One of the ways video marketing can help business owners is the way it can boost their personal brand. Sports players, executives, musicians, actors, entrepreneurs and professionals are all realizing how important it is to build their personal brand and one of the best ways to do so is video marketing. Here are a few ways video marketing can help your personal brand:

1. Share Who you are - video gives you a chance to share who you are in a visually stimulating and personal way. People can get to see your personality, mannerisms, facial expressions and so many other characteristics that they would normally not know if you just wrote an article. If you really want your fans, followers, clients and prospects to get to know you without having physically met you, videos can provide the perfect platform.

2. Relationship building - one of the key elements to successful branding is relationship marketing and video can help you build strong relationship connections with your audience. As they keep watching your videos they become more familiar and comfortable with you. They can also interact with you by asking live questions if you are on a video conference or webinar or they can post responses in the comment section of the video page.

3. Share your knowledge - video is one of the best communication methods for you to share your special knowledge, skills and thoughts in your area of expertise. It provides an easy and engaging way to dispense information to your audience that has the highest response rates over text or audio. The proof of this is the sheer number of tutorials, demo videos and how to videos available on YouTube which shows videos are a popular way for people to get the information they need.

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So a blog is an ongoing updated series of content about a particular topic. Many people blog just for the fun of it by keeping an online diary of their activities regularly. But if you are intending to make your blog profitable, it takes a lot more skill. What are some of the skills needed for a profitable blog?

Firstly, there is the skill of finding a profitable niche. A niche is a topic people are interested in and therefore would draw readers to the blog. Many internet marketers advocate choosing a niche based on your likes, interests, hobbies and experience. But that would be too restrictive. If your aim is to make money with your blog, then it follows that you need to blog about what people are interested in and not necessarily what you may be interested in personally. Two sources to find niches people are interested in are Google Hot Trends and Wordtracker. Google Hot Trends gives you an hour-by-hour listing about what topics receive the most searches in Google. Go through this list and find any you may want to blog about. Once you identify one, insert the main keyword of this niche into Wordtracker. Wordtracker gives you a daily search count on a particular keyword and a list of related keywords. A good rule of thumb is that if a keyword gets above 100 searches in Wordtracker, it is a profitable niche. So if you find a niche topic in both Google Hot Trends and Wordtracker to blog about, you've got a potential money maker.

Secondly, there's the skill of getting your blog in front of as many people as possible. This is also called traffic generation. For this, the important thing to do is find people interested in the topic of your niche. Visit forums related to the topic and become a participator. You will be able to add your blog URL to your signature file and when people want to find out more about your topic, they will click on your URL and be brought to your blog. Another important thing to do is introduce your blog to others by bookmarking it in social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Furl etc. If your blog topic is a popular one according to Google Hot Trends, chances are there would be many other people interested to read whatever is in your blog.

Backlinks are hyperlinks placed on another website which link to your site. The most powerful backlinks are one-way backlinks. This means that another website has links pointing to your site, but you don't have reciprocal links pointing back to theirs.

Using forums is a great way to get high quality one-way backlinks to your site. These links can generate direct traffic to your site, as people browsing the forum click your links in addition to raising your search engine ranking. But you have to be careful when using forums in this way. Do it wrong and you will be branded a spammer and most likely get your forum account closed. But if done correctly, forums can be a very powerful tool in your traffic generation arsenal.

Step 1: Find relevant forums

The key word here is 'relevant'. You want to be sure to find forums related to your niche – the topic of your website. The easiest way to do this is to go to Google and type in your topic along with the the word 'forum'. Let's say you have a blog on coin collecting. You'd type this into Google:

coin collecting forum

There are two reasons you want to find forums related to your niche. First, the search engines will usually give more weight to links pointing to your site if they come from sites centered around the same niche as your site. Secondly, you'll get much more direct traffic from a forum where the members are interested in your niche.

Step 2: Pick the best forums and join them

Now that you have found some forums you need to check them out and choose which ones to join. Click the links to visit about half a dozen of the top search results. Most forums will allow you to view the content without having to join, it's only when you want to start posting that you have to register. If you land on a forum that won't let you view unless you join, forget it and move on.

When looking for a forum to join you want to find ones that are popular, so look for those with a decent number of members. You also need to make sure those members are active. Go into one of the more popular forums categories and scan down the list of threads to see when the last posting was made. This information is usually in the right hand column of the forum threads table. If you see a lot of posts made in the last 24 hours, you've found a forum with lots of active members. With the content changing this often, the search engines should be all over that forum, which means that your links will get picked up quickly. Search engines tend to love sites with lots of frequently updated, relevant content. This is the type of forum you want to join.

Now there is just one more step before joining. You need to make sure this forum allows you to have a 'signature'. Jump into one of the more popular threads on the forum. Scroll down and look at the posts to see if anyone has a signature showing at the bottom of their post. There will usually be a horizontal line after the body of the post and some text and/or links underneath it. Often people just have a quote or witty saying, but sometimes they will have links as well. Not everyone will have a signature, but try to find some members who do. Signatures are crucial, because this is where you are going to put the links to your site.

When you find a forum that meets the criteria, follow the steps to register and confirm your membership. If you find just three or four forums that's plenty to start with.

Step 3: Set up your signature

After you login to the forum you should see a link to your user profile. Often this will be called 'User CP' or 'User Profile'. In the user profile area you can edit things like your avatar, your bio and preferences. Look for a link that says something like 'Edit signature' and click that. You'll see a text field where you can type in the text you want to appear beneath all your posts. This is where you'll put the backlinks to your site.

Forums use a special kind of code to allow members to format their posts. It's called BBCode and it's quite simple to use once you get the hang of it. Copy the examples below and change the URL and text to your URL and some catchy keyword-rich text. Paste the code into you signature box and save it.

Link to your website or blog with this code:

Learn how to start [url=http://www.mycoinblog.com/]Coin Collecting[/url] the easy way.

You can see in the code above where you need to edit the domain to be your domain. In this example, 'Coin Collecting' will be the anchor text for the link. This is where you want to put your keywords. Almost all forums will allow you to have a link in your signature.

If you want to make your signature bold, just add the bold tags around it like this:

[b]Learn how to start [url=http://www.mycoinblog.com/]Coin Collecting[/url] the easy way.[/b]

Most forums will allow you to bold the text in your signature. If you add the bold code and your signature still doesn't come out in bold then it's you know the bold formatting is not allowed.

Some forums will also allow you to change the color of the text, although the anchor text will come out as the default link color, usually blue. Here's how you change the text color:

[color=red]Learn how to start [url=http://www.mycoinblog.com/]Coin Collecting[/url] the easy way.[/color]

You can also combine formatting. This would make your signature red and bold (except for the link text which will usually be blue bold).

[color=red][b]Learn how to start [url=http://www.mycoinblog.com/]Coin Collecting[/url] the easy way.[/b][/color]

One final tip for creating your signature. Less is more. If you make your signature look spamming people will treat you like a spammer. You don't have to use up all available lines in your signature. Make it short, sweet and to the point. If you post great content and people are interested they will click your link.

Step 4: Participate!

The first three steps were all preparation. Now you get to start creating backlinks to your site! It's simple, just participate in the forum. Post good content, ask questions. Try to help people out by answering questions. Be nice, be helpful.

Every post you make will give you a backlink to your site. The higher the quality of your post, the more powerful your backlink will be, at least in Google. Because Google looks at the text surrounding a link to determine the relevancy of a link having good content in your posts is much more valuable than having a post that says something like, "great post, I agree". If you simply participate in the forum and try to be friendly and helpful chances are your content will take care of itself.

That's it. Have fun. And remember, you can change your signature any time you want. You might changing the text a bit from time to time to find out what generates the most clicks through to your site.

Adverts like these are only partially true. No one can really guarantee you the number 1 spot in Google or any other search engine, and if they can, it may only be for keywords that none of your potential visitors are seeking.

How come? Google's programmers keep the exact basis on which websites are rated and positioned secret. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts have been able to find out many of the factors that Google weighs to determine which position to assign any particular website. However, no one knows exactly how much weight Google attaches to each factor. So even the experts can get it wrong and spending huge amounts of money on SEO can turn out to be futile.

How does this affect you as a business trying to maximize your web site visibility? Can your site rise to the top of Google? Yes. Possibly. You can get into the top 10 positions – with hard work and depending on a number of factors including what you are promoting, your sites domain name, how much competition there is, the number of pages your website has and how well you use keywords on your site – among others.

What can you do to boost your website sales and position?

a) Try to make your website the best one possible for the services and products you offer. If your site appears unprofessional, is difficult to use, unattractive or lacks the products people want – then even if you get to the top search engine positions, you will not be able to make sales.

Add regular features, articles and special offers to your site. Pay attention to what your competitors are doing and to new trends. Research, update and improve constantly, innovate. Capture details of your visitors in website forms and communicate with them.

b) Identify the best keywords for your website. When you surf the Internet, you type in relevant words. The search engines then find and list websites whose content matches those words. Help your website to be found by including the items people are searching for in your site's text. Think about what people seeking your products would type in Google. What words do your competitors emphasize on their websites?

c) Apply standard website optimization techniques to your website. Any good website developer will know the basic technical aspects of SEO (Keyword density, using keywords in page titles, keyword selection, tags etc.) So let us focus on the things you as the site owner can influence directly.

As the content provider, sprinkle your keywords throughout your website (e.g. see how often the words "website" and "position" can be found in this article). But make sure you use your keywords in context. Mix up your phrases, but make sure they don't come across as stilted or un-natural. The last thing you want to do is gain search engine positions and lose customers.

d) Get other websites to link to your website. The links count as votes in your favour.

In summary, while SEO is important and worth paying for if you can afford it, there are many things you can do to optimize your website if you can't. Remember that optimizing your site will take time to yield any results.

Even if your site never gets to be number 1 in Google, doing these things will benefit both your website and your business.

When subscribers to your list don't open your emails anymore it's known as list fatigue. They're not exactly unsubscribing and yet they're not opening your emails. Why is this happening? Without taking into account the bounces, here are some probable causes:
1. Perhaps they are no longer interested in the subject of your emails. They may have new interests, and there's not a whole lot you can do about that.

2. Are the spam filters catching your emails? Make sure you're not using words that the filters think are spam. Do a search for the current list of spam words and find other ways to say the same thing.

3. Sometimes subscribers opt-in with an email address that they don't check very often, if at all. What you need to do from the beginning is encourage them to sign up with their primary email address.

4. You might be sending them too many emails and they're getting tired of you. If this is happening, slow yourself down and don't send so many, especially the promotional kind.

5. You've given them helpful information in the past and they stay on hoping you'll send them something else they need. So far, your email subject lines have been boring. Take a good look at the content of your emails. Are you sending valuable information or just promotions? Also look hard at your email subject lines. They need to be intriguing and catchy. Start a swipe file of your favorite lines.

The best bet is to try to prevent inactive subscribers before they happen. Here are some ways to engage your subscribers:

1. Give high quality content. People will rush to open your emails if you always over-deliver.

2. Survey your list and find out what information they want from you. This shows you care about them and their needs. It also gets your emails opened.

3. Hold a contest that's relevant to your niche and get your readers to respond.

4. Give people a call to action and be specific. Ask them to respond to an email you sent or leave a comment on your blog. Ask them about their successes or ask them what their opinion is on such-and-such product.

5. Drop tantalizing hints about what the next email is going to be about. Leave them wondering and wanting to read your next email.

List fatigue happens, but you can take active measures to minimize it. Always remember that you're writing your email to real people and when you have something good to say, they'll want to read it.