absolutely love Christmas lights and, apparently, so does Google; check out their holiday doodle. You click on it and it lights up and then plays a song!
• Try using Google’s search engine and type in words including “Christmas” and “Santa.” Google’s results page becomes decorated with a string of holiday lights.
• YouTube even got in the spirit by adding a snowflake button to some of the videos so, when you click it, it starts to snow inside the videos!

It’s been fun to see how Google has gotten into the spirit. It seems like it was contagious too; people searching for the words “let it snow” increased more this month than it ever has! It’s nice to see that Google is helping spread Christmas cheer! Now I’m off to do the same thing!

I hope you all have a wonderful and safe holiday season!

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

As we approach the end of the year, it is a good time to be making big lists of things we want to get checked off for the coming year. As many of you know, video and video marketing have been very popular this year. Making, editing and hosting videos for your business has never been easier.

The elves over at YouTube have been very busy in the last few months. So as you make your 2012 list, spend some time with two of YouTube’s newest upgrades – Analytics and New Channel Designs.

YouTube Analytics

As with most social networks, YouTube has always had an Analytics program. They called it Insights and you could view them at the bottom of almost every video. Now YouTube has beefed up their analytics. If you have a YouTube account (and videos on it) you can log into your account and check out the new analytics.

If you are familiar with Google Analytics, you will definitely see some striking resemblance (YouTube is owned by Google in case you didn’t know). In the new Analytics you get a snapshot of how all of your videos are doing on the Dashboard. You can see which of your videos are most popular. From there you can dive deeper in to the data by looking more into Views, demographics, playback locations, traffic sources, how long people watch your video, video interactions and more.

For more information on YouTube Analytics and a fancy infographic you can check out the YouTube blog.

New Channel Designs

Now that we have some solid numbers to look at… we can take that information and with the new look of YouTube Channels – we can make a perfectly branded channel design that appeals to our customers!

YouTube had customized channels before but there wasn’t much you could change in the form of layout. Now with the new channels, when you edit your layout, you can choose from 4 template layouts. Hopefully you will find a better layout to display your videos the way you want them to.

There you have it. Those are the biggest changes to YouTube that you should take advantage of for your business.

If you want more from this post, feel free to watch this currently trending holiday video… of the HMS Ocean crew excited to be able to come home for the holidays. Even Mariah Carey thought it was the best video ever.

Enjoy more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

So there I was playing Farmville/Gagaville while tweeting and not doing any work and I saw this tweet from Matt Cutts.

Well hey… that sounds interesting. So I Skyped my search nerds, Alex and Monica, and we followed along for the hour and a half information fire hose from Google’s famous employee.

So pretty much Matt just started a YouTube live video chat with everyone who wanted to join. In it he was his charming self and took questions via the live chat and the Twitter hashtag #askmatt.

YouTube Live Streaming

Here is a screen shot of the YouTube live chat with Matt Cutts:

This platform in itself was news… YouTube is apparently testing out and rolling out this live streaming. This could be great for live events, for webinars and e-learning. Matt didn’t have any real information on this but now we know it is coming down the pipeline.

People could ask questions live right on the right hand side. Some of the questions were great and his answers, in my opinion, were super helpful. Monica was really excited when he actually answered her question live.

Google Correlate

One of my favorite parts was the discussion about Google Correlate, which is now in Labs. What is does is takes other people’s searches around a topic and makes some educated guesses on other searches other people are looking for around that topic. This is experimental and based on patterns, no Google cannot read minds but it can sure help you take note of trends.

It also shows you where these searches are taking place geographically.

Apparently this whole idea started with the flu and all the different searches people enter in and around flu symptoms and the flu. There is a whole comic explaining how this got started.

For an test I added ‘hr software’ to Google Correlate and I got some good information on some other keywords like: employee management, employee performance, employee development, employee assessment, partner software, training management software etc.

This is not only kinda cool (and I love the map feature) but this is great for making some good decisions about keywords you are targeting, where to have your ads display, perhaps a tool for discovering new keywords.

I wish I was a faster typer and that there wasn’t a major bee incident during this broadcast so I could have gotten more of Matt’s great questions and answers. There was of course a lot of questions about spam and the Panda update. For me, the new YouTube live streaming and Google Correlate were two of the high points on this random hour and a half chat.

Did you tune in? What were some of your favorite takeaways?

I am not sure if this chat was recorded or will be archived but if it is I will be sure to update this post with the info.

5/25/2011 – Search Engine Land has a great recap of the Matt Cutts stream today: Google’s Matt Cutts Riffs On J.C. Penney, Panda Update & Other SEO Topics In Live Webchat

Video is a great way to add more content to your website. This doesn’t mean you need to spend lots of money on professional videos. You can incorporate other videos that you see around the internet and add your reaction to them.

YouTube is the largest video site in the world. There is already so much content there. If you haven’t done it before, watch the video below to learn how to take videos from YouTube and add the player directly on to a page of your website or your blog. These instructions are specifically for YouTube but other sites like Vimeo have embed options as well, so these instructions should help with other video players as well.

If you can’t see the video, click here

How to Add a YouTube Video to Your Website

1. Find a video you want to add to your website
2. Click on the Embed button
3. Personalize the video to the correct size and specifications you need
4. Copy the HTML code
5. Go over to the HTML side of your blog or website
6. Paste the copied embed code
7. Publish
8. Voila – you have embedded a video to your website