Get social! Take advantage of the social marketing trend that is taking over the network. There are a variety of tools and platforms to take advantage of.

  1. Social bookmarks. On the home page of your content, you should have an addthis.com link to allow users to bookmark your website using the social bookmarking tool of their choice. This can allow viral exposure of your content.
  2. Send to a Friend. Create a send-to-a-friend feature to allow users to evangelize their own content within their personal network.
  3. Open the Social/Facebook app. Build an app for both of these popular standards that will open your app up to be seen on the top 10 most trafficked sites on the internet, which are mostly social networking sites. The app can expose your content and also allow users to interact with comments or ratings. Once again, you will turn casual viewers into interested fans who will want to come back to your website.
  4. Create social media profiles. Create profiles on popular social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Orkut. Dedicate an internal resource to frequently update your profile with new videos, add friends to your network and see increased interest in your brand and visits to your website.

Think outside the browser. As Internet users continue to consume information and interact with the web in new ways, you need to be prepared to take advantage of that and offer your services and information in an ever-growing variety of formats: mobile and email are some good ones for begin.

  1. SMS contests. Just like American Idol, you can incorporate SMS polls into your existing live events.
  2. SMS Marketing – Same concept but sending videos by SMS to mobile devices.
  3. Mobile site. Create a mobile version of your website to view it on the go.
  4. Junk mail. Create daily or weekly alerts to email to your most loyal user base. Members will enjoy email and be reminded to come back to your site every day. It’s great to get a new visitor to your website, but if you get a new email address, you can continue to market to that person for years, and even for a marginally interested person, get hundreds or thousands of site visits from them, just because you have the ability to continue to communicate with them.

User Generated Content. The good news is that users want to contribute to your website, they are ready and waiting to add valuable content to your website for you. The problem is that you have to spend some time thinking about the most appropriate ways to offer these opportunities to your audience. And also, you don’t want to do this in a vacuum, because it’s going to take a while for enough users to contribute their own content, so you’ll need to continue to provide the content until your user base takes off.

  1. Upload photos/videos. Create contests on popular topics on your site to encourage users to submit their own videos and images to the site. Announce the winner in your live event.
  2. Incentive for Participation. Your viewers want to engage with your website. By creating contests and user introduction campaigns, you will give users a reason to visit your website. Create a contest themed around one of your content categories.
  3. Classified. Create a classifieds section to allow visitors to interact with each other and build a community on your website.

audio Video. As more and more video websites gain popularity and large corporations invest in them, it’s not hard to see where the future of information consumption will lie. The good news is that the tools to create your own audio and video are becoming more affordable and accessible. Here’s how to take advantage of your audio/video:

  1. Integrated video player. Leverage existing video content by adding an ad-embedded video player. Allow users to embed this video on their website, blog, or MySpace page to share revenue for an affiliate program. Take advantage of the long tail effect of users sharing your content within their own networks. Although you may be tired of giving your content away for free, people will always want to come back to your website for the full experience of your brand, so you don’t need to worry.
  2. Increase exposure of web content. Put teaser video clips on YouTube and other popular video sharing sites, to take advantage of the large user bases on those sites and convert them into fans and frequent visitors to your website.
  3. Flash Media. If you’re still using Windows Media as a video or audio player, stop right now! Standardize your video to flash video format and get rid of Windows Media Player
  4. Create a video montage. Gmail ran a similar campaign ( http://mail.google.com/mail/help/gmail_video.html ) in which it encouraged viewers to submit videos with certain parameters and stitched all the videos together into an interesting and fun montage.

And more! Here are some additional weapons to add to your arsenal.

  1. SEO optimization. For the purposes of increased search engine exposure, each piece of content, whether it be text, audio, images, or video, should have its own separate home page. It’s fine to have a player on the home page that allows the user to conveniently navigate all the videos on your site, but there should be a link available to a dedicated page for each video with a good URL structure. Some suggestions for additional features on this page are user comments and related videos.
  2. AdWords campaigns. The key here is the custom landing page – you need to take the time to figure out a very specific target you want to market to and build campaigns towards that.
  3. Interactive game. Create a flash video game tailored to the interests of your viewers.
  4. Live events. Create live events centered around your content. If you have video content, these can be live webcasts. If they are audio, they can be live teleconferences. If it’s just written content, create a chat room and announce a time when you’ll be online, live, available for Q&A.
  5. RSS Feeds. Create feeds to syndicate your content in this popular format. There are many aggregators that will pick up your content and a growing user base of information consumers who prefer to consume news, video and photos through the convenience of an RSS reader.
  6. Blogging. Dedicate an internal resource to writing blog posts frequently. Search engines love blogs and you will be rewarded with traffic for frequent and well-written posts.