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Why You Want to Use Rich Media in Your Campaigns

Victoria Rosendahl

If you’ve been hanging out on the web in the past year or so you’ve probably heard the terms rich media, web 2.0 and local search being bandied about. They’re all part of the new frontier of advertising and you’ll want to at least know what they are so if a client asks you about any of them you can talk knowledgeably.

You may also decide that these methods wouldn’t suit your client well and you’ll be able to explain why you have this opinion.

Ready? Here goes …

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RICH MEDIA

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Rich media is part of universal search. Huh?

Go open another tab on your browser and I’ll show you. Let’s use the long tail search term “waist high raised bed garden”. Plug that into Google or Yahoo and see what comes up.

When you see images or video, in the search results that’s rich media. This particular search happens to be related one of my gardening products, GardenRack. And because I’ve sprung into the video marketing scene, I dominate page one of Google.

Using rich media - images and video - has helped my product get noticed and purchased. You can also add images, video and news to Google Base for free and that helps jump your rankings.

Now, admittedly, I tailored the keyword phrase to something really specific. I did this for a reason. The search term “raised bed garden” has over a million pages and it’s hard to compete effectively for that term. And this should be part of your thinking when it comes to conquering a niche market.

When I research a market, I look at how many pages Google comes back with. Ideally I want 300,000 pages or less, plenty of sponsored ads and little to no rich media.

However, with “waist high raised bed garden”, “waist high raised bed gardening”, and even “waist high garden”, I dominate page one of Google because of all the video out there.

So what do you do when there are lots of products you’d like to promote? Do you have to get a domain name for every one of them? No. The answer for you is …

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WEB 2.0

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This is the difference between having to buy a domain name every time you want to promote something and having a newer idea.

Web 2.0 sites are user generated. Sites like Squidoo (www.squidoo.com), Hubpages (www.hubpages.com) and Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com ) are all sites where you can sign up for an account and create a web page with your target keywords in them. And wetpaint is a wiki page which means that others can add to the page you start and you can share everything together.

Take a look at the Squidoo page for GardenRack here: http://www.squidoo.com/gardenrack . This is the web 2.0 page I started last year to help send traffic to my money page which is www.garden-rack.com . Whenever I have something new going on, say a new article that I’ve published, I’ll link to it on my Squidoo lens.

These web 2.0 pages can be edited and updated any time like your own website and are pretty easy to use. When you’re setting it up though, remember to use your most important keyword in the address, header and title.

Why use web 2.0? Because the more sites you have pointing to your money page - or the page you want to convert - the more links you’ll have and the better you’ll rank in the search engines.

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LOCAL SEARCH

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You’re going to see a lot more of local search in the near future as I think it could be the next big wave of the Internet. And the way it works is really pretty simple.

Local search means that you add some geographic identifiers to your keywords like “San Diego Trial Attorney” or Trial Attorney, San Diego”. Why do this? Because it’s a way to narrow your target audience even further.

Let’s say you’re a copywriter in the interior design arena and this is huge in Dallas, Texas. I’m just taking a guess here - if it really is huge in Dallas, go for it.

When putting together search words, you’ll want to use the long tail “interior design copywriter” and then add “Dallas, TX” to the end of it. Now it’s truly focused and specific.

Here’s another example. When I was researching for a mother’s day web 2.0 page, I found that flower searches were huge in Houston. I would then go for “mothers day flowers Houston” as the web address and in the title.

I think we’ll see a whole lot more local search as the year goes on and into 2010.

I hope you enjoyed this month’s installment of Chix Trax and that you’ll start to venture more into rich media, web 2.0 and will keep an eye on local search.

We’re going to start using video for some of our newsletters and I’ll have a quick demonstration of rich media, web 2.0 and local search in the next week or so.

We'll see you next month!

The 3 Chix

Victoria (with Beth and Donna)