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Promoting Your Doodles
Explains how and where to promote your doodles. Talks about black hat promotions and the dangerous effects these can have on your doodles.
Opportunity
SoloBoss will provide a cost free method of promoting content you create to a larger audience a week from releasing this article. If you are reading this, you are invited to participate. The 100th SoloBoss article release will have more details.
Can I set it and forget it?
No, that is not how promotion works. In marketing, you’ve got to get your message out in front of people that want to hear it consistently. Just putting a doodle or any video production out there and not telling people about it not useful. When is the last time you saw a doodle go viral? Never? There is a reason for that. Ask yourself if you would spend the time making a huge submarine sandwich and then just leave it on the counter and not eat it. Consistent promotion is necessary.
How do I promote for free?
To answer this, we have to understand the difference between hosting and promoting. Hosting is placing your doodle at a place where people can view it. We can host our doodles on several platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. Just because you are hosting it does not mean people will find it but there are methods for which you can use to promote your doodle while hosting it such as using keyword phrases for which people will search. Finding keyword phrases is outside the scope of this article.
There are on page, off page and in video promotions.
On Page Promotions
Using the tools that are available to you along with keyword phrases for which people are searching in order to promote your doodles using the search algorithms used by YouTube, Google and other search engines. No single person or even team of people knows these search algorithms so it is trial and error. There are some very expensive tools out there that will help in determine whether your on page promoting is viable.
Off Page Promotions
Using other avenues available to you such as Facebook, Instagram, Google Business and anywhere else your message can be uploaded and viewed by people. However, it is not enough just to post in these places because these places also need to be promoted. These places should act like a funnel for people back to your message. Everything should be a cohesive funnel back to your message.
In Video Promotion
A viewer is watching your video. This is the perfect opportunity to promote your product service or funnel for where you want them to go. You have an active person on your video interested in your content. This is it! This is what you’ve worked so hard to obtain. This is your chance to market to them and keep them on your channel, using your products or service and keep them coming back in front of you. This is your prime time customer and why you have worked so hard at learning how to produce videos. Why would you throw this opportunity away by not putting a plug into your video about your service or product?
When should I begin promoting?
If using the free method of promoting then promoting a message/product should start about a year before a product is released and should be promoted 2 to 3 times a week or more.
What is a marketing funnel?
There are several marketing funnel types. This article will focus on one type. Think of this like putting oil in a car. We have a funnel that we pour the oil into so the oil doesn’t spill all over the place and it goes exactly where want it. A marketing funnel does the same thing. It takes all the places for which you are allowed to advertise and funnels the people to one point.
Take this SoloBoss article you are reading right now, for example. I have taken the time to provide you with valuable free information. This is helping you learn all the while promoting the SoloBoss brand recognition.
The Doodly Users Group by SoloBoss is a promotion of brand recognition using the blanket of another larger software base to get the SoloBoss name out there while providing members with a safe place to gather and share doodles with one another. It is a win/win for both the company and the member. When a member joins the group, what is the very first thing we do with every approved member? We welcome them to the group and funnel them to the SoloBoss YouTube channel.
The SoloBoss YouTube channel not only provides people with valuable free information but the free video tutorials are promotions of brand recognition in themselves. The first thing that plays on every video is the SoloBoss or the B2B I.T. Solutions introduction. Do we stop there? No, because it is not enough to just set it and forget it.
We go into the Doodly Design Group and help people with their video designs and then what do we do? We send them to the SoloBoss YouTube videos or our SoloBoss Detailed Doodly Articles Index which then brings them to the Doodly Users Group which funnels them to the YouTube channel. People see the value in the items provided and that shows them that we are trustworthy and are not just out to get their money which establishes a blanket of trust. Members now realize that they have found someone that genuinely wants to help them, which is a diamond in the rough in todays cutthroat world.
If and when it comes time for SoloBoss to say, hey members, if you are interested in product X, we now have a fan base who knows they can trust us and all of this was done for free to the viewer or member and free to the company.
Approved Facebook Group Members:
This is a very tedious and time consuming task but by qualifying and approving each and every member, we not only keep our members safe from hackers, scammers, bots, sales and marketers, advertisers, people that wish to do harmful things, etc. but what else are we doing? We are ensuring that we have real people in the group that are interested in our brand recognition and the information we are providing. By ensuring that each and every member responds to us with a screenshot of Doodly, we now know they are a real person that is interested in learning more about the Doodly software, video design and interested in our videos and our articles as well as our brand recognition. This provides a trust blanket because we do take the time to qualify each and every member, builds up a potential customer base for people interested in our videos, services or products; even if they are free, allows for building new friendships and working relationships, and helps ensure that we keep potential competition out of the group.
This is an example of one type of a marketing funnel. In this real world example, those free video tutorials took thousands of hours to create and these free written articles took hundreds of hours to create. We are banking on the significant amount of time that is put forth initially to pay off in the long run by seeing a continual increase in the approved Doodly Users Group members and the subscriber base on the SoloBoss YouTube channel.
Are there paid methods of promotion?
Absolutely. These are often very expensive endeavors and require a lot of technical expertise on how to work the advertising system to compete against the competition. Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising are two of the top advertising platforms.
Google AdWords requires extensive knowledge of Search Engine Optimization and search algorithms in addition to the knowledge of how to work their system. The AdWords providers that are assigned to your account only care about getting you to advertise and consistently hounding you until you do regardless of how many times you tell them not to call. We finally had to block our Google AdWords representative because he wouldn’t stop calling every day and then we had to block him from leaving messages on the voicemail. Needless to say but it wasn’t a very good experience for us; the customer. Additionally, Google also pays attention to not only search algorithms but how much money is paid per click to provide placement for a search.
Facebook advertising requires extensive knowledge of your target market and how to use their very confusing advertising system.
LinkedIn has a marketing platform but this requires extensive knowledge of how their system works and how to use their marketing platform.
What is Black Hat Marketing?
Platforms, like YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and many others have algorithms and reporting not just for you but for them. They know when you are purchasing views and subscribers and when these are not organically grown. Using platforms like Fiverr to market out your video will see that the video views or subscriber count go up but it will have a very negative overall impact if when there is a full understanding of what that means.
Purchasing Views
1. Facebook considers a view to be 3 seconds of a video.
2. Google considers a view to be 30 seconds of a video.
This information is not news to these companies that provide these services but they won’t tell you this information because they want the sale.
<Techinese Warning>
The companies utilize bots to provide this service. Regardless of how much they tell you that they don’t and they use real world people, they don’t have 8,000 or 64,000 or 128,000 people ready to watch your videos. They are using real world accounts but using a bot to sign into that account and provide that view then log out of that account, use a free VPN service to look like they are coming from a different IP address and then logging into another account, going to that video for 30 seconds and then repeat. This provides the appearance of real people.
The average watch time for purchasing views will be around 30 seconds of watched time per view. That’s wonderful if the video is only 30 seconds or less in length because it will mean that 100% of the video is watched. If the video is 15 minutes in length and a view is only 30 seconds this breaks down to:
15 minutes = 900 seconds
30 seconds watched = 3.3% of the video has been watched.
This provides an average watch time of 30 seconds on that video which YouTube then interprets as extremely bad. This reflects extremely poorly on the video and the channel. In turn, YouTube has algorithms that look for patterns like this and then mark the channel with a red flag which will prevent the channel from appearing for any type of highly sought after keyword phrases.
</Techinese Warning>
Interpret the same thing thing as above for Facebook but with the understanding that the views would be 3 seconds in length.
Purchasing subscribers or followers
We can purchase these as well. Some companies will use bot accounts to sign up and YouTube has algorithms to catch accounts like this and it is in their rules that if your account is caught using tactics like these, they will ban the account. Is it really worth it after all the time and energy that has been put into these videos, to be banned from using the service?
In April of 2020, when we first started working with our YouTube channel after 10 years of having it and doing nothing with it, we considered purchasing, for $500.00, 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watched hours. We decided against it and decided to get them organically. Why? Because of research.
Yes, we would have made 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watched hours a lot easier. The company we were researching did it legitimately through advertising campaigns and while this would have been considered white hat marketing, it required a 1 hour video and a 30 minute video to be on the channel which we didn’t have at the time. We could have made a 1 hour video and a 30 minute video but what would that have gotten us? 1,000 subscribers that didn’t really want our content. 1,000 subscribers that weren’t really interested in our message and that were obtained through ads that we had no say in what was said however misleading. So we decided to not go with this option and to gain the subscribers organically.
<Techinese Warning>
When purchasing subscribers, these are not real people. They are a made up account of subs that will never watch your future videos leaving you with less watch time and therefore almost no revenue. The reports are now inaccurate because they will show more stats than have really been obtained. The algorithm for YouTube knows what the average watch time is supposed to be based on the number of subscribers. They look for patterns like these to red flag accounts they believe are trying to circumvent the system. If your account is red flagged, their algorithm will treat your videos badly and you won’t appear in their search algorithm for any top quality keyword phrases.
</Techinese Warning>
What is White Hat Marketing?
These hosting platforms have rules for obtaining organic followers, subscribers and views on the video. We are not their first video provider. This type of marketing follows those rules. It uses advertising and linking campaigns to let people organically come to the channel and subscribe.
Promotion Advice
Promoting yourself is about getting your product or service in front of someone over and over again. How many times do smokers need to see quit smoking before they are so sick of it they either ignore or it finally follow the advice? How many times did you see that mattress and look at it and lay down on it before you purchased? How about those shoes? What about that food? How many times did you see the SoloBoss Tips of the Day or Detailed Doodly Articles Index before you clicked on the link? How about the SoloBoss videos? Did you think they were just overdone and get tired of seeing them in the Doodle Design Group before you finally clicked and realized, WOW, there really is a lot of really fantastic information in these videos? WHY? Because I am consistently in the DDG every day helping someone promoting my videos until someone finally clicks on them after seeing them over and over again. With 84,000+ members in that group, even with only under 100 active members, the posts zip by really fast at times so helping every person that writes into that group is another promotion opportunity to bring someone into The Doodly Users Group where the real information and real help is located.
Introverts
If you cannot get yourself in front of people, promoting will not be for you and you’ve got to master this otherwise you will be left in the dust by your competition hanging your head wondering why nobody wants to see your videos or product and why this didn’t work for you. You’ve done so much, come so far and have so much to offer people. Don’t stop now. This is the information as to why it won’t work. If you don’t promote, people won’t know about your product or service. How are people going to know about you unless you tell them?
Here is some very simple homework to help you get past your fear of talking to people or not knowing what to say or whatever the issue may be that is preventing you from getting to 100%.
The following information has been written specifically to not get you in trouble in the Doodly Design Group and to stay in compliance with their rules. Copy and paste the following information, as a comment, into at least 20 different people’s posts requesting assistance in the Doodly Design Group over the next month and feel free to change the wording as you feel comfortable enough but don’t change the links.
SoloBoss has 100 free very detailed Doodly articles written and the Top 50 Doodly Frequently Asked Questions. The articles may be very helpful. Here are the links to the index and F.A.Q.: