Issue #764 Nov. 9, 2013
Publisher: Joan Stewart
“Tips, Tricks and Tools for Free Publicity”
In This Issue
- Google Helpouts Promote You
- Tips for Your Videos
- New Posts at My Blog
- Hound Video of the Week
This Week in the Hound House:
You know how much I love my Green Packers and my Cheesehead hat. But I couldn’t help but smile when I saw what three creative Chicago Bears fans had on their heads at Monday’s game at Lambeau Field.
1. Google Helpouts Promote You
Google has a new product that will help you promote your expertise to the world and create a new revenue stream.
It’s called Helpouts, and it lets you sell small chunks of time to people and coach them, via videocam, on how to do something like play the guitar, do a yoga pose correctly or make a souffle. You set your own price and decide how long you want each Helpout to be.
Google takes 20 percent of your revenue and you keep the rest.
Your clients get a money-back guarantee. You can decide if you want Google to create a video of the Helpout to give to the client.
You can create multiple Helpout pages for different types of coaching. Google rolled out Helpouts this week, and I’ve already used it.
I bought some Helpout time yesterday afternoon from Google+ expert BL Ochman who helped me devise a killer Google+ strategy and incorporate it into my other marketing. The whole thing worked effortlessly. I love it! You will too.
Read about Helpouts in the New York Times article.
Google Helpouts include these categories: Arts & Music, Computers & Electronics, Cooking, Education & Careers, Fashion & Beauty, Fitness & Nutrition, Health, Home & Garden, and Other. So as you can see, almost anything goes.
You can see BL’s very thorough Helpouts page.
But, please, don’t create your own Helpout until you understand the technology and are familiar with Google Hangouts, the popular instant messaging and video chat platform, and all the ways you can use it in your Helpout coaching sessions.
I’m hosting a webinar on Thursday, Nov. 21, with BL on how to do a Google Hangout, how to practice with it until you feel comfortable, and then how to advance to Helpouts and start selling time.
You’ll be able to register for the webinar starting next week, so please save the date.
Visit the Helpouts page but don’t create anything until you know what you’re doing.
2. Help for Your Videos
When you discover a cool new tool that helps you create video quickly, like the Vizify tool that I told you about last week that lets you create a video of your Twitter stream, jump on it!
But don’t just create the video and upload it to YouTube. Understand all the things you can do with the video to pull traffic to your website or blog, or encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel, or call you for more info, or give you their email address.
Jeff Johnson, who created the excellent “Tube Traffic Secrets” course I took last winter, is giving away free YouTube training right now. The second of his three free videos is here.
“How to Get New Customers Online Absolutely Free” explains a simple trick that virtually forces YouTube and Google to send you tons of traffic. And it takes only 5 minutes to set up.
If you missed Video 1 and your free cheat sheets on how to optimize your videos to pull more traffic, you can grab them by clicking on that link. I’m promoting the free video training as an affiliate who earns commission if you buy anything from Jeff because his course helped me understand YouTube and all the free tools it includes to turn your video channel into a lead generation machine and a powerful publicity tool.
3. New Posts at My Blog
Think you know hashtags? Take this quiz (it’s tricky)
Important Note: If you missed Thursday’s webinar on how to use hashtags, you can get the video download link and all the other materials sometime tomorrow.
5 top things to consider before you write and self-publish a book and why publicists should care
Dog Tweets of the Week–How to make a blog banner–free, fast and easy
4. Hound Video of the Week
Why do we love dogs so much? Watch “On the Ninth Day, God Created the Dog,” and you’ll understand.
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