Social artifacts

If you’re into marketing at all (which I’m trying to teach you about), you need to be producing all kinds of social artifacts. There are a lot of tools out there that you need to be learning. A lot of them are online.

Video

Video on your website and landing pages causes conversion rates to soar. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. OK, so it has to be at least a decent video, but it really does help. And people are gobbling up video on YouTube at astronomical rates.

Record voice narratives and screencasts using software like Camtasia, Captivate, or Jing (if you’re on Mac).

Record yourself on your webcam while talking about a topic that your audience would be interested in. It can just be 3-5 minutes.

Ramit Sethi demonstrates how effective you can be with a webcam and small whiteboard in a simple video about automating your finances:

Learn how to be a good marketer via video because this is more highly effective than you can imagine. And post everything to YouTube where more people will find it!

Audio

Maybe not a full-blown podcast, but you can come up with some good stuff using the poor-man’s alternative to video. :) A good free choice for souped-up editing is called Audacity.

Articles

I think that article-writing is different than blogging. You (and I) should probably be writing more articles for other websites as well.

Presentations

The opportunity to give presentations online is becoming more common. Some bigger companies host speakers via webcast conferencing software like WebEx and Acrobat Connect (amongst others). And there’s always the old-fashioned way: doing them in person at local networking events.

If you don’t have an audience, post some captivating PowerPoint slides on SlideShare. This presentation on SlideShare about The Brand Gap is one of the best I’ve seen on there.

Be creative. Use plenty of imagery.

Blogging

Yup, a good way to reach out if you can stay consistent. WordPress is by far the best platform for doing this.

Document Sharing

Kind of like articles and blogging. But sometimes you can make cool documents, spreadsheets, and flowcharts that people would find interesting. Like all of this stuff, a little creativity can go a long way.

Aaron Wall did a great flowchart about SEO a while ago.

You can also share your documents on Scribd. Their documents sometimes get you some extra exposure in Google and Yahoo!.

The hard part: commitment

For some reason, I’m really fired up about this tonight. I probably won’t be as fired up in a couple days. I should be producing and planning more than one social artifact when I’m in an over-caffeinated mood like this. I’ll probably stay up late tonight and work on it some.

I hope that you’ll see more from me, and I hope to make announcements of a variety of social artifacts that I produce and how you can get your hands on them.