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” 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.

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.

Black Hat World’s SEO Forum has a post (free registration required) listing many, many article directories, press release directories, and social bookmarking sites with high page rank, in page rank order. A couple of notes. One is that I just discovered Black Hat World, and their terms of service are almost comically middlebrow. They don’t appear to be very black hat. The other note is for beginners. These are sites Google thinks of as popular and authoritative, and virtually all of them allow you to submit either an article you’ve written or a press release. Social bookmarking sites just let you keep a site bookmarked as you would on the browser, but it’s public so everyone can see it. The theory, which works pretty well, is that using these free resources helps focus searches to land closer to your site.

Ever wonder how to get Google to index your site? You can do it fast and free using free classifieds and bookmarking sites. I wrote a popular article on forcing Google to index your site for EzineArticles.com.

Coty Schwabe looks to be on the fast track to gurudom, despite his professed outsider status (Guru Crusher, anyone?). He claims in a recent opt-in video for what appears to be an upcoming product called Google Dogs of War that he can get an existing (say, month-old) blog to get indexed on Google within a few minutes. This is months-old domain name and I just set up the blog tonight. I’m going to put it to the test.

Schwabe says in the video he earns a full-time, if not lavish income as an internet marketer. He’s obviously young, and if you search for his name you’ll find that he seems to be executing a very competent review blog strategy. The sites he creates are clean, the videos simple and clear, and he likes to work on a tight budget, befitting his tyro status. Definitely a person to watch.