Colin Klinkert Dot Com

Have you ever wondered how YouTube video marketing can help you generate traffic to your site? Well, the answer is pretty simple. YouTube is a site that has one of the largest reaches in the Internet. It receives millions of visitors everyday and because it is owned by Google, video results for searches are generally featured at the the top of almost every Google search.

So, with all the traffic going through YouTube, why not try to get some of those people to your site? YouTube video marketing is actually a lot easier than you might think. First, you need to make a video. Pick one of the most popular articles or sections of content of your site, understand exactly what the content says, and repeat it, in your own words, in front of a camera. Limit the length to a maximum of five minutes.

Most modern computers have built-in cameras, but if you don’t have one, don’t hesitate to purchase one online or at a local store. Webcams are pretty cheap nowadays, and the fantastic Flip Video cameras are not only inexpensive and mobile phone-sized, but they come with a built-in USB connection that pops out the side and plugs straight into your computer.

Once you have the video recorded, head over to YouTube and sign up for a free account (if you don’t already have one). In the meantime, join my YouTube channel for great internet marketing and money money online video content. There are a lot of videos set to be released.

The uploading process is very easy and streamlined. All you need to do is select the file from your hard drive when prompted and enter a title and description for the video. Feel free to use the same title and keywords you already used in the source article you used to create the video. Very importantly, at the beginning of the description, make sure to include a link back to your site.

That’s it! The process requires little to no initial investment (depending on whether or not you already have a camera), and doesn’t take that much time. You may then repeat the process to make more videos using other popular articles from your site to increase the odds of generating views and most importantly traffic to your online presence. Don’t forget to share your videos on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, etc. If you don’t know about the latter yet, learn how Google goes social with Google Buzz!

Domain name research is of paramount importance when it comes to setting up an online presence, whether it’s a site, blog or squeeze page. That’s why I already published a blog post on how to find a domain name. As I previously mentioned, a good domain name can be a great asset for your online business. However, I noticed that too many tend to forget about domain name keyword research.

I strongly recommend you to use the keywords you want your online presence to rank for in your domain name. A keyword-rich domain name can give you a competitive advantage, helping you rank better in search engines and thus generating additional traffic to your pages. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), domain names can be of great help, along with other on-page and off-page factors of course.

However, remember to avoid dashes and numbers when possible, and choose a common domain name extension like .com, .net or .org. In my previous blog post on how to find a domain name, I recommend a few domain name suggestion tools. However, there’s a major downside: they don’t mention anything about keyword popularity.

You thus need to combine keyword research (with Google Keyword Tool for example) and domain name availability checking (with 1and1 for example, or even NameCheap for bulk search). Not too sure how to proceed? I created a short video on how to effectively research keywords for a domain name. Check it out…

Sign up and Register Domains Through 1and1

I hope you find it useful! In addition to the two registrars I mention in my previous blog post, I would like to tell you about 1and1, which is a great domain name registrar for internet marketers and home business owners. It’s cheap, reliable and has a pretty cool affiliate program. They have great offers so make sure you check them out!

Last week I had the chance to be interviewed by internet business coach and trainer James Holmes for his Internet Business Blueprint podcast. This podcast is dedicated to internet marketers and home business owners in network marketing, affiliate marketing and direct selling so there’s a good chance you’re in the target audience!

The call went very well and I’m glad to be able to share the podcast with you today. James and I discussed several topics including viral marketing and my products ViralUrl, ViralHosts and ViralNetworks, which is about to be relaunched. James is an early user of ViralUrl and I was really glad to have his feedback live.

Listen to the podcast to learn more on my path to internet marketing, what makes viral marketing so appealing and of course how to get the most out of ViralUrl. My business partner Frank Bauer was also on the call so make sure you listen to it now or add it to your favorites to listen to it at a later time.

Click to play or
right click to download

The introduction is about 5 minutes long so feel free to go past the 5th minute if you don’t have much time. I strongly recommend you visit James’ website Ask James Holmes for lots of great blog posts on internet marketing and his radio blog James Holmes Radio for more podcasts. If you’d like to learn more on ViralUrl and ViralHosts, feel free to watch the MLM Lead System Pro Webinar Video I posted a few months ago.

A few weeks ago I was searching for a great affiliate WordPress theme for future squeeze pages and sites of mine. I just couldn’t find anything I really liked until I found a great theme called Squeeze Theme. As you can imagine, this theme was developed to help internet marketers and alike easily set up squeeze pages, sites and even blogs with WordPress.

Squeeze Theme was specifically designed to grab visitors’ attention and make them opt in, which is of course a must in our industry. As they say, if you aren’t squeezing the email addresses out our your visitors, you’re missing out on new customers… and profits! I couldn’t agree more. Your site may receive lots of traffic but if it doesn’t convert well (if visitors don’t opt in) all your traffic generation efforts are pretty useless…

Now you may think that this is just sales text after all… but if you test drive the actual theme and take a close look at how it is built, you will certainly understand why I picked this one and not another. This theme is considered as being one of the best converting themes in the industry, and when you remember how popular WordPress is… this is quite a fact!

This very professional looking theme is also very easy to customize. I’m not surprised Frank Kern and John Reese themselves recommend it too! It has an easy-to-use interface to customize your online presence almost as much as you want. The best part is that you don’t need to know anything about coding. If you already have a site or blog, you may simply want to use this theme for a single page of your site. Well, that’s possible!

Squeeze Theme design

As you can see the design is pretty neat, and you can of course change the appearance. You can for example change the colors, add your own background as well as widgets, ads, etc. Added to the regular WordPress features… it simply has it all! There is not much else you really need to start making money online!

Squeeze Theme interface

Another great advantage is the resource center. The members area is indeed full of videos, tutorials, etc. on how to set up your squeeze page, site or blog and most importantly make the most out of it. It also has a support forum, which is great if you’re a beginner as you will be able to find help very easily. They even offer a 12-week training course to learn how to set up an affiliate site and build a list.

To be honest with you, I really regret I only found out about this theme recently… This is certainly the best WordPress theme I have ever used. Period. And with all the support that comes with it, even total beginners can have a professional looking squeeze page, site or blog in no time! The most important aspect is actually the fact that the theme was designed to convert visits into opt ins. That’s truly priceless.

The people who developed Squeeze Theme also developed another theme called Affiliate Theme. While you can use Squeeze Theme for almost any type of make money online page, site or blog, Affiliate Theme is more specifically targeted at affiliate marketers. Both themes are available on Squeeze Theme’s site.

If you aren’t really familiar with WordPress, I suggest you to sign up to ViralHosts and take the one-time offer, so you can install WordPress in just a few clicks (with Fantastico De Luxe). For more information, check out why ViralHosts web hosting is so good for internet marketers!

Are you one of those struggling to find a good domain name? If you are, don’t worry too much… you aren’t alone. I already had several of my customers asking me how to find a good domain name for their site, blog or squeeze page. According to them, most good ones are already taken… which is partly true. Finding a good domain name for your site or whatever the type of online presence you’re planning to have isn’t easy. However, don’t just hurry to register a domain name but rather take the time to think about what you really need or want.

Some will say that a domain name isn’t that important… Well, a good domain name can definitely help your site rank better in search engines but most importantly it can grab your visitors’ attention and stay in their mind. A great domain name can even become one of your greatest assets! Don’t be too over excited though. A great domain name can help you rank better in search engines for example but isn’t necessarily a guarantee of success…

How your domain name should be:

- Short
- Memorable
- Easy to spell
- Easy to type
- Descriptive…

Easy to say but difficult to do… By descriptive I mean including keywords (as in viralmarketingmanuscript.com even though this domain name is a little too long), because they can help you rank better in search engines. You should avoid dashes and numbers as much as you can. Web users are now overloaded with information, so it MUST be memorable. Unless you target a specific geographic area, choose a common domain name extension such as .com, .net or .org.

Study the competition, ask around you and maybe use domain name suggestion tools like Domains Bots, Domain Tools or Dot-o-Mator. Once you have an idea of what you need or want, check the availability on a domain name registrar like GoDaddy or NameCheap. You will need to perform a search to check if the domain name you want, with the extension you want, is available or not. Feel free to perform as many searches as you want as they will help you find alternatives.

If you really struggle in choosing a domain name for your online presence, it’s still time to do a brainstorming. Most good domain names are already  taken, that’s right… but with some creativity you can find a great one that will perfectly match your needs. Try to think outside the box but always remember the characteristics of a good domain name.

You can purchase your domain name from a large range of websites but I tend to purchase mine from well established companies like GoDaddy and NameCheap. They are large companies that aren’t going out of business anytime soon… which is definitely a plus. Both GoDaddy and NameCheap provide good support. Now if you need web hosting as well, make sure you check out what makes ViralHosts web hosting so good!

Last week we organized a Twitter experiment to learn more on the traffic sent by Twitter to the blog. At this time of the year, the traffic the blog receives is very low and it was thus the perfect time for us to launch this experiment. We created a blog post and tweeted the link @ColinKlinkert a total 6 times over a period of 48 hours (at different times in order to reach most time zones at day time at least once). We also wanted to study the traffic in terms of conversion: Would visitors take action by commenting the post (as we asked them) and get a chance to win $50? Let’s find out!

Overall traffic (over a week)

- 22 total visits on Thursday
- 38 total visits on Friday
- 35 total visits on Saturday

While the overall traffic to the blog is fairly low at this time of the year, we can notice a slight increase during the time of the experiment. This chart has a limited interest for the experiment but at least we can see if there is a significant traffic increase or not. Now let’s move on to the traffic that interests us the most: the Twitter traffic.

Twitter traffic (over a week)

Here we can see that over the week Twitter generated 41 visits to the blog but only 25 between Thursday and Saturday. During that period of time, the blog post we created for the experiment received 26 visits. This can be considered as fairly low for a Twitter account with a list of over 26,300 followers, don’t you think?

Twitter generated traffic to the blog post but not as much as we could have expected. Even though this experiment is not comprehensive enough to draw solid conclusions, we can suggest a few reasons for which the Twitter traffic hasn’t exploded during the period of the experiment and despite the 26,300+ followers @ColinKlinkert.

First, as suggested by several industry experts and confirmed by research firms, Twitter has a lot of members but most of them are inactive (or not active enough to have an impact on the traffic). Secondly, the way the list of followers was built (with tools to be automatically followed by other users) is probably not the most appropriate list building method in terms of conversion. Thirdly, the way we tweeted the links (with call-to-action and link to the blog post) also played a role in the experiment. It is however difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the calls-to-action.

Out of 26 visits, 4 visitors commented the blog post in time and 2 after the experiment was over. This is a 15 to 23% conversion rate, which isn’t bad but cannot be considered as satisfactory either… Anyhow, the experiment was successful in the way that we were able to study the traffic sent by Twitter to our blog. Have you ever done any similar experiment? If so, please share your own thoughts with us!

In April last year I organized a Twitter experiment that saw a lucky visitor win $25 cash. This time, I want to go a little further and am ready to give away a total of up to $150! If like me you often wonder how powerful Twitter really is, how much targeted traffic it can send to your site or blog, then take part into this experiment!

Win $50 by simply commenting this post!

To get in, all you need to do is to comment this post answering the following question:

What will make you want to subscribe to my RSS feed
and follow me @ColinKlinkert?

Hints: It could be:
- a type of content you would like to see;
- a topic you would like to learn about, etc.

If we get 50 comments, I give away $50. If we get 100 comments, I give away $100 ($50 each). If we get 200 comments, I give away $150 ($50 each). It is as simple as that. The more comments we get, the more chances you have to win $50 cash! No more questions asked.

We will tweet this post 6 times over the next 48 hours. Like for the previous experiment, Twitter will be the main source of traffic so we can see how many people post a comment and retweet our initial tweets. If you aren’t interested in the cash, you may still participate to help us with this experiment.

You are of course encouraged to retweet my tweets, increasing your chances to win cash.

>>> Click here to retweet <<<

Post a comment now and get a chance to win $50!

The winners will be chosen at the end of the experiment. Please use a real email when commenting, so if you win you will get my reply to your comment on how to get your money!

Good luck to all of you!

P.S. – Why not subscribe to my mailing list in the top left too… You get a cool free e-book and also updates on future competitions & industry-leading information! You can opt out at any time.

Last month I shared an MLM Lead System Pro webinar video with you. The main focus of this webinar was on our new web hosting system called ViralHosts, but the guys at MLSP decided to do another webinar about a product of ours. This time they invited Internet Marketing Expert Jim Chao to talk about ViralUrl. Once again, the video call was recorded and is now made available to anyone who wants to watch it:

>>> MLM Lead System Pro Webinar Video <<<

Jim Chao only spends 2 minutes every 3 days on ViralUrl and gets 60 to 80 leads with every single mailing he does. If you want to find out how he does it, make sure you watch this video. It’s only 40 minutes long and is full of great insider tips. It’s definitely worth the watch! Like last time, if you want to download the MP3 file, go to the MLSP archive section (you need to be logged in to access this page).

The videos are also available on ViralNetworks:
- MLSP Webinar – ViralUrl & ViralHosts
- MLSP Webinar – Supercharging ViralUrl

About week ago I participated in an MLM Lead System Pro webinar along with my VP of Operations Julien Duc and Top Network Marketer Brian Fanale (co-owner of MLSP). Unfortunately, a few MLSP Members missed out because the webinar was at 6.30pm instead of 9.30pm (Eastern) but the video call was recorded and is now made  available to anyone:

>>> MLM Lead System Pro Webinar Video <<<

If you were unable to make it last week and want to learn more about ViralUrl and ViralHosts, make sure you check out the video. It’s about an hour long but is full of useful information: features and benefits, how to get started, testimonials, questions and answers… We got a couple of very good testimonials that we’re really happy about. If you want to download the MP3 file, head to the MLM Lead System Pro archive section (you need to be logged in to access this page).

I hope you enjoy it!

Update: A new webinar video about ViralUrl is now available. Make sure you check it out! Both videos are also available on ViralNetworks:
- MLSP Webinar – ViralUrl & ViralHosts
- MLSP Webinar – Supercharging ViralUrl

Today I’m glad to announce that I will be participating in this week’s MLM Lead System Pro Webinar. I will be joining top internet marketers Brian Fanale, Norbert Orlewicz, Todd Schlomer and the rest of their team for what I’m sure will be a great occasion for you to learn more about viral marketing as well as how to make the most of ViralUrl and ViralHosts.

$0.10 Per Lead, Host Your WordPress Blogs + Additional Income Stream?

Wednesday, November 11th!

6:30PM Eastern
5:30PM Central
4:30PM Mountain
3:30PM Pacific

Time Converter

I strongly recommend you to attend this webinar. If you can’t make it, don’t worry too much, it’s going to be recorded. If you haven’t heard about MLM Lead System Pro yet (which is very doubtful – this attraction marketing system is a real hit!), make sure you check it out. It’s a must-have! Period.

We’re really glad the guys at MLM Lead System Pro agree with us on the importance of having a site or blog for anyone who wants to make money online. That’s why Frank, Tycho (my business partners) and I have created ViralHosts, an all-in-one web hosting, traffic generation, list building and mailing system. ViralHosts is ideal for internet marketers and alike because it provides them with highly important, tangible requirements to their success.

I hope you can make it! Make sure you register before it sells out!

Update: The webinar video is now available!