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

By now, you are probably wonder where in the world am I coming up with all of these different topics and ideas. If not, I will tell you anyways. I set up a few different Google Alerts and have been digging through them for little gems of info to pass along.

I believe videos will continue to gain major ground as Internet speeds increase and more people figure out how to upload their videos easily to sites like YouTube. With that in mind, here is a good tip for marketing your videos:

The first thing that you have to determine is where you are going to post the videos that you are making for your products and services. Some different places that you can post your videos are on your blog, on your website, and on video hosting sites like YouTube.

The point is that you want to have as many people as possible look at your video. You can also ask your online friends if they are willing to post your video on their blogs. There are places that are going to bring more results than others, and it’s a good idea to research which places are going to be the best for the results that you want.

You can read the rest here at Articlebiz.com

The holidays are upon us and with that it is time to ramp up the marketing of retail businesses. For this post I used the assistance of HARO (help a reporter out) and got a good return of ideas. I will explain more about HARO and different ideas on how to use the free service a little later.

1. The first suggestion comes from Leah Dossey who is the owner, art director/ designer for Blue Leaf Creative. She suggests:

2. Next we have Karl Schmieder who is one of the founders of MessagingLab in New York. Karl suggests:

3. Erin Read Ruddick, the client services director at Creating Results, LLC – Strategic Marketing, suggested that I find a video clip from the show WKRP in Cincinnati “Turkeys Away.”
Here is the video, you might have to click here to view it.

also suggested by Erin:

We’ve done multiple fall promotions for clients, including creating a giant corn maze for a real estate developer that drove thousands of leads, but nothing specifically Thanksgiving.

4. Next Benjamin Christie suggested I take a look at his blog www.gourmetads.com.

“Taking advantage of targeted advertising next to online recipes for holiday favorites is a great way to get your brand at the top of every shopper’s grocery list this year. When a consumer goes online to look up recipes on how to roast their Thanksgiving turkey, will they be thinking Butterball, Norbest or Honeysuckle White? That all depends on whose ad is cleverly placed right beside the roast turkey recipe.

More and more consumers are turning to the Internet for their recipe needs; especially their holiday recipe needs and smart advertisers are taking advantage of this trend with their Thanksgiving advertising in order to create brand awareness during the critical holiday sales rush. Ideally, companies should get their products placed four weeks before the big holiday as many shoppers have already begun to stock their pantries in preparation for the big event.”

5. Lastly I figured I would throw out a suggestion of my own called the Turkey Hunt

I would aim for success by getting as much local publicity as possible, including local business sponsors. Then right on or around Thanksgiving Day I would dress 3-4 people up in big turkey costumes and have them run around in a big field. I would charge people a couple bucks for a bucket of water balloons (all proceeds go to a local charity). Next give them all water balloon launchers and let them rip. The first person to hit each turkey with a water balloon wins that turkey’s prize package from the local sponsors.

So we create a fun way to promote sponsoring businesses, free prizes and also donations to charities. Maybe even instead of charging for the water balloons we offer a swap of a balloon or two for a nonperishable food bank item.

Do you have any Thanksgiving marketing ideas for local businesses or charities? Have you ran a successful marketing campaign on Thanksgiving? Tell us your stories.

Chances are if you live in a big city you are no stranger to high-speed police chases followed by a news helicopter and live commentary. Is it sad that the whole time I watched a chase on TV yesterday I was thinking I wish my website logo was on the roof?

I am not sure that I would necessarily want to be associated with a fleeing criminal, but it makes me think about different marketing strategies, hopefully without anyone going to jail for a long time. Not to mention that one time I was almost killed by some 16-year-old in minivan running from the cops. Thankfully I looked up and saw what was about to happen to the rear of my car. But I digress. There are legal and illegal ways to spread a message. I hope most go for the legal.

I don’t think anyone could ever condone running from the police unless you are part of the Gumball 3000. This is a cross country free-for-all that takes place once a year somewhere around the world. It happens about once every other year in the USA.

The Gumball 3000 is a combination of too many people with too much money Baha’in across the country as quick as they can in their upper-end sports cars. They also have a huge following (a Tribe). If you have ever seen them you would know because all 160 or so cars would be zooming by you at 100+ MPH on the interstate. Here is a clip of the 2006 Gumball.

The Gumball 3000 is an extreme example of a Tribe of people taking part in something they love, fast cars and parties. This originally started out as a recreation from the movie Cannonball Run where Burt Reynolds races an assortment of muscle cars across the country on the silver screen. Now the Gumball has taken on a life of its own with documentary crews and celebrities going along for the ride.

In order to participate in a Gumball rally you will need a fast car and lots of money (the car in the video was $60,000), not to mention gas and food (AAA extra).

The question I ask myself is how can I create a group of people like those Gumballers? Seems like the answer to that would be pretty simple:

• Focus on the thing everybody in that group loves (like fast cars and parties)
• Organize / lead the group into an idea (like starting a rally including the above)
• Have a way of separating them from others (the high cost of entry)
• Allow the merchandise to spread (stickers, shirts, videos, etc.)
• Rise and repeat

If you are running a business that has a core group of people who center around one thing, your goal should be is to enable those particular people to talk about and share that thing with others. Become a leader and an enabler. If people are buying your products, you already have the core thing needed to build a Tribe. Now it’s a matter of finding what they need, not what you want.

Here is an Interview with Turnip of Power | Social Networking marketer on the creation of a new advertising network called CMF ADS. CMF (Changing Marketing Forever) ADS is a widget-based advertising system that allows advertisers to purchase ad space on quality niche blogs on a CPM (cost per thousand views) basis. Currently, there are 20 blogs in the network that have been selectively chosen to participate in the initial launching.

I like discovering new and up and coming products or services and thought CMF ADS would be a great candidate to share with everyone. After you read through the questions below, I encourage you to visit CMF ADS and see what it has to offer. Without further adieu, here you go:

What was your motivation for starting CMF ADS?

My motivation was to implement an idea I had posted several times on both my blog and on the Entrecard Forums. Each time the idea was ignored or given the canned response of “We have limited resources for that.” Then recently I was disappointed with the Performancing Ads Network. Stan from razzball.com approached me and said “Why can’t we do something like that?” That’s how it all started.

What are your short and long-term goals for CMF ADS?

Short term the goal was to get good people involved who wanted to be part of something new. We wanted to test our code, our server, public reaction, and iron out all the little unexpected surprises. Long term we would like to expand our portfolio of blogs and reach out to other social networks. As we are only 3 weeks old today, we are still refining our initial goals. Just yesterday I rewrote the widget code to allow for this expansion.

What is your major selling point for CMF ADS (elevator pitch)?

For publishers: We monetize your social traffic for you. All you have to do is maintain a quality blog. We help promote your blog, help you with your website when help is requested, and at the end of the day provide you with a small paycheck for displaying our widget in previously unused space next to their social networking widget.

For advertisers: We get your message out there on 20 of the best up and coming websites. No need to interact with so many small sites individually. We bundle our members’ page views and sell them to you in a very affordable CPM bundle, providing geotargetting and other advanced features the individual site owner could not easily provide due to a lack of technical expertise.

I could imagine many bloggers will want to utilize your service. Do you have strict quality control admission?

We have quality control on both the publisher and advertiser ends. Nobody wants to advertise on horrible made for adsense splogs. Likewise, no blogger wants scammy ads on their website. We manually approve all blogs and ads, allowing both publisher and advertiser to opt out of any ads or sites they wish. Each blog in our network was discussed in detail before being sent an invitation to join.

If a blog is interested in joining what will be the minimum requirements for joining?

Initially we invited only WordPress blogs. Since then we have allowed blogs using other content management platforms to join. The main requirements are your own domain name, a minimum of a 250 pixel wide sidebar, and maintaining a high-quality blog. Sometimes we work around the sidebar issue in special cases, but generally adhere to these rules.

How does the advertising widget effect the speed and efficiency of a site?

Our widget opens in an i-frame, so won’t ever slow down the rest of a site from loading. In addition, we host the bottom image locally, further speeding up the process.

What has been the overall perception of the widget so far?

Reception has been great. The first day we announced our network we sold 25,000 impressions as well as numerous high-quality blogs looking to join the network. Many curious bloggers have taken notice, along with a few advertisers.

Do you see yourself in competition to Entrecard or merely using some of their ideas to create a stand along advertising network?

We don’t see ourselves in competition with Entrecard or using their ideas. We took twenty well-respected blogs and made an ad network out of them. Now because we are active in the Entrecard community it was only natural that these twenty blogs were discovered through Entrecard. One blog has since left Entrecard and we welcome that, as well. A good blog is a good blog, Entrecard or not.

What measures are you establishing to provide the smoothest growth possible?

To ensure smooth growth, we are only letting in a fraction of the blogs asking to join. Each step of the way we have checked to make sure all issues were addressed before moving on to the next phase.

Conclusion:

I think this network has some great potential to develop into a full service advertising network. I don’t know how often they will be accepting new publishers, but I would make admission highly selective, more on the prestigious side. Say it only has enrollment every two weeks and only X number of new publishers will be allowed in during the beta stage, kind of like Gmail was invite only for the longest time. This would help in the beginning to have controlled growth of all the system resources preserving the quality of the network and service by not having a bunch of down time.

I really enjoy when people go out on their own by mixing and matching various different ideas to produce a worthwhile product. Time will tell how things play out, but I would again encourage you to head over to CMF ADS and check it out for yourself.

Since humans picked up the very first stick and rock to help make their lives easier, we haven’t stopped. The same goes for tools online. Learning how and where to find those tools along with using them help make our lives much easier is vital for productivity. Here are my Top 10 Web Marketer Tools (in no particular order):

1. SEO Quake Toolbar

The SEO Quake toolbar is a FireFox extension that allows you to quickly and easily see quick stats about every web page you visit. As I am browsing from site to site I can simply look at my toolbar and know roughly how much traffic, authority, backlinks, age, keywords and indexed pages a site has. This is invaluable information when you are doing research on clients or competition. With a few clicks you can see much more detailed information until you are blue in the face. Here is where you can get the SEO Quake Toolbar.

2. COcomment

COcomment is another great tool to allow you to track the online conversations you have had. Every time you leave a comment on a fellow website or blog it records that and feeds it into your COcomment inbox. If anyone replies to that comment in the future you can see that to continue your conversation. I use this every day, and it helps to build your trust on other websites as a member and participator, even if you only visit to update your conversation. This is a bigger time saver and an absolute must for maintaining an online presence in all different communities.

3. Google Alerts

I have touched on this before and won’t exhaust the topic, but if you are trying to become an authority on a subject there is no better way to stay up to date than with Google Alerts. You can play with the settings to receive alerts by email one a day, hour, as they happen and so on. This is a great tool for brand management and to see what others are saying about your subject, company or yourself.

4. Ping.fm

Ping.fm allows you to send messages to all of your various Twitters, Facebook, Myspace and just about every other major social networking site. I have it set up through my Gmail that allows me to send a message automatically to my Ping.fm dashboard and it simultaneously updates all of my social networking platforms. Huge, HUGE, time saver. Never again do you have to log in and out of 20 different sites to update all your friends and followers. It’s great.

5. All in One SEO Plugin

All in One SEO Plugin is for self-hosted Wordpress sites. So, if you have a blog and use Wordpress, you need this plugin. This plugin allows you to quickly optimize your post title, description and keywords. When you do this on a subject like Halloween Marketing Ideas, when someone searches for that keyword term it shows up in the search engine instead of your normal blog title. It looks better to the eye, meets the searcher criteria, allows search engines to categorize better and helps overall in SEO.

6. Auto Social Poster (ASP)

ASP is really a neat tool to automate the initial boost of your post in the search engines in a given term. What ASP does is allows you to automatically bookmark your newest posts to sites like Delicious, Scuttle sites, Flurl, and many, many more. You can create as many different accounts to all the sites you would like, and it will randomly select as many or few sites to post to. This gives each of your newest posts an automatic backlinks from dozens of social bookmarking sites. If you are writing on a trend type subject, this one plugin alone can help to drive hundreds of visitors.

7. G-Lock Blog Finder

G-Lock Blog Finder program allows you to search for keyword terms similar to yours in order to build good backlinks. If you have a blog about apartments and want to build that blog as an authority on apartments you can use this program to help find those apartment blogs. If you are leaving and participating on their site in a useful manner and have similar content, it should be easy to attract like audience to your own blog. This not only builds your reputation but helps to create more trickle traffic from similar sites.

8. FoxyProxy

The FoxyProxy plugin for FireFox allows you to view the web semi-anonymously by routing your web viewing through a proxy. This helps to reduce your footprint on the web and lets you stay one up on the competition. You can pick and choose how you want your settings and what sites should and shouldn’t be routed through a proxy. Once again, a very useful and free tool that can be used in many different ways.

9. Aweber Newsletter

Building a Aweber newsletter list is a very valuable tool. If you have not jumped on board I would encourage you to do so as soon as you reasonably can. Permission based marketing is becoming a huge tool for marketers to utilize. If people like what you have to offer, setting them up to receive your newsletter is a great way to keep them in contact and make genuine offers you feel will help them. This doesn’t mean you can now spam everyone on your list but it does mean you now have an opportunity to point them in the right direction hopefully with an affiliate link or commission cut. Don’t lie, cheat or steal and you can make good money from this tool just by being responsible.

10. Bookmarking Demon (BMD)

BMD is a lot like the auto social poster plugin in how it helps to automate backlinks from bookmarking sites. These sites help to increase exposure for your content and hopefully some additional traffic as well. With this program you have the ability to bookmark and share your site, useful information or even your friend’s site. This would be the equivalent of an online shotgun with the idea of getting your site out to as many places as possible. This has the potential to be used in a spam-like manner but if used correctly can again help you to increase your digital footprint online.

Before you do anything online you should make yourself familiar with all the tools and possible consequences of using those tools. If used improperly some of these can get your site deindexed or ever banned, resulting in less traffic and authority. You also never want to spend money on any tools or programs that you will not utilize fully. Look up reviews and what others have to say about any one tool over another and proceed with caution. These are a few of the tools I use on a day-to-day basis, and I personally find them useful.