Day 21: New Video On YouTube, Creating a Personal Balance Sheet, and Article Marketer

In: Education| Marketing By: Brian Armstrong

9 Jul 2007

This is day 21 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new readers to this website and demonstrate that blogging can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start.

I spent the day preparing a personal balance sheet and discussing it with my mentor to track my own wealth building goals. I’ll post on this in more detail shortly.

My three tasks for the day to market this site are as follows:

1. I created a quick video to upload to YouTube as a marketing tool. As you know, YouTube gets a ton of traffic and is one of the top five free ways to market your business. It was pretty fun to make this video and if it gets some traffic I may make some more. I have plenty of quick things like that I could teach about finance.

I used iShowU to record it (for the mac) which was really easy. If you have a PC you can use something like Camtasia.

One thing I learned for next time is that I’m going to have to zoom in or make the text bigger, it’s not quite as legible as I would have liked.

The video is about how to use excel to answer this question: how much should I save each month to become a millionaire by the time I’m 50?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C8WU7SECZI[/youtube]

2. I remembered that I paid for an Article Marketer account a while back and I haven’t been using it as much as I should. It is a service which will take your articles and make them available in a large number of directories. People can then find your article and use it as content on their own sites, if they include your link at the bottom. Essentially, this is a way to syndicate your writing and get links to your website. I submitted the article on Toastmasters that I wrote for MindPetals and the article on Cell Phone Companies. I should remember to do this more in the future.

3. I wrote a new article for LifeHack.org on creating a personal balance sheet to track your net worth. This is something I discussed with my mentor today. He made an excellent point that how can you have a net worth goal if you aren’t going to measure it? I may post more about this in the near future.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

Brian, nice howto video. I bought your ebook a few days back and have been following your blog (and 30 day marketing challenge) since reading your recent series on problogger.net. When the marketing challenge is complete will you be posting a follow up article breaking down your results? I’m very curious to see how well your efforts have paid off.

Chris Hunter

July 9th, 2007 at 4:24 am

Great video, Brian.

Man, I’m so far behind on saving for retirement and such, I’ll be working until I’m 85!

Plus, I’ll TWO wedding to pay for and THREE different college funds that I need to get started on!

Gah!

Zaech

July 9th, 2007 at 6:11 am

Hi, nice video!
But isn’t there a calculation error in it?

IMHO it makes a big differnce if you get 12% per year or if you get 12times 1% per year.

If you calc it on a anual basis you need 624,99xx $ per month instead of 532,24$.

But maybe i’m wrong in this point.
greets from bavaria

Steve's Tech Blog

July 9th, 2007 at 8:24 am

Nice ideal about using YouTube. I have seen the method before and will use it for my own promo on my free software. I need to redo them anyway with the upcoming new version.

Just a tip:
At the end of the video, you could also display the site name while saying it and showing the web site itself(nice tip). If the design change later, they will have the name to fall back on.

Did you have many visitors from YouTube since posting it? 10, 100, 500 ,1000…

Brian Armstrong

July 9th, 2007 at 10:27 am

Thanks everyone! Glad you are enjoying it, and yes I will post results of how many visitors the YouTube video brings in, and the results of this experiment overall after 30 days. It will take a few days to gather results (Google Analytics has about a 24 hour delay on traffic data.)

Zaech, you are right, in the video I showed interest being compounded monthly instead of annually. Nice job catching that! Neither one is more correct that the other, it just depends on how your particular investment vehicle calculates it. It would have been a bit much to cover in such a simple video, but perhaps I that can be a topic for my next one. Thanks!
Brian

Brian Armstrong

July 10th, 2007 at 7:00 pm

You can also try this to calculate your retirement income:
http://marketplacemoney.publicradio.org/toolbox/calculators/RetirementIncome.html

Mark

September 9th, 2007 at 12:02 pm

Brian – Don’t forget to be sure your articles are on your site first before submitting to article directories or they will get the credit for the origional content, and you will get penalized for duplicate content.

Mark

Brian Armstrong

September 10th, 2007 at 5:28 pm

Thats a good point Mark, I made a mistake there.
B