Press Release Distribution Top Sites shows the most prominent press release distribution sites (both paid and free) by Quantcast ranking. Links to Alexa and Compete are given too. There are some interesting surprises, such as the fact that Squidoo is still very high ranked and accepts press releases, and that the top two sites by Quantcast ranking are free.

I’m working on a video marketing product right now, and once again Coty Schwab of GuruCrusher.com has humbled me. His teaser promo video for an upcoming project apparently called Google Dogs of War is wicked good. He does make some elementary mistakes:

• Doesn’t start the listing with a link to his site, GuruCrusher.com
• Keywords should probably include the name of the product (or not, since he’s pushing the mystery a bit) but they should definitely include the name of the site as one word, not “guru crusher” as two separate words
• Vid should be watermarked with a website name or at least show it at the end of the video for 15 seconds or so

Here’s why my niggling criticisms don’t matter. He’s executing. He’s getting the job done. And most of all, the production values look like pure Hollywood and the music is seriously rocking. A hearty A- for that teaser video, and I can’t wait to see the product itself.

I dread giving this person a free plug, but I must. “She” (the use of a stock photograph casts doubt on the user’s identity) has obtained an easily- and cheaply-available pack of 170,000 PLR articles (PLR stands for Private Label Rights, and it means you can distribute them under your own name) and has posted them en masse in DocsToc. Here’s the thing. She’s posted the articles in raw form, not even bothering to remove things like the word count. It’s the #2 laziest possible strategy-and it’s resulted in about 40 views per article, over 100,000 on DocsToc alone. All for a packet of articles she quite likely got free.

I’ve had that same article pack for almost a year, but I have executed the #1 laziest possible strategy, and that’s doing nothing; I couldn’t bear to do what she’s doing but I haven’t set aside the time to massage the articles (or write a program to do so). Result? She’s made money and massive backlink love. I’m giving her a free plug and feeling sheepish. Well done, Ms. (Mr.?) Stock Photo Using Winning Internet Marketer!

Video marketing on YouTube is an incredible opportunity for internet marketers. It’s already kind of hard to remember, but before YouTube hit the scene hosting video was a source of endless frustration. It is technically challenging, bandwidth-hogging, fraught with file format peril, and poses unique search challenges.

Unless you just post your videos to YouTube and let Google handle all these problems. You the intrepid video marketer, on the other hand, get to focus on the fun stuff: Search engine optimization (SEO). And YouTube gives you a wide array of opportunities to help ensure that users find your video, and ultimately, your site. Depending on how well you choose your long-tail keywords, it’s possible that you could get a video ranked on page 1 with just five minutes of work. The golden rule: every time you type something on YouTube, expect it to get indexed.

1. Your username: Don’t call register L0serB0y1987 unless you’re marketing a product to dweebs who were born in 1987. If you’re promoting an eczema product, do some keyword research and register as EczemaTreatmentsAndCures. Google does factor in the username.
2. Your video’s tags: Obviously, we humans use tags as search aids. You think you get irritated when you click on an email that says “Urgent matter” and end up with a Nigerian bank scam onscreen? Google does too. You should tag your video with the keywords you want people to use in their searches for your product. Keep that set of keywords tight, to improve  targeting.
3. Description: The video description field seems to be limitless, and it is indexed. Drop in an article or two. If you don’t have one handy, use one from an article directory like EzineArticles. Just be sure to include the resource box. It’s required by licensing terms, it’s the right thing to do regardless, and it won’t hurt your search results.
4. Related videos: Make sure the related videos feature is either turned off or features other videos you did (if they’re in the same niche).
5. Name of video: Duh. Still, don’t get cutesy with your video’s name. Keep it readable but keyword-packed, just like the title you’d use in an article directory or social bookmarking site.

Remember that Google (which owns YouTube) indexes every bit of text it finds when you post a video. Make sure your contributions reflect that reality every step of the way, and you’ll reap the benefits in free traffic.

280Slides Review (still in beta but worth a look anyway)

280Slides has hit the ground running, in a beta version that’s better than most production sites. It’s an online, browser-based application that lets you create PowerPoint slide decks, and save them as PDF to boot. Highlights:

• Create slide shows with a solidly professional interface that feels like the best of PowerPoint and Pages combined
• YouTube-style player with equally similar embed codes
• Instant publishing to SlideShare.net, allowing you to publish your presentation to a high PR-ranked site in seconds
• Attractive themes
• Import feature
• Ability to insert pictures and videos into a presentation
• Speaker’s notes
• Supports the Google Chrome browser
• Saves to PowerPoint, PDF, and OpenDocument

Here’s an embedded show I created in a very few minutes.

280Slides review: Pros

• Intuitive interface both for learning and for repeat use
• Very, very fast to create highly professional-appearing slide shows
• Makes creating text boxes on slides a breeze, far better than any similar product on the Web
• Nice public profile; more fodder for search engines
• Several nice templates
• Though beta, it’s ready for production use

280Slides review: Cons

• Slides don’t look as good viewed in PowerPoint
• Undo occasionally went too far, undoing more than I wanted (but this is a beta app)
• No master slide concept
• No watermark concept
• Themes are good but more is always good
• Limited to a fixed set of text sizes
• Can’t include a hyperlink in a slide

“Video marketing” sounds like a big deal, but it doesn’t have to be. Savvy internet marketers are giving their campaigns a rich new source of visitors and traffic with what looks like decades-old technology: PowerPoint, and things that look like PowerPoint.

In today’s video marketing, you create anything one to a dozen slides (typically), accompanied by a voice and maybe a soundtrack,  then get the whole thing down on video. PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote are tremendous starting points, but don’t worry about buying software if you don’t have them. There are free apps every step of the way, so don’t worry about cost. This begs the question. If you’ve sat through boring PowerPoints before, you’re quite rightly asking why you’d want to subject others to that kind of treatment and how, incidentally, could they be “traffic powerhouses”? Here are 5 reasons even boring videos make good marketing sense.

Automatically gives you a podcast and an article, too! Once you’ve created a video, you have a script that can be turned into an article, and a soundtrack you can use as a podcast.  And why not blog posts announcing each one? Presto, at least 6 pieces of content for the price of one.

Multiple involvement devices: from Related Videos to watermarks, to music to spinning logos. A video gives its consumer many, many ways to be drawn into your universe. Maybe they like your voice. Maybe they like your looks, if you’ve included yourself in the video. Maybe your background music perks up their ears. Maybe you’re graphically gifted and your slides just look good. Every one of these possibilities can mean a customer who’s more ready to visit your site.

Discipline. A simple slide show forces you to get the point across in very few words. This hones your message and forces you to stay on point. Because of this I’m starting to do videos first, then write articles after the videos have been completed. I waste less of the reader’s valuable time and am more likely to say something she wants to hear.

DocsToc and ScribDoc are underrated for SEO. Look carefully at your Google search results. I’m seeing sites like DocsToc and ScribDoc (which accept actual PowerPoint decks as is) appear very high, and they both have killer page rank.

YouTube’s Description is a secret SEO powerhouse: The video description in YouTube can hold articles at least 1,000 words long. Since Google indexes the descriptions, you have some serious search real estate to play with. Smart marketers put a clickable link in the very first part of the description, and smarter marketers include a call to action right after that link (“Click to claim your free special report showing how to become a better public speaker in just 5 minutes”).

So why would someone want to view your slide show? The obvious answer is that you should be promoting a product, whether it’s your own, that of a client, or an affiliate offer, that scratches someone’s itch. They’ve landed on your slide show because they think it will solve a problem.

Last but certainly not least, here’s a bonus reason slide shows are traffic powerhouses: even if your slide show never gets read, it will yield so many other pieces of content and sources of traffic that it does the job it was meant for, popularity contest or not. Try starting your next article as a slide show, and watch your traffic soar along with your productivity.

You know what would be great? A way to create video slide shows with the maximum automation computer technology allows. The feature set might look like this.

• Free
• Exceptionally easy to to learn. We internet marketers have enough on our plates
• Efficient to use
• Ability to take just about any kind of digital image in just about any format
• Lots of effects like the Ken Burns look, sepia tone, and so on
• Easy subtitles
• Generates a standalone movie file that could be downloaded
• Includes a bottomless well of free music in many different styles

Windows Photo Story 3 (free download) is just such a product. It is criminally underrated. It works on Windows 7, and as far as I know Vista and XP too. It lacks a few features many internet marketers would like, such as export to Apple movie formats or Flash, but there’s nothing insurmountable. Workflow is incredibly fast. The music feature is kind of interesting. Instead of using canned music files, it lets you choose a music style (funk, new age, classical-everything except hip-hop, disappointingly), mood, and part of the world, and it spits out an original composition. Obviously the quality isn’t anything you could turn into a hit single, but it has the two massive advantages of being acceptable and not posing any risk of lawsuits, because it’s not copywrited music.

If you’re a PC user, try Photo Story for the creation of your next video. You may be very pleasantly surprised.

I just finished a moderately ambitious video and all the images came from the free stock photography site stock.xchng. You have to be careful with “free” clip art or stock photography sites because the vast majority of them forbid the use of their images in commercial projects. stock.xchng is an exception, and the quality of images will surprise you. A very few of them have commercial restrictions, and some simply ask that you contact the contributor. Non-buyer beware. I can tell you that over 90% of the images I used were unencumbered, and the remaining onces required only notification, not permission.

Bonus tip before I even start: don’t listen to “branding experts”, at least when it comes to domain names.

Millions of domain names are registered every day. All the short, punchy  ones are gone, but that may be a blessing in disguise. The truth is, search  engines like longer, more descriptive domain names. Keep these things in mind as you dream up that perfect domain name

1. Dot com is not as important as you think

If you think your domain name needs to end in .com, think again. Google doesn’t care in the slightest whether your domain name ends in .com or in .info. A well-organized website ending in .info will always win out over a poorly-organized site ending in .com. Exception: When most people will hear about your site through audio sources such as the radio or phone calls. If people need to remember your name and type it into the browser,  they will almost always use .com even if they’re reminded otherwise.

2. Clever domain names are stupid

Throw out everything you’ve ever heard about branding when you choose your domain name, especially if you’re a local business or organization  and you want your customers to find you on the web through search  engines. Domain names figure enormously into how search engines make your site available. If you have a a carpet cleaning firm in the Seattle area and its name is, say, Floorology, consider very strongly getting a descriptive domain name instead. A domain name like CarpetCleaningSeattle.com will help people find your site when they  search for local carpet cleaners. All things being equal, search engines tend to give more weight to the site named CarpetCleaningSeattle.com that Floorology.com or whatever when people search for carpet cleaning seattle or seattle carpet cleaning.

3. Hyphens in domain names are fine

Many search experts feel that hyphens are bad for search engine results because they look like spam. They are wrong. All else being equal, it is the content of the site that marks it as a spammy site. Others take a less dim  view but say that hyphens help search engines extract the meaning of the  words in the URL. Neither is true. The search engines decompose names like SeattleSEOMarketing into their component parts all day long with no problem. Hyphens in names, such as Seattle-SEO-Marketing, aren’t necessary to assist the search engines.

4. Domain names need not be short

Branding experts recommend that you get a short, punchy domain name. Um… sure. If you’re worrying about branding, you probably don’t need this guide. Short, punchy domain names are cool, but they’re also all taken. If you can afford one, you can probably afford a so-called branding expert! As we’ve already discussed, keywords in domain names are good. Hyphens are fine. Descriptive domains are better thant clever ones. So do  you really want to spend $100,000 for the name www.kobo.com? Right. Stick to calling your site www.PacificNorthwestHomeownersInsurance.com, because you’re going  to get a lot more searches for pacific northwest homeowners insurance than you are kobo.com.

5. Search engines think just like you, but more so

Here’s a gem: search engines don’t care about word order as much as you do. The search engines seem to separate the words of a domain name but at that point the order seems to matter less. You might think that boisecarpetcleaning.com is the only possible name for your website, but a search engine will be just as happy with carpetboisecleaning.com. It  gets all your keywords in, making its search value much higher, and that domain name may well not be taken. Not optimal, but that approach could make a huge difference in the number of people who find your site  on the web. Of course it won’t make for the most graceful business cards.  But who uses business cards anymore?

Warrior Forum has been a good resource for beginning to intermediate internet marketers for years now. For a treasure trove of free information on everything, look at this list of best warrior threads on everything from affiliate marketing to Web 2.0 marketing. If you can’t afford any classes or ebooks, it is one of the best starting points you could hope for.

You probably already know this, but read each thread all the way through. Many of them have contributions from respondents rivaling the quality of the main posts themselves.