Using Fiverr for SEO and promoting Youtube channels

A few days ago I wrote an article discussing my $10 experiment with Fiverr and how the results were rather unsatisfactory. However I decided to try a few other gigs to see if I could obtain better outcomes. This time around things were much more positive.

I searched the site for the keyword "RPG" and discovered a gig where someone with a popular Facebook Fan Page about roleplaying videogames was offering to plug websites related to games on the page. So I seized the opportunity to get my RPG Fanatic.net Community Gaming website plugged.

The result? I'm happy to say that my website gained a spike in traffic! We also got about ten more users to sign up and make new accounts. That may not seem significant but these users quickly started adding new content to the website. My $5 was a worthwhile investment and I intend to keep purchasing this gig every few weeks to keep sending traffic to my site.

I also looked into seeing if there was any decent SEO gigs being offered, and stumbled on someone with a PageRank 7 blog. For a mere $5 he would make a promotional article on his blog with a keyword rich backlink, sending some vital link juice back to your website.

Once again, this is $5 well spent (If you don't understand why, then please check out this article that explains how Google Search works).

In this case I'm going after the keyword "gamer community", which receives 6,600 global searches per month and is considered low competition by the AdWords keyword tool. This phrase is one of the primary search terms I've been focusing on in my SEO strategy for the site. I feel I can get the webpage to the front page result without much difficulty, since few competitors are using it in their marketing strategies.

Now there are many gigs on Fiveer offering SEO, but the majority use bots to spam links all over Chinese and Korean wikis, as well as the comment section of various Chinese .gov sites. The effectiveness of this strategy is pretty low in my opinion given that the Google Penguin update slams these "poor quality" sites pretty hard. However I have tested it out with a few articles on some blogs I don't care too much about, just to see if the links will impact the rankings at all or even appear on Alexa (because it takes a few months for Alexa to update I'll have to revise this article in the future on how that went).

There are also people on fiverr who do the mass spam bot SEO stuff. For example one of the services I did, the bot created a blog profile at Tested.com and inserted gibberish about my Atlantica Online wiki article, which will likely be deleted by a mod later. At the very least I was able to get a list of good places to make accounts at for my manual backlinking, so I guess it wasn't a total waste of $5.


My advice for those interested in using Fiverr gigs to search engine optimize and build their site rank up is to focus on posting one link at a time on high PR blog sites, rather than turn to the mass spam indexers. It'll take a lot of articles but if you target low competition keywords you will undoubtedly make a lot of impact, especially if there isn't much competition to begin with.

Using Fiverr to get social media traffic?

Many people are aware of the website Fiverr.com, where you can hire people to perform a variety of tasks for just $5 a pop. But did you know that Fiverr has a section just for people offering to perform social media marketing?

For example, you can hire this attractive nerdy Asian girl to make some videos promoting any website you want, so long as you provide her a script to work with.






Tempting as her offer was, I instead decided to test the waters by purchase a tweet from a service promising a reach of 500,000+ customers.....

...and indeed a tweet was made on a Twitter account with 536,470 followers.

However, the blogger also marked my paid tweet with the hashtag #ad.

Unsurprisingly, even two hours later I had received no additional likes to my RPG Fanatic Facebook Fan Page, other than perhaps from people who I already had the ability to reach through my personal social network.

I would think that with so many followers I would still get at least a handful of additional likes to my page, but alas this didn't happen. So my conclusion is that purchasing tweets is a waste of $5 that could otherwise be spent on something more useful like hiring someone to be your girlfriend on Facebook to make your ex jealous. 

I jest.

Anyway before I abandoned the site I tried purchasing some promotion for my Weekly Texas Jump Facebook Fan Page.

The result was as equally disappointing as the prior effort. I received no traffic at all from that page.

However, the ten dollars I spent has taught me something; it's not enough to merely share links with tens of thousands of people. I believe you need to personalize the sharing and be much more specific with who you are sharing with; I think very few of the people who subscribed to the Twitter and Facebook accounts in this article were interested in the products I was advertising.

But perhaps if I was able to send a personalized invite to people who are interested in my sites I think I would have much better results.

I'll talk about this more in a future article.

Creating Subreddits for Fun and View Traffic

Despite what reddit pitches to its user base, it's no secret that reddit is frequently used by social media marketers. This write up from The Daily Dot talks about the case of Ian Miles Chiang (a moderator for many communities such as r/WTF,  r/Politics and r/AskReddit) who was was hired by the GlobalPost to promote their articles in the reddits he administrated.

One of the comments left on the Daily Dot article

What I find interesting is that some users claim Ian often used his mod status to delete and ban other users who competed for views with him.


Sadly this kind of admin abuse is not uncommon and has been reported by other sites as well. Even I have written prior articles about how subreddit mods have blasted my submissions even though the content submitted was appropriate for the topic of the community.

The only way to not deal with moderators who want to compete with their subscribers for views is to create and grow your own subreddit communities. This is the tactic I'm now taking. The thing is, it can be difficult to stand out from the legions of other subreddit communities that already exist for every conceivable topic under the sun.

So what I've done is try an experiment; I created a subreddit for users of my website to share news, videos and other kinds of links relevant to all things RPG. I also made it clear the community was associated to my site, so there can be no accusations of "spamming" or misleading users.



Another thing I did to differentiate my community from other subreddits about RPGs is let people know they won't be banned for self-promotion. Nearly all subreddits have mods looking for any excuse to use their mod powers, so my belief is that by allowing people to self-promote we can find a niche.

I also encourage my users to submit links, because I will be using the community to find news about games to promote on my RPG Fanatic Facebook Fan page. So if they submit one of their own high-quality articles it might receive a personal plug from me.

The benefits to creating my own subreddits are simple to understand:

• Nobody will be deleting my links anymore.

• Because my links aren't getting deleted, I'll be able to gain more link karma as people upvote my comments and links.

• I can include links to the sidebar of the community to things I want to promote, including other communities.

I'm planning to start more subreddits but at the moment I haven't quite nailed down how best to promote a new subreddit. I shall have to write about that in a future article.

Update: I've taken over moderation of an existing the sub reddit,

http://www.reddit.com/r/YouTubeGamers/

We'll see how this experiment goes.

The Importance of Facebook for Youtube Partners

Having a Facebook Fan Page is crucial to your success on Youtube for several reasons.

Firstly, even with a small number of fans liking your page, you can have a lot of reach. For example, even with just 346 fans on The RPG Fanatic Fan Page I am able to reach 1,917 people with my status updates.

This is because as fans 'like' a post they also share it with their friends in their status feeds, and they can 'share' your Fan Page posts on their wall. This allows you to embed a video into a status update of your Facebook Fan Page and then have that video circulated throughout the social networks of Facebook.

I have Facebook Fan Pages for every project I have created, ranging from books I've published to movies I've made. Every one of my websites has a Facebook Fan Page.



Additionally you can use your Fan page to create an event, such as announcing your next livestream or a convention panel you are going to hold.

Some people might think just having lots of subscribers on Youtube is fine, but a few months ago Youtube added a function called 'highlights' to the subscriber feeds. The highlights function cannot be turned off and intentionally hides a lot of content from subscribers. It is also incredibly buggy and often just displays the same 5 videos over and over again. Youtube has also done some other shady things to manipulate Youtube Search page results to favor big companies and screw everyone else over.

Additionally, the number of 'likes' your Facebook Fan Page has demonstrates "social proof", which can be used to convince other people that they should also be following your Fan Page. Companies also want to work with those who have large social network reach; for example, my ability to get into press events and receive review copies of products depends on how large my audience is on both Youtube and Facebook.



It can be hard to accumulate 'likes' to your page, even if your videos receive a lot of traffic. However, one of the most effective ways to build followers is to send mass Facebook Fan Page invites to your friends. 

Lastly on your Youtube channel you can add links to your right hand sidebar. A great link to put at the top is one directly to your Facebook Fan Page. My RPG Fanatic channel is a great example of what I'm talking about.

I hope this article has helped convince you of the merits of making and maintaining a Facebook Fan page.









Looking for more information about what you can do with Facebook Pages? Check out these other articles I've written.

• Pinvolve App For Facebook
• Buying Facebook Ads
• Send a Mass friend invite on Facebook
• Facebook Pages now show Reach

Youtube To Take Steps To Combat Troll Comments

According to this Wired article, Youtube is planning to overhaul the way comments work on the site.

Personally I've had a great deal of trolling on my own videos, and some I've had to enable the moderator approval functions on because the user vs user harassment gets so bad. And I don't like to see all the homophobic and racist slurs some users leave on my videos or those of others.

I hope the upgrade comes quickly and actually addresses the problems in a realistic and useful way, rather than being a band-aid fix.

Send a mass friend invite on Facebook for Pages and Events

Many people wonder how they can send a mass invite on Facebook Fan and Event Pages. There is a method you can use involving manipulating the URL code of a page using javascript, but I have honestly never gotten the thing to work.

The method I use is MUCH EASIER and only requires using the Google Chrome browser to install the following plugin from the Chrome Web Store - Facebook Inviter. 

After installing the plugin you can use the Build Audience drop down menu on your Page / Event to locate the Invite Friends function, 

Next you need to set your display parameters for all of your Facebook friends. By default Facebook will only show your recent interactions, so you need to manually switch it to all of your friends. 

Lastly you need to SCROLL TO THE VERY BOTTOM of your friend list BEFORE you hit "toggle all". If you don't scroll to the bottom the tool may not select all of your friends. Additionally if you have over 500 friends it may not select all, because Facebook limits how many invites you can send at once. You may need to run the invite friend function several times, repeating the steps in this guide until all of your friends have been sent invites. 

I hope this guide has helped you. It is a major pain to manually send out friend invites to Pages and Events, and this little plugin makes it so much simpler!

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How to effectively choose a Youtube channel name

A lot of people choose usernames for personal reasons and that is fine, but if you want to build a business with your Youtube channel you need to choose a name that is going to help you in search engine results.

My original Partner channel was 'jfreedan'. I eventually realized this is not a great keyword, so I moved my gaming content over to an account named TheRPGFanatic, because the name of my show on jfreedan was 'The RPG Fanatic'.

Today I am making a new Youtube channel for a series of cosplay tutorials I am producing so I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain the process I use to choose channel user names.

By using the AdWords keyword tool I can see that "cosplay" receives 4 million global searches, with 1 million of these searches performed by users who are local to my geographical area.

I can also see related keywords, such as "costume". That keyword receives 37 million global searches, with 16 million of them from users local to me.

Additionally, "What is cosplay" and "how to cosplay" receive 4 million global searches. These are all keywords I should be incorporating into my Youtube video descriptions and channel description area.

Unfortunately the username that would be most ideal for my show, "HowtoCosplay" already exists; http://www.youtube.com/howtocosplay

It is also under-utilized, but it does have a video on it that has 25k views.

My first instinct is to reach out to the owner of the channel and ask to purchase the channel. This would actually save me some trouble because the channel already has some presence and lots of activity. But is the channel even for sale and if so, at a price I can afford? Probably not.

The channel http://www.youtube.com/user/cosplaytutorials also exists, but has been abandoned for over a year. The chances of being able to purchase this channel are rather low because the owner has not logged into the account since August 2011.

On the other hand, http://www.youtube.com/user/whatiscosplay does not exist so the channel name is available.

So I will create a Youtube channel with that username. This is because even though it isn't the most ideal channel name, the keyword "what is cosplay" receives 4 million global searches per month on Google.

The next step is to optimize the channel for appearing in search engine results related to the keyword "cosplay". For this we edit the channel info,

I will post the text here so you can see what I wrote and why,

"On this channel you can learn how to cosplay and receive costume ideas. We will teach you how to make lots of amazing anime costumes! You will also be able to purchase items from our costume shop! Happy cosplaying!"

Every underlined phrase is a keyword that was recommended by the Google AdWords keyword tool. 

The tags for the channel are also selected from the recommendations of the tool.

This is the process I use to create channel names for Youtube. I hope this article has helped you. 

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Content ID Under Fire

For years many Youtube Partners have had trouble with companies using Content ID to claim their content but the issue is finally starting to receive some media attention. This Ars Technica Article by Timothy B. Lee shines a spotlight on one instance where Content ID was used to claim a video of President Obama.

Personally speaking, I have a channel I created to upload public domain videos called the Classic Movies Network.  I've uploaded videos with expired copyrights or those commissioned by the federal government (videos that exist in the public domain and who no one can claim copyright ownership of) and received copyright strikes from companies who have claimed ownership of these videos using Content ID.  I end up keeping the videos private while I appeal the decisions, which can take weeks or a full month.

To date I have always been able to appeal the decision and get the strikes overturned (they would need to file a lawsuit over it which they know they cannot win) , but Youtube then prevents me from monetizing the videos unless I show proof of copyright ownership. This is terribly unfair because no one can provide proof of ownership for these videos, yet they allow companies to claim them using Content ID.



Worst of all, Content ID is not given freely to all Partners; only a select few companies are allowed to have it. I have been rejected many times even though I have millions of views to my videos and several Partner channels. So Content ID is basically monopolized by the few who have it, and they use it to claim content they do not exclusively own in order to run ads on public domain videos that other users have uploaded.

I'll admit, the strategy is smart from a business point of view. They probably make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month by using Content ID like this. However it is not morally correct and Google should do something about it rather than waive their hands in the air as they collect ad revenue.

Why RPGFanatic.net and other community blog sites are great for Youtube Video SEO

This is going to sound a little like tooting my own horn but the strategy behind RPGFanatic.net is insanely great for Youtube Partners who make gaming content, and I really want to tell you why.

As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, Google made a lot of changes to the Google Search algorithms that have altered the landscape. The "freshness" of a website is now heavily factored into what web pages are displayed on the front page of the search results; that is, the more often a website makes new pages, the more likely that site is going to be having articles be displayed on the front page of the search results.

This is why community oriented sites where users have the ability to add content are fantastic for SEOing. On RPGFanatic.net you can have tons of people writing blogs every day and editing the wiki database. Once the site really kicks off with a few hundred daily users it is going to have a very high Page Rank and search engines will favor content related to it. I've already managed to get one of my articles on the front page of a Google Search listing for a game, so I know it is possible to make this work.

Another thing is that you can plug your personal blogs, Youtube channels and Facebook Fan Pages inside your blog posts, creating a backlink from Rpgfanatic.net to your own content. This has the effect of increasing your site's visibility in search engines!

If you want to get your content seen, all you need to do is embed your roleplaying videogame videos into our database and then plug those articles on other websites, such as forums, Squidoo articles and your own personal blogs. Share them on Facebook, reddit and Twitter! This has the effect of not just driving traffic to your videos but it improves the ranking of your content in search engines.

You will also be introducing more people to RPGFanatic.net who might start adding content of their own, which increases the "freshness" value of the website in Google, boosting the Google Search rank of ALL content that exists on the website!

And note that while there are other websites which allow you to submit your content to them, most of them have mods who discourage you from submitting monetized videos and will ban you for "spamming" if you embed your entire library of gaming videos. RPGFanatic.net will never ban users for adding legitimate content to our servers; we want you to be able to earn revenue from your game reviews, let's plays and walkthroughs!

We realize the more successful our users are, the more successful we will be.


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Getting your video on the front page of Google Search

It can be difficult to get your videos seen if you don't have them embedded into blogs and then get those blog articles on the front page search results for a search engine like Google.

All of the listings in green are pages that I made!

Fortunately there is a tactic that can work quite well. The key is to target keywords that get a lot of searches but don't necessarily have much competition from other web pages.

For example the search term "Ragnarok Online Leveling Guide" receives a few thousand searches per month. By making pages on high PageRank domains that pointed to my article titled, "Ragnarok Online Renewal Leveling Guide" I was able to get my page on the front page search results for those keywords.

Backlinks on forum posts related to the subject of the article can also count toward the SEOing of your page; for example, I made a post on the Warpportal forums (used by the Ragnarok Online game developer ) linking back to my guide. 

I also made a Squidoo page for Ragnarok Online Leveling Guide which exists primarily to get a link back to my site from Squidoo. However I made sure that the link went to my Ragnarok Online Leveling Guide.

Currently my article is receiving around 1,000 hits per month from Google Search. That might not sound impressive on its own but when you do this kind of tactic for every article on your website the views start racking up into hundreds of thousands of hits a month -- and that translates into views to your embedded videos.

And it only took a little bit of effort to make the forum posts and the Squidoo page. A few hours of work is translating into thousands of views.
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Want more tips on how to be successful with Youtube? Click Here!

Using the Youtube Merch Store to Boost Awareness

As many people are aware, Google added a Merchant Store option to all Youtube Partner channels. The store allows you to sell your Cafepress, Topspin, iTunes, and Amazon products directly from your Youtube channel, and even appear as offers directly below the videos on your channel.

There are pros and cons to each merchandise provider. For example, Cafepress offers print on demand products (meaning the items are created only when they are ordered) but the prices tend to be higher for merchandise due to the limited printing quantities.

If you use TopSpin you can either make your own merchandise or order them locally, and then mail them to TopSpin. In exchange for a storing fee, TopSpin will then handle the shipment of orders that your customers place. Because TopSpin ships the items you send to them you can sell everything from t-shirts to DVDs to concert tickets.

One of the neatest things about the Youtube Merch Store is that it appears next to the video description of all videos on your channel. Using the arrow keys the viewer is able to see all the merchandise displayed on your store.






Personally I am selling bumper stickers, t-shirts, magnets, keychains and a laptop cover using Cafepress' print on demand products. This is because I want to gauge the demand for products without paying any upfront costs. Most of the products have a QR code on them, such as the bumper sticker and t-shirt.

I have the QR code set to go directly to my Youtube channel The RPG Fanatic Show. This means that whenever someone becomes curious and scans the code using their cell phone they will discover my channel.   The result is by selling merchandise your fans want you can tap into your fans to help build awareness of your channel.


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Reddit mods hate self-promoters

This is the kind of thing that led me to creating this blog in the first place.

This isn't the first time I've had a Reddit community mod message me about why they deleted my content and it is always because "self-promotion" isn't allowed. It's just a repeat of the nonsense I've had at other so-called "community sites" where moderators with nothing better to do with their lives need to lord their power over others.

The funny thing is that the only way he knows it is my content is because my username on reddit is 'therpgfanatic'. I could call myself anything else and we wouldn't be having an issue, but because I chose to be honest about who I am on reditt I am being punished.

But it'd be perfectly okay to plug my content on reddit if I was paying for an ad, right?

Or what about all those ad agencies who constantly plug content on reddit and have their employees post back and forth positive things about the link?

This kind of nonsense is one of the biggest reasons why I designed my video game community website as a place where users are rewarded for posting content rather than punished. Nobody will ever get this kind of message from me for doing my site a favor by posting high-quality content for our users to enjoy.

The solution to this problem is pretty simple; I'm going to make a new reddit account that doesn't make it so obvious who I am. Additionally I will show these PMs I've received to my friends who post on reddit and use it to encourage them to post content on my behalf.

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Youtube releases "Dashboard" and Youtube Trends features

Youtube has released a few features that I really like.

The first is a new tab to your channel controls, the Dashboard. It basically has a snapshot of all the latest information about your channel such as recent comments, subscribers and views.

The other feature is the Youtube Trends Dashboard which tells you what videos are trending right now.  This tool has a lot of potential to be incredibly useful to those who are trying to "ride the wave"; if you upload videos with similar keywords and titles as a trending video you might gain some of the search traffic being directed at that video or appear in the related videos feeds of these videos. You can also post a video as a video response to these videos.