This phase essentially consists of organizing and planning for the Production phase to ensure it will run as efficiently as possible. It is almost impossible to guarantee a problem-free production, which is why proper planning is so essential. Pre-production begins with establishing the purpose of the video and the target audience. From here, the style of your video and the elements you want to include based on that audience are determined. Who will be seen in the video? What are the key points that need to be made? What will the tone be? Will there be music? How long will the video be? These are some examples of the types of questions that need to be acknowledged and addressed when choosing the target audience.

The next item to evaluate in Pre-production is the budget. Whether big or small, online video is a worthwhile investment being made for the purpose of advertising your business. Everyone has heard the saying, “You need to spend money to make money,” which is exactly the case here. If the video is low quality, the audience will most likely view the business being advertised as low quality, and will search elsewhere to get what they are looking for. In order to successfully generate business for your company, your video needs to illustrate you as the top choice to your audience. In the long run, a high-quality video will be worth it for you and your company.

After the audience and budget has been determined, a Production outline is created. All the points to be made in the video need to be clearly identified, analyzed and organized. You work off this plan to create a script. The script is a detailed document of all that will be said and concurrently seen in an itemized order. This should be as precise and specific as possible, as this is the master plan that the production will run off of. From here, the script is then broken down by scene, then by shot, with the accompanying audio going with each shot, whether it be spoken words, music, or a combination of both. Also included are the locations of each shot, the direction of each shot (i.e. wide, medium or close-up) and any camera movements (i.e. pan across, dolly up or down, or zoom in or out). Lighting and audio recording factors are taken into consideration for quality assurance. It is critical for these details to be decided on and thought out prior to the actual shoot, not during. This way, any problems that may arise during the shoot can quickly be resolved.

Pre-production is the most important part of the process. Without proper planning, there won’t be a proper execution. And if your video is important to you, you should focus on making sure every possible, specific element is covered. It’s all about the planning and the details!

First of all, SEO (search engine optimization) is more than just keywords in your metadata. The fact is, pretty much anyone can input metadata on a web page, and you don’t have to have technical engineer to do so. This is why so many people claim they can do SEO. However, if you don’t have the proper experiences or knowledge, it’s like throwing spaghetti at a wall when it’s not done, it just won’t stick.

Below I will go over 5 techniques used by bad SEO companies. These techniques should indicate a red flag and for you to run in the opposite direction before getting scammed:

1. Never trust anyone who offers you a free trial! If the offer sounds too good to be true then that’s because it is. People offering free trials are generally after one thing, your password and website access information. NEVER give out your website information without a written agreement on services and ownership.
2. We all like guarantees, but when it comes to SEO you want to be cautious. When an SEO company promises a quick turn around in a short period, run for the hills. Any guarantee less than 6 months, is a sure sign to avoid at all cost. Google, along with the other major search engines do not crawl sites on a regular basis. There is no sure way of saying when your site will be crawled. It can take weeks or even months before you start seeing results. I know most business owners are anxious to see quick results, but nothing done quickly can be done properly.
3. Back links, who doesn’t love back links? Beware of anyone that claims to provide you with hundreds or even thousands of back links. Most likely they are going to be providing you with low quality links that can end up hurting you, not helping. Quality over quantity! You also want to avoid reciprocal links at all cost!
4. Keywords, there are millions! But, not all keywords will help you gain exposure. Many unethical SEO companies will ask you what you want to rank for and then insert them on your site, without doing any research. What they have failed to notify you of is their search volume. If no one is searching for it then of course it easy to get you to rank for it, because NO ONE IS SEARCHING FOR IT! Ask for the search volumes or check them yourself using the Google adword tool. Also beware of keyword stuffing, yes there is such a thing as having to many keywords.
5. Content and website structure play a role in SEO. So anyone who is trying to sell you on SEO that has not either analyzed your site thoroughly or offers website design/development in conjunction with the SEO, are scamming you. It doesn’t matter how many back links, or keywords you are using, if you’re content and website structure isn’t properly in place, well then it’s like having a business with no name.

Written by: Jessica MacRoberts, Business Development Manager for SearchPro Systems

As you probably know, Search Engine Optimization is a huge and essential part of making your organization an important player in the online universe. Social Media profiles rank high among many of the top search engines like Google and Bing. These are more progressively indexing and ranking posts and other information from social networks (such as, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and LinkedIn). To make this even more effective, use keywords and crosslink to your pages. This will make your business easier to find. YouTube videos can also be optimized for indexing by most search engines.

Narrow your Demographics

Let’s face it; social media is easy market research. You have everything at your fingertips to connect with your industry, your customer base, and potential customers. So, ask questions! Find out what is important to your customers and those involved and your industry and listen! Keep track of what they like and don’t. Social platforms like Facebook, allow you to look into you insights into your fans and posts, allowing you to track your performance and your followers. Take a look at the type of people and businesses who like your business on SM platforms and target your posts and specials to this audience.

Look Savvy

Most businesses are on Twitter and Facebook these days, including your competitors. If you are not, this could make your business look like it is not savvy in technology, trends and communication aspects. Honestly, it also looks bad if you have these profiles but haven’t updated them in over a month—this kind of defeats the purpose.

Visibility / Word-of-Mouth

Social media makes your business visible. It is only becoming more popular by people and businesses, so you want to be seen. Since social media has a great deal to do with word-of-mouth, don’t be afraid to ask for referrals from those who are already your fans/followers. You can even offer incentives for those who do so. Having a great SM profile can also create your company with some pretty great brand recognition. Make sure your you put pictures up of your products, office, people who work there, even your customers. Put up relevant posts about your industry and news, but also mention how it relates to what you do, so they are aware of what your company does and the meaning of it. Be willing to follow, “like”, or mention others. This technique actually gets your business (and brand) out there more. Posting regular updates relating to your business and activities can remind your friends about what your company does and influence them to use your services or make referrals.

Spotlight your Products and Events

While you don’t always want to talk about just what your business does. SM does provide an excellent portal for promotion. Send out reminders about your events and create some weekly specials even if it is Twitter and Facebook exclusive, also, share testimonials by your customers/clients (people are always curious to hear what people, other than you, have to say).

Get leads

It’s important to post regularly if you want to increase your followers or fans and convert them to potential leads. If what you have to say is interesting, then it will build the curiosity and convince others to try your products/services or recommend you to someone else.

Network with Influential Businesses

Social Media makes it easy for you to network with other businesses and communities by joining groups, mentioning other businesses in posts, sending messages, and by following or liking their SM profiles.

Personalize your Company

Letting people know your own business’ story really adds sentimental and personal value to your company. Show off your business personality—is it you are trying to convey? It might be that you are humorous, customer-oriented, friendly, or corporate. Your personality should reflect in your social media posts and profile. Show pictures and videos too, after all, these say more than a thousand words.

Show-off your Expertise

Mentor your fans/followers. Share the knowledge of your business. Your company profile is a great opportunity for you to post regular updates on your activities and about important news and trends in your industry. This will attract the attention of new customers interested in your industry and increase your reputation as an expert in your field. Doing how-to’s, tips, and answer frequently asked questions, are a great way to show-off your skills.

Increase your Customer Service

Social media allows you to get questions and comments in real time. ALWAYS respond to questions and comments or give them a number to call. Be consistent and reply as soon as possible and be informative. Get your business to have a reputation for caring. Correct inaccurate information and back up a negative answer with something positive.

Get Feedback

Social Media is an incredible way for customers and curious leads to give feedback and ask questions. You can also ask your own questions and do polls to initiate feedback. This can help you discover what works well and what doesn’t. Try out different promotions and find out what posts gets the best reactions or what new products they get excited about. Keep record of frequently asked questions and frequent compliments or complaints.

Learn from Others

Social media is a wonderful resource to learn from both people and other businesses. Look at what other businesses (maybe in your industry, maybe not) have to say (within their profiles and posts) and learn from them. What are they doing to get reactions and fans? Maybe they have a good how-to post that could benefit your business.

Build a Community

SM platforms make it so easy for businesses to create their own exclusive sharing community. Encourage comments and feedback. Have them participate in contests and sweepstakes, and always make it fun. Often times, businesses will take SM way too seriously, when in fact; the point of it is to communicate and have fun! Check out your profiles daily and always reply, even if it is following them back or “liking” what they have to say. This is a great way to leverage your social media. This builds a large trust factor and better reputation for your company. Your fans/followers also are likely to share these promos, good advice, videos, etc. with their own contacts.

Written by: Kasey Andrew, Social Media Manager for SearchPro Systems

If the financial aspect of bringing in a professional team to create your online video is what has you questioning its necessity, think of it as a lucrative investment—but you don’t necessarily have to break the bank. Your video’s efficacy, however, relies on involving people who provide services that will deliver exactly what your company needs to become a leader in your industry. You want your finished product to exemplify everything your business has to offer and compel your target audience to give their business to YOU. Online video gives you the opportunity to reach beyond your local community, while maintaining the sense of personal interaction. Consumers are more likely to respond positively to a face, rather than just a name.

Depending on what your company has to offer, you have an extensive variety of options for how to use online video to benefit your business. You can establish your product or brand, the services you offer, and your professional objective. You can address universal issues that potential customers can identify with and demonstrate the solutions you can provide. You can include current client testimonials to represent your credibility and success. Most importantly, you can highlight why one should choose you and your business over your competitors. These are just some basic examples. With online video, your company’s functionality is brought to a whole new level.

Furthermore, the presence of online video for your business gives you more opportunities to be found on the online search map. Once you upload your video to a video-sharing website (such as YouTube), when people search for keywords relative to your business, your video link can be located and provided within the search results. This function also allows your video to receive a search engine rank. The higher you are ranked, the higher your link will be on the search results page, creating more traffic to your video link and/or business page, and ultimately generating more business for you! Now, doesn’t that sound like a worthwhile investment for you and your business? IT IS WORTH IT!!

Article written by Meghan Desrosiers.

You may be asking yourself many questions as a business owner, when it comes to social media. Such as, why is social media so important? How can social media help my business? And, how do I use social media for my business? If you are reading this article, then it’s probably safe to assume you are one of those people, still trying to figure out the benefits of social media. In order to help you get a little better understanding I have provided answers to what I feel are the top 3 concerns/questions business owners typically have.

Why is social media important?

The biggest reason is because it plays an important role in your rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. With social media on the rise, it is no wonder why the major search engines look at them for guidance on determining how relevant you are. It also shows your market that you are providing new information consistently. Therefore, if you want better rankings and website traffic, you NEED to be utilizing social media!

How can social media help?

There are many ways you can use social media to promote and help your business. One way is through video content. Videos are engaging and will allow you to show your market who you are, what you do and answer questions about your offerings. There are many advantages to adding video to your social media properties such as YouTube and Facebook. The will help your business gain exposure through potential sharing and drawing more traffic to your website with quality social back links.

How to use social media for businesses?

You can use social media in your business by connecting with clients/prospective clients, and keeping them updated on the latest industry and company related news. People like working with people that are well educated in their industry. Credibility goes a long way in today’s corporate world. By helping others make a better decision through informative content will help you intrigue prospects and keep current clients onboard.

Using social media for a business isn’t an easy task, and can be very stressful and time consuming for many. If you decide to take on the tasks yourself, make sure you are well educated on how to properly utilize social media, making a minimum of 3-5 well organized posts per week. You must provide a balance of industry news, company news and promotional content/posts in order to have a balanced page. If you decide to outsource or hire someone in-house, make sure they are properly educated on using social media for business and have experience. This article is a prime example of how using social media can help your business, I just provided you with some informative content, which answers a question about my industry, without coming off as I’m trying to sell you on services we provide.

What business doesn’t want to generate more qualified leads? Studies indicate that one of the main issues businesses endure is the lack of qualified prospect leads. Whether you’re B to B or B to C, you need to have qualified leads in order to expand your business and become successful. The main problem for many businesses is either they don’t have the time, money or ability to develop them.

There are many ways to receive qualified leads: you can purchase them (which are usually very expensive and not always cost effective), print advertising (which typically isn’t targeted, and can become costly), Television commercials (which can be very costly, and generally not targeted), telemarketing (can be costly and have a slow turn around, but usually effective), SEO (which is one of the most cost effective ways to advertise directly to your target market), online videos/VSEO (can be costly or inexpensive depending on the production company’s capabilities, very good conversion rates if done properly and is targeted), Social Media (very inexpensive, can be time consuming, and has a good conversion rate if done properly), and so much more.

The TOP 4 must haves to generate more qualified leads are as follows:

• Website - Well constructed, with a clear call to action. This means it should have a contact form asking questions, that will qualify the lead (i.e. who is the decision maker, what is your budget, when are you looking to purchase, etc.), good use of informative content and it should be easy to navigate.
• SEO – It’s all about organic location. Organic SEO will provide you long term equitable placement with a gradual turn around. PPC is a great way to get instant exposure. However, it’s extremely costly, provides no long term equity and is ineffective for many companies/industries (reports say that 4 out of 5 people that use search engines never click on a PPC ad.).
• Online Video’s/VSEO – Proven to be the most preferred form of content, and most clicked on if available. Getting those video’s to rank is not an easy task. There are too many companies out their promoting VSEO that don’t have a clue on how to do it. Make sure the videos are informative and have a clear call to action to order to work properly. See more on web videos here http://www.searchprosystems.com/maximize-your-business%e2%80%99s-video-visibility-with-video-seo-vseo
• Social media – The most inexpensive way to generate qualified leads, and the most underutilized. Social media properties such as Twitter, Facebook and Linked In are great tools to use, for networking, branding and driving awareness for who you are and what you offer (yes B to B can benefit from social media too!). This can be very time consuming and ineffective if you do not utilize them in a proper manner.

In order to get most out of your dollar, you want to use them all in conjunction of one another. Spending $20,000 on a beautiful site is of no use if you’re not using SEO or even worse the website is not able to be optimized (same goes for videos and VSEO). And SEO is no good if the website doesn’t have a clear call to action or is not informative.

2. K.I.S.S
Keep It Short and Simple. An online video for video seo (vseo), should not be more than 3 minutes. Any longer, may exceed a web browser’s attention span. It should be focused on a specific topic (try not to ramble!), be genuine, and include your contact information at the end.

3. An Eye Pleaser.
We don’t expect you to spend tons of money on a video or video seo (vseo), but it should look somewhat professional. Using an old cheap camera can be kind of a turnoff, especially if the person taking the video doesn’t know what he/she is doing. People are naturally attracted to things that are visually appealing so the video should come in clear, be edited well, and should not be too shaky. Keep it colorful and add movement to draw viewers in. Be enthusiastic (but not over-the-top), it will make you seem warmer and more relatable. Animation can make great attention grabbers too and can even help explain things better to the audience.

4. The Sound of Video
Not only does visual play a huge role in video, but so does sound. No one wants to pay attention to a video where the sound keeps cutting out or you have to turn the volume way up and put your head against the speaker just to know what their talking about. Test out your sound before you shoot the complete video and make sure you have decent audio so you don’t come in sounding all muffled. Another part of sound is what you say in the video. Not only should it be informational but it doesn’t hurt to include a sense of humor too! Humor will likely add to the appeal of your business as long as it is in good taste and doesn’t come off too cheesy. Music is great feature to incorporate into video as long as it goes with the theme and feel of everything else.

5. SEO!!!!
In order to make video seo (vseo) work and rank on search engines you must make sure your video is properly optimized. First, upload your video to a video sharing site (i.e. YouTube). Then, you need to add relevant textual content that search engine robots can easily read and categorize. When you publish your video add text transcripts and captions (with links and information) on the page with your business video. An important aspect of video seo (VSEO) is using metadata descriptions; this should include a description of the video using multiple keywords. Also, use these relevant keywords within the title of your video to make it easier to search. On top of this, optimize your video’s URL to contain information about the video and keywords.

To further optimize your video, try to link to your video from outside sources when possible; from websites, blogs, social media, etc. You should also encourage ratings and reviews on your video too, because search engines pay more attention to videos with higher ratings. This also shows that people really like your video and are likely to share it with their friends.

This video just goes to show how important it is for you and your business to be a part of the Social Media world. I mean, 574,000,000 Facebook users worldwide and 190,000,000 Twitter users worldwide! It’s IMPERATIVE that you get involved. Television, Radio, Newspaper and other ‘old school’ methods of advertising are faltering, because people spend an average of EIGHT HOURS online each day! People are watching TV, listening to commercial free radio and reading news articles online, so commercials and traditional advertisements can be avoided (for the most part).

When Television was first introduced into every home in America, there were very few companies who could afford to advertise on TV. After a few years, hundreds of businesses were able to, so commercials became shorter in length and in order for your commercial to stand out from others, your commercial needed to be flashy and short and have a catchy jingle or slogan. In 2010, those types of advertisements are the exact opposite of what people are looking for. There are so many business options out there that people want to choose based on trust and likability, and using uninformative, cheesy slogans, can actually turn people away from your business. People are going online now to search for businesses with that trust and likability factor. So businesses now need to cater to people’s online searches, (hence SEO) to be informative, (hence website content, videos and VSEO) and to be personable and likeable (hence Social Media).

Twenty four out of the world’s 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation. The average person only spends 15 minutes listening to the radio during an average week. More than 50% of people are watching TV online. You be the judge, but know that traditional marketing is most likely in a permanent decline, while SEO, VSEO and Social Media Marketing are experiencing shocking increases in worldwide popularity.

Yahoo Search Direct is similar to Google Instant, in that it shows suggested search results as you begin typing your search term or phrase. However, it also nicely displays a box of three or more suggested links to the right of each suggested search result.

The features increase user friendliness as well as search speed and accuracy, which is the goal of every search engine. So far, Yahoo users seem pleased with the update.

As I discussed before, very minimal SEO changes will be necessary, if any. This feature is a bonus for businesses who are practicing SEO, as potential clients and customers will be able to find your website(s) more easily and quickly. Not only that, but as suggested keyword/key phrase results are listed below, when users click on your keyword, those users will now be a much more targeted audience since they’re able to find specifically what they’re looking for (hopefully your website) with a little bit of guidance from Yahoo Search Direct. Also, if your site ranks highly enough for a given keyword, you may even land a spot in the three suggested links to the right, which should prove to be a highly valuable location in Yahoo searches. The only thing SEOers may want to consider is the use of lengthy key phrases. Google Instant and Yahoo Search begin showing suggested results after a single letter or two, so the odds of a user typing in your entire key phrase are slim. A lengthy key phrase may not even show up in the suggested list either, so test out your keywords and key phrases and make the necessary changes from there.

Sara Beaudoin is the Marketing Communications Manager for SearchPro Systems