Corporate Work

[Silas Barker]

Check out my corporate page on my website at Wedding Event & Corporate Video, Sacramento Roseville Folsom Tahoe

I am looking for any advice on improving the amount of corporate work - ideas on advertising and getting going would be great. I have some great clients and some great samples but it does not seem to be blooming lately (either because of the economy or advertising??)

Thanks in advance!
Weddings are booking nicely however!

[Paul Hudson]

Silas,

As they say "Things are tough all over". Your work looks good.

The best advice I can give anyone is spend whatever it takes on SEO. It has done a world of good for our business.

______________________

Paul Hudson

[Chris Davis]

First and easiest - separate the weddings from the corporate. I've heard several clients mention that they passed on one of my competitors because they were "just a wedding videographer". Move away from the "we do it all" website and set up two (or more) targeted websites.

You also need to start becoming the video "expert" in your area. Get involved in local service and promotional organizations (Chamber of Commerce, Jaycees, United Way, BNI, etc.)

[Tim Polster]

Originally Posted by Paul Hudson

Silas,

As they say "Things are tough all over". Your work looks good.

The best advice I can give anyone is spend whatever it takes on SEO. It has done a world of good for our business.

______________________

Paul Hudson

Paul, how much would you think is a normal amount to spend on SEO for a small video/photo business with a well coded CSS website?

I am aware of this stuff, but it seems it would be easy to get taken to the cleaners as it is kind of a black art.

Thanks

[Silas Barker]

Thanks everyone for the comments.
I have a google tracking thing on my website and I think there people coming more to the wedding section then the corporate. Its either an advertising problem or no interest because of the wedding stuff right there. I am not about making a second website right now, but I'll think about it.

Anyone suggestions are welcome

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Tim Polster

Paul, how much would you think is a normal amount to spend on SEO for a small video/photo business with a well coded CSS website?

I am aware of this stuff, but it seems it would be easy to get taken to the cleaners as it is kind of a black art.

Thanks

There is an old adage that 50% of the money spent on advertising is wasted but unfortunately you can't tell which 50%. With SEO the figure is more like 90% wasted.

[Tim Polster]

So I guess you are not a fan of SEO Nigel :)

[Chris Davis]

Originally Posted by Tim Polster

I am aware of this stuff, but it seems it would be easy to get taken to the cleaners as it is kind of a black art.

You've got that right. About 30% of our company's gross revenue comes from web development, and my educated guess is that nearly 75% of the so-called "SEO experts" take your money and give you little in return.

You'd be better off reading some kind of "SEO for Dummies" book and keep your website up-to-date with relevant information.

[TJ Robertson]

Some great advice already on this thread, but I'll try to add some more.

First of all.... if you aren't getting as much business as you'd like, it's not the economy, you just need to market more... or better.

And whoever said it is right, if you change your site to "just weddings" or "just corporate" your conversion rate will go up, no doubt. Which means more clients. (Also, they'll be willing to pay you more, which is always good)

SEO is pretty straight forward, that's why I laugh when people call themselves "SEO Experts". You can learn the basics of SEO in 15min.

If SEO is wasting 90% of your money, you hired the wrong people.

Google ranks sites based 70 - 80% (depending on who you ask) on back links. The easiest way to get back links (IMO) is video and article submissions.

Sure, putting your keywords in your title, meta tags, and h1 will be the easiest way to improve your ranking, but when dealing with competitive keywords, it's all about the back links.

There, I've spilled the big secret about SEO... it's simple, just a bit of work.

If you're going to hire someone to do it,... just make sure they actually get results on COMPETITIVE keywords.

I hope this helps. Good luck =)

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Tim Polster

So I guess you are not a fan of SEO Nigel :)

I am not a fan of the scammers & con artists that claim to be SEO experts or that perpetuate the mumbo jumbo of the whole SEO business.

There are no secrets about SEO. It's simple. What the search engines are trying to do is provide the most relevant answer to the user's search query. They do this by ranking the content of the site on a variety of criteria as TJ Robertson mentions back links i.e. links to your site are very important. Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with the idea of PageRank based on the number of backlinks & that fundamentally is the way all the search engines work. The other criteria unsurprisingly is relevant content as that is what the user is searching for in the first place. Relevant content is literally the words on your site plus the hidden HTML stuff that the search engines can also read meta-tags (no longer used by Google apparently), page titles, headers, alt image tags etc

There in a paragraph is the whole core of SEO. The reason that it is seen as a black art which needs expensive 'experts' is that Google, Bing etc are not open about how they work as they not only regard the search engines inner workings as their commercial advantage but also want to preserve the mystique of SEO when selling their services to advertisers.

[Tim Polster]

Great information guys. Thanks a lot!

Whom do you submit articles and video to?

[TJ Robertson]

There are about 100 article and video submission sites... so the best way to do it is using video or article submission software.

Tubemogule.com is a free video submission website... there are probably some free article submission sites as well, but I don't know what they are.

I use a program called traffic geyser (trafficgeyser.com), which is hands-down the best submission tool online. It costs $97 a month tho. But if you're serious about it, I would highly recommend it. It's made by Mike Koenigs, who is like "the guy" when it comes to video marketing.

I hope that helps

[Tim Polster]

Thanks for your input TJ. I will check this out.

I would like to increase this and maybe some Google Adwords for marketing my websites.

It would seem modern consumers prefer to find you rather than you to find them and interact.

[TJ Robertson]

Google adwords is great, but if you're going to do ppc (pay per click) marketing, I would suggest starting with 'yahoo search marketing' and 'microsoft adcenter' (at the end of this year they'll be merging into "search alliance" to compete with adwords)

Google does get the most traffic, but it's much more expensive, and they have some strict guidelines, that if you don't understand, could get you screwed when starting out.

Yahoo and Microsoft (Bing) are much cheaper, and their traffic typically converts better (don't ask me why). Also they don't have strict guidelines like google. As long as you're not scamming people, they'll love your ads. And surprisingly, yahoo and microsoft combined actually get about as much traffic as google.

So, I would start with those, and then once you test your ads and your landing page for a while, and get your conversions up, start playing with adwords

IMO

[Tim Polster]

Thanks for your help.

Lets say I have a video. How does it get attributed to my website as a backlink?

When I think of video, it is most often a reel of some sort. Which by itself might seem out of context just being placed on a video sight.

Is the best way to handle this to create "sell yourself or business" style videos to act as a standalone tool?