For a long time searches for music and bands has bought up fan sites which give little information for people searching directly for songs or albums. For example many people will be looking for a new album by a band they like but not necessarily know the name of that album. Trying to find that new album would be difficult with the current set-up as users would have to click through several pages on a site. This is not ideal as users want information quickly and easily.

The new service will display a thumbnail, background info, review links and most importantly a preview button. This will allow people to listen to short extracts of music and then have the option to purchase that music. Of what i have read users should be able to buy from other services including ITunes. This will be an important inclusion as Google won’t want to be seen as being unfair. Also Itunes has a huge user base.

Of course we will be able to see just how the service will work on wednesday and it should hopefully transform the way we find out about music on Google.

In recent month’s Microsoft has had its fair share of disasters in the search field including the recent failure of its much fabled analytics package. Despite these failure and being overshadowed by its bigger and more powerful competitors Microsoft has the ability to create the odd gem or two. Of course i am referring to Microsoft’s new PubCentre, which is still in limited beta mode.

PubCenter is Microsoft’s answer to Google Adsense however it offers some much bigger benefits over its rivals, namely its customisation abilities. Early testing has shown a great level of appreciation for the customisable options which allow publishers to set a look and feel for each ad. This flexibility gives the freedom that many loyal adsense users have long dreamed of.

The new scheme not only answers publishers prayers but also those of advertisers. They should get access to a much wider range of sites to advertise on and be able to increase the impression and possible click through rates on the ads. The scheme offers benefits to many however it all comes down to its uptake. Will people leave Adsense. When Performancing Ads was launched initial uptake was fairly high though it never really made a significant impact on Google Adsense. Microsoft of course has a much more advanced system with a greater presence in the market place.

I think it will be interesting to watch developments over the next few months and i personally hope the scheme takes off. This is because i really like Microsoft’s Adcenter and think it is a much over looked option for advertisers. The system is not only cheap but it is also extremely easy to integrate data from other sources such as Adwords.

The first thing i would like to point out is that there is no point in releasing a video for the sake of it. You need to release something that is useful to it’s audiences and content that is expressively more useful in video format. If you have something that can be delivered more interestingly in text then you should consider that.

Ok so lets begin by looking at your potential audience and what keywords you would like to target. The great thing about video is its popularity. Google and other search engines like to rank popular and useful content and videos hosted on YouTube often perform well on Google. YouTube is of course one of the most popular video sites to date and achieves around 60 million unique viewers a month (Quontcast). The site is extremely popular with generation y viewers however it is not the only site to look at when considering video marketing.

Keywords

You are probably not going to rank for extremely competitive terms with your video so when titling your video look at some long tail terms or at lease terms that are less competitive. Google keywords tool should give you some nice hints. Obvious titles would be ‘How To ******’ if you are offering some type of guide or tips in your video. You would probably achieve good rankings with this.

So now that you have your great idea and well crafted title you should look at distribution and delivery.

Promoting Your Video

• Upload your video to YouTube and other leading video sites. I personally like Vimeo and you may also find video sites that operate in your particular niche. It may also be worth varying your titles across the sites.
• Video content is perfect for social media sites such as Stumble Upon. Stumblers tend to like humerous content so this site is a must if you have this type of video.
• In YouTube leverage the power of the subscribe feature. The more subscribers you have to your channel the better as your videos will be embeded in their subscriptions panel. This means more people are likely to see your video.
• Use a consistant layout and theme with all your videos.
• Make it easy for people to share your video. Social media buttons etc.
• If your making regular video’s add it as a feature on your blog and maybe in your newsletters.
• Post video in relevent and related forums. Engage with your audience.
• Chose the right thumbnail. If the first image users see looks dull then they will be unlikely to click the play button.

Benefits Of Video

I’m not going to bang on about the benefits as they are mainly obvious but some of the main ones are listed below.

- Lots Of Traffic
- Rankings
- Promote Products and Services
- Build a community & following

Hope you found these tips useful and don’t forget to look out for our up and coming monthly video series.

For more information please check out:

http://blog.heaven-spa.co.uk/

Heaven Spa
Heaven Spa have two of Manchester’s most reputable spa salon’s and a leading online beauty retail site.

Contact Details:
Cath Murphy
Heaven Spa
cath@heaven-spa.co.uk
T: +44 (0)161 870 1789

http://www.heavenspa.co.uk

• Tweet Deck – Twitter Client. In marketing we all understand the need to follow conversations and be able to engage in them quickly and easily. The standard Twitter interface makes this extremely difficult so making use of a comprehensive Twitter client such as Tweet Deck can make this much easier. The three panel layout means you can see track your direct messages, your standard responses and also the overall Twitter conversation of the people you follow.
  http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/
• Tweet Scan – Brand Monitoring. This tool is excellent for finding out what is being said about you, a topic or a particular business. Tracking what people say about your business is extremely important. This tool is a great customer feedback tool as you can see what people are saying about your product or brand.
  http://www.tweetscan.com/
• Monitter – Real Time Keyword Monitoring. This tool allows you to type in multiple keywords and track the conversation around those in real time. This gives marketers the chance to see what people are talking about around particular topics and themes. This gives us the chance to release pages or news items around this coversation. This means that your site is keeping up to date with the latest trends and gives people a reason to come back.
  http://monitter.com/
• Twitter Tools Plugin – Keeping Your Readers Up To Date. Twitter Tools is a plugin for wordpress that allows you to post new post url’s to your Twitter feed automatically. This drives traffic to your blog or news section. If you post a lot of new blogs each day then this probably wont be the tool for you. Tweeting to much can annoy people.
  http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
• Twitter Local – The Local Angle. This is something that i came across and have not had chance to fully research it however the concept behind it is interesting. A lot of SEO campaigns are going local these days so with this tool you can now track what people are saying in a particular geographical area.
  http://www.twitterlocal.net/

This list could essentially be endless as the number of tools being released is rapidly growing. If you think we have missed an essential tool then why not drop us a line. It is also worth checking out Julia Roy’s blog. She does an excellent weekly round up of Twitter.

At first we were slightly skeptical as we wanted to make use of stylish drop down menus and insert customisable video’s. Luckily we found some excellent plugins for such things. This is where Wordpress really comes into its own. We used the Multi-Level Navigation plugin and also the Smart Youtube plugin. We found these gave us excellent results.

The other thing we were slightly concerned about was accessibility. We are strong believers in accessibility and wanted to ensure we could continue to deliver accessible sites. Fortunately Wordpress doesn’t incorporate a lot of useless code in to a site. Although we have used Wordpress as a full CMS before we found the updates in the new version to be extremely useful. The content restore feature especially. We are very pleased with the new design and if you ever need home or industrial insulation services give Sprayseal a try.

Moving to Flash has provided a real opportunity for the company to not only offer full screen tours but also improve loading performances. Flash gives users a number of options to help compress their files. 360 Spin of course specialise virtual tour photography which is designed to help enhance user experiences on your websites. The service seems to work particularly well with businesses such as restaurants, hotels and also retail outlets.

Even for just the fun factor we recommend you logon to their site and checkout some of the examples. The hotel room one is especially good.

I was surprised by the details.  It’s made up of around 300 images, and each small fragment of the overall collage is at 10 megabytes (cropped from an original 12 megabytes).

So it means you can see details such as a man sitting reading a book by the cathedral, and even stacks of Buxton water bottles in the Royal Bank of Scotland head office window.

Here’s Simon and Aiden standing in front of the Manchester City Centre backdrop:

I’d recommend going over to see it, especially if you live or work in the centre, it’s fab.