Corporate Work
 

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!

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

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.)

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 =)

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.

Great information guys. Thanks a lot!

Whom do you submit articles and video to?

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

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.

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

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?

The best way to do it is to create videos that answer the most popular questions you get about your services.

You shouldn't try to sell yourself in the video by any means. Start by introducing yourself, then say something like "...and one question I get asked all the time is..." then say the question, and give a legitimate, helpful answer.

And then at the end of the video say something like, "...to learn more, visit: yourwebsite.com"

If people see that all you're doing is helping them with their concerns, and you never even mention your services, you'll gain a lot of trust and you'll get some valuable customers going to your site.

And to create a back link, simply start the description with http://www.yourdomain.com. Don't start with "my website is...". The "http..." has to be the very first thing for it to count as a back link.

You'll see this happening more and more recently, as people are learning how easy it is to drive traffic using this method.

I hope that helps =)

Thanks it does help.

I want to clarify one concept though.

When you mention description do you mean like a meta tag you associate with the video?

How is the description made?
Where is does it go?

I am assuming that search engines have no way of judging what you say in the content of the video, only the description?

The content of your message drives people to visit your website. Correct?

So content for people, description for search engines?

Correct.

Whether you submit straight to a video hosting site, or use software to host to multiple sites, it'll ask you for a description.

Search engines use 3 things from your videos to determine which keywords to rank you for.
1. The most important is the title of the video
2. The second is your description (try to get a few keywords in the description two or three times, while still sounding like a human. The search engines will know if you're just spamming the keyword, it has to sound natural)
3. The tags, or keywords. These can help, but not as much as the title or description.

And no, the search engines won't rank you based on the content of the video, but they will be able to in the near future. Also... the easiest way to make articles (IMO) is to have your videos transcribed (costs like $2 for a short video). And then you can just submit those to the article directories. And the search engines Do use the content from articles... so it may be worth it to include your target keywords in your videos

Thanks a lot for your valueable help TJ.

When I right-click one of my AVI files in Windows Exlplorer, I see a details tab. When I open this tab the title is blank even though the file has a name.

Is this part of search engine tag like meta-data for photos?

Do you know how I would fill this in for my video files?

I not sure exactly what you mean....

You need to upload a video file from your computer onto a site like Youtube for it to be indexed by google.

I am on a PC. I realize it needs to be uploaded to be seen by a seach engine. But the video itself has meta-data fields just like photographs.

Just wondering if this was information search engines use and how to fill it in.

Oh, i see what you mean.

Nah, don't worry about the actual video file. Search engines only use what appears in the source code of the web page.