With few questions asked, the bank gives you $10,000, but takes a $500 fee. With a smile, they tell you to be in touch whenever you’re on your feet and ready to get them that design work. That’s a pretty good deal, right?

In the past two years, Kickstarter.com has redefined the way that start-ups and small businesses raise capital. The online fundraising portal takes a 5 percent cut, which can be a sizeable chunk of change, but they also work with you to promote and market your campaign and make sure it’s successful. And once it’s funded, they’re out of the equation.

Just in case you’ve missed the phenomenon completely, here’s how it works: Businesses, bands, entrepreneurs, and people with good ideas create a video explaining what they want to do and how much money they need to do it. They then create a series of rewards for people that contribute at different levels. If you’re a band raising money to record a new album, $10 might get backers a copy of the CD when it’s done. $25 might buy a CD and poster, while $2,500 gets a house concert.

The Kickstarter team reviews the campaign before it launches and helps to ensure that it’s got a good chance of succeeding. Once it goes live, backers can pledge at whatever level they choose. Their credit cards and PayPal accounts are only charged if the project meets its pre-determined financial goal.

When the campaign ends, the project’s founder collects their money, pays Kickstarter 5 percent, and with their now fully-stocked bank account, gets to work on creating the rewards they’ve promised their backers.

Sound intriguing? Here are a few errors to avoid in making sure that your Kickstarter campaign doesn’t fall short of its goals:

Don’t Be a Panhandler

Kickstarter campaigns that fail to meet their goal often have a common theme: they don’t make financial sense for the backer. I’ve been sent links to several campaigns that offer next-to-nothing for as much as $20. Last week, I supported a friend’s project to film a documentary about the sport of kiteboarding (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1148654711/with-a-kite). I gave $25, which seemed very reasonable for a signed DVD once the project was completed. 56 people agreed with me and backed at that level. However, only three people gave the minimum $5 backing, which included only a “virtual fist bump.”

If you’re not a non-profit organization doing charity work, don’t seek out altruism. Give your backers a deal for paying up front for your work. When paying ahead-of-time saves money, people will do that, but if your prices are the same (or higher) than the finished product, you’ll be hard-pressed to find support.

Don’t Overlook the Video

A Kickstarter campaign is defined by its video. If you’re hawking a quality product or service, you want to present it at the highest possible level.

You don’t have to create a Super Bowl commercial — people are already at your page to learn about what you’re offering, so it’s not necessary to hook them in with dancing polar bears and talking babies.

In 2010, the LunaTik watch became one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns ever (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1104350651/tiktok-lunatik-multi-touch-watch-kits). After setting a goal of just $15,000, the company raised nearly a million dollars ($942,578), vastly surpassing their initial mark.

How did they do it? First of all, their video showed detailed images of the watch, which allows an iPod Nano to snap into it and work as a wristwatch. The four-and-a-half minute video leaves no questions about what the watch is and what it will do. Secondly, the rewards saved people money. 2,432 backers agreed to pre-order a watch for $25 that would later retail for $35. (Notice again that only 128 backers gave $1 just to support the product and receive nothing — why bother taking the time to type in credit card or PayPal info?)

Don’t Forget to Market

Yes, Kickstarter has a built in platform to get the word out about your venture. There are lots of people who browse the site, finding start-ups that they have no connection to and deciding to back them.

However, the great majority of backers will come via your own online networks. Most funding comes in the first day of a campaign. Launch with alerts on Facebook, Twitter, and every other platform you use, and implore your friends to spread the word.

First, get people to your Kickstarter page. Once they’re there, if you present a clean video and rewards that save them money for a product or service they’re intrigued by, you’ll find success. Skip any step in that process, however, and you’re likely to fail. Remember that with Kickstarter, you only get paid if your project meets its goal.

About Anita Brady

Industry veteran Anita Brady is the President of123Print.com, a leading provider of high quality customizable items like customizable business cards, letterhead and other materials for small businesses and solo practitioners.

Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to Like Future of Publishing on Facebook!

Alerti social media monitoring chart about negative and positive conversations surrounding Facebook’s iPhone app UI change:

The great thing about Instagram is the fact that a user can utilize the tool just like anyone else. While some picture taking services and sites, such as Pinterest, are best used by advanced designers and are usually only looked upon by the average Joe, Instagram is easy to use for anyone who knows how to point and shoot. This tool also has what are called “filters,” which change the picture color and tone slightly and often add borders in order to change the look of the image.

Consider the following example:

As you can see, different filters give the “normal” photo a different look. This puts a little bit of editing power into the hands of non-editors. According to co-founder Kevin Systrom in an interview with TechCrunch, Instagram is really a “storytelling service. It’s the way you go out in the world and tell a story about your life.” Because Instagram users can connect with other Instagram users, it makes it more than just a picture taking tool. Naturally, this leads many to scratch their heads and wonder: So how can this be utilized for businesses again?

Top 5 Ways to Heed the Power of Instagram

Instagram can be utilized by any business in any industry, but I would be lying if I said that it would yield great results for every type of business. The truth is—B2C businesses that sell a concrete product, such as restaurants and clothing stores, as well as bands and those in the entertainment industry are much more likely to benefit from Instagram. Companies such as law firms or Internet marketing firms will have a much tougher time taking advantage of Instagram. Nonetheless, below lists a few ways that a business can utilize this tool and get in on the phenomenon while it’s hot:

1. Find Your Fans – Know who is mentioning your brand. Go to your Instagram account, hit the profile button, hit “search Instagram,” and then hit “tags.” Once you type in the name of your company, you will be able to see all of the people who have already been using Instagram to take photos of your products. This will help give you an audience and help you identify where your power with Instagram users lies.
2. Geo-Tag – Geo-tagging photos means adding a location to every photo before putting them onto your Instagram account. Many people from out-of-town are actually beginning to use Instagram as a way to see what cool things are in a given area (much like Foursquare). Make sure that your cool photos are uploaded with your location so that out-of-towners can get some awesome local food or funky foreign outfits.
3. Contests – This is probably the most popular way that brands are leveraging the tool. Hold a contest and ask fans to take pictures using your product or hanging out in your store. Levi’s even held an open casting call on Instagram for models, and Starbucks simply asked fans to use Instagram to answer a question (completely unrelated to coffee). Ultimately, it’s all about the interaction.
4. Event Markting – This is one way any type of business can take advantage of Instagram. If you hold a seminar or an office Christmas party, take a few photos and post them to your Instagram account. Ask those attending your event to also take photos using Instagram.
5. Social Media Sharing – You can post any photo you take onto social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. If you’re starting a business and feeling overwhelmed with social media, this makes it easy to hit all of the bases in one fell swoop. Many major brands have already started their Instagram story. These brands include fashion brands such as Puma, GAP, Gucci, and Nike, and restaurant brands such as RedBull, Ben and Jerry’s, and Starbucks. Music stars such as Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber also love Instagram, and sport teams like the Chicago Bulls and Philadelphia Eagles are taking advantage. To get a larger list of brands taking advantage, visit the Instagram Notable Users Directory.

Has your business started using Instagram? How do you leverage the tool, and have you had any success?

Photo Credit: phandroid.com

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to phone systems. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including business credit cards to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.

Highlights:

• Integrate SMM tools into your social marketing campaigns.
• Analyze the data they give you to improve those campaigns.
• Try tools that fit your budget and needs!
• Newlands recommends Alerti since it has good analytics and a free 90 day trial.

Part 2 highlights

• People don’t click on display ads anymore…
• The way around this is to put ads within the content…
• Interactive, in-content image ads are very effective in producing revenue for publishers!

Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. Be sure to Like Future of Publishing on Facebook!

1. See what competitors are doing
2. Target competitors’ customers
3. See how effective your branding campaign is

and more! As a result, the benefits of using a good social media monitoring tool far outweighs the drawbacks. Some businesses simply utilize “drive by” social media, but this does not work. They are too results-oriented with their initial efforts and see it as a broadcast medium instead of an interactive medium, so they quit posting to their Facebook wall or quit making tweets when they don’t “see sales” coming from their content. Frequently, they simply aren’t grabbing customers’ attention. SMM tools can be used to find out what to write so that you can grab the customer’s attention effectively. In this Future of Engagement episode, host Murray Newlands looks at how to use social media monitoring tools well:

Social media monitoring tool: How can they change social media?

Social media monitoring tool use among tools like Alerti has skyrocketed at a faster rate than the growth of social media itself, and they are showing that they can have a direct effect on how businesses use social media. For example, when businesses realize that their marketing campaign does not work, they can shift gears and become more interactive or produce different content. Also, the act of monitoring itself lets them directly engage with users who like their product so that they can target them more effectively. They can then use these people’s profiles as high quality leads at which to aim well-targeted marketing campaigns.

The Suburban Collection, who owns car dealerships in the Detroit area (for all sorts of brands), has been running a Social Test Drive campaign where they put local bloggers and social media influencers in the driver’s seats of cars for a few days, and ask them to use social media to talk about their experiences. Here’s what makes this campaign especially good:

• There are no requirements about how many tweets, pictures, posts, etc. each driver has to make or what types of social media to use. Zac, the Online Marketing Coordinator for Suburban, just asks that you talk about your experience and followup with at least one blog post or video or some type of content summarizing your experience.
• Equally important, there are no requirements that you only post good things about the car. Zac makes it clear that he just wants you to post what you think.
• Every test driver is recommended by a previous driver. As a test driver, you get to recommend others who you think might enjoy the experience, so it’s a nice perk to give to your network, and it’s equally nice to receive a recommendation.
• Most of the time when you go to test drive a car, you get it for about 15 minutes. The Social Test Drive lets you take the car for a weekend, giving you a better understanding of how the car handles under different conditions. Not only does this give you a better feeling for the car, it helps you give a more balanced opinion to your network.
• People trust what their friends and colleagues say more than what a company says.  By putting cars into the hands of people with strong networks, The Suburban Collection, is providing the opportunity for people to have a conversation about the cars (and about the dealership brand).

Now, about the car.  I drove an Acura RDX for a weekend:

The RDX is a sporty little SUV/Crossover that has nice luxury features and ride, but also handles pretty well with good pickup. It also has quite a bit of space inside considering how compact it looks on the outside:

You can fit full load of groceries in the trunk and both the backseats fold down for more cargo room:

The inside styling has a rich color palette and fairly user-friendly controls (very similar to my Mazda CX7):

Unfortunately, the RDX doesn’t get great gas mileage: 22-24 mpg highway depending on if you have an AWD or FWD model.  I believe city is around 18ish.  But the car does have a nice ride and good pickup for the size (turbo, which probably is also the issue with the gas mileage).  I took it down a bumpy country dirt road and it was the smoothest ride I’ve ever had on that particular stretch of non-pavement.

I hadn’t really considered Acura before as a brand, but I would definitely look at their products when I’m ready. The gas mileage may be an issue when I’m ready to look for another car, but I definitely would put the RDX on my short list of contenders based on the ride, pickup and amount of interior room (we need to travel with stuff for a kid and 2 dogs, plus I like to kayak & bike).

In Future of Publishing, VigLink CEO Oliver Roup and Influence People CEO Murray Newlands interview leading industry experts to cover the ever-evolving world of online publishing. In this episode, Newlands and Roup interview:

• Pirouz Nilforoush, President of NetShelter, and
• Paul Edmonson, CEO of HubPages.
• Yulia Smirnova, SEO Manager of a large company,

Watch the first episode below:

Find out more at the Future of Publishing Facebook page.

Let Them Know

Tell the users why they need to scroll to the bottom of the page. Put offers and buttons at the bottom that are useful to your clientele but don’t expect them to find these on their own. Announce what they will find at the bottom of the page above the fold so they are more likely to continue down to see what is below. On the way you can fill the page with useful, important information because you have a captive audience.

Photos

Images are a great way to get people to scroll downwards. Make sure the top of the image is visible above the fold and people will not be able to resist scrolling down to see the rest of the image. If you then fill the images down the page so that each teases into the next section like a path to the bottom of the page, you will find more people going all the way down and fully understanding your website.

Give People Short Cuts

Your page does not always have to link to another page. Often if you have extensive information “below the fold” it is because you are trying to keep the costs down of running multiple pages. Because of this, it might behoove you to put links to other portions of the page. This means teasing the information at the top of the page and giving people a button that will then instantly take them to the headline they are interested in. While it only takes them down the same page, it gives you the opportunity to tease other information and gets them below the fold.

Keep a Blog

Run your website with new information such as “tips” or a blog that warrants users coming back daily. For this reason, they are likely to continue to scroll down in case they have missed anything you have posted. By keeping your website evolving with new articles you are not only increasing traffic but also increasing the amount of time each of these people spends on your page which ultimately translates into more customers or subscribers. Getting people to see your site as a destination adds value to your site as well as your company.

Those are 4 of the most effective tips for getting users to scroll below the fold on your page. It is not always easy to get this done, but with useful information and the tips mentioned above, it will be very possible. Users will always show interest in any page when they discover that the entire website has always given them good information on the things they want to know.

This is a guest post by Sam Mauzy. Sam is an Internet marketer and enjoys blogging about industry related subjects. When not working for an seo company, he can be found learning and reading about conversion rates optimization.

Image via Wikipedia

Around 2009, small business followed the lead of big businesses and created pages on social network sites right and left. They might have heard somewhere on the Internet that social network is a great way to reach customers and profiles are free to set up, so why not?

A lot of those pages are graveyards now. They haven’t been updated in months and almost nobody Likes them. They didn’t even get a very good response when they were active.

A lot of businesses gave up once they didn’t see a surge in new customers, but no form of advertising can do that for very little work. Everything worth anything takes time and effort, and companies forgot that because they expected social network profiles to provide instant rewards with little effort. Social network requires effort just like any other form of marketing outreach, so how can you improve your social network marketing campaign?

Put some time into it

Casually telling your friends to Like your company page on Facebook won’t cut it. A few of their friends might see posts about your company, but social networks is all about contacting highly targetable customers.

Run an advertising campaign

Let’s say you run an insurance brokerage that sells medical insurance locally. Social networks like Facebook allow you to run targeted ads based on demographics, people’s interests, and even pages that people Like. You can make an ad that is directed toward people who Like, say, pages relating to medical insurance, or healthcare reform. Or, you can go even narrower and make an ad for health insurance with an orthopodic addendum that’s aimed at people who are in Facebook groups about foot health problems.

Social media monitoring

Most social networks have analytics tools that let you see the effectiveness of your advertising in terms of how many people click on your ads, but that’s where they stop. You aren’t able to find out whether or not people are talking about your company or your products. That’s why companies like Alerti offer social media monitoring services to let your company know what people are saying about you online, both on social networks and other forms of social media, like blogs.

Measure your success early

When you run a traditional advertising campaign, you have to wait weeks or more to see if you’re getting good results. Even AdSense campaigns take a while to get accurate results since the variance is so high and Google likes to show campaigns quick results so that they keep buying AdSense ads. However, social media monitoring tools let you get results instantly. When you sign up for a service like Alerti, you can see any social media post relating to certain keywords or linking back to certain URL’s. So, if you make a blog post about your company and promote it on social media, you can easily see if people are reposting your post and talking about it online. Furthermore, most social media monitoring tools have analytics that let you see where people are talking about you the most so that you can focus your marketing efforts on the appropriate social networks.

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company Influence People do blogger outreach work for a variety of clients, such as Alerti.

Show notes. Here are the links we discussed in the podcast:

• HootSuite
• Bit.ly
• Twitalyzer
• SproutSocial
• PeerIndex
• CoTweet
• Twitter Grader
• Wildfire Analytics
• Klout
• 10 Twitter tools for better social networking (Webdesigner depot)

Subscribe to the Sazcast podcast:

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To see all the Sazcast episodes, click here.

If you have a topic idea you’d like us to discuss, please email us at sazcast [at] sazbean [dot] com or send us a message on Twitter @sazbean. Please consider reviewing us on the iTunes site or emailing us your comments and ideas at sazcast@sazbean.com. Intro Music by: Band: Tripudio, Song: Blue monday

This is a guest post by Andy Havard, who is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company.

Video blogs are rapidly taking over the blogging world, but many Internet users are still apprehensive about making the transition from text blogging to video blogging. A lot of text bloggers struggle with the idea of getting confident on camera, especially when it’s outside of their traditional blogging comfort zone. The following article explores how you can create confident video blogs on the Internet and enjoy the popularity that ‘vlogging’ is receiving across the web.

1. Always Know What You Are Talking About

The simplest way to appear confident on camera is to know your topic. Make sure you’ve researched your subject area well and even take time to script what you want to say in your video. If you naturally get nervous speaking publicly, then having a solid subject knowledge on the tip of your tongue will minimise the chances of you stumbling on your words. When you know what you’re talking about, you’ll look like you know what you’re talking about too. This will make your video blogs appear very confident and extremely knowledgeable.

2.  Make Sure You Know Your Target Audience

The chances of your vlog getting seen by every Internet user in the world is pretty slim. A lot of on-screen nerves actually comes from vloggers thinking there’s millions of people watching their video. Your real audience will be those interested in the topics and subjects you’re discussing on your video blog, or users familiar with your written blog. This means that you’ll easily be able to find out who the audiences in your niche are and the content they enjoy, which theoretically means you should be of the same disposition. Once you’ve understood the content your audience likes and what they engage with well, you can create your video blogs in the same vain. If you can engage with your audience you’ll make a stronger connection with them and that should in turn help you to get more and more confident on camera.

3. Get Comfortable With The ‘On-Screen’ You

One thing that makes video bloggers lose confidence in themselves is watching their videos back. The way you sound and the way you look to ‘you’ is actually a lot different to the ‘you’ that’s captured on camera. The ‘you’ that appears on camera is the real you and you need to embrace it. Learn the ways you phrase words, notice the intonation and pronunciation in your voice and make note of what you do with your face, hands and body when you talk. By understanding the habits you have when you present yourself on camera you can start to make changes to your performances and become more confident in how you’ll end up looking and sounding on video.

4.  Analyze Your Takes & Videos

Once you’ve become fluent in how you look and sound on screen you can start to make real changes to the way you present your videos. Analyse your takes and final videos, be cut-throat in what works and what doesn’t work. Make note of ideas to try out for your next take or episode and always strive to better yourself. When you start to analyse and criticize your own performances you will be able to better your video blogs every at every turn and gain more confidence as a result.

5.  Practice, Practice, Practice

There’s never a substitute for good, old fashioned practice. Try record one or two videos a day, just for your own benefit. Don’t upload them anywhere, just practice. If you practice one particular video a few times a day you’ll go from having a pretty poor video on Monday to having a fluent, confident and knowledgeable video come Sunday. This will help you to get comfortable with the whole recording process, get you to be more relaxed on camera and help you to make your video seem as confident as possible.

Summary

By following these five pointers you can start to become the confident, professional video blogger you hoped to be and make your video blogs just as popular as your established written blog.

Interview with Sarah Worsham on BSC Designer

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.