There is a lot of enthusiasm in the Barcelona Startup and PYME community, to use web video to engage with customers or to promote startups, apps, websites and businesses online.

However the biggest obstacle to producing professional web video is the cost.

Many Startups and PYME business owners don’t have the budget to spend on professional video production.

The solution

To solve this problem, and to make professional web video affordable for everyone, I’ve launched BCN Startup Video.

BCN Startup Video invites Startups and PYMEs to come to a professional Barcelona studio, with professional camera, audio and lighting equipment, to produce outstanding web video with graphics and audio, from only 49€.

Get involved, Sign Up and register your interest here!

www.signup.bcnstartupvideo.com

Photos of the studio available on our Facebook and Twitter pages:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/bcnstartupvideo

Twitter: @bcnstartupvideo

If you have any questions about web video, please don’t hesitate to email me directly and I’ll get back to you. My email:  matt [@] bcnstartupvideo.com

I hope to see you all at the BCN Startup Video studio soon!

Matt Wright (14/04/2012)

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You can read it in full here:

www.bcnin.com/blog/item/153-using-web-video-to-engage-and-communicate-online

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You can watch it here:

SpanishVenues.com : Book your next group trip or event in Spain!

You can check out the Spanish Venues Facebook page here.

Or you can follow them on Twitter @SpanishVenues or visit the main Spanish Venues website.

Cafe Federal: Best cafe in Barcelona? We think so

A big muchas gracias to Adria and the lovely staff at Cafe Federal in Barcelona, who kindly let us film the cafe scenes there.

If you are in the Sant Antoni area of Barcelona, I definitely recommend a visit to try their delicious chocolate torte or one of their famous brunches. Really difficult to film with all the amazing food going past all the time.

They also have a couple of outdoor terraces, one up on the roof with great views! Go check them out www.federalcafe.es

Video credits:

Video Production: http://www.zumoseo.com
Music credit: “The Cognitivists” by The Rhombus (http://psrecords.net/artists/the-rhombus/)
Photo credit: Bradley Stemke

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Matt Wright (14/03/2012)

Motion tracking text is something Adam Lisagor talks about in this video on my earlier blog post (Adam Lisagor: Video As User Experience). I thought I’d upload a quick demo of one of the motion tracking effects I’ve been experimenting with (in After Effects).

As you can see on the video, I’ve just tracked the text next to a girl as she walks down the street. It’s a fairly simple effect, but I love the way it makes the text and video work elegantly together. The text is a little jumpy at parts, and to fix this it just needs each keyframe tweaking and moving ever so slightly (which can be a painstaking process!).

I’ll be uploading further examples of motion tracking and other video effects over the coming weeks.

Matt Wright (01/03/2012)

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Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard.

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests. (taken from Pinterest website)

This report on Shareaholic ‘Pinterest Drives More Referral Traffic Than Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn Combined‘ also shows impressive statistics. Recommended reading if you are thinking of using Pinterest to help market your brand.

My experience with Pinterest so far

I have a client who hires venues around the world for weddings and other special occasions. Because the venues are stunning buildings in beautiful settings, Pinterest is perfect to help him share photos of the venues he has to hire, reaching out directly to his target audience (people interested in weddings and travel).

Within a few hours of uploading around 20 venue photos to Pinterest, about 15 different people had either repinned the photos to their accounts, or ‘liked’ the photos similar to how people ‘like’ content on Facebook.

Pinterest is certainly an impressive platform, with a massive audience (predominantly female) who enjoy sharing content covering many different topics and interests.

Pinterest is still fairly new, so I would certainly recommend getting involved and trying it out. However, remember each business is unique and not every platform or digital marketing channel will be suitable for every business.

Experiment with some different marketing strategies to start visually engaging customers with your business and brand.

If you don’t have your own web content to pin up, share content from other websites or repin other users content, to help start connecting with your target audience.

Matt Wright (14/02/2012)

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In this post I’ll be sharing some of my own experiences, having worked with clients on web strategy, SEO, digital marketing and web video as an effective tool of communication over the last 10 years.

Most of ZumoSEOs prospective clients already have online businesses in operation when they contact me for help with SEO or digital marketing. Having tried doing their own SEO, digital marketing and social media in house to save money, over time they find the strategy isn’t working. They are always curious to know why my approach and strategy will deliver results and theirs did not.

Digital marketing, SEO, web development and video production are just like any other trade. The more experience someone has working in that trade, the more knowledge they accumulate and the more specialist they become. Therefore resulting in a much higher chance of success when they set to work.

If your car or motorbike broke down, would you look on the internet for advice on how to fix it? Or would you take it to an experienced mechanic?

I always advise any business online that it’s crucial to get some SEO and digital marketing expertise, to setup and manage a cohesive digital marketing strategy that will help increase sales and revenue for them. A strategy that will run consistently on various channels (a main website, blog, social media accounts, networks, video, etc) and long term will help make them more money.

As with any form of marketing, the goals for a successful campaign are increased business revenue and profit. That all sounds great, but where do you start?

Common mistakes with digital marketing and social media

Many of my clients had already opened social media accounts themselves with every social channel they could find. They had been randomly posting the odd link on these social media accounts whenever they had a spare 5 minutes. But without any clear strategy and with no one taking charge of what was being posted, this plan rarely leads anywhere, apart from confusing your users and customers.

This is a common mistake in digital marketing, because if businesses have accounts open on every digital channel and social media website available, they spread themselves to thinly and rarely target their key audience who will bring them sales.

Clients often think that 1000 hits to their website from a scattergun approach to digital marketing is great. However these hits from various sources around the web are usually low quality and lead to few, if any sales. Getting loads of hits might look great on a digital marketing report, but the truth is that getting 1000s of low quality hits isn’t that hard.

Aim for a lower quantity of high quality hits from your target audience, and focus on converting those hits into sales, if you want to succeed online.

Finding a source of your key target audience will take a little work and research, but once you’ve found them, you can start building relationships with them and create content directly for them, because the chance of conversion from your key target audience is much, much higher.

I’ve worked with businesses who were paying 100s a month to Google Adwords for 1000s of low quality hits that delivered very few, if any sales. Please don’t fall into this trap.

It’s a very common and easy way for businesses to lose money from their marketing budget, especially new businesses who are naturally keen to drive as much traffic to their website as possible.

Always focus on your key target audience and your long term marketing strategy to have the best chance of success online.

In the past, when I have changed clients existing digital marketing plans to a ‘less quantity / higher quality’ hits strategy, sales always increase over time and the clients business will start to build a loyal following amongst their key target audience. The people who matter.

Some of the things I’ve done to help businesses increase their online sales and revenue

Whenever clients ask for help with their online business, the first thing to do is fully research their business and to analyse their competition online, locally, nationally or worldwide.

Some businesses want to compete for attention with the big players online, who have endless marketing budgets, making life for smaller businesses very difficult.

Using an intelligent marketing strategy can help you immensely and help keep costs at a minimum. As an example, if you wanted your website to appear on Google page #1 for a highly competitive keyword such as ‘Barcelona Hotel’ then it would be very difficult on a small budget.

Instead you should focus on a long tail search keyword strategy, so you can achieve a much higher chance of getting your website on Google page #1 for keywords like ‘’Sunny hotel in Barcelona’ or ‘Quiet hotel in Barcelona’. Using long tail keywords can deliver very effective results.

Long tail search terms also deliver a much higher conversion rate in terms of sales, rather than a head search term eg ‘Barcelona Hotel’. Research shows that people searching with long tail keywords are much nearer a decision to making a purchase online.

Using a long tail keyword approach as part of your digital marketing strategy, can really help your business stand out against the competition.

Matt Wright (07/02/2012)

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BCN Startup Video – Affordable, Professional, Web Video for Barcelona Startups and PYMEs

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On Saturday morning, with heavy rain washing down the streets of Barcelona, I made a dash for the metro and headed up towards Gracia for the Barcelona Internet Startups meetup.

My aim was to meet other locals and expats here in Barcelona with internet businesses or startups, and offer to help them market their websites and businesses online. Either with a digital marketing campaign, or by producing online video to help show customers what their business does, or to demo how their app or website works.

After 3 hours of chatting to everyone in the group, hearing about all the internet businesses and startup ideas, it goes without saying there’s a wealth of creativity, talent and entrepreneurial spirit here in Barcelona.

With the media full of downbeat stories about double dip recessions and the eurozone crisis, it makes a refreshing change to meet with so many people pushing ahead with their own business ideas and working to make them a success.

I hope that everyone who attended got as much out of the event as I did, either by connecting with someone who can help your business or who you can team up with.

For those who were interested in a free consultation from ZumoSEO for digital marketing or online video production, please drop me an email and we can set-up another meeting (matt@zumoseo.com)

Also a big thank you to the organisers Hannah and Pedro for putting on such a fantastic and well organised event!

Matt Wright (30/01/2012)

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This all sounded great. By having super fast pageload times, I could give a more positive user experience to visitors on a website, and also help boost the position of a website in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Although let’s not forget you still need brilliant content and a good website, built with clean and semantic markup to see decent rankings on SERPs.

So, CloudFlare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). I’m no expert on CDNs (who is?), so here is a summary about how they work, copied from CloudFlare’s website (www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn):

“CloudFlare’s global CDN has 13 edge nodes around the world. Our CDN automatically caches your static files at our edge nodes so these files are stored closer to your visitors while delivering your dynamic content directly from your web server.

“The result is that your website, on average, loads twice as fast for your visitors regardless of where they are located.

“On average, a website on CloudFlare loads twice as fast for its visitors, sees 65% fewer requests and saves 60% of bandwidth.

I’ve been running ZumoSEO’s website with CloudFlare Pro for a couple of months and the decrease in pageload times has been impressive.

You can test the load time of any webpage or website (especially useful to test results before and after you setup your website with CloudFlare) with this Pingdom pageload tool (http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/).

In respect to whether CloudFlare can help boost your websites position on SERPs? We all know Google prefers faster websites over slow ones, so it certainly won’t harm your SEO ranking to speed up your websites pageload times. However, as with everything in SEO, having the fastest website in the world won’t help if your website is full of crap content and badly built.

If you have a solidly built website using clean, semantic markup and focus on providing informative, shareable content, then speeding up your pageload times should help boost your position on SERPs.

If you have any experiences with CloudFlare and how it has helped or hindered your SEO ranking, we’d love to hear from you.

Matt Wright (12/01/2012)
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Google+ is a really impressive set-up for networking; there are some fantastic free tools for business use and Google+ will become the place that connects all your Google accounts and YouTube in one place.

The Google+ account for ZumoSEO is available here.

Setting up your own business profile is easy in Google+, with a clean and simple user friendly interface. You can set-up your own Google+ business account here:

You can also create a banner for your Google+ homepage, using this GPlusBanner tool www.gplusbanner.com.

My favourite aspect of Google+ will be the increase in YouTube video sharing between users. YouTube is already the worlds 2nd most popular search engine and because Google now owns YouTube, the two will become even more interconnected between users.

Being on Google+ enables you to have face-to-face conversations with multiple customers at the same time which is a fantastic business tool. This can also be used for ‘Google+ Hangouts’ to broadcast yourself and connect with your customers live on cam. Not necessarily the right marketing technique for every business, but a useful tool nonetheless.

Your brand and business online presence will benefit from the +1 button, if you have great content to share. Other users can click +1 to give approval or a reccommendation to your content, similar to the ‘like’ button on Facebook.

Google will view +1 on your content as a personal recommendation by another user and so this will help with your page ranking and SEO authority.

Let us know if you are already on Google+ and we’ll add you to our circles.

(Matt Wright 02/12/2011)

 
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It’s that time of year again, when the incredible World Press Photo exhibition is on show, currently at the Centre De Cultura Contemporania in sunny Barcelona.

What I love about the World Press Photo exhibition is that photojournalism has always been my favourite type of photography. This exhibition is a selection of the best photojournalism over the last year, covering everything from sport, politics, cultural events, natural disasters and war.

Having lived in both London and now Barcelona over the last 10 years, I’ve spent many rainy lunchtimes shuffling around art galleries looking at the latest photography exhibition. It’s always photojournalism that captivates me the most.

I look at the photos, and wonder how the photographer managed to capture that exact moment, sometimes in potentially dangerous environments. How did they stand so close to the subject? Why did they take the photo? What message is being conveyed?

Sometimes when looking at photojournalism, it can make us question whether the photographer should have taken the photo at all. A great example being the famous Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a Vietcong prisoner, the moment a bullet kills him, taken by Eddie Adams who was a combat photographer in the Korean War.

Because photojournalism records newsworthy events unfolding across the world, rather than a posed studio shot, this can stir strong reactions and emotions for the viewer. This voyeuristic nature of photojournalism is what makes the images so powerful.

The World Press Photo Exhibition 2011, is currently being shown at the Centre De Cultura Contemporania De Barcelona from today until December 18th, and also tours other cities around the world. I recommend if you only see one photography exhibition this year, it’s this one.

(Matt Wright 23/11/2011)

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