5 Things You Can Learn by Drilling Down on Traffic Sources in Google Analytics

Did you know there is more to the Referral Traffic Sources in your Google Analytics than just the referral domains themselves? Here are a few things you can learn by clicking on some of the domains listed under your Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals.

What Twitter User Really Sends You Traffic & Your Most Popular Posts on Twitter

Want to find out who is really sending the most traffic to your website via Twitter? Look no further than the t.co domain in your Traffic Sources. When you click on this, you will see the specific t.co links that have led visitors to your website.

Copy the Referral Path listed, then paste it into your browser after http://t.co so you can go to the post or page that it references. In another tab (if you don’t have this already), install the Topsy Trackbacks bookmarklet on your bookmarks toolbar. Then go to the tab with your post and click on the Topsy bookmarklet. You will now see most of the tweets for your page in Topsy.

When you get to the All posts about this link section, scroll to the bottom and click on the more link until you’ve pulled most of the tweets for your post (which could take a while, depending on how many times the page has been tweeted). Then use your browser’s Find on Page (CTRL + F) and paste in the Referral Path again. It should take you to one (or more) tweets with the t.co link that you pulled from Google Analytics. The first person who tweeted it is the source of your Twitter traffic!

In my case, it was Dave Larson of TweetSmarter that I had to thank for the most traffic from Twitter for my post on how to start a blog on WordPress.

Going back to your Referral Paths from t.co, you can also use this to see which posts on your site get the most Twitter traffic. Simply click on the Secondary dimension dropdown and select Landing Page under Traffic Sources.

This will show you the posts each t.co link references.

Pages with Traffic from Image Search

Curious what posts or pages on your website get the most traffic from Google Images search? Find out by clicking on the google.com domain in your traffic sources and then click on the /imgres Referral Path. Next, use the Secondary dimension dropdown and, again, select Landing Page under Traffic Sources.

Be sure to check out the images on those pages to see if you can use similar images for future posts / pages on your site for more image related traffic!

Guest Posts, Comments, or Crowdsourcing

When you’re looking at your Traffic Sources, it’s easy to tell which source is related to your guest posting, commenting, or sites you contribute answers to for crowdsourced posts. If you do multiple activities on one site, then you need to click on that site’s domain and drill down to the Referral Paths to see which activity gets the best results from that site.

By drilling down on my own referral traffic from Social Media Examiner, I could see that it comes from a variety of things, including one guest post, making their top blog list, a crowdsourced post, and a link left to one of my posts in the forums.

LinkedIn Shares, Groups, Answers, or Company Pages

If you are active on LinkedIn and take advantage of different things such as sharing your posts on your profile, LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn Answers, or on your company page, then you will probably want to know which of those activities bring the most traffic to your website. Click on linkedin.com in your Traffic Sources to see the following.

Here, I can see that the most traffic comes from shares within groups (/news), followed by status updates (/home, /profile/view, and /share), more group shares (/groupItem), and Answers (/groupAnswers).

Most Popular Posts on StumbleUpon

It’s tough to find things on StumbleUpon sometimes, including which posts from your own sites are the most popular on their network. If you want to see which posts on your site get the most StumbleUpon traffic, click on stumbleupon.com in your Traffic Sources, then click on the refer.php Referral Path. Next, use the Secondary dimension dropdown and, again, select Landing Page under Traffic Sources.

Now you can see which posts have driven the most StumbleUpon traffic over the last year. This is great to reference when you are determining what new content you want to create and how it will fare on the SU network. Going forward, with the latest changes to the SU networks, you will just look at any links starting with /su/ in the Referral Paths.

Do you go deeper into your Google Analytics Traffic Sources? What other discoveries have you found about your referral traffic?

Local Paid Inclusion – Get Up to Date

Have you heard the buzz in the SEO community? Bruce Clay announced on Facebook, later followed up by this Search Engine Watch post, the launch of a new service that guarantees top listings in local search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. The service works to promote your business listing for a nominal fee, guaranteeing a top position – in organic listings! It also boasts to be a cheaper option than PPC. UBL, the backend partner of Clay’s in this venture, verifies that they are still in the beta phase and are currently testing the system (now being vehemently denied).

When I first heard about this news I had to look at the calendar – April 1st? Seriously, this seems a bit far fetched. Within a very short time the SEO community reacted with amazement; it’s common sense that this type of service would be looked down upon. Miranda Miller’s Search Engine Watch post did a good job of sharing her investigative research and the comment section is a worthwhile read. Additionally, friend of SEM-Group.net, Dave Harry wrote a summary post with some good reactions in the comments as well.

Bruce announced on Twitter that they’d have a statement this morning regarding the local paid inclusion fiasco. Google, Bing and UBL all deny involvement in lpi as reported in Danny Sullivan’s post. More reactions include thoughts that this is just some clever marketing plan or package done by Clay’s team – but gone awry maybe? I was intrigued by a comment on the SEW post by Bob Bigellow, he stated:

“I bet I know exactly what this is. 

It probably requires each individual to install a plugin or extension or script or to otherwise implement some sort of service which will insert these “results” into the organic results area. Google has a service similar to this for a while where you could subscribe to certain feeds and, as a result, certain searches would trigger a special result on the page which was artificially put there by a third-party. 

So, this likely won’t be anything new and won’t be very significant in that it will require opt-in, which means it will never reach the full breadth of Google.”

So what’s your take on the whole thing? Hoax, bad PR fiasco for a new service, or an April Fools Day joke 2 months early? Who knows, the whole thing could just be a ploy to get links or some elaborate SEO experiment….

How Do You See Blog Comments: ‘Bullshit’ or ‘Democratic’?

I’ve written several articles on the benefits of blog commenting. And I couldn’t resist writing one more. Recently, a lot of debate has been going on as to whether it’s worthwhile to allow commenting on one’s blog.

There are some who think of comments as mere ‘bullshit’. There are others who support commenting as a ‘form of democracy’. Let’s have a look at what MG Siegler (a columnist for TechCrunch) has to say.

“Here’s the thing: while some try to paint comments as a form of democracy, that’s bullshit. 99.9% of comments are bile. I’ve heard the counter arguments about how you need to curate and manage your comments — okay, I’m doing that by not allowing any.”

From the readers’ point of view, commenting provides them with a great feeling of participation. It also creates a sense of belonging, around which the entire concept of blogosphere revolves. On the other hand, listening to people’s views via comments motivates the blogger to work even harder so as to deliver what the former are actually looking for. That’s exactly the reason blog comments are seen as a ‘form of democracy’.

Still, many people would call blog commenting to be nothing more than a waste of time. Let them have their own opinions. Supporters, however, don’t see comments as something worthless or vile. Though, at times, commenting tends to get noisy, you will certainly miss out on a rich experience by turning off comments or not allowing people to share those ‘little tendrils of thought’.

I think permitting readers to comment on your blog is as much democratic as it is for you to freely share your own views by publishing posts.

If Commenting is a ‘Form of Democracy’, It can be Misused
It’s obvious. ‘Power to People’ can be misused. But that’s what rules and policies are made for. Instead of shutting out people from commenting, a serious blogger should find ways to optimize the discourse so that it adds value to the conversation (which is the soul of a blog) that strikes up after a post is published.

It’s simply unacceptable or immoral to deny democratic freedom to others while you’re enjoying it yourself. If you’ve got the freedom to express your opinions publicly by publishing blog posts, you have no right to prevent others from sharing what they think about a particular topic. Not giving people the right to comment is like ‘ruling as a dictator’.

Not Allowing People to Comment is Highly ‘Unsocial’
How can you afford to be unsocial when the entire world is fast turning into a global village? Video chats are creating global classrooms. A new era of interactive advertising is about to begin. Searches are getting social. Regardless of their size, businesses are focusing more on the ‘listening’ part of the customer acquisition process. A blog is one of the best social media tools that you can use. You can never imagine to use a social media tool without being social yourself, can you?

Do you support or detest blog comments? Let us know by casting your vote in the tweet poll below and commenting.

Dear SEO Professionals, Please Stop Complaining

Around the start of the New Year I wrote an article detailing my new years’ resolutions as an Internet marketer. One of the resolutions was to read more, to dive ever farther into our industry to learn all of the secrets I could. What I found instead was a lot of disgruntled SEO’s about all of the changes with Google. Google Personal Search, the Https cloaking, and the absolutely Genius “Don’t be Evil” plugin are making huge waves across the SEO world.

Https Cloaking of Google Analytics:

Around October 2011, Google implemented a protocol to hide keyword and traffic information for visitors to your website if they were logged in to their Google account. What essentially happened was a sophisticated version of cloaking, whereas if a person was logged into Google, their search was completed under https protocol.

Https is a combination of classic hypertext transfer protocol, and SSL/TLS protocol. This combination of protocol allows for secure identification of a server or network from the browser, and opens an encrypted line of communication between your computer and the website that you are trying to connect to. This information is usually very sensitive, and different modifiers can be placed on the information that is traveling down this secure pipe. It is the system most commonly in use for corporate information transfer over an internal intranet, or for payment information for a shopping cart.

What this means for SEO’s is the information that is normally passed along to Google analytics is being encrypted in this SSL protocol, and it will show up as (not provided) when you search for incoming keywords.

The small issue I have with this change is not with Google, but with us “professionals”. Now, I understand that I use the term “SEO” loosely, if I were to describe my position more accurately, I would at least be performing SEM, most likely a full blown internet marketer. I do link building, on-site tag optimization, site architecture optimization, goal funnel creation, content creation, and PPC management.

The only professionals that were really affected by the keyword cloaking were only those that concentrated solely on SEO. The landscape of our positions are changing so rapidly, I would argue that someone that purely specializes in on-site optimization and keyword research had better have an amazing track record, because they are all but obsolete. Yoast, SEOMoz, MySEOCommunity, SEM-Group, SEOJournal and a huge list of others have free guides to on-site optimization easily accessible to everyone. They rank extremely well for their relevant SEO terms, and are written in plain English, with screenshots so anyone can learn.

PPC management alongside good organic SEO and link building is what I would say is the BARE MINIMUM for someone calling himself or herself an Internet Marketer to know. The only thing the cloaking issue did was force pure SEO’s to become well rounded, and you should thank Google; they are doing you a favor.

“Search Plus Your World” – Google’s New Search Function:

Over the past couple of months, it was pretty clear that Google was going to be focusing on the proliferation of Google+. With the constant updates, the use of your Google+ profile in the implementation of author attribution, and the syndication qualities of sharing with your circles made it obvious that Google would concentrate on it.

Furthermore, if you paid attention to https cloaking, you knew that for Adwords campaigns keyword information was still available, regardless of whether that user was signed into Google or not. It made perfect sense that Google was going to integrate Google+ into search and have their profiles show up over more relevant social profiles. So it was a huge surprise to see all of the negative feedback about “search plus your world”.

It seems like we are treating Google like our best friend’s garage band that just signed a record deal; we’re complaining about the fact that they are selling out. Sure, the first incarnation of Google had pure intentions; they wanted to give the people the very best possible way to search for what they needed on the Internet. Their algorithm was almost alive in the way it updated, and they protected our rights by refusing to bend to government subpoena.

We all seem to forget that Google went public in August of 2004. This means that they have been accountable to their shareholders, the public, for almost a decade. To convince Google to go back to their old ways would be to convince the hundreds of thousands of shareholders to change their minds. The loyalties of Google are now with their investors, and since we just make money off of it all, we really have no leverage to justify our frustrations.

People hate “Search Plus Your World” so much that a bookmarklet effectively disabling it was created. The “Don’t Be Evil” bookmarklet is actually an amazing piece of code, and I absolutely think you should all go check it out. However, I don’t see this being used by anyone except SEO professionals. Search plus your world is just going to be a reality for a portion of all Google users from here on out, and instead of convincing them to use a bookmarklet, I was surprised at the resistance to use this new content syndication system.

If it is a lot of work to post to Google+, there are solutions for you. There are a number of browser plugins you can use that posts to twitter, Google+ and Facebook all at the same time. Unless we see a slide from Google+ and it loses popularity, (not likely, since they just broke 90 Million users), I embrace this new medium, and the integration into search, as another way to get my clients seen for keywords they might take months to optimize otherwise.

The Roundup:

Lets review: August 2011 was Panda 2.0; link farms died, keyword stuffing was made obsolete, SEO complained. October 2011 was Google+ and Https cloaking; yet another social network to optimize, people are forced to start actually marketing their sites, SEO complained. January 2012 is Search Plus your World; Google+ is now integrated into searches instead of more relevant social signals, SEO complained. Does anyone else see a pattern?

I have a question to the Internet Marketing community as a whole, why do you think our industry is so hard to sell? Is it because there are dishonest SEO’s? Is it because of article spinning? Is it because there is a lot of misinformation out there? Is there too many tools and not enough proven data about them? Or is it that we sometimes spend more time complaining about certain new features of the search landscape than learning them?

My answer is simple, and its inspiration comes from my father. My father is a man that embodies the essence of never giving up. He never went to college, got a library card to learn what he needed to, and worked 14 hour days just so he could eat more than a can of tuna fish a day. He built a business with his wife, overcoming the problems of mixing work with pleasure, to become successful.

We make money off of Google. Everything change they make is just another way for us to specialize, to add to our resume, to learn, and charge more for our services. Every hour spent complaining is an hour that people that refuse to give up; get ahead. His advice to me is the same advice that I want to share with you:

Step Up, or Step Aside.

It’s not being harsh, its the reality of our business. I love what we do, and the more we just step up, the more Internet Marketing will gain credibility.

I Just Sent Out My First Ask Gerald Newsletter

I’m excited to announce that everyone who’s already signed up for my Ask Gerald newsletter should now have the inaugural edition in their inbox. If you haven’t had a chance to sign up yet, it’s not too late to become part of my free newsletter.

The point of the Ask Gerald newsletter is to make it as easy as possible for you to directly ask me questions. While you will continue to see great content on the blog, I wanted to create a place where people feel comfortable asking direct SEO questions. After evaluating several options, I decided a newsletter was by far the best. Not only does this format allow me to answer individual questions, but it makes it possible to share that information with an entire community of people who truly care about SEO.

Once you sign up, don’t forget to send in your SEO questions. Whether you’ve got a question about building links, increasing your social media presence or dominating a local business niche, I want to provide you with answers. So, be sure to send your questions to askgerald at sem-group.net so I can start answering them in the next newsletter!

Sign up now so you don’t miss out on the next Ask Gerald newsletter:

Tips on Treating Clients Right (or Applying the Golden Rule to Your Online Business)

I’ve heard some people say they got into their online business, be it SEO or copywriting, so they could work from home and not have to interact with people. And every time I hear that, I can’t help but take a step back and think, “That’s stupid.” I mean, sure you may not be dealing face to face with people on a daily basis, but a large part of what you do involves client interaction. You absolutely have to know how to work with people in order to succeed.

Now having said that, I fully realize that some people who “retreat” to an online job in order to avoid social duties may require a little extra help in respect to client relations. If that describes you, here are a few tips on how to help you out. Follow them and you’ll be retaining clients and getting referrals in no time.

1. Go the extra mile to fix your mistakes—I’m writing this post today because quite frankly it’s fresh on my mind. See, I did another post for this blog that I was supposed to schedule for 9 A.M. this morning. But I screwed up and it published overnight. Well, after thinking about it, I decided that it just wasn’t right for me to say “OOPS!” and move on. So instead, I decided to supply the blog with an extra post. And it just so happened to be fitting material. Would Gerald have let me keep posting to his blog if I had simply said “Sorry,” and moved on to next week? More than likely. But hey—I want to make sure I keep my business relationships moving in the right direction. I plan on working with him for a long time. So why not scratch his back?
2. Deliver as promised (and don’t promise if you can’t deliver)—Sometimes I’m lucky and acquire a project that has a flexible deadline. But more often than not, if a client contacts me then they needed the piece written yesterday. So they ask when is the soonest I can finish for them. I’m always tempted to overcommit in order to secure the project. However, I’ve learned the hard way that it’s better to give them an honest answer than to promise and not deliver. Nothing makes a client unhappier than having to wait for work that should have already been completed.
3. Keep communication lines open—Again, sometimes you get the low maintenance client that just wants you to send them the finished product and shut the hell up. But always go into a new relationship assuming your client needs his hand held. In other words, give him frequent updates. And ask him if he has any questions (and be ready to answer them). Bottom line—make him feel important.

Have you run into client issues before? What have you done to go the extra mile?nbsp;

Why Bad Writers Don’t Necessarily Make Bad Bloggers (and Vice Versa)

Thinking about getting into the blogging game but afraid that since your college professor always gave you D’s on papers that you won’t cut the mustard? Here’s a little secret for you: there’s little connection between how good you were at writing papers in school and how successful of a blogger you can become.

The fact is, you don’t have to be a good writer, technically speaking, to be good at blogging. Here’s why:

• You can get away with sloppy mechanics—You’re English teacher isn’t going to be reading your blog posts with a red pen in hand. In fact, chances are almost no one will be checking out your mechanics. And in some cases, grammar errors can actually enhance your writing. Unless your mechanics are so poor that they take away from the meaning of your posts, you’re probably going to be okay. Sure there may be a few commenters who give you a hard time (see: grammar Nazis). But you can just tell them to go to hell.
• You don’t have to have an SAT vocabulary—Back in school, it was all about flexing your vocabulary muscles. The bigger words you used it seemed, the better grades you received. However, when it comes to blogging, the rule of thumb is to keep the vocabulary to a junior high level. That way you can keep things conversational and make sure people of all reading levels can join the conversation.
• Complex sentences are frowned upon—Again, when you write online, the idea is to keep things simple. You should only do things to enhance readability, not detract from it. One way to go about it is to keep your sentence structure relatively simple. That means weaving together 3 line long sentences with subordinate clauses and conjunctions and blah blah blah simply is not necessary.
• It’s more about voice than anything else—What it comes down to is does your personality come out in your writing? Furthermore, do people like this personality? Is it witty? Knowledgeable? Approachable? If you can answer yes to these questions, then you’re going to do just fine.

What might be more surprising here is that often people who were “good writers” before will attempt to enter the blogosphere and go on to suck it up. Why? Because they’re style is too stiff. A good blogger needs to be able to bend and not break. He needs to be able to make the words work for him—not the other way around.

What about you? Have I planted a seed of faith inside of a would-be blogger?

Learn What Technology Websites are Using, Statistics, and More

Have you ever visited a website and were curious about what they were running on it, such as the platform, analytics, or add-ons? Have you ever wondered how many other people are using the same website components as you do? Do you want a quick SEO profile of the site as well? If so, then you need to visit BuiltWith.com.

Learn What Technology Any Website Uses

There are three ways to find out technology a particular website is using. First off, you can visit the BuiltWith.com homepage and enter the domain name in the search box. Next, you can just enter http://builtwith.com/domain.com into your browser and change domain.com to the domain of the site you wish to view. Or you can download the Chrome Extension and click on the extension to see a popup with the website’s technology profile.

On the website’s profile page, you will find the following information (when applicable).

• Server Information – This doesn’t tell you where a site is hosted, but tells you the type of web server the site is hosted on.
• Content Management Systems – This will tell you if the website is using WordPress, Joomla, or a similar CMS.
• Ecommerce – This will tell you if the website is using an Ecommerce system like E-junkie or other shopping cart software.
• Frameworks – This will tell you the programming framework of the website. For WordPress, it will commonly be PHP.
• Advertising – This will tell you what advertising systems are being used on a website such as Google AdSense and some affiliate networks.
• Analytics and Tracking – This will tell you if a site uses Google Analytics, StatCoutner, or similar analytics system. Aweber’s mailing list code sometimes pops up into this area too.
• JavaScript Libraries – This will tell you about the different JavaScript coding libraries called in the website’s coding.
• Audio / Video – This will tell you about any technology such as Vimeo, YouTube, or other media found on the website.
• Widgets – This will tell you about different widgets and add-ons a website is using, including social sharing buttons. It will pull information about some WordPress plugins, but most will just be lumped under WordPress Plugins.
• Aggregation Functionality – This will tell you about the RSS and pingback functionality of a site, including whether it uses Feedburner.
• Document Information & Encoding – This will tell you more about the website’s coding, like if it uses HTML, CSS, etc.

View Trends About Website Technology

While you are viewing a website’s technology profile you can click on the link for any technology listed to see more data about its usage. Alternatively, you can visit theTechnology Trends page and see the top technology used across the Internet. For example, if you clicked on WordPress, you would see the following.

Trending Usage‘

This chart shows you if a particular piece of technology is increasing or decreasing in popularity. In this case, usage of WordPress is definitely increasing.

Industries

Find out what industries use a particular piece of technology the most. This pie chart shows that, aside from the Other category, WordPress seems to be used equally amongst different niches.

Similar Coverage

See what website technology is similar to the application you are viewing. In this case, the next most popular technology similar to WordPress is Joomla.

Top Sites

Want to see the biggest sites using a particular piece of technology? Click on the Top Sites list on the application page.

Get a Glimpse of a Website’s Search Engine Optimization

If you want to check out a website’s SEO information, click on the SEO Profile tab. This will give you a little analysis of basic SEO elements such as your title tag, meta description, H1 heading tag, common keywords (as shown in the pie chart above), image ALT tags, website speed, and social bookmarking stats on Facebook & Delicious. It also gives you an overall score plus a score of where your website ranks compared to others. Apparently 57% is a good score if 97% of other websites score below that!

4 Vital Digital Marketing Trends (or Developments) for 2012

Keeping an eye on what the future holds in its palm is key to growing your business and reaching out to new audiences. Trends will continue to change directions. And if you aren’t ready to embrace the upcoming developments, you can easily lose the race. As we proceed into 2012, it’s highly essential that you become cognizant of the top digital marketing trends.

Given below are four key trends that you’ll need to watch in 2012, so that you can make your digital marketing efforts fruitful and elevate your business to new heights.

#1. Location, Location, Location!
Location-based marketing (LBM) is one of the top trends in the digital marketing arena, as the year 2012 continues to unfold. Focusing on delivering content (instantly usable information) to the user should always remain a high priority, if you’re really serious about generating more leads as well as staying ahead of the competition. With the ever-increasing population of mobile device users, delivering content to consumers based on their location becomes even more important.

The biggest benefit of location-specific marketing is that you can immediately increase the rate of conversion for your business. To improve your location-based marketing, you can follow these tips.

Buy country-specific domain names (.co.uk for UK, .com.au for Australia etc)
Create a mobile-friendly version of your website
Use Facebook ads to target audience by demographics, interests etc
Master the usage of free tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc
Use services like foursquare and Gowalla to engage consumers
Don’t forget to claim your Google Places page (Google Places Optimization)

#2. Video Advertising Leads the Way
According to a recent report by emarketer, online video advertising spend in the US will cross the $3 billion mark in 2012. Online video marketing is an emerging trend due to two major reasons – better reach and better measurement. Since more than 1.3 billion videos are watched in the US per day, video advertising happens to be a rich medium to establish an emotional connection with consumers, engage them quickly and achieve a higher conversion.

#3. Gamification Drives Social Momentum
Yes, it’s not just the latest fad. Though adopting this marketing approach depends on the kind of business you run, gamification can present some of the most potential opportunities you wouldn’t want to miss. To get started with it, you should first of all get the concept pretty clear in your mind. Gamification is not entirely similar to games. In fact, the concept that underlies the term is the application of gaming principles to non-game experiences in an effort to drive social momentum among the audiences. Several brands have gamified their marketing strategies to engage customers (by offering incentives) and provoke them to take action. Start-ups can benefit from this concept the most.

#4. Privacy Concerns are Growing
User privacy is another burning issue that digital marketers should pay careful attention to. Today, consumers are more vigilant about the usage of their personal data by businesses. Whether you’re an advertising agency, a retailer, a trader or an OS creator, you can never keep consumers in the dark about how you’re going to handle their personal data. The more knowledge and control (over personal data) you provide, the more trust you can gain from users.

There are many more trends that you’ll need to watch out for, to bolster your digital marketing strategy further. What’s really important, however, is that you don’t get distracted while getting the basics right.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions on other upcoming trends in digital marketing. The comment section is all yours.

60 Hours a Minute – Video Marketing in 2012

Monday Youtube announced the mega site hit a milestone – 60 hours of video is uploaded every minute, up 30% in the last 8 months. Surprisingly this milestone was less than the company’s goal of 72 hours, but regardless is quite astonishing. Along with this milestone, Youtube humorously developed OneHourPerSecond.com showing you exactly what can be done in various lengths of time visually. It’s worth a watch.

With a days worth of video (24 hours) uploaded every 24 seconds it can be worrisome for marketers. Will your video stand out? How can you capture viewers attention? Is it even worth it? These are growing questions, only made the more clear by Youtube’s recent announcement.

So what are marketers to do in 2012? What does 2012 have in store for video marketing? Here are a few tips and blog posts to help you put together your video marketing plan for this year.

1.) Use Insights for Audience to see what interests your demographic and what they like to do on Youtube.

2.) Build greater audiences with the creators playbook on Youtube, full of tips and best practices.

3.) Make use of these 29 tips from experts on how to better integrate video into your marketing efforts this year.

4.) Try your hand at a video tutorial. Using a program like Camstudio you can take an otherwise boring tutorial and turn it into an easy video.

5.) Next time you do keyword research see if any long tail terms come up that you could turn into a video. Make a goal to identify, research, plan and shoot a new video every quarter, to address some of the questions or keyword phrases you found in your research.

6.) Consider doing a series of videos and knocking them out all in one sitting. For instance – arrange to interview a few experts. Book a space to shoot the video and capture them all in the same day. Then promote them as a series to build momentum and encourage regular visits to your blog as well as increase in email opt ins.

7.) Remind yourself that it’s not too late to get into this whole video marketing “thing”. With a flip cam and a few hours to burn, you can turn a seemingly simple idea into one that transforms beautifully on film. When you think of content start thinking about video too.

8.) Cisco predicts that by 2015 almost 80% of all internet traffic will be video. That’s quite astonishing when you think about it. Video communication isn’t a new concept, but due to the increased availability of video compatible devices (including iPhone 4S) video has become all the more popular. Frame Concepts names video as one of the hot marketing trends of 2012. They suggesting thinking about running customer events via video or even producing a video newsletter, a pretty cool concept!

9.) Check out these creative tips for video marketing newbies, this video highlighting how Realtors can use video in 2012.

10.) Attention spans are getting shorter, as pointed out in this post by Omaha Video Solutions. All the more reason to shake things up and start saying the same message but in a different format – with video.

11.) 3D is gaining momentum and can take a dull and boring video project and make it into something a lot more exciting. Realistic, creative and interesting video is a thing of the future. While it might not be in your 2012 plans, it is something to consider if you look to take your video marketing to the next level anytime soon.

12.) As more and more people use handheld devices to access the internet it’s important for websites to cater to this growing trend. Optimizing your website for mobile and optimizing your video for mobile is extremely important.

What do you think about video marketing in 2012? If you have additional feedback to share feel free to do so, in the comments below!