The YouTube Partner Program says:

You’ve got great videos and a growing audience. Let YouTube help you take your channel to the next level through our Partner Program. Generate revenue from your videos and access YouTube’s specialized partner features and tools, including rentals, content management, and analytics.

In addition to having a place to spotlight your work, we know that videos help with link-building, an important component to SEO. So if having videos makes sense for your business, it’s a good idea to add that to your marketing strategy. You’ve heard of viral videos? How creative can YOU get? Your video could end up going viral! It’s not something that everyone can pull off and viral videos usually apply to a more general audience rather than a niche market you may be targeting but the possibility exists. You don’t have to join the Partner Program but you can post videos to your website and share them with relevant online communities where people discuss their experiences and needs for your type of product or service. Just make sure your video is informative and useful to your audience – it can address a specific topic or issue or simply introduce your business as a solution to a certain need. Here are some topics for video content to get you brainstorming and help you figure out what might apply to your business: instructional videos, advertisements, “a day in the life” look into what you do in your business and/ or success stories/testimonials. What else might work for you? We’d love to hear your personal experiences.

This video might help you with a brainstorming session! It serves as an informative guide to our service as well as a tutorial on search engine marketing. Click here!

There have been discussions about being in a tech bubble or a filter bubble. Eli Pariser is the author of “The Filter Bubble”, which confronts the issue that personalized search may be limiting our worldview. During his talk on filter bubbles he asserts that the major players in the tech field should at least give online users the right to choose what they want to be informed about. Still, we can shoot ourselves in the foot, because sometimes there are things we need to hear that we don’t want to hear. It’s like going to the same restaurant every single time you go out to eat: you’re going to miss out on things — not only different types of food, but different social and cultural experiences. But with Google News badges, we can police ourselves, so to speak. We can set up badges for topics we’d like to become more educated on, not just things with which we’re already comfortable or familiar.

When you set up your badges, the purpose and graphical element functions like an equalizer on musicequipment. The EQ’s filter out unwanted frequencies or signals and bring up the desired “sound” or news. You can set the topic bars to the desired amount of how much news you want to cover sports, organic farming, music, technology, etc. News badges are private by default but you can opt to share them however you like.

Click here to check out how they work!

This is important because, as we’ve discussed before, mobile search is becoming increasingly popular among consumers. It is important to make sure your information is (1) easy to find on the internet and (2) easy to read on any device so that consumers don’g have anything making it difficult for them to convert to becoming a long-term customer.

Through things like daily coupon services and location-based apps such as Foursquare, businesses can be creative with special offers to attract new customers and craft ways to get them coming back. Additionally, businesses can reward repeat customers by adding a gaming component where the more a customer purchases or the more frequently they check in, the more they get in return as a reward.

Just be sure to do the math and think about what sort of campaign will help you establish a trusted network where both your company and customers benefit.

What this acceptance means for SEO is that there is a real need for businesses to stay ahead of the curve as the online space continues to dominate. Businesses need a skilled support team to ensure that they constantly appear in relevant search results returned to internet users that are looking for a specific product or service. That is a crucial time to appeal to consumers who are engaged exactly at that moment and ready to make a move. Being at the right place at the right time is the first step to conversion. Beyond basic SEO, businesses need a support team that also understands basic marketing strategies as well as trends that can be customized for their purposes.

Here’s the full post on the subject.

We talked about our Consistency Contest in April and we’re still going! The goal set was to make a sale each and every day. If you work or have ever worked in sales, you know this is a seriously steep slope to climb. Even if you haven’t worked in sales – setting out to do something, anything every day, or vowing to not do something (like smoking, eating sugar, or giving up something for lent) – can be a daunting endeavor.

In a recent post, I pointed out the importance of setting reasonable goals for yourself and your team in order to be successful and maintain a positive culture and morale. The only reason we can hold a contest that other companies might think impossible to maintain is because our sales team (aka Superhero Sales Squad) continually breaks even their own records - so setting the bar ridiculously high is, in fact, not ridiculous at all.

We’ve got 3 contenders remaining – Stephen (DSR: Dream Team), Tracy and Marcos (both on DSR Team: Millionaires). They’ve made sales each and every day — going on a month, now! Awesome job, guys! Keep it up — we’re rooting for all of you!

photos: Tammy Bright

As I’ve talked about before, culture plays a huge role in what we do at Outrank and ProfitFuel. One of our core values is balancing a strong work ethic with having fun. It’s a key factor to what has made us successful and enabled us to grow so quickly. In the last 12 months, we have doubled our number of employees. At the beginning of the week we merged with Yodle as they acquired ProfitFuel to attract a wider variety of clients. So now we have plans to again double in size over the course of the next year and a half! We’re excited that our mission and cultures are so similar and look forward to celebrating with our new family!

One of the ways we have developed such a strong culture is by fostering relationships in the workplace and rewarding team members for reaching significant milestones or surpassing designated goals. To celebrate, we plan happenings outside of the office. We do things like send top performers on trips and organize team builders.

We also just make time to relax and have fun together. As ProfitFuel has grown and we’ve extended our product Outrank.com to over 11,000 customers, the marketing department has kept pace with rapidly changing requirements and algorithms to ensure clients rank highly on local search engines. Recently, the team escaped to get in some bowling, pool, and mini glow golf!

You know what they say -

We have our April Superstars! Congratulations, ya’ll! Your team nominated you based on qualities they value and a job well done. You deserve it!

Each month team members from every department at ProfitFuel and Outrank send in their nominations for Superstar via email. To become a Superstar, you must exceed expectations and do something extraordinary – whether you exemplify an outstanding attitude or reach far beyond the call of duty. Emails that employees send in as nominations outline the reasons why they think their nominees deserve recognition.

Once the votes are tallied the winners gather together for a catered lunch where they are awarded a Certificate of Excellence. The luncheon is a special opportunity for the winners to hear the reasons for their nomination read aloud in appreciation and shared among other Superstars as well as heads of each department.

There’s a unique tradition Superstars have to uphold in order to actually get the Certificate of Excellence in their own hands … but I won’t tell you what that is so as not to spoil the surprise for Superstars in the making. We know you’re out there … and we’re comin’ for ya!

source: www.searchengineland.com

I was pretty excited to hear about Google’s +1 business rating feature that I covered in another blog post at the beginning of April. Google still hasn’t rolled it out for use yet but at the I/O developer conference in San Francisco yesterday, presenter Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land showed screen shots displaying how publishers will be able to incorporate the button to sites. He also touched on how +1 is directly integrated into Google Analytics.

At Outrank we encourage our customers to talk to their customers and clients about rating and reviewing services rendered because it helps improve search results and page rank. The Google +1 button will be another opportunity for us to share current industry news with our customers and help them round out their marketing plan — utilizing all aspects of good internet marketing.

There’s Local Search, Social Media, and Website Optimization. We say the best place to start is with your website — your home base. Think of your marketing strategy as a baseball field. You make lots of plays (social, local, promotions, banner ads, etc.) but you want to send everything you do across home plate. And, after you create an optimized website, it starts with Local Search.

Are you in the Circle of Trust? Better yet, are you in the Outrank Circle of Excellence?

The Client Services team keeps growing in order to provide an excellent experience for our customers. Management has devised a strategy to incent and thank the CS team. Operation Outrank CS COE. Client Services Circle of Excellence. 

To reward our top agents who have risen to meet the challenges of a rapidly growing team and customer base , Operation Outrank CS COE is a plan of which Robert de Niro (retired CIA operative Jack Byrnes in “Meet the Parents”), would even be proud.

Agents earn points in the following manner:

1 point = Perfect attendance for the month
2 points = Weekly MVP
8 points = Monthly Superstar Winner

The top two agents who accrue the most points at the end of the year win a special recognition dinner and a lovely hotel stay for two at the Hyatt Lost Pines, an amazing resort getaway which will also include fun weekend activities.

Joking aside, we’re happy to be able to offer such awesome rewards for a job well done. Unlike Jack Byrnes, Outrank is looking to uncover excellent talent and performance rather that dirt from your past!