“Does your website need a spring clean?”

This is something that I’ve started asking my clients as a result of one of the interesting things to come out of the recent Google algorithm updates (Panda), i.e.  the increased importance that Google is now giving to ALL the content on your website.

It looks like Google are now really delving deep into websites to check whether all the content is of high quality and relevance to the readers of the niche you are catering to. If any of your previous posts are perceived as being poor quality, stale or outdated, Google will take note of this and will downgrade the overall ranking of your website.

So what can you do to prevent this?

One of the tactics I highly recommend is implementing a regular content audit. The main goals of this audit should be to:

• Identify and delete any low quality or irrelevant posts and pages;
• Identify any posts or pages that can be tweaked or improved;
• Identify opportunities to improve your overall website rankings by using your link equity, internal anchor text and content interlinking strategies.

There are 3 main steps that I follow when I perform these audits for myself and my clients, and it has proved to be very effective in pruning out the ‘dead wood’ from a website and improve the overall ranking.

Step 1. Gather Your Website Data

The first thing you need to do is to get an overall picture of your website in terms of numbers of pages,  number of inbound links and amount of visitors each page receives.

Luckily, if you’ve setup your website with Google’s Webmaster Central, you can easily extract a listing of all your pages along with the number of links for each of those pages into a spreadsheet. The next thing you’ll need to do is add an additional column for the number of page views over a specific time period – I usually use a time frame of 12-18 months.

Depending on the size of your website, collating all this data can take some time. This is the sort of work that is perfect for outsourcing. I normally assign this sort of stuff to my outsourcers in the Phillipines, but you can just as easily assign this task to someone via Odesk for a small fee. Websites with around 1000 pages will normally cost you about $50 and will take around 24-48 hours.

Step 2. Identify Any Low Performing Pages

Once I receive the data from step 1, I start by trying to identify all the low performing pages. The two main things I look for when identifying these pages are how many links does the post/page have and how much traffic did it generate over the past 12-18 months.

Generally, any page that generates less than 100 unique page views and/or has less than 25 external back links over this period is a prime candidate for deletion.

Step 3. The Big Decision – Do I Delete or Rewrite?

Once I’ve gone through and deleted all the obvious low performing pages, I’m left with a list of pages that may have still generated a low number of links or traffic, but have shown that they may still have some potential left in them. It’s these pages,  that with a bit of attention and tweaking, may still be able to generate some good results. This is where you need to make some tough decisions.

If a page has generated either a lot of links or a lot of traffic (but not both), it’s a fairly easy decision. I usually leave the page intact, but look at ways to improve it. In most cases, the page just needs a little updating. One of the best tools I have found to be useful for this is ScribeSEO. This WordPress plugin gives you an overall analysis of the page and provides you with some quick recommendations on how to improve it.

If a page hasn’t generated a significant number of links or traffic, that’s when it becomes a bit more difficult to decide what to do. In some cases, whilst the page was current at the time it was written, things have moved on so the content is now outdated, obsolete and irrelevant. If the page falls into this category, it’s probably best to put it out of it’s misery and simply delete it.

In other cases, the subject matter of the page whilst outdated, may justify the effort required to rewrite it and make it relevant to today’s environment.

A third option is to pull content out of several related poor performing pages and combine them into a new, consolidated single page.

In all cases, you should also focus some of your efforts into creating and updating your anchor text and internal linkages wherever possible.

I’m often asked – “Why Should You Delete Old Posts or Pages?”

At first glance, deleting poor performing old posts or pages sounds a bit drastic. After all, you’ve spent so much time and effort creating these pages, so why not just let them sit where they are?

I only recently came across the answer to this question in the form of link equity.

Link equity is the concept whereby each website only has a certain amount of links, trust and authority coming into it, and that this link equity can only support a certain number of pages.

For example, it’s impossible for a brand new website with only a few links to have thousands of pages in the index. There are simply not enough signals of quality for search engines to pick up on that would warrant them to support anything more than a quick crawl through the site.

Google in particular is becoming extremely sophisticated and won’t be easily tricked into giving a high ranking to a site that doesn’t actually have the content to back up it’s claim to a high status. In short, Google will know if your website can actually ‘walk-the-walk’.

A lot of my clients look at me in disbelief at the mere mention of deleting their old posts. They have spent so much time generating this content that they are sometimes reluctant to make the hard decisions and delete their poor performing posts. It sometimes takes a fair bit of persuasion before they realise that this is in the best interests for the long term performance of their website and their online business.

Don’t Forget To Backup and Redirect!!

Deleting information on your website is fraught with danger. Always, always make sure you have backups before you even think of deleting any of your posts.

WordPress keeps a copy of any deleted posts for around 30 days when you delete it so you can always get it back.

The other thing to remember when deleting posts with lots of internal links to other posts/pages on your website is that you will need to setup redirections. Make sure that you identify as best you can any potential broken links that will occur before you delete the post. Redirect these links to other similar posts/pages on your website or a relevant page on an external website.

Also make sure you capture any 404 errors and ensure that these are redirected as well. There are some excellent redirect plugins you can install for the WordPress platform that will take care of these 404 and redirections automatically. The key is to make sure that deleting your posts or pages will not leave any link ‘orphaned’. Google hates this sort of thing and will penalise you heavily for your perceived low attention to detail.

Summary

So to recap, it’s essential that you need to perform a content audit on your website at least every 12-18 months to ensure that your website isn’t being adversely affected by low performing content.

You can achieve this by following these steps:

• Make a list of all your site pages, showing all the associated inbound links and traffic stats for the past 12-18 months;
• Identify and delete the worst of the poor performing pages;
• Of the remaining pages, decide which ones could benefit from a bit of tweaking to improve their performance, which ones need a rewrite, or which ones need deleting;
• Consider consolidating the content from several poor performing pages into a single page for improved performance;
• Make sure everything is backed up BEFORE you delete anything;
• Setup redirections for any deleted pages, monitoring any 404 errors and redirect as required.

One of the really effective ways to increase traffic to your blog is by leaving a comment on well-known and high traffic-attracting blogs.

Unfortunately, it’s such an effective strategy that you’ll find that a lot of other people have the same idea, often resulting in hundreds of comments.

So how can you get your comment to really POP! and stand out from all the others and leverage the popularity of these blogs?

Here are 7 really easy ways to ensure your comment stands out from all the rest.

1. Reply To The Top Commenter in the List

Some of more popular blogs may have several hundred comments so when you add your comment, it can quickly roll off the page and out of sight. A really easy and often overlooked way to get your comment to the top of the page is to simply reply to the top commenter in the list.

Readers will notice a thread more than just a reply and will often contribute with their own opinion. However, make sure you maintain control of the thread. Done correctly, you’ll attract your own little audience and in doing so, create some targeted traffic back to your site.

4. Automatic Notification of Replies

This little trick will allow you squeeze the most out of the tips above.

If you’ve managed to start a thread, maintain the interest by getting notified of any replies. Most commenting systems will have this facility – simply check the box to be notified automatically of any new replies. Just be sure to act quickly and respond back to replies as soon as you can to keep the momentum going.

This is also a really easy way to establish and maintain an ongoing relationship with the host blogger and some of the more interactive readers of the blog.

5. Format Your Comments

The previous 4 strategies are some of the more time consuming ways to make your blog comment stand out, but it assumes that the readers are actually taking the time to read the comments.

As with most things online, the majority of readers on skim stuff on the ‘net, stopping only to read something that catches their eye.

Formatting your comments is an incredibly simple yet very effective way to make your comment stand out. It’s just so damn easy to do, yet hardly anyone takes the opportunity to make a few tiny tweaks to their comments. Almost everyone uses these methods for their own blog posts, so why not a comment?

Simply bolding a word or two, using italics or even a mixture of both can be the difference between your comment being read or simply skimmed over.

Most comment systems will allow the use of basic HTML tags, so give them a go.

Some of the more common ones are:

1.  <strong>This makes text bold</strong>
2.  <em>This makes text italic</em>
3.  <blockquote>This allows you to add a quote</blockquote>

4.  <ul>

<li>Why not make a list? – point 1</li>

<li>Why not make a list?– point 2</li>

<li>Why not make a list?– point 3</li>

</ul>

These tips are usually enough to help your comments stand out from the vast majority of all the others.

But wait! You’re not quite there yet! Once your comments have been made, there are just a few more things you need to do to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your efforts.

6. Ping Your Comments

You’ve made your comment, applying some or all of the tips listed above. Now you need to make sure all the search engines know what you’ve just done.

Pinging is the term used to describe the process by which you notify your server that your blog content has just been updated. The server will then notify a variety of pinging services about the update, which in turn cascade down and trigger all the search engine bots to come and check out your new content.

If you have a WordPress website, you can set it to automatically configure it to ping using services like Pingomatic.com, but I usually also ping my new blog posts by hand using other services like Pingler.net and Pingoat.net.

Whilst this process is usually for notifying the search engines of new content to your own blog, you can also use this method to notify them of any comments you’ve made on other people’s blogs. This decreases the time it takes for the search engine bots to crawl the site, pick up your new comment and your link, and attribute it to your site.

7. Show a Bit of Respect

This last tip is simple good manners and an example of accepted net etiquette. Whenever you’re commenting, always, always, ALWAYS use the host blogger’s name.

This simple action shows that you have respect for the host blogger and have an excellent attention to detail.

Secondly, this seemingly trivial tip might be the single most important piece of evidence that will help your comment avoid getting stuck in the spam folder if for some reason it ever ends up in there.

In most cases, the only way the host blogger can identify a spam comment from a genuine comment when checking the spam folder, is if there is a specific reference to their name in the comment. It might only be a simple trick, but it can save your comment from being deleted permanently and prevent all your efforts going to waste.

8. Use Your Social Media ID (Bonus Tip)

I know I said this post would be 7 tips, but I thought I’d tack this tip on the end at the last minute. It’s a tip I picked up recently and is particularly useful in light of the recent Google search engine algorithm changes (Panda).

Google is gradually increasing the importance it places on your existing social media footprint and uses this information to provide you with search results that are specifically tailor made for you.

To increase the size of your social media footprint, and in turn, increase the variety of links back to your website, try replacing the link on your comment with either your Twitter or Facebook ID.

If you’re one of the many unfortunate people out there with a common name like ‘John Smith’, this is an easy way to ensure that the top Google search spot for that name is the one that applies to you.

One of the most important elements in your blog or online business is an autoresponder, which allows you to automate communication to your subscribers. It’s a great way to streamline the running of your business by helping to keep in regular contact with your subscriber base.

However, this is one part of your business that needs careful planning and quite a bit of work to initially set up. The emails you send out using this system represent you and over time will help build up the overall impression that a customer has of your product or service. But being an automated system, it is very easy to just set-and-forget your autoresponder and assume that your subscribers won’t notice.

So, I trawled around the ‘net looking for some of most popular tips surrounding proper autoresponder use to see what other bloggers do to make sure their subscribers best interests aren’t forgotten about. Here are the top 10 tips that will help you get the most out of your autoresponder and keep your subscribers coming back for more…

1. Always, always acknowledge your customers straight away

No-one likes to be forgotten or ignored. Whenever someone subscribes to your newsletter, make sure that you send out an email thanking them for taking the time out to do so. This reminds those users that you have received their opt-in request. Sending out a thank you email immediately after they opt-in also makes for a good first impression. Straight away they will see you as someone who gets things done and who appreciates (and is thankful for) their decision to trust you enough to opt-in.

2. Treat your subscribers like human beings

Your subscribers are human beings with feelings, and everyone likes to recognised as an individual. Think how impressed you are when you receive a letter that has actually been signed by a real person instead of a generic signature. It makes you feel special.

Use the autoresponder customised fields to insert the subscribers first name in your emails, and use it a few times in the email. Starting of an email with ‘Dear John’, sounds a lot better than ‘Dear subscriber’.

Note: I have noticed recently that a lot of bloggers are now only collecting email addresses in their optin forms on the basis that a lot of people are wary of entering in their actual names due to fears of being spammed. In a lot of cases, subscribers enter in fake names anyway. It also appears that by only asking for an email address, you can boost your overall optin rates.

Also, it is becoming obvious that subscribers are generally becoming more tech-savvy and are aware that most forms of personalisation are automated anyway, so they are not too fussed if their emails are personalised or not. However, before ‘de-personalising’ your own autoresponder emails, I would test this out on your own list and see if it makes any significant difference to your optin and email open rates.

3. Don’t spam your subscribers – it really sucks…

There’s a fine line between spamming someone and keeping them informed. Don’t bombard your subscribers with emails several times a day unless you’ve been explicitly asked. Being in their face all the time can have the opposite effect to the one you are trying to achieve. You stand a better chance with an informative weekly newsletter, then a daily series of emails containing pushy sales talk. Most bloggers only send out emails every 2-3 days. Again, test this with your own list and make a note of your open rates.

4. Reward your loyal subscribers

Reward your subscribers with regular free bonuses like coupons or gifts. This further reinforces the impression that your primary concern is providing them with useful information and increases the feel-good factor for your subscribers. It makes them feel good that you appreciate them and care about them enough to give them that little bit extra.

5. Have a privacy policy in place and make it obvious

Privacy concerns are high on the Internet – no-one likes their information being sold or given away without prior permission. Alleviate your readers concerns by re-assuring them that their information is safe and include a link to your privacy statement in your newsletter and on your website.

6. Always include an unsubscribe option

For whatever reason, people may change their mind and decide that they want to unsubscribe from your newsletter. It happens all the time so don’t take it personally. But always make sure to make it easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe. It shows that you are honest and that you have nothing to hide. A standard unsubscribe rate is around 10-15%; any higher than this and should be taking steps to work out how to keep your subscribers interest and prevent them from unsubscribing.

7. Make your headlines stand out

Everyone nowadays gets spam emails, so much so that we have become desensitised to them. Try to stand out by using interesting headlines that give your subscriber some reason to open your email. Again, try to incorporate the subscriber name in the heading so they at least know there has been some previous connection.

Also, split test your heading as often as you can, so you are always improving on your click rates. This is easy to do with most autoresponders. You’ll soon work out which headlines are the best in enticing your subscribers to click them.

8. It’s NOT all about the money

Don’t get too caught up with having to sell stuff straight away. Your subscribers joined your list hopefully because you are providing some useful information. They already know who you are, so just keep focussing on producing good informative content. Autoresponder emails have been designed as a way to build trust and rapport with your subscribers.

Every now and then, suggest that you have some extra information or service that they may be interested in purchasing. In the blogosphere, you should always follow the mantra, “If you teach them, they will buy”. Remember that this is a long term commitment, so just chill out and enjoy teaching others what you know. The money will sort itself out. Have patience grasshopper…

…always follow the mantra, “If you teach them, they will buy”.

9. Offer useful and relevant tips

Don’t stop providing your subscribers with useful and relevant tips. After all, the main aim of the game is to build up your list, and that’s not going to happen if your newsletter suddenly dries up. You need to constantly drip feed your subscribers to keep them interested and happy. But you also need to make sure your content is informative and relevant to the niche you are in and is unique in some way. Don’t be a cut-and-paster. Anyone can do that.

10. Keep your emails simple

Keep your emails short, concise and to the point. People usually don’t have the time to read excessively long emails. Try to keep your emails above the fold. After all, your autoresponder emails in most cases are newsletters – keep them like that. They should merely be used to inform your subscribers of where the real action is happening – on your website.

If your newsletter is long, make sure that your subscribers will get useful pieces of information along the way. It’s frustrating reading a long email only to get to the end and find that there is no useful information after all. People will soon get sick of that and will unsubscribe from your list faster than rats from a sinking ship.

Do you agree with these tips and have you implemented any of them in your autoresponder strategy? I’d be really interested to hear if you have had any significant results, good or bad, by using these tips.

Spam is something that you simply can’t ignore. Traditionally taking the form of annoying emails that keep popping up in your inbox, selling anything from pills to porn, they take up the majority of the email traffic on the Internet.

But there are ongoing efforts to prevent these emails, and the effects are starting to be noticed by these spammers. As a result, they are focussing on other ways to get their message out there, and unfortunately, bloggers are ever-increasingly being used as a way to do this.

To help you better understand about spam, here are a few things you need to know.

1. Not All Spammers are Spambots.

A spambot is a program designed to collect, or harvest, e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail. Because it’s becoming more difficult for spammers to use emails, blogger are now being targeted because they often have the facility for their readers to leave comments which are viewers are then able to read.

By default, a lot of blogs don’t have any spam detection software running, so spammers are increasingly using humans to find these blogs and to write and post comments by hand.

Typically low-paid workers in Internet cafes, schools and factories, or professional viral marketers, they are paid by spammers to promote new products. The fact of the matter is, they are constantly trying to exploit your blog for their profit – and trying to do so without you noticing.

2. Web Spam is not the same as Email Spam

Email spam is targeted to you, the owner of the inbox. They want you to buy their product. On the other hand, web spam, in the form of comments on your blogs, are targeting your readers. You, as the author and owner of the blog, are not the target.

3. Web spammers are using your blog as an advertising platform

Unfortunately, they have no intention of giving you any of the profits. What makes it worse, they’re not even asking for your permission first. Spammers will sell links from your blogs to anyone willing a pay a few cents or even dollars. If your blog is particularly popular, it will probably be listed by name, with backlinks for a sale at a premium price.

4. Web spammers are expert social engineers.

Email spammers have spent years perfecting the craft of writing messages that are specifically designed to get your attention.

Web spammers on the other hand, write messages to escape your attention. They are constantly trying to deceive you by pretending to be real bloggers, real people, writing real comments. They don’t want to be found out. They want you to approve their comments and publish it on your site. They’ll try everything including flattery and blatant lying to take advantage of your trusting nature in order to trick you into giving them the benefit of the doubt.

5. Backlinks – the secret sauce

The ultimate goal of web spammers is to sell links (known as backlinks) from your blog to their clients. This technique is an effective way to bypass the search engines and trick your readers into visiting dubious and illegal web sites. These clients are often harmless, but most of the time they are trying to sell fake pills, malware, scams and even porn.

So what can bloggers do to stop web scammers?

Here are 2 really quick and easy ways you can make your blog a pain in the ass for web spammers.

Install CAPTCHA – this plugin is a really easy way to filter out the majority of automated comments submitted to your blog. CAPTCHA stands for (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) and is based on the Turing Test, named after the famous computer scientist Alan Turing.

It essentially involves adding to your site’s comments area an image that contains a random stylized piece of text. The text is usually blurred or distorted just enough so that whilst a human can interpret it, a computer will find it extremely hard. The commenter is asked to copy this text exactly into a form field before they submit the form.

By asking for the correct text, this process almost always guarantees that the commenter is a person, and not some automated script or process. However, this does not solve the problem of a human being spamming your comments section manually. This is where the next strategy comes into play.

Install Akismet – this is a really simple way to sort out any of the comments that got past the CAPTCHA process. All you need to do is install the Akismet plugin on your blog. It’s free and easy to use. Just install and register your blog URL on their website. You’ll get sent an API key, which is just a unique string of characters, to configure on the plugin.

Once activated, Akismet will check all the comments that are left on your blog and cross reference them, by using various methods, against their database, identifying anything suspicious. You can then delete these suspicious comments at your heart’s content.

Just by following these 2 simple actions, you can pretty well knock out all but the really determined web spammers from exploiting your blog.

Over the past few years, it has become increasingly difficult (and increasingly expensive) to attract visitors to your website using traditional strategies like Google Adwords and other paid and/or SEO methods.

Competition amongst online business owners for visitors is fierce, and as such, there is a real demand for any strategy that will give them an upper hand. Video marketing is one of these strategies and is one of the most effective ways that online business owners can use to attract visitors to their websites.

Even though most of the aspiring online business owner clients I work with are aware of the power of video marketing and how it can attract traffic to their website, there still appears to be a real reluctance to actually produce videos and implement an effective video marketing strategy.

When I queried my clients on what was holding them back, I found that their overall perception is that video marketing is just too difficult and demanding, and so they simply continued on with the old standard methods to try and attract traffic just like everyone else – no wonder they were not getting anywhere!

Now I’ve helped quite a few online business owners take their marketing efforts to the next level using video marketing. After talking with them, I quickly find out that they usually believe in one of several unfounded myths about video marketing, and that is the real reason why they are usually too afraid to jump in and give it a go.

What I’ve found is that there is a common set of these myths about video marketing. Once I’ve broken down and exposed these myths, most if not all of my clients end up implementing at least some sort of video marketing for their business.

So, let me expose the top 5 video marketing myths that are preventing online business owners from implementing one of the most effective marketing strategies available.

Hopefully, once you’ve seen that there really is no mystery to video marketing, you’ll be able to start implementing a video marketing strategy as a key component in your online business.

Myth #1 – You Need Expensive Equipment and/or Big Marketing Budget

The first myth surrounds the belief that you need to invest in lots of high end equipment and have a big marketing budget before you can start video marketing.

You may be surprised to learn that you probably already have all the equipment you need to start producing and marketing your own videos.

Most laptops nowadays have a webcam and microphone built-in, and if not, you can buy a HD webcam with an integrated microphone for under $100.

Software-wise, you also probably have everything you need as well. MovieMaker is part of Microsoft Windows and is easy to use to make decent videos. Apple Mac users can use iMovie which also allows you to make really nice quality videos.

The other misconception is that you need a big marketing budget to have an effective video marketing strategy.

You can promote your videos for free using established marketing channels like email newsletters and via social media like Twitter and Facebook. There are also free video distribution sites like Tube Mogul that will get your video onto heaps of video sites.

And of course, don’t forget YouTube. That’s an obviously free way of getting your video in front of people, but for that extra exposure, you can pay for a ‘Promoted Video’ marketing slot. The costs for this aren’t as expensive as Google Adwords.

Myth #2 – The Video Needs To Be Like a Hollywood Production

This follows on from myth #1. A lot of my clients believed that the actual video they produced had to be of a really high standard with lots of fancy graphics, amazing sound effects and precise scripting and timing. That’s complete nonsense.

People know that you’re not a multi-billion dollar company, so don’t act like one. You are a small business, so instead of worrying about how good your video looks, focus instead on what your customer in your particular niche is looking for – relevant and useful information.

You can do this very effectively by narrating a simple PowerPoint presentation or by just standing in front of a camera and talking about your niche.

All you need to do is make sure your camera is of a decent quality, the lighting is clear and bright, and the sound quality is good. That’s it!

For a bit of pizzazz, you can spend $5 at Fiverr.com and get someone to do you a 5-10 sec professional video and/or voice intro to tack on the start of your video. That in itself will make you stand out from the majority of the other videos out there.

Myth #3 – Nobody Will Watch It Or Find It Interesting

This myth concerns the inherent belief that most of us has at some point in our lives – that what we do could not possibly be of interest to other people.

One thing I learnt early on is that we all have an extremely skewed, negatively-biased view of how other people perceive us and what we create. We are our own worst critic.

A lot of my clients simply didn’t believe that any video they created would be of any interest to other people.

To disprove this theory in one of my client workshops, I got a group of clients to each create a short video, then got them to write me a quick sentence or two, describing what they personally thought of their own creation. The majority of them were negative about what they had produced and didn’t think they were worthy of submitting to the general public.

I then let the other clients in the group see all the other videos and got them to comment on each one. This time, the majority of the comments were complementary, describing the videos as being ‘wonderfully informative’, and ‘witty, funny and interesting’.

Almost every single time, what each of the original video creators personally thought of their own creation was completely the opposite of what an unbiased outsider thought of the video. Often it took only a simple exercise like this to destroy people’s perception that what they create will not be of interest to other people and get over their fear of actually creating a video.

Myth #4 – It Needs To Go Viral To Be Effective.

On YouTube, there a number of videos that have received hundreds of millions of views. These are what are known as viral videos, because they seem to take on a life on their own.

A lot of my clients think that unless their video goes viral, it won’t be an effective way to generate traffic.

What they fail to realise is that only 1.7% of videos get more than 100,000 views. In fact, 2/3 of all videos get fewer than 1,000 views!

But the number of views that a video gets is not a real measure of its real effectiveness. Remember that you are creating a video for your niche market, not a silly video for the general public who are only watching it for a laugh.

Your niche market is looking for something specific and in a lot of cases, are ready to buy your product or service. They are simply waiting for you to provide them with that last bit of proof or justification in your videos before they take that final step and buy something from you.

It’s called niche market for a reason. You’re not trying to create something to cater for millions of people. Focus instead on your target market, your niche market, and prove to them that you are worth investing in.

Myth #5 – All Videos Should Be Short

There is a general rule of thumb that videos should only be 3-5 minutes long. Anything longer than this, and you will lose the interest of your viewer.

This is something that I also tell my clients, but unfortunately, this has been taken as gospel and turned into an urban myth.

The truth is, there is nothing wrong with producing longer videos, as long as it suits the purpose for which it is created. It just needs to make sense for the content.

If you’re creating an online video course, then of course you will need to create longer videos. Just try to keep the content relevant and interesting. If you’re creating promotional videos, keep it snappy and to the point.

By having a variety of short and long videos in your collection, you’ll find that people visiting your site will stick around for longer.

Hopefully I’ve been able to dispel some of the major myths about creating and marketing videos. You may have some other issues with videos that I haven’t covered, so feel free to send me your questions via the form below and I’ll try to answer them for you.

If you haven’t already, why not register for my FREE 7-Day Online Business Bootcamp where I cover some of these video marketing myths in more detail.