Anyone that has spent more than an hour on YouTube knows how cool many of the videos are. They also know how lame most of them are. The great ones go viral and that’s exactly what HornBlasters.com has achieved.

I found a pretty funny YouTube video the other day through a tweet by John Sullivan @jsinkeywest. It’s Train Horns Scare Daytona Florida! [below] by Matt Landon Heller of HornBlasters.com Matt has many YouTube videos, several with around half a million views. The video below alone has over 440,000 views, 860 ratings (4 1/2 stars) and 853 comments. Can it get more viral than that? Driving traffic to their site to sell product – that’s what I’m talking about! I love this stuff. My hat’s off to YouTube Viral Marketing at it’s best and HornBlasters.com. I am now a big fan.

HornBlasters on Facebook
HornBlasters on Twitter

HornBlasters.com Train Horns For Your Ride!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGYcnYLK_50

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKeEaeVcHV0

If all of your marketing efforts are designed to keep your online business from shrinking then you are loosing ground. We can see examples of this in every size online business in every niche. I’ll offer a couple recent big ones…

Right now there is a lot of debate on why myspace.com was just recently passed by facebook.com in traffic. We can discuss why one site suddenly outperforms the other but I would like to use it as an example. The chart below by compete.com clearly shows myspace.com holding steady and maintaining it’s traffic. That’s not good enough, is it? facebook.com is growing while myspace.com flat lines.

Another example is mybloglog.com and blogcatalog.com. I have accounts with both and everyone has their own opinions but we see the same scenario. blogcatalog.com grew 162.5% while mybloglog.com pretty much stayed level with a negative 3.9% in unique visitors. Within just a couple of months that growth shot blogcatalog.com way past mybloglog.com.

The reasons for the traffic shift of those two examples are really irrelevant for most of us. We don’t face the same challenges or have the resources of any of those four giants. What we can gain from are the results. For whatever reason one site is growing and the other isn’t. We need to find the ‘growth button’ for our niche and our business.

Marketing is much more than advertising and selling goods or services. The Marketing Mix (The four Ps) Product, Price, Place, and Promotion covers all of the basics of general marketing. Our marketing mix incorporates market research, pricing, customer service, promotion, terms, branding, exposure, message, distribution, selling and much more. It is all about influencing new consumers to buy our product while convincing current customers to stay with our brand.

We don’t have to have huge marketing budgets for steady growth. It’s not even necessary to have a traditional product. If you are a blogger your website is your product. Optimizing our specific marketing mix for growth along with retention is imperative.

The Extreme Ezine is going to kick it up a notch. How about you? Is your online business growing? Are you gaining unique visitors to your site each month? Are your profits increasing each month. What are you doing to grow your business?

That was until I read a post on John’s Tech Blog Google Turns SEO On It’s Head! John’s post made me go back and pay attention to a Google search that I had just made. I was checking our ad tracking site‘s current position by searching ad tracking in Google search – still number two So I went back and noticed the little icon  where I could add a note to my URL.

I didn’t even think that was so special until I noticed that is was public! Wow, a public comment next to your URL in Google’s search results. SearchWiki does not affect the way websites are ranked by Google but adding a public comment about your site is a great way to make it more visible and perhaps even a little more legitimate in the eyes of some.

Related: The Official Google Blog SearchWiki: make search your own

Complete the Digg submission exactly the same as always. The only exception is the Captcha (Are You Human?) form before hitting the ‘Submit story‘ button. Get it wrong. That’s right, enter the wrong answer on the captcha form the first time. When it comes back to tell you to try again you, all of the sudden, have the image option again. If there is an image available that is.

So make a mistake once in a while and get your image on Digg again Oh ya, here’s my Digg Profile.

Blog Post To Article

Nothing new here. Bloggers have been doing this for years. Once you have the post written it’s a breeze to submit it to article directories so other site owners can use the content. Now your blog post just went viral!

Blog Post To E-Book

Another way to increase the value of your work is take the content and write an e-book. Yes, even more viral. It was quick and easy since the content had already been written.

Random Tips

Using a simple HTML rotator I was able to set-up random tips taken from the article to display on my site. It took about an hour to copy and paste each tip into it’s own section.

Other Ideas I Could Have Used

I could, and still may, build a blog widget so the random tips can be added to other blogs as free content – and viral site promotion of course.

It would have been a very simple task to require subscription to a newsletter in order to download the ebook.

I could have expanded my promotions even further by writing and submitting press releases.

Another idea could have been to break the content into parts for a free e-course using an autoresponder to build another list.

I don’t want to forget about video! I could have read the post on video or even recorded it for an audio download.

I’m sure a cool interview could have been worked out using the content.

I could have taken the time to include affiliate or product advertisements such as a few banners in the ebook.

I’m sure there are other ideas. Site promotion is limited only by your imagination.

Would you like to use this article on your website? See our EzineArticles.com bio page for details and a list of available articles. You must include the author resource box below each article published and please make sure each link is ‘clickable’. Don’t forget to come back here and leave us the page the article is on using the comments feature of this post. That will give you a search engine friendly link back

The post is already written, it’s original by you and hopefully it’s related to your niche market. Like I said, common sense. Why not take that hard earned work and let it generate some quality one-way links back to your site, free site traffic and a reputation as an expert in your field? Let’s get started building your expert reputation;

1. The first step is to sign up for a few article directories and learn their terms, rules and guidelines. I can’t stress this enough, follow the directory’s rules to the letter. You want published, not flagged and held for violating key word abuse or something similar. See if and how many links your articles can have, what HTML tags you can use etc..

2. Once you have setup accounts with a few sites, every time you write a new Blog post ask yourself if it’s worthy of an article. Is it something others would want to read? If not, you may want to reconsider posting it to your Blog but there are many posts that I don’t convert because they wouldn’t be appropriate. One example would be a post that’s loaded with resource links and wouldn’t be worth much if the links were removed.

3. Now all you have to do is a little editing to adhere to each directory’s terms. Personally, I keep a separate folder on my computer and use notepad to archive my articles. I keep the basic article there along with each title, key words, a short teaser, number of words and author’s bio. This makes it a very simple task to add the same content to multiple directories.

4. Write your Author’s Resource Bio for each directory you are going to contribute to. Just like the article itself, be sure your bio isn’t in violation with the site’s rules. This is where you get your traffic and back link from. Don’t try inserting links to your site in the body of the article, self promotion is inappropriate there and will get your submission rejected. Remember, you’re providing valuable content for other sites to use and, just as with any product, your article must be of value to them or it will never be used. Keep that in mind and write for the best content and you’ll be fine.

Now that you have the ball rolling, I’ll offer a few tips so you get the most from your work…

In a very short time your articles should start adding up. It’s not unusual to see thousands of back links generated from other sites using your content if you keep adding to the pool. An easy way to speed things up is to go back and look at old blog posts. If they have potential edit and submit them. You may have dozens or hundreds of articles just waiting to be free content for someone’s website.

Mix it up a little too. Write different variations of each article and your bios for each site you submit your work to. This will help ease the issue of duplicated content but that’s for another discussion. EzineArticles.com, my favorite, allows up to three separate author bios so I use one for three separate niches using links back to the related site.

Tracking your progress is easy. A few weeks after your article is approved and online, check for back links with one of the many free online tools available. Link Popularity Checker is one that’s easy and free but there are hundreds of others. You could even use tracking links to split test the results but I believe the SEO benefit of the back links are more important. Tracking links would steal any page rank, if any, that might come from the link. I do want to mention that recently I’ve noticed of few very popular article authors with very little or no page rank. I’m not sure why, perhaps it’s from other unrelated issues such as text ads or some other search engine penalties. My whole reason for giving my hard earned work away is to build traffic and my reputation. Anything else I’ll just consider a bonus.

Expert Author Brian HawkinsWould you like to use this article on your website? See our EzineArticles.com bio page for details and a list of available articles. You must include the author resource box below each article published and please make sure each link is ‘clickable’. Don’t forget to come back here and leave us the page the article is on using the comments feature of this post. That will give you a search engine friendly link back