“Viral Video” has exploded online over the past year. According to a recent Business 2.0 issue, It’s estimated that by 2010 more people in the US will watch video online then offline and 80% of Internet users will watch more video online then offline…

Those figures are simply impressive, but not necessarily surprising. Americans spend an increasing amount of time online every day, we live in a connected world and traditional TV is dieing… TV Giants see this, they’re moving their efforts (and money) online by the buckets full.
We want to be able to customize our channels, we want to share interesting videos with friends, we want to be able to watch videos while we sit at work.

Google shelled out approx. $1.65 Billion in cash and stocks to purchase YouTube. A company that a little over a year ago was little more then an Alexa top 100,000 site… now it pulls more traffic then Myspace and Ranks 4th in according to Alexa’s stats on the most visited sites.

We know that the market is there and that it is growing every day, the question is, How do you capitalize on it in your business?

Company’s such as Coke, Ford, Kodak, and Trojan are making attempts. They realize that there is a huge profit potential for companies that can create videos that become viral.

But its not easy. How to you get people to spread your ideas? To share your videos?

We can use humor, action, weirdness, sex, intriguing ideas and inventions, how-tos, and more… but now the question becomes, how does this help us to profit?

We need only to look at other markets to see how various businesses monetize viewer loyalty… specifically Advertisements, Sponsorships, and Branding.

Advertisements are of course the most obvious method that TV generally uses offline. But we’re now dealing with a market that can do more then use Tivo, they can click forward, they can click in the middle, they can click AWAY… Answer? Short Clips, Watermarking, Short End Clips.

It’s getting late now, I’ll pick up and talk more about utilizing viral videos in your marketing next post… there are hundreds of pages of strategies and concepts to be discussed.

- Todd Dickerson

P.S. There are many more benefits then just Viral traffic… I’ll show you how to use Viral Videos to get TOP Search Engine rankings.

P.S.S. Are you using viral videos in your marketing already?  Comment and let me know your successes, failures, and advice.

Jason designed this dark camo military theme for someone previously.

It has a tasteful black and gray camo pattern background with a simple black table pattern. The headers and links are in a very cool fitting light blue and greenish

<br /> <style type="text/css"> body { background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-image: url(http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/8347/2128wf.gif); background-position: left bottom; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: fixed; } table, tr, td { background-color: transparent; border: 0px; } table table { border: 0px; } table table table table{ border:0px; } table table table { border-width: 16px; border-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-style: solid; background-color: transparent; } table table table td { background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); filter:alpha(80); -moz-opacity:0.8; opacity:0.8; -khtml-opacity:0.8; } table table table table td { filter:none; }</style> <style type="text/css"> body, div, span, td, p, .orangetext15, .whitetext12, .lightbluetext8, strong, b, u, .redtext, .redbtext, .btext, .text, .nametext, .blacktext10, .blacktext12 { font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; } .nametext { padding: 5px; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; color: rgb(83, 234, 255); font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; display: block; } .whitetext12, .orangetext15 { font-family: Arial; font-size: 17px; color: rgb(83, 234, 255); font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; } a.navbar:link, a.navbar:active, a.navbar:visited, a.navbar:hover, a.man:link, a.man:active, a.man:visited, a.man:hover, a, a:link, a:active, a:visited, a:hover, a.navbar:link, a.navbar:active, a.navbar:visited, a.navbar:hover, a.text:link, a.text:active, a.text:visited, a.text:hover, a.searchlinksmall:link, a.searchlinksmall:active, a.searchlinksmall:visited, a.searchlinksmall:hover, a.redlink:link, a.redlink:active, a.redlink:visited, a.redlink:hover { color: rgb(185, 236, 0); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; } a.navbar:hover, a.man:hover, a:hover { color: rgb(255, 255, 0); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; } .badge { position: absolute; left: 1px; top: 1px; } </style> <p><a xhref="http://www.jetpacked.com/category/myspace-layouts/" mce_href="http://www.jetpacked.com/category/myspace-layouts/" >Jetpacked Myspace Themes</a><br />

I just finished adding multiple penname support and advanced error checking to Jetsubmitter.

This should make it much easier to tell why you’re getting errors submitting to various directories and make it easy to submit articles under different pennames.

Full details and instructions can be found over at the Spontent Blog: http://www.spontent.com/blog/multiple-penname-support-advanced-error-checking

Thanks,

Todd Dickerson

We design themes for everything else, why not social networks?

More people are interested in Myspace themes and layouts then any other type of template. So we decided we should not only focus on creating badass Wordpress themes but Myspace, Joomla, Drupal, and other Social Network CMS’s designs.

This is a theme we had designed a little while back but its been pretty popular in the past. It has a slick dark gray background with black tables and a tasteful border. The gradient background up top is one of my personal favorite styles.

<br /> <style type="text/css"> body { background-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-image: url(http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/8404/header7nh.jpg); background-position: left top; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-attachment: fixed; } table, tr, td { background-color: transparent; border: 0px; } table table { border: 0px; } table table table table{ border:0px; } table table table { border-width: 11px; border-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); border-style: double; background-color: transparent; } table table table td { background-color: rgb(15, 15, 15); filter:alpha(88); -moz-opacity:0.88; opacity:0.88; -khtml-opacity:0.88; } table table table table td { filter:none; }</style> <style type="text/css"> body, div, span, td, p, .orangetext15, .whitetext12, .lightbluetext8, strong, b, u, .redtext, .redbtext, .btext, .text, .nametext, .blacktext10, .blacktext12 { font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; } .nametext { padding: 5px; font-family: Arial; font-size: 17px; color: rgb(79, 79, 79); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; display: block; } .whitetext12, .orangetext15 { font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; color: rgb(79, 79, 79); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; } a.navbar:link, a.navbar:active, a.navbar:visited, a.navbar:hover, a.man:link, a.man:active, a.man:visited, a.man:hover, a, a:link, a:active, a:visited, a:hover, a.navbar:link, a.navbar:active, a.navbar:visited, a.navbar:hover, a.text:link, a.text:active, a.text:visited, a.text:hover, a.searchlinksmall:link, a.searchlinksmall:active, a.searchlinksmall:visited, a.searchlinksmall:hover, a.redlink:link, a.redlink:active, a.redlink:visited, a.redlink:hover { color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; } a.navbar:hover, a.man:hover, a:hover { color: rgb(190, 190, 190); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; } .badge { position: absolute; left: 1px; top: 1px; } </style> <p><a xhref="http://www.jetpacked.com/" mce_href="http://www.jetpacked.com/">jetpacked Myspace Layouts</a><br />

Tired of the lame, boring, white, and way too common business cards? Cardtel wants to design you something that will be remembered.

Demo: You’re looking at it.
Download: [Ettison Wordpress Theme]

Ettison is a new simple and search engine friendly wordpress theme. It is widget capable and bundled with a lot of widgets to make things easier for you. Enjoy!

I’m heading out in a few hours for Yanik’s Underground Online III Seminar in DC.  His Seminars are always interesting.  Seminars are a great place to meet and network as you may have already heard.  But this seminar was a great turning point for me in focusing my business and efforts online.  If you’re going to be there shoot me an email or post a comment here.  I’ll be spending most of the time there partying with the speakers.
I’ll be hard to contact for the weekend.  If you need any type of support jump to jetpackedsupport.com and I’ll get with you asap.

Todd

I was just received an email from one of our Jetspinner users who is using a fairly obvious but effective trick for spinning articles with a thesaurus.  Until we add an AJAX thesaurus in Jetspinner 2.0 this is a great solution to help you come up with alternative words and phrases:

“I use ‘Word’ and the built in thesaurus to get other words with the same/similar meaning… It’s quick when you get used to it just put the curser anwhere in a word and press SHIFT and F7 and it pops up with suggestions….” - Russell

Thanks for the tip Russell!

If you have any other ideas or tips for users post them as comments here and I’ll post the best ones as their own posts.

Happy Spinning,

Todd Dickerson

I actually stumbled across this method completely by accident, not that what I did was accidental, but I had no idea that i would reap the benefits that I did. For the longest time I have been a designer at heart, graphic, print, apparel, interfaces, I just love to design. I also love to blog, so it was a no brainer that I would be modifying, and redesigning the look of my website, over.. and over again. First I started with a simple theme someone else created, just changing the colors and images. Then I moved on to totally restructuring other theme designers’ themes and layouts. Finally I got around to creating my own. Now I’m no expert coder so I had to pay someone to code the layout I came up with, but it was still all worth it. My first theme completely created from scratch was called “Shooter Red”. I initially was just going to use it as my site layout, and not let anyone else use it, but then I thought about how I feel when I go to a great looking site and hope they offer the theme for download, but they don’t. If someone loved the look of my site, I wanted them to be able to use the theme as well. But before I could prepare the theme for distribution, I lost time to keep blogging on my personal site and Todd Dickerson and I started on the development of our relaunched company “Jetpacked”. While we were busy developing the first two tools of the JetTools suite, I found some time to prepare the theme and created a section on our site for “Wordpress Development”. I posted the theme for download there, and also did a “Shooter Blue” version as well. To let the community know about the theme release, I sent a few bloggers messages and wrote a little bit about the themes. That’s where it started, word of the “Shooter” themes spread like wildfire through the blogosphere and theme directory sites. Our site saw traffic go up steadily by the hundreds. But not only that, we started to see that we were gaining back links by the THOUSANDS. Feeling pretty good about this method, I decided to have a go at a second wordpress theme. In no time I whipped up a theme I called Infonightly, it was a simple 2 column “web 2.0″-ish theme. But I did something a little different this time as a test. I didn’t tell anyone about it, didn’t submit it anywhere, to this day it’s not even on our site! What I did was partnered with a site owner that offers wordpress themes for a fee. And we created a “Sponsored Theme” section on his site. In this section was a free download to my newly created infonightly theme. To this day the theme has been downloaded more than 4000 times. Resulting again, in thousands of back links.

Creating or modifying themes is relatively easy if you have any experience with HTML and CSS. Keep in mind you don’t have to create a theme from scratch to distribute it, you can simply modify someone else’s (but do something effective and noticeable, don’t be a sap and change the header color and redistribute it, I’ve seen a lot of these and it makes me angry every time). If you don’t have any experience doing this, and you’re not willing to learn how, there are plenty of individuals and companies that will be happy to design and create a theme for you to distribute. (for a fee of course).

If you would like to gain thousands of backlinks from releasing your own wordpress themes, contact me.