Greg Jarboe: Pimp My YouTube Channel, 6-Steps to SEO PR and Roosevelt’s Arena
DishyMix
Susan Bratton
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Episode 117 - Greg Jarboe: Pimp My YouTube Channel, 6-Steps to SEO PR and Roosevelt’s Arena

This all started when I saw Greg Jarboe dashing through SFO, newly minted book in hand. "YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day" is another one of those Wiley tomes that plunges all the way to detail hell on every aspect of using web video for marketing. This book is a must-read that will get you up to date on the constant changes YouTube is putting into place so marketers and Google can milk this phenomenon for everything it's worth.

Nobody reads anymore, except the newsbots that crawl your press releases. So start making video and let Greg tell you how to produce it, research the keywords and optimize your video so you can get found, watched and loved.

And in case you still want to get those press releases out there, Greg gives us his updated, freshly reformulated 6-Step Process for Optimizing Press Releases for the News Services.

If you like those DishyMix episodes where the guest delivers how-to advice in painstaking detail, this show is for you. Packed with great tips, insider short cuts and a level set on the world of online video marketing, banana-milkshake fueled Jarboe works his buns off for you.

Transcript

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to Dishy Mix, I’m your host Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Greg Jarboe. Greg, if you haven’t heard of him already, is the president and co-founder of a company called SEO PR. They’re a search engine optimization firm combined with a PR agency with an expertise in video production as well. And he’s the author of a brand new book, an excellent tome on video marketing called YouTube and Video Marketing An Hour a Day, similar in the wily series to Dave Evans book, Social Media An Hour a Day, which I was lucky enough to get to write the forward for, which is an awesome book. This is another one of those really good books that teaches you nuts and bolts end to end about the entire world of online video marketing. And in addition to covering video marketing we’re really also going to at the end of the show make sure that we get Greg to tell us the latest and greatest about optimizing PR for Yahoo, AOL and Google News, because it’s a changing landscape and he is the expert. So lets get him on the show. Welcome Greg.

Susan Bratton: Ha-ha, it’s so good to have you here. It’s so funny, I saw you in the airport. You were buzzing by me and I said, “I know you” and found out that you had your new book out and invited you on the show; it was perfect timing. I’ve been doing a lot of Dishy Mix episodes on video marketing, and so I was so glad to see that you are the current expert at it.

Greg Jarboe: Well this is my new tactic; I go through different airports everyday, run into key people and it’s a way of getting the word out.

Susan Bratton: I know, one person at a time. That’s going to scale Greg, that’s going to scale. So I just have to start the show with this funny, funny cartoon that’s about, oh gosh, pretty close to the end of the book. There’s a guy, there are two guys standing next to, in an office standing next to a water cooler. One of them is, you know, the typical nerdy office guy with his tie and his pens in his pocket and he’s got his hair combed and he looks a little pasty white, and he’s standing next to another guy at the water cooler who has on boxer shorts, a jacket, he’s smoking, he has on his sunglasses and he’s drinking a martini, and he says, the martini dude says, “Hey, when you’re nailing the numbers they don’t ask any questions”, and I love that. I think that’s a fantastic cartoon, but I think it’s also – as the man Greg Jarboe, who one the Golden Ruler award- really emphasizes the importance of getting the metrics when you’re doing work like online video marketing and not just doing it for getting, you know, getting the distribution but also measuring the effectiveness of it. So I want to talk about that and I love that cartoon.

Greg Jarboe: I do too, and it’s in the chapter about measuring outcomes as opposed to outputs. And one of the traps that a lot of people fall into really quickly is they start measuring their video on “How many views did I get?” And the answer is if you can take the views and put them in a bank then you’d know what they were worth. But views is a metric, but I’m more interested in did it help you sell more DVD’s, did it help you get elected President of the United States, you know, did it help you boost sales of your industrial strength blender. I mean, tell me what this really did in business terms.

Susan Bratton: Well and speaking of industrial strength blenders, one of the people of the many people who gave you advanced praise for this book was George Wright who is the VP marketing and sales of Blend Tech, which of course is one of the classic examples of a viral video that’s done extremely well to boost sales for a company. But you’ve got a lot of luminaries on here; everybody, a lot of former Dishy Mix guests from Seth Godin to Matt McGowen, Jim Lauderbach, you’ve got Avanash Koshak, you’ve got Brian Eisenberg, Lee Odden; there’s some really top level people here giving you a lot of great testimonials for your book. I know for a lot of people when they’re trying to get testimonials for the work that they do, they’re a little bit shy. What was your approach to going after some good testimonials for your book?

Greg Jarboe: Well like applying for anything I have people who I knew very well and I thought I’m pretty sure, I’m pretty confident that they’ll give me a, you know, a blurb. And then I had some stretch goals, people who I thought who knows, it doesn’t hurt to ask. You might get rejected and then again you might get a great blurb. And I ended up asking about 20 people and close to a dozen said yes. So the response rate surprised even me; I was actually looking for 4 or 5 and I had to go back to my publisher and said, “You only needed 4 or 5; what do I do when I have 11?” And so we put some on the cover and some on the inside book jackets, so we made room for everyone who provided a quote. But went for 20 and was a mix of close friends and luminaries who, who knew, who knew. And they responded.

Susan Bratton: And did you write them for them or did they write them for you?

Greg Jarboe: They all wrote them for me…

Susan Bratton: That’s great.

Greg Jarboe: One person who actually sent back a quote that said I could use it but had restrictions on it was Seth Godin, and I think Seth was worried that he may become blurbed out or over-blurbed, so he said basically, “You can use this in your book, but I don’t want to see it in press releases, I don’t want it distributed on the web”, it’s, too many of his quotes have turned into spam…

Susan Bratton: Got it.

Greg Jarboe: So of all the blurbs that I got back one came with restrictions.

Susan Bratton: See, that’s a really good thing. If you’re going after somebody like Seth and you could offer up restrictions in advance if you’re concerned that that might be an issue for them…

Greg Jarboe: Well he was…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Greg Jarboe: He was the only one; everyone else said, “Here it is, you know. Use it.” And what’s been fun is even after providing the blurbs we’ve had several of them do YouTube videos…

Susan Bratton: Nice!

Greg Jarboe: So we’re now in the process of rolling out a series of press releases with basically people who’ve done early reviews of the book talking about what they like, and I even, I have to say this, I’m a University of Michigan graduate and I’m a Boston Red Sox fan and I got blurbs from both an Ohio State Buckeye and a New York Yankees fan.

Susan Bratton: So you’re willing to be flexible.

Greg Jarboe: Not only am I willing to be flexible, the book had to be twice as good as it needed to be just to like reach across the aisle and get bipartisan support.

Susan Bratton: I love it. Well, you know, I want to really dive right into the book. So the title of the book again is YouTube and Video Marketing An Hour a Day, and I love this series An Hour a Day because it really does just kind of let you get your hands around a vast category like video. You have a list of the top ten online video websites, and then you also have a list of the top video search sites, and I want you to explain, just give us an example of which is which and how they’re different.

Greg Jarboe: Sure. Well lets start with the top video search engine, which is Google Video. And it’s been out there for five years, people started optimizing for it, I started hearing people speak about it at search engine strategies conferences way back in 2005, and once upon a time it was a contenda and then out of left field came this little start-up called YouTube. Now Google owns them both, but according to Comscore, 99 percent of the traffic to videos on all Google sites goes to YouTube, 1 percent goes to Google Video. So being the number one video search engine means that you are dwarfed by the number one video sharing site, which is YouTube.

Susan Bratton: So give us a list of who the players are, the top three to five video sharing and video search sites, and why we care about both…

Greg Jarboe: Sure.

 

Susan Bratton: If only, if Google Video was only 1 percent why do we even care about it?

 

Greg Jarboe: Well we don’t.

 

Susan Bratton: Okay. Well there you go.

 

Greg Jarboe: And that’s a surprise. There are way too many people out there who are optimizing their video for their websites so that a video search engine can crawl it, index it and serve it up in results. And if video search engines in aggregate, ‘cause Google Video’s the number one video search engine – the number two used to be Yahoo Video; they threw in the towel a little over a year and a half ago and they no longer crawl sites, so they’re acting strictly as a video sharing site, they are not a video search engine anymore. And the next one down the line is Blinks. And again, if, they have a market share of less than 1 percent, at some point you’ve got to ask yourself, “If I’m optimizing the video on my website to be found on video search engines, wow, I’m putting in a lot of effort to get less than 1 percent share of the videos.” This is a strategy left over from 2005, the market shifted and maybe it’s time to deep six all those sites anyhow. So I would recommend going after where the traffic is, and the number one site there is YouTube, and with such a dominant share that it’s the first, second, third and fourth place you probably ought to go. The next site I would go to is probably Yahoo, and Yahoo video, although it is no longer a video search engine, is still a video sharing site. And then Veoh, Meta Café, My Space, Daily Motion, (unintelligible), Crack Whole, etcetera. You know, there’s others, but again at that point you’re moving down into the single digits.

 

Susan Bratton: I think a lot of people who are optimizing their video for search are trying to get in the, they’re trying to get search engine optimization of their video in the universal search results on Google, not to appear in the video search sites.

 

Greg Jarboe: Well then let me share a secret.

 

Susan Bratton: Okay, we want… Oh, could you share a whole bunch of secrets?

 

Greg Jarboe: Well there are a whole bunch, but then you’d have to read all five hundred pages of the book.

 

Susan Bratton: Oh we’re going to. We’re going to give a couple away, aren’t we?

 

Greg Jarboe: Absolutely.

 

Susan Bratton: Good.

 

Greg Jarboe: So one of the secrets is Google Universal Search doesn’t show every video every time. It shows videos selectively. More often than not the video that surfaces is from YouTube, although occasionally it can be from Metacafe or, you know, occasionally you might find a Google video just sort of sprinkled in to be slightly acumentical. But overall the videos that do surface when they surface are from YouTube, and the reason they surface is because they are the top ranking videos in YouTube. So here’s the trick: if you’re not well ranked in YouTube for YouTube search algorithm, which is different than the Google Universal Search algorithm, then you don’t get pulled into the Google Universal Search algorithm on appropriate searches.

 

Susan Bratton: Well lets just go right there then. So how do we, I know you have this – it’s on page 95 in your book – but for those of us who are dying to know right now before the book arrives, tell us…

 

Greg Jarboe: It’s in chapter 4; you can skip all the other chapters and just go to chapter 4.

 

Susan Bratton: Give us the top line. What do we need to do to have our videos ranked in YouTube and therefore ranked in Google’s organic search results?

 

Greg Jarboe: Well there’s about two dozen factors, but five of them that are probably the most important are putting your keywords in your title, putting those keywords again in the description of the video, and putting the keywords in your tags, because part of the algorithm is looking for relevant videos and they can’t see the content of the video so they use the title, the description and the tags; the words that are written around the video determine relevance. Then the other part of the algorithm basically looks at popularity, so they want to know how many views the video got and what kind of ratings the video got, and that doesn’t happen until after people find it and say, “Hey, that’s good and I’m going to share it with other people” and views start going up and ratings start going up, etcetera.

 

Susan Bratton: How do you get ratings Greg?

 

Greg Jarboe: Well you have to be a YouTuber, a member of the YouTube community. So if I have a channel and I see your video then I am authorized to go rate your video. And after watching it I can give it five stars or one star, you know, whatever I think it deserves. So the community votes basically on other members videos.

 

Susan Bratton: One of the things you have in the book is all about being a member of the YouTube community, interacting and being very active as a YouTube community member. What are some of the things that people are doing to try to get other members of the community to rate their videos? What’s working? Begging? Blasting?

 

Greg Jarboe: Well it starts off with you go out and find other videos you like and you rate them and you comment on them, so you can put up text comments – and again, you need to be a member of the community to post a text comment. And on occasion you can even do what is called a video response; “I loved your video so much it inspired me to do this one, which takes off on the theme or provides, you know, variation on what you’ve done”, etcetera, and that video response will also come to the attention of the person you like. And, you know, by participating in the community – I call it stone soup. It’s sort of like, you know, I may toss in the carrots, you toss in the meat, we both cook it up and we have a stew. So participating in that community is absolutely essential to getting those comments, to getting those ratings and frankly getting your video passed around to other members of the community and getting enough views for you to rank high.

 

Susan Bratton: Got it. And so it’s perfectly acceptable from an etiquette perspective, if you’re an active participant and you’re giving, it’s okay to ask for people to rate your videos too.

 

Greg Jarboe: Oh absolutely…

 

Susan Bratton: Okay.

 

Greg Jarboe: and there are some very popular bloggers who would also have, you know, YouTube channels who ask for those rating shamelessly in their video on their blog and get them. Michael Buckley is one of them and has been very successful just saying, “Please, rate me highly.”

 

Susan Bratton: And who’s Michael Buckley?

 

Greg Jarboe: Michael has a show called What The Buck…

 

Susan Bratton: Okay.

 

Greg Jarboe: And he has been so successful in terms of getting views, it’s basically Hollywood gossip that he was able to quit his day job and he makes about a hundred thousand dollars a year now selling advertising on his YouTube videos, which is basically, you know, “Here’s the latest movie that’s out and I’m going to give you my commentary on it” or “Here’s the latest fight between Lindsay Lohan and, you know, this media reporter, and, you know, here’s my take on it.”

 

Susan Bratton: Got it.

 

Greg Jarboe: So Michael, who lives in Connecticut, has built himself a nice little business by starting to broadcast out of his bedroom in the second floor of his home.

 

Susan Bratton: So we should really be looking at how he’s working the system as a good indicator of possibility.

 

Greg Jarboe: What The Buck. Here’s a guy who is a real success story.

 

Susan Bratton: Before we go to the break I want to talk about search; search terms, search intent, how we can, you know, the top ten search terms in YouTube may not mean a hoot to any of us because they’re not related to, you know, they’re about Brittney Spears or Mentos or whatever…

 

Greg Jarboe: Well they’re mostly about Lil’ Wayne. Lil’ Wayne is the most popular search term right now.

 

Susan Bratton: Okay. There you go. Well but how do we use search? How do we go in and we find keywords that we can leverage in our title, tags, descriptions, etcetera.

 

Greg Jarboe: Well as I was writing the book that was an interesting puzzle, and I tried to solve it by saying if you start doing a search in YouTube they have an auto suggest feature and the auto suggest feature basically is showing you what other people has searched for. So I sort of had to work at it backwards because at the time the tools were pretty rudimentary, and of course things change; you publish the book and what happens? YouTube introduces a keyword research tool, just like the Google AdWords keyword tool, and so you can now look for YouTube keyword tool, and you can now do the kind of keyword research you would do for the web. And what you will see after you’ve done a couple searches is that the terms used in YouTube are radically different than the terms that are used on lets say Google the web search engine. And when you start thinking about it it’s perfectly obvious that if I’m going to go to Google and search for information I might go to YouTube and search for ‘entertainment’ and find a very different set of things.

 

Susan Bratton: Makes perfect sense. So we’re going to go to a break and I went to let you know that Greg has very kindly offered to autograph, personally autograph two copies of YouTube And Video Marketing An Hour a Day. And so if you’d like to be one of the recipients to that you may know the drill; if you’re new let me tell you how you can get one of the copies. You go to my Dishy Mix fan page on Face Book, it’s just dishymixfan.com, it’ll take you right there, and you just become a fan and post on the wall that you’d like to be one of the people who gets a personally autographed copy, and Greg and I will pick two of you and we’ll make it happen. We’re going to go to a break and when we come back with Greg Jarboe we’re going to talk about video beyond viral; what are some of the other models that we can use as marketers and promoters of our personal brand and our corporate brand. We’re also going to get a video advertising update from Greg, and I still want to have him make sure he goes through the latest and greatest process for optimizing PR, press releases, for all of the news engines. So stay tuned. We’re with Greg Jarboe, president and founder of SEO PR and author or YouTube And Video Marketing An Hour a Day. We’ll be right back.

 

Susan Bratton: We’re back with Greg Jarboe. So Greg, viral video, Blend Tech, everybody wants to have viral video, but that’s not always the best option for us as corporate marketers and people promoting our own brands. What are some of the other models that you see working well out there that we might consider?

 

Greg Jarboe: Well viral video, you know, was popular because it was the first thing that everyone saw that appeared to be successful. But if you haven’t figured out a way to monetize your videos yet then they can go viral and big whoop, so what. I mean, I’m world famous in Poland; yahoo! So one of the people who had their video go viral recently, sort of back in April of this year, were the people at Britain’s Got Talent, and they had Susan Boyle’s video just take off and it was like, it’s the worlds fastest video to hit a hundred million views, but they hadn’t monetized it and had to scramble over the first two weeks that the video was taking off to do a deal with YouTube where they could actually sell advertising around all those views. So going viral is no longer, you know, the end goal; making money ought to be, you know, one of your objectives, and so if you’re going to have popular videos, great. Monetize them by selling advertising. There are other ways, and one of the folks I got to interview in the book is John Goldstein who is the producer of Monte Python and the Holy Grail and many of their other movies, but he also put up that YouTube channel, and in it when they went up they assumed that the only people who wanted to watch Monte Python videos were people who wanted to see free, free, free and they figured better to put up high quality stuff than let them rip it off and upload it themselves and have grainy versions. But he added something called Click To Buy, which is a new advertising option that YouTube offers and was basically saying if you like the video you want to buy our CD. Well CD sales shot up twenty-three thousand percent with this little Click To Buy feature and all of a sudden people need to understand that it’s more than just college kids who are watching videos these days; it includes guys like me who love Monte Python, got to own the DVD. Don’t want to just watch it; got to play it.

 

Susan Bratton: Yeah, the posters might not be the over 40 crowd, but the viewers certainly a big, big portion of them are. The age range of people who watch YouTube videos is spread across all demographics.

 

Greg Jarboe: It is. And again, it started off with college kids and people who last sort of checked in, you know, in 2006 are totally missing the fact that a hundred and seven million viewers watched YouTube a couple months ago. A hundred and seven million is way more than the fifteen million college students in the country. It’s pretty mainstream.

 

Susan Bratton: So there are a couple of different business models you talk about in the book; one of them is you could do video for product introductions. Another is videos of the key leaders in your organization with messages and information. Another is videos of speakers and exhibiters at conferences and tradeshows. Those are some of the different things that you talk about in the book. Are there others?

 

Greg Jarboe: There are almost as many as there are marketing objectives. So if you want to build brand awareness you can use video. If you want to generate traffic to a website you can use video. If you want to do lead generation in a B to B world you can use video. If you want to do e-commerce you can use video. In other words, in the early days video was sort of limited by, you know, how funny can you be before people pass it around as the latest “Ha, ha” funny viral video. These days, particularly as one more advertising and marketing programs begin to take advantage of some of the features and the huge audiences, it basically comes down to, “I don’t know, what’s your marketing objective?”, and guess what, more often than not video can play a role in that.

 

Susan Bratton: One of the things that you cover in the book also is a section on pimping out your YouTube channel or creating a brand channel; apparently there are some qualifications that you have to have. Are those the two basic kinds of channels that there are on YouTube?

 

Greg Jarboe: Yeah, there’s the free channel, which anybody can set up this afternoon. And then there’s a brand channel, and a brand channel can cost you a couple hundred thousand dollars, so it is not for the meek. It’s not for the “I’m going to put my toe in the water and see how it works.” But the brand channel gives you several features and capabilities you don’t get with the free channel, including – for those of us who are into measurement – you get to use Google Analytics on your brand channel and you have to use YouTube Insight for measurements on your free channel. And the difference between Insight and Google Analytics is the difference between getting a rough sense of this wavy line seems to be going up versus here’s the hard numbers and lets make some hard decisions.

 

Susan Bratton: So for most of us we would start out with our toe in the water. If you were going to pimp my channel what would be the advice that you would give me? What are the kind of low hanging fruit easy things we should quickly do to make our channel look really good and look like we know what the hell we’re doing, ‘cause we don’t?

 

Greg Jarboe: Well I wish it was that simple, but let me give you some raw numbers. There are a good three thousand brand channels already out there; so these are people who have ponied up that two hundred thousand dollars to make themselves industrial strength. And there are, in the United States alone, somewhere north of three million channels. So if you think I can just throw up a channel quickly and I’m okay, here’s some cheap advice, that would’ve worked just fine thank you very much a couple years ago; now you got to understand, I got three million competitors out there, I got to go beyond the basics. And so you need to spend a little time customizing your channel – and again, there’s a chapter in the book on how to do that. It probably doesn’t hurt to give somebody whose done it before and can help you, but if you got to do it yourself you got to spend the time to take it beyond “I’ve just got a channel up.”
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Susan Bratton: Are there a couple of things that you could tell us from the book that are kind of the minimum things that we should do?

 

Greg Jarboe: Yeah. One of the things that people tend to overlook but is actually one of the first things people have seen when they hit your channel is what is the video that you’ve got featured there? And a lot of people sort of do that by default, and as a result it may be the most recent video they’ve put up; it just sort of cycles in there. Recognize that if that’s the first thing people are going to see when they come to your channel, you want to think about that, that’s your, you know, “Here’s who I am, this is what this channel is about.” And that’s incredibly important to convincing someone to become a subscriber to your channel, and subscribers are incredibly important to traffic over time because if you have to fight tooth and nail for viewers for each and every one of your videos, god help you and good luck. But to the extent that people say this channel has great stuff for the following subject area or with a following focus, I’m going to subscribe to it and it will automatically notify me when this channel sends out new videos or uploads new videos and all of a sudden you are now building in, you know, recurring viewership. Fred, who has a channel, a very popular channel on YouTube, who is really nothing more than a teenage kid from Nebraska who is pretending to be a preteen with a high squeaky voice, has one point three million subscribers, and so Fred could throw up anything tomorrow and he’s already got one point three million people who are going to go check it out.

 

Susan Bratton: I wonder if Fred makes all his money on the T-shirts my daughter keeps buying.

 

Greg Jarboe: He is making money. And again, if teenagers in Nebraska can do it, any, anyone can.

 

Susan Bratton: No kidding. Is there, I really liked your advice about getting the featured video and making sure that’s really dialed in and then focus on getting subscribers, getting a reason to subscribe…

 

Greg Jarboe: Yeah, and…

 

Susan Bratton: Those are two good ones.

 

Greg Jarboe: some of the other just little things is make sure that when you’re writing your channel description put a link in the description to your websites, your Face Book pages, your, you know, Twitter profiles, you name it. In other words, tell people how to take, you know, if they like your channel they may like other things that you’ve got going for you and give them links to where you can find it.

 

Susan Bratton: Yeah, that’s a good one. Okay. So I want to move on to video advertising. I want an update from you on what you see are the formats or the standards that are, that are having the most wide scale appeal and/or the formats for video advertising that are returning the best clicks, awareness, whatever that metric might be that is judged on video advertising.

 

Greg Jarboe: Well the amazing this is if you’ve gone to YouTube in the past and found that the advertising options appeared a little lame, you’re right. Most of the really robust programs that they’ve rolled out they’ve rolled out since last Fall, so they’re all less than a year old. One of the ones I would suggest that you check out first, particularly if you want to put your toe in the water, is their self service option they have; they have something called The Promoted Video Program, and it’s just like Google Adwords, you basically decide which search terms you want to bid on. You put your video up and when someone does a search for that term your video appears on the right or in related video areas off to the side. But the point is that you turn up its own searches for macromay and you’ve got an ad about your macromay channel, it turns up at the right time. So that’s the first thing I would do. The second is basically at the other end of the spectrum. In January of this year YouTube rolled out something they called the Homepage Expandable Masthead Unit, which is a term that none of us will remember because, God help them, they need help with these things. But what it basically does is it allows you to buy the top half of the YouTube homepage for a whole day. And we’ve seen people do that, take advantage of it, and the thing to remember is roughly eleven million people a day in just the United States will go the YouTube homepage to find out what’s new. So if you want, if you’ve got a new movie that’s coming out, we’ve seen a lot of movie studios us this, we’ve seen a lot of pretty creative uses of that space; you know, buying the top half of the homepage is now an option and people are using it. And in between you’ve got a variety of other Click To Play options. As I mentioned you’ve got the Click To Buy options. You’ve also got overlay templates, and you can see this with a lot of the music videos where as the video is playing and you’re grooving to the latest song down across the bottom of the video is if you want to buy this song at iTunes click here.

 

Susan Bratton: Got it. That’s really good. Thank you for that. It’s amazing how fast the world changes and, you know, so tough to be an expert in all of these verticals; this overview I think is really helpful.

 

Greg Jarboe: This field was changing as I was writing the book…

 

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

 

Greg Jarboe: so I had to rush just to get all of that into chapter, I think it’s 9. And then as soon as I was done they added more.

 

Susan Bratton: Oh, of course. Absolutely. Well that’s why you just need to make everything a downloadable virtual product.

 

Greg Jarboe: Or keep talking about it on Dishy Mix.

 

Susan Bratton: There you go. Both would work. So you know I can’t let you go…

 

Greg Jarboe: Alright.

 

Susan Bratton: ‘til we talk about this, used to be five steps, I want to know what the, you added a step, The Five Step Process For Optimizing PR is now the Six Step Process, and of course I hope one of them is, includes embedding video into a press release now, so… Tell us everything we need to know to do a really great press release that gets picked up by the wire services; Yahoo News, AOL News and Google News, which I guess, that’s all that counts, isn’t it, or is there something else that counts or is only one of them now the one that counts? Tell us that too.

 

Greg Jarboe: In the United States Yahoo News, AOL News, Google News topics are all the big news search engines. Outside of the United States there is Google News and other. So again, we’re doing work with clients in the UK or in Canada or in Europe and over there it’s Google News, Google News, Google News. In the United States Yahoo News and AOL News still have huge market shares in the news search engine field, so you get a little more acumentical here. But yes, of all the things that you used to do with optimizing a press release, do all those and the sixth and final one is add video. And there are several wire services that let you embed video. PR Web lets you do it for free if you’re already at the $320 dollar option. You can use Market Wire will let you add video for I think about $50 bucks and you can embed your YouTube video there; we’ve tested that. There are a couple of traditional wire services, like Business Wire and PR News Wire, let you attach a video to your press release, but an attached video means it doesn’t play when someone opens it; they’ve got to both read the press release, see the little multimedia icon up to the left and off to the side, and then click on it and far fewer people do that than if it’s literally embedded right in the body of the press release as you see with PR Web and Market Wire. So again, do some experimentation with it, but if you have not added video to your press release you’re missing a bit because it immediately makes it more interactive, it immediately prompts people to get a whole new dimension to your message, and if your video is compelling it can prompt them to act.

 

Susan Bratton: So go through the six step process.

 

Greg Jarboe: Okay. Step one is keyword research; that hasn’t changed. If you don’t have your keywords in the right places, like your headline and subhead or lead paragraph, if someone does a search for you God bless you and good luck, it’s not likely to rank well with all the other competing stories on the same topic.

 

Susan Bratton: It’s not even just keyword research, it’s keyword density in the release, right?

 

Greg Jarboe: Well actually density is becoming less of an issue…

 

Susan Bratton: Okay.

 

Greg Jarboe: We’ve had density as low as two percent still rank number one, so we don’t, we don’t think the news search engines are putting the same weight on keyword density that they used to. It’s, you’ve got to have the keyword in there at least once or twice, but you don’t have to have it half a dozen times, doesn’t do you any better than having it two or three times.

 

Susan Bratton: Okay.

 

Greg Jarboe: So keyword density, less important; keyword position, very important, needs to be in the headline, needs to be in the lead paragraph, certainly helps to have it as some of the anchor text link in the press release, but not necessarily repeated five percent of the time or anything like that.

 

Susan Bratton: Alright, that’s good to know. Thank you.

 

Greg Jarboe: So keyword research, number one. Number two is putting those keywords in the right position. So I’ve already alluded to that. And you’d be surprised how many people think “I did my keyword research; what do you mean I have to add up my headlines?” And the answer is if you haven’t put the keywords in the key places, you’ve missed the second step. There’s still people out there who naively think that somehow or another keyword meta tags will be sprinkled invisibly on the press release and they don’t have to edit their headlines. And Google News ignores keyword meta tags, and if it’s not in the headline and it’s not in the lead paragraph it is not optimized for that term. So putting the words in the right places is the second step…

 

Susan Bratton: Okay.

 

Greg Jarboe: Step three is adding links when appropriate to key landing pages on your website. And it’s important that they be relevant. There have been enough spammers out there who tried to bait and switch people to, from the link in the press release, to, you know, the classic PPC, porn, pills and casinos…

 

Susan Bratton: Right.

 

Greg Jarboe: So Google will follow through to a link and see where you’re taking it and support if you take it to a relevant page. The fourth thing that you want to add is multimedia elements, and that at a minimum can be a j-peg image, but increasingly it can be a YouTube video; in releases that we’re doing we do both. So adding the visuals are important, and if you’re not doing it you’re missing a beat. That’s the new element. Fifth is making sure you’re using a wire service. That is actually included in Google News and Yahoo News and AOL News, and Google News is pretty much acumentical and rounds up all the suspects that you might imagine. Yahoo News is a lot pickier. And so just because you’re in Google News doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in Yahoo News, depending on the wire service you use. You need to probably use one of the big four or five. And then last but not least – and this is the part where a lot of people stop and they don’t even know about the sixth step – is measurement. And again, just as I measured, said about video measurement, you need to go beyond the “How many clips did I get” or “How many, you know, full page reads of my press release did I get”; all that’s nice, those are impressions, those are metrics, those are what I call ‘outputs’. At the end of the day you also want to know what percentage of people click through on the link, when they came to the site what percentage of them actually purchased something. If so, how much? If so, was that enough to offset the cost of the whole PR campaign? And taking it to that last step is really what separates out what I call ‘outcomes’ from outputs. When you can show your boss that you’ve generated two point five million dollars in airline ticket sales for Southwest Airlines then you have a seat at the big boys table. They tend to say, “Ah, this public relations stuff, you know, maybe we should pay attention to it.”
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Susan Bratton: I want to go back to number three, adding links to landing pages. Can you clarify a little bit more about when you put links in a press release, how many you can put in, you know, how you can do it, is it anchor text, what is that; just a little bit of an overview about the links.

 

Greg Jarboe: Sure. You can put up to a hundred links in a press release. I wouldn’t advise it. I think it makes a press release a joke. So the rule of thumb we’ve come up with is no more than one link for every hundred words. And that is a rule of thumb; you know, it’s not a hard and fast, you know, Google will punish you otherwise. But it deals with what we call human behavior. I can read about a hundred words in a half a screen, and then I scrolled down to read the next hundred words, and if I then decide I want to take action, if you don’t give me another link I’ve got to scroll back up to find the one I just passed, and people hate scrolling. So we find that if we can sort of spread the links out to three, maybe four in a four hundred word release, we’ve given people appropriate opportunities to click through and take the next step without having to scroll up or down…

 

Susan Bratton: That’s how…

 

Greg Jarboe: It has less to do with engines and more to do with human behavior.

 

Susan Bratton: Got it. Yup, right, we can’t forget the fact that we’re writing the announcements to make sure that people know what we’re doing.

 

Greg Jarboe: Yeah. And if you give people a hundred calls to action…

 

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

 

Greg Jarboe: “Click here, click here, click here”, they just get confused.

 

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. I’m confused already. Well this has been so helpful, and I just want to remind you that if you would like to have a personally autographed copy of Greg’s book - he has two for us - you can have your own copy of YouTube And Video Marketing An Hour a Day from Greg Jarboe by going to dishymixfan.com, posting a comment with your desire for one of the copies, and Greg and I will pick two of our favorites, so make it a good post, and we’ll get a book out to you, addressed to you. So to close the show, one of the things Greg that I asked you before we got started was what you wanted to be remembered for professionally, and you had a really great answer, and it actually was about something that you kind of taught your kids and I wanted you to share it with us as the close to the show today. Are you willing?

 

Greg Jarboe: Sure.

 

Susan Bratton: Okay, great. Tell us the story.

 

Greg Jarboe: So all three of my kids were on their high school speech and debate team, and they went out competing and, you know, sometimes they brought home trophies and sometimes they didn’t. And they were ecstatic when they won and they were crushed when they lost, and by the time my third child got into the process she was wondering whether this was worth it at all. So one of the things I shared with them, all three, was a famous quote from Teddy Roosevelt from about 1910 and the quote is from a speech he gave over in Paris called The Man In The Arena. And the quote goes something like this: “It’s not the critic who counts. It’s not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, where the door of thieves could’ve done them better. Credit belongs to the man who’s actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust, sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there’s no effort without error and shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion. Who spends himself on a worthy cause. Who at the best knows at the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst if he fails at least fails by daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls, know neither victory nor defeat.”

 

Susan Bratton: I love that.

 

Greg Jarboe: My kids put that on cards, took it with them on tournaments, and it’s interesting, I would like to think that that’s, you know, a good credo to live by.

 

Susan Bratton: I say even if all this online video marketing and SEO PR is daunting to us, we should get in the arena and go for it, right?

 

Greg Jarboe: Oh, and trust me, I’ve come short time and time again. But you, when you win you win big.

 

Susan Bratton: I love it. Well lets toast to winning big today. Lets toast with your favorite thing, a banana milkshake.

 

Greg Jarboe: Wait, wait, with a cheeseburger.

 

Susan Bratton: Oh you have to have the cheeseburger. Alright, we’re going to toast with a cheeseburger and a banana milkshake to high achievement and failure.

 

Greg Jarboe: Yes.

 

Susan Bratton: Alright. Greg, well thank you so much. You have really delivered a wealth of knowledge on this show today. I think you’ve given us a level set about a lot of things and given us an update on how fast the world of online video marketing is moving. Congratulations on the completion, although a never ending job, of your book. I really appreciate that and for giving a couple of copies to our fans too.

 

Greg Jarboe: Thank you Susan for having me on.

 

Susan Bratton: Ah, it was my pleasure. I’m your host Susan Bratton. You’ve been listening to Dishy Mix. I hope you’ll do it again next week. I’ll see you in the arena.

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