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This is more or less just a few random thoughts I had on the future of vlogging or video blogging. Soon, technology will be to the point were you can watch these sorts of videos on cell phone and other mobile devices. As soon as people can take, upload and watch video all from their cell phones we’ll see a huge explosion of vlogging. Might as well get used to it and start preparing for it, vlogging is here to stay. Not to mention it is much harder to steal other people’s content when your face is the one distributing it. Cheers.

From time to time I have been known to venture out of my Internet cubby hole into the real world. Usually when that happens it involves some sort of social gathering, speaking or private consulting. If you are interested in any of the following, shoot me an email at josh@joshwhitford.com or head one over to my contact page.

Social Gathering

If you would like me to attend your social gathering and feel the need to shower me with free passes and perks, go ahead. If you would like me to blog about your pow-wow and share it with my readers, I encourage everything stated earlier . If not, I will probably find it interesting and will talk about it anyway.

Speakings

If you would like me to talk about online marketing, online advertising, blogging, Twitter, SEO or another similar topic I would love to do so. I have done past speakings for small and medium groups and will continue to help as many people grow online as possible. If you are interested, I am located in Fargo, ND, and will travel almost anywhere given the right set of circumstances.

Consulting

If you or your company would like a more intimate or private meeting discussion, send me an email explaining what you are looking for. I will not sell you a bill of goods I do not know about. I will also fully disclose any and all techniques I have learned and used for my very own business and past clients.

This is the twenty-fifth day of a 30-day trial. Follow the link to Marketing Ideas En Masse to find out more.

Since I am on the theme of sports from the last post about Dick Beardsley’s Running Store Fargo I was shown an article talking about Nike targeting female athletes. Thanks to Apyrl from the Women Like Sports blog it appears that Nike is starting a new marketing campaign to encourage and promote women’s athletics. Here is an excerpt:

The Nike Gamechangers: Change the Game for Women in Sport competition encourages people from around the world to showcase their game by outlining their exciting ideas for women in sport on their website.

“Nike understands the transformative power of sport and we know there are social innovators around the world doing amazing work in this area,” states Nike “Let Me Play” Global Director, Maria Bobenreith. “Through the Nike Game Changers competition we are providing an online platform to form a community of game changers and showcase their ideas and innovations around empowering women through sport.”

The idea is to find new and innovative ideas and use the power of social interaction and promotion to determine the top ideas for creating more opportunities for women in sports. By way of blogging, voting, commenting and group participation, ideas can move up or down in popularity. The most popular ideas will be voted on by a panel of judges resulting in the top ten winning $5,000.

Even if you do not offer a proposal of your own, we invite you to join the dialogue. Your experience and insights are invaluable to the emerging field of sport for social change.

Join the online Changemakers community to make suggestions and recommend resources that will help refine and strengthen the strategies presented by competition entrants. Tell us what you’re thinking, how you see the field, where its challenges and opportunities lie.

I would love to see a tribe of people build up around this idea and only time will tell how successful the idea turns out to be. I think that there are many positives stacked on the side of success such as group interaction, worthy cause, enagaging people with a similar interest, connecting people and a place for central and quick communication. I have no doubt that this will produce some sort of results in promotion of women’s sports and female athletes. Have you heard of this competition before? What are your thoughts?

What do you do when you don’t have a lot of time to express your thoughts and ideas?

1. You can hire an extremely fast typist and have them pound it out for you
2. You can wait till you have more time to write
3. Post a video and move on

Check out the video below

{seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/1ybZp1UAHk_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Seesmic marketing ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/lPTuWtipx3″}}}

Mentioned Links:

• Seesmic.com
• Textual Healing

These are the responses to the second round of Ask Josh. Occasionally I open up the floor for people to ask whatever they feel like asking. I don’t think there will be any perfect answers, but you asked for my opinion, so I’m giving it . Here we go:

Sherry Asks: What webhosting are you using? Have you heard of Shann Host or Dotster ? What do you think of the webhosting that I just mention.

Josh: I use 1and1.com as my webhosting. I have not heard of Shann Host or Dotster. I personally think web hosting has to do a lot with your needs are and how much you would like to spend. I have two servers, one shared and one dedicated, that I use for personal and business. I can tell you that the dedicated server customer support is much more knowledgeable and prompt. If you are only hosting a couple of sites and don’t drive tons and tons of traffic, focus more on the price. If you are hitting it hard, focus on the services and equipment.

BM Asks: How do I  start blogging? How many blogs do you own? How many are active?

Josh: I started full-time blogging at the start of the year. I had written a few blog posts before that but wouldn’t really consider myself a blogger at that point. Currently, I work on about 10 or so active blogs. I have a few drifters that are waiting for some attention. Mostly I use the extra blogs to drive niche traffic or build support for other sites I work on.

Chelle Asks: Is the majority of your traffic from social media or organic search results?

Which makes me wonder, why do you think more people don’t search for more marketing related terms? I’ve done a lot of keyword research for it and there are very few that aren’t broad terms that get more than 20 searches a day. Are people just not thinking that way for marketing info yet?

Josh: Most of my traffic comes from organic searches or referring site. I am averaging about 150 marketing related searches a day via the major three Google, MSN and Yahoo.

It’s hard to have an accurate view of search traffic from just keyword searches alone. Once you are first for random marketing related terms, you would be surprised of the amount of searches they bring. I have moved up a lot recently for “marketing ideas” and related terms like “Halloween Marketing Ideas” which will bring a nice steady flow of traffic in at least until the end of the month. I usually see what people are searching for when they come to my blog and at what page I show up in the serps for that term. If they are finding me on page 5 and I know with a little work I can get to page 1, I will spend a little time doing that. The first spot on page 1 receives about 80% of the clicks for that search term. You never know what you are going to get until you do it.

shawal Asks: It is possible to sell a blogspot blog, if yes, HOW?

Josh: Technically, no. But can you work something out with a potential buyer? Probably yes. Not easy. That is one of the hard things to overcome in free hosting like Blogspot. Everything you do there is like renting a house. You don’t get the equity you put into it.

Driveway Sealing Asks: I’ve started a new site and I wanted to know: What would you do to get it ranked highly in the SERPS in under 3 months?

Is it blog commenting? or directory submissions? a combo of both maybe? Anything else I am missing?

Josh: I would approach this one of two ways depending on how old the domain is. If it is a brand new domain, you are going to shoot up in the serps and then right back down to work your way up again. This is Google’s way of preventing spam sites from taking over their serps. So in that case I would do directory submissions, blog commenting on dofollow high pr pages and reciprocal linking like blog rolls. It’s as effective as one-way links, but it passes link love more evenly while you crawl the new site back up the serps.

For an older site that has been established for at least 1-2 years, I would focus on high quality anchor links. Write a guest post for a high pr site with your link in it and comment on high pr pages with a contextual anchor link. I don’t personally do this but it works if done correctly to purchase a link from a high pr page. Sometimes it can run $30-40 a month for a good link, but it is an option. Always consider the risk vs. reward factor before doing any of this. Link building is strictly forbidden in search engines TOS.