Author Archives: Tom Antion

Video Marketing – Leveling The Playing Field For Small Businesses

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Video has become so easy and so inexpensive to produce for the web, small companies now have the advantage that used to only belong to large corporations in terms of exposure to the public. Not long ago, before the web, you only saw video media on television. Television advertising is so expensive that only the big companies had the money to make commercials. That left out millions of small businesses that could have made an impact of the public if only they had the budget. A great commercial or promotional campaign could have been the turning point for many of these small businesses in growth and profitability. It was a game they could not afford to play….

But no longer.The Internet has opened up the possibilities and access to the public like never before. Online video is the key to small business success on the Internet. In fact, online video is reaching more people than even television due to mobile devices… people can watch their favorite shows, commercials and all, while they are doing other things. A small pizza shop now has just as much access to the general public as a major company. In this regard, small businesses are looking for staff that can manage their online video needs.

At the Internet Marketing Training Center, you can learn everything you need to know about online video, hosting, sharing, web page design and social networking skills to take any company to the next level of business, whether it's your company or someone else's. Find out how easy it can be to get started!

Internet Marketing: Target a Niche Market for Your Home-Based Internet Marketing Business

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One of the advantages of Internet marketing is that you can select a topic that interests you and target a niche market that shares your passion. After you choose your subject and narrow your audience, you can decide which approach to take to reach your market.

How will you reach your customer?

  • One-to-one approach
    This approach relies on search engine keywords to draw users to your website as they browse the Internet. Once they have found you and given you permission to use their email to contact them, you may reach out to your customers through email promotions. In addition, you can nurture a client relationship by routinely posting blogs and inviting visitors to your site to interact directly with you.
  • Appeal to specific interests and locations
    With this method, you can define your market according to age group, gender, geographical location and special interests and then post ads based on the keywords your target enters when browsing. For example, a tire company can post advertisements on racing and trucking websites with the assurance that the audience has a similar interest.

What do you need to start targeting your market?

For starters, you will need a website, an email program and a blog. You will also need to know how to use keywords, shopping carts, merchant accounts, autoresponders, search engines and social networking programs In addition, you will need to develop and package products such as e-books, MP3 files, and e-courses.

To discover how to easy it is to learn these skills required for operating your home-based Internet marketing business, visit http://imtcva.org/program/curriculum/.

Print-on-Demand: Have you heard about createspace.com

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You know that book you have always wanted to write but never did because you would have to pay the printer to print hundreds more than you need and then store them forever in your garage? I have good news for you. Now with print-on-demand, you can have as few as one book printed at a nominal price. This means you can order just enough to sell at your book signing,  for back-of-the-room sales, for selling from your website or for giving away to promote your business. Each book is printed when you or your client orders it and you only pay for the quantity ordered, whether it is one or 1,000.

We are using createspace.com for print-on-demand. It’s a free online self-publishing tool that helps you prepare your book for printing. While compiling and formatting your book takes a lot of time, the actual process of uploading your book to createspace is very simple and consists of three basic steps:

  • Enter information about your book into the createspace software.
  • Upload a pdf file of the content.
  • Upload a pdf file of the cover.

After you upload the pdf files, createspace prints a proof copy, which costs about $3.00 for a 100-page book, and mails it to you. When you have approved the proof copy, createspace will print as few or as many copies as you want. When the book is completed, createspace will even distribute it on Amazon.com for you. You only pay when a customer orders a copy and that money comes out of your commission.

You can also order copies to sell on your own website and through other retailers. It’s a win-win because you have no setup fees or and no inventory to store.

Check it out at https://www.createspace.com/.

Pay Per Click – Be An Advertising Professional

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Pay per click… what in the world is it?

These are the sponsored ads you see in the sidebar section of Google results (and all the other search engine as well). They advertise the products and services on the Internet for companies all over the world. Instead of relying on the search engines to get your website on the first page of results, you can purchase an ad to show on the first page. Sponsored ad placement is determined by how much you are willing to pay for each “click” by bidding on certain keywords or phrases.

Anyone who visits Facebook (and who hasn't?) will notice ads on the right hand side for websites, Facebook pages and groups. These are paid ads too, again determined by bids you place on keywords. These ads are targeted to searchers by the keywords they use when searching the Internet. Of course, creating your ad is not as easy as it would seem.

If you are going to pay real money for someone just clicking on an ad, you will need to make sure that your ad will really sell or you could spend money very quickly and get few results. How you write the ad, what kind of people are clicking on it and how well your website converts into sales are all things you have to learn before getting involved in pay per click. At the Internet Marketing Training Center, we teach you those finer points of writing great ads and making sure your website is ready to sell. Armed with this knowledge, you can run your own business profitably or work for a number of larger companies that place ads everyday. Find out how you can be an advertising professional today!

America’s First School for Internet Marketing

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Step into the Internet Marketing Training Center where you can make your dreams come true…  See what we can offer you that will open your path to bigger and better opportunity's.  We have it to where you can take the whole semester all together or you can take individual semester's when you have time and at your own pace.  We also have Tuition Finance options/Payment plans available,  You can call us @ 757-687-5190 and we will direct you.  You can even go to the right of the page click on LIVE CHAT and you can leave a message and we will get right back to you, Thanks for visiting!

Web Design: What Is Web Accessibilty and Why Does it Matter?

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If you have done even the tiniest bit of web design and entered alt text for an image, you have already encountered the concept of web accessibility. Maybe you were in a class and instructed to type a description of the image into the alt text field. You may have even received a brief explanation that alt text helps people with vision problems because a screen reader will read the words to them and they will know a specific image is being loaded onto the web page.

While alt text helps the visually impaired, there are people with other disabilities that you may not have considered when designing your website. These people may have mobility issues, deafness, color blindness, learning disabilities or difficulty concentrating. The practice of making your website usable by people of all abilities and disabilities is called “web accessibility.”

Why make your site web accessible?
The obvious reason to design a web accessible site is to make it easier for people with disabilities to use your site. However, there are two other reasons to keep in mind:

  • To avoid lawsuits and bad publicity
  • To benefit from a wider audience

Making online content more accessible
The United States Distance Learning Association offers these ideas for making online content more accessible:
1. With an audio excerpt also provide a text transcript of that excerpt.

2. Many blind students use screen readers to read a website. To help these readers, use tags in your web designs to give alternative explanations for images and links.

3. Avoid long, scrolling pages, and avoid putting important information at the bottom of a page because if a screen reader starts at the top of the page, it may take a long time to get to this content at the bottom of the page.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) offers guidelines for web page accessibility (see http://www.w3.org/WAI)

Web developers can download aDesigner for free from http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/adesigner. This tool is a disability simulator, and will test your website for accessibility problems.

Where can you learn more?
There is much to learn and much you can do to make your site available to everyone. Fortunately, there is also much information to assist you in achieving web accessibility. For starters, check out WebAIM’s site. WebAIM is a non-profit organization within the Center for Persons with Disabilities and their site is packed with information to help you understand how people with disabilities interact with the web and how you can design your website to comply with principles and standard regulations.

Here’s what you will find on their site:

  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines with four legal principles (POUR)
  • Principles of Accessible Design
  • Training and technical support
  • Experiences of Students with Disabilities

See WebAIM at http://www.webaim.org/intro/.

To learn more about designing your website, visit http://imtcva.org/program/curriculum/

Free Internet Traffic For Your Websites

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Getting free traffic to your website is easier than you might think! There are so many avenues to traffic that it can feel like your standing in the middle of the highway… the information superhighway that is.

Let's go over just a few of ways that you can get traffic to website without spending a dime.

* Social networking – we all have heard about this by now. Major sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter provide profiles that are searchable all over the Internet and can contain a number of valuable links to your websites. Over half a billion people are now members of social networking sites and the potential traffic stream is endless.

* Article sites – writing articles not only builds you and your business as the expert, the links you leave in the author's profile or resource box can help drive heavy traffic to your website from all over the Internet.

* Videos – free hosting sites such as YouTube and Revver not only let your searchers meet you face to face, leaving a link to your website in the profiles and even in the video itself as a watermark can help send valuable prospects your way.

* Leaving your URL in the comments boxes of other peoples blogs, social networking profiles and forums will let people easily click on your site to see what your business is all about.

* Discussion boards – There are hundreds of discussion boards on every subject under the sun all over the Internet. This is a great place not only to leave a link to your site, but also engage other readers and ask or answer questions about a subject that makes you the expert!

* Traffic exchanges – an exchange is a service that lets you click on a certain number of URLs in exchange for others clicking on yours. You can earn credits just by clicking on sites and trade them in for free ad space.

* Free classifieds – search for these free classifieds and you'll find amazingly that there are quite a few you can utilize. A site like Craigslist is an example.

In the old days of the Internet, you had to rely on getting good search positioning to get any traffic at all. But using these short cuts to driving traffic to your site will accelerate visits and make big potential money.

Point of View- Commercial

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Here are some images of the way we set up for the Commercial this past weekend.  We have views from the back right of the set, back left, and also one from the talent's point of view.  Adding any kind of video's is one of the best way to get traffic to your site, you can share video's on Twitter, YouTube, Friends, Myspace, Facebook, Ect….

Before the Commercial we had to make sure all the Talent was contacted and for them to know what was expected of them.  Then we had to make sure we had all the hair products, make-up, and even wardrobe was picked out and ironed.  You really have to be on top of it and GO GO GO until it's over with.  We had the Talent come in 30 minute increments that way there was not to much waiting, but at the end of it everything came together and looked AWESOME! Way to go everyone, Thanks for helping out and being apart of the team.

Video Marketing: Use Camtasia to Create Short Videos for your Website

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One way to increase your rankings in Google is to use short videos on your website. You may be surprised to discover that you can create short videos even if you don’t have a video camera. Using Camtasia, a screen capture video capture software, you can record anything you can put on your screen and can narrate over top of it from a microphone or from your speakers.

After you capture your presentation, you can revise it by cutting and/or pasting in various segments. In addition, you can overlay your voice, as well as sound effects or music, onto the presentation. Camtasia allows you to record audio while screen-capturing a demonstration so you can narrate the presentation while it is in progress. However, many presenters prefer to wait until they have completed the screen capture, and then record the voice-over from a script as they play back the screen capture.

Camtasia also allows the video stream to be exported to common video formats such as MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 which can be read by most computers, even if the Camtasia software is not installed.

To see the Camtasia video demonstration below, go to https://HowToUseAShoppingCart.com

This Camtasia video tells how Tom Antion has made over $750,000 just referring a product.