Setting Up Your OWN Syndication Network

Businesses pay an untold, large sum of money every day to syndicate press releases and run paid advertising on sites all over the web. What they are buying is the results that authority sites have worked hard to get. Through painstaking, quality content development and massive marketing efforts, popular authority sites that have hundreds of thousands to millions of visitors per month are netting huge amounts of money through paid advertising.

By paying for advertising on those sites, businesses are able to skirt all the work it takes to build an authority site of their own. They have this luxury, and they are the only ones who do, because they have big bucks to pay for ad space anywhere they want.

This is not a luxury everyone else can afford

The rest of us, me included because I refuse to pay for most advertising, this isn’t an option. When you get the same amount of traffic (or more) per month for free, it’s hard to pay anyone for ad space!

SYOC (Syndicate Your Own Content) for Free or Very Cheaply

Did you know that hundreds of social sites allow you to run your RSS feed on them in your profile? After publishing this post (and this is precisely why blogging rocks for traffic) my content is syndicated across dozens of sites across the web. My Twitter is updated, my Google Reader is updated, my profiles on Mashable, Facebook, Myspace, and countless others are all updated the instant I publish new content.

Websites who run my feed are all updated without moderation, instantly. You ask how I get so many links? It’s syndication baby!

When a reader, who is also a blogger, sees my latest post through my feed they can post about it on their blog. And they do. Every day. So private feed readers are an important part of this syndication process.

Podcasting Opens Up a Huge New Channel

Now carry it forward into other media. The above deals only with written text, right? Heck no!

Audio and video content have their own directories, podcast directories, that you can get listed in with your podcast feed. Video as well. Doesn’t matter if you do audio or video, it’s all podcasting. Check out my recent podcasting guide to find out more about opening up a huge syndication channel by publishing audio and video content.

Start podcasting and you have a new feed for people to subscribe to, like my Webside Chats podcast, and through which you can syndicate to all the sites you currently have profiles on plus a whole new set of sites that specialize in audio/video content and podcasts.

Video Syndication

Using video syndication software you can get off YouTube as your only outlet and start broadcasting your video content to all the video sites on the web that matter. This step is easy. You’ve already done your video and uploaded it to YouTube. Might as well take the next, extremely effective step and syndicate your videos all over the web.

Can’t make video? Poppycock! Anyone can get into video with without experience with tools like AniMOTO!

Big Business Cannot Compete With Us

Because big business has no interest in really doing what we’re doing, and because they can just buy traffic all day long, AND because social marketing is between real people and not corporations and people, they cannot compete with the reach we have.

Big business cannot get on the networks we are on and gain meaningful followings, for the most part. They also don’t know what it takes to make real connections and draw big followings because they don’t understand social is personal. It’s people to people networking.

This is to your advantage. While competitors spend billions on advertising (that many people know how to block with browser plugins) you can have free reign on high traffic networks, communities, social profiles, and microblogs to draw people to your site.

Mostly by setting up profiles and syndicating your feed to all the tons of sites that let you keep your friends up to date with your RSS feed.

Instead of paying for access to a large press release network (there’s nothing wrong with that by the way) you set up your own far-reaching network and post to it for free or very cheaply every time you post to your blog.

Getting Started

If you haven’t noticed all the places, where you currently have a member profile, that allow you to insert your RSS feed, go back and check each and every profile you have! Insert your RSS feed(s) and start building your network.

Make sure you post your blog feed to Twitter with a tool like Twitterfeed.com. Syndicate your feed to Tumblr and Pownce as well. In fact there are TONS of places like these where you can do this. Check out Hellotxt.com to see what’s possible!

Feel the Power

Imagine updating all the ping directories and all the sites that carry your feed, along with all the subscribers who are following your feed, the instant you publish a new post. The power of this is staggering and the results, if your content is good, are incredible.

To take it to a whole new level, hundreds of people have joined Social Power Linking where I have stashed all my tricks, like this one. And where collectively we are generating millions and millions of visitors each and every month. Now THAT’S power!

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Tags: Content Syndication, feed readers, rss syndication, video syndication

Make Money With Video

The web is going video in a big way now.  There’s no denying that there is massive demand for video content, and that it will continue to soar.  Especially when Google and others figure out how to convert video to text on the fly and rank videos just like regular text pages.   (It’s not as far off as you might think!  See EveryZing.com)

There is also growing demand for video syndication as more and more video sites pop up every month.  Like article syndication, video syndication services save massive amounts of time by allowing you to upload once and let them upload to all the directories for you.

People are making money with video by syndicating their video content to all the video hubs and acquiring backlinks for direct traffic and search engine love.

But there are tons of other ways to make money with video…

IstockVideo:  Upload video footage of all kinds on all topics and get paid for the rights to use your content by others.   All you need is a camera and an internet connection and you’re in business.

Revver:  Upload your videos to Revver and take advantage of the backlinks, branding, and their revenue sharing model which pays you for the ads they tack onto your videos.

YouTube:  Log into your YouTube.com account and find a far more exciting use for Adsense on your site.  They now have a player that you can use to compile videos in your niche from YouTube that also earns you Adsense revenue.  Bye Bye all-but-invisible Adsense text ads!

Creating Video for the Web

Along with millions of tutorials at YouTube on how to shoot video, picking the right video equipment, doing screen capture tutorials, lighting, green screen, and everything else you can imagine, there is a great course on everything you need to know about shooting, editing, and final production and syndication of video for the web called Video Profits Workshop.

The course was done by Mark Braunstein and Mike Stewart, the biggest web video geeks I know.   It’s not cheap, but neither is your time.  Going through and picking up valuable tutorials in YouTube is time consuming and you have to wade through a lot of crap to find the good stuff.  And you still might be left wondering exactly what you need to do to launch your own video campaign.

Video Profits Workshop was designed to get you up to speed methodically from beginning to end.  It’s great for beginners and pros alike and comes highly recommended by past customers and marketing pros.

“Video is Hard!”  -Good! 

The reason people are seeing such success with video marketing is that it is definitely not as convenient as writing a post.  You have to learn some video skills to pull off a good video marketing campaign and make money with video.

But as a proponent of going where the competition isn’t, I can’t recommend video marketing enough to my readers and clients!  Because there is a learning curve involved you don’t see as many competitors on video sites as you do everywhere else on the web.

Don’t get me wrong though.  Doing screen capture video tutorials or even slide shows is far easier than people think.  If more people only knew how easy it really was there would be far more doing it.

The bottom line is that a lot of content can be done in video that is currently competing as text with thousands or millions of other pages.  Put a topic together on video and syndicate it and you can see far better results in links, rankings, and direct traffic from places you currently aren’t showing up.

Tags: make money with video, making videos, Video Marketing, video production, video syndication

Video Sharing Sites List Updated

We’ve added a bigger list of video sharing sites, now called “Top 50 Video Sharing Sites.”  It’s getting more important than ever to get organized and use a syndication service to hit these top sites.

Like I predicted a couple of years ago, video sharing hubs are growing in numbers like article directories did.  The list on the page above started out with 29 sites.  Many of those sites have grown in popularity and many more have come online since the list was first created.

The list represents millions of visitors per month. 

For marketers, the Top 50 Video Sharing Sites list also represent scores of hours per month uploading videos by hand.  Are you getting in front of all this traffic?  Here’s a far easier way to do it without knowing anything about creating video and without uploading to each by hand.

The traffic is too good to pass up and now you can create and syndicate great videos without even owning a camera or editing software!

Tags: top 50, video sharing sites, video syndication

Video Syndication Equals Free Targeted Traffic

Remember When Article Directories and Syndication Started?

When article directories became the rage a few years ago, now with hundreds, even thousands of them all over the web, article syndication became a serious business.

A very serious traffic-driver. Still is today, though much less so than in the beginning.

Once we had several hundred sites to submit to we were more than eager to find solutions for article syndication that didn’t require us to submit articles by hand to each article directory.

And the solutions came screaming at us. Now it is unheard of to submit your articles by hand to all the important directories. Services abound to help you with article syndication today.

Enter Web 2.0.

Video is all the rage, YouTube.com sells for a billion and change, and video search engines are popping up everywhere.

Everyone wants to be next. And they are throwing free video sharing and streaming at their visitors to attract a following.

Video is coming into its own now and people are marketing their sites by providing content in video, but not nearly as much as content that’s still provided via the written word.

Here is where it gets exciting.

The cost of entry into the video production and syndication world, financially and learning curve-wise, is always going to be a bit higher than article creation and syndication.

Everyone and their sister can sit down and bang out an article like this one. Everyone has access to and knows how to use word processing programs.

Video is a whole different beast.

You have to know how to shoot it, how to do screen captures (for how-to videos), how to produce a video that looks and sounds good, and how to get that video into the growing list of places that organize that medium exclusively.

Frankly, people will always be scared of the jump between article marketing and video marketing. This leaves a much smaller number of people competing in video search engines for eyeballs than there are now in article directories.

Watch Out For Your Competition!

I see a massive upsurge coming in 2007 in the number of people creating and sharing how-to videos and viral videos to promote their sites, but nothing like the article marketing explosion in the last few years.

It’s that barrier of technology and a higher learning curve that will keep the weekend promoters at bay for a good while, until video production and marketing is as common as article marketing. (If that day ever comes.)

My tip for 2007

Get into video. Learn about how to produce it and syndicate it. Find out what’s going on at YouTube.com and how people are generating massive video subscriber lists and traffic back to their main sites with video.

It will take some surfing, some thinking, and some creativity, and that is exactly why you want to know everything you can about video marketing.

Because most people simply will not take the time to learn about video marketing until those of us who are doing it now are so entrenched, it won’t matter!

Resources

Free Video Sharing Sites

Video Syndication Service (The very first one of it’s kind and I love it!)

Video Production

Tags: article syndication, Video Marketing, video sharing, video syndication

Video Syndication

Google got into the game of video syndication first.

Now Yahoo has launched and upgraded their video syndication service.

When these guys go to war, it benefits all of us!

Why you should create and syndicate video:

• It is a marketing method seen as very difficult and advanced by your competition
• Most people won’t take the time, preferring to continue marketing via proven methods like RSS and article syndication, no matter how tough the competition is for their niche.
• The harder something seems, the fewer people who take advantage of it.  i.e. LESS COMPETITION!
• Video is instantly respected (done properly) far above written and audio content.  (Again because only a handful use it as a lead generator.)

How to learn about creating and syndicating high quality video with cheap tools…

One place is Content Propulsion Lab.  Here you can find screen capture software and other tools to create how-to videos that you can upload to Google, Yahoo, and other services like YouTube.com.

 

Tags: Content Syndication, video, video production, video syndication