I have to confess that, once again, this is a blog that I have been watching for some time. I have noticed a definite theme developing in terms of the blogs that have won the Blog Of the Day Award. Almost without exception, they share certain characteristics … the best word that I can find to summarise these qualities is that they are all engaging, and that’s very true of today’s winner.

Looking at previous posts on today’s winning blog, we find good use of pictures and graphics. As far as content goes, there’s a nice mixture between internet marketing, associated topics and some personal glimpses. These definitely tell a story and they do it simply and eloquently. The latest blog post details the anxiety of preparing and shooting that important first video.

A link to the video itself would ensure even more viewers, especially because of the freeze-frame image that it would have, though this is a very minor carp on my part ! But do click on the link to see it on YouTube because it’s well worth it ! I think that this is probably the best video that I have seen by any of my fellow students so far.

Not only is it different and novel, but I found it charming and captivating. And there are double digit comments on the post that agree with me.

So, for all of this – but especially for that video – today’s Blog Of The Day Award goes to Melanie Steeden for www.melaniesteeden.com.

Congratulations Melanie, your Blog Of The Day badge is on its way !

Over the last five days, I have been very busy working on the Blog Of The Day Awards. I am really enjoying it and my fellow students seem to like the idea.

The idea grew in response to a task set by my mentor, Alex Jeffreys, as part of his Marketing With Alex 2.0 internet marketing coaching programme.

But I have been working on other parts of the syllabus too. For example, I have now viewed the recorded video session that Alex had with Maria Andros, “The Video Marketing Queen”. Wow ! I’d figured for a long time that video is the way to go, but if there was ever any doubt in my mind about its effectiveness, she has dispelled that. What she is doing is amazing !

I have also been looking at ideas for generating reports that can be used in “giveaways”. For example, I have had a resale rights product “on the shelf” for quite a while and just before starting in on Alex’s coaching, I was getting a sale page together for that. So I thought that it might be worth writing a short report to act as a lead magnet for this product. But first, I wanted to know whether my sales page was up to scratch.

So I took advantage of the fact that we had our second brainstorming session with Alex last night. He gave me a critique of the web site I’d roughed out, but more importantly (and without realising it), he gave me a better idea for a lead magnet ! I shall get working on that later today, after I have made the next Blog Of The Day Award.

After that, I have a number of other things to move on. For example, I need to think some more about video because there’s also Alex’s video competition. And then later in the week, we have our next session on social media traffic generation. It’s all go !

Watch this space …

(Picture from sxc.hu by L_Avi)

I have to confess that when I came up with this idea, I already had two or three blogs in mind as significant. But in each case the reasons were different … as I said when I announced the awards, my criteria are entirely subjective. And as I have been surfing some of my fellow Marketing With Alex 2.0 student blogs over the weekend, I find myself placing different blogs in to different categories in my mind, like Gil in the Dogged Persistence Until The Problem Was Solved category and Shirley in the Grace Under Pressure category.

Well today’s winner would be up-front in the Getting Out Of The Comfort Zone category. Why ?

Well because he’s been very open about the fact that he was uncomfortable about something that he felt that he really needed to do – and that was to make a video to place on his blog. I guess this decision came as a result of watching Maria Andros’s session with Alex Jeffreys as part of his training programme (something that I still need to catch up with !)

But he did it. OK, it may not be the kind of highly polished, super quality production that Maria turns out, but it does the job more than well enough – if my first “to camera” video is half as good, I’ll be over the moon.

But most importantly of all, what’s totally clear from what you see is that it’s authentically him.

He’s honest about how difficult he finds the situation, both on the video and in his written words, but he’s engaging and he gets his message over very clearly. And yesterday he posted an interesting follow-up piece in which he also talks about his plans for Alex’s video competition.

So today’s winner of the rog-blog.com Blog Of The Day award is Sean Beardmore for his first video on www.seanbeardmore.com.

Congratulations Sean ! I look forward to seeing more of your videos soon.

I’ll be in touch with your Blog Of The Day badge later today.

Well last time I used an old version of Camtasia from Techsmith. Today, I have made another video, but this time I used CamStudioPro from Dave Guindon.

In this video, I talk about Dave’s product and its value to internet marketers. I mention the two minor drawbacks that I see in it – if anybody knows how to get around these, I’d love to hear from you. And I’d also be very interested to know what everybody else is using. Do people use CamStudioPro or Camtasia ? Was the huge price difference a factor ? Or are you using  something else ? If so, why ?

As I write this, I still haven’t got around to viewing the recording of Alex’s session with Maria Andros, “The Video Marketing Queen”. When I do, I may find that I’m barking up the wrong tree entirely with everything that I say ! Even so, here it is … please let me know what you think. Thanks !

PS: I can’t quite remember whether I mentioned this on the video, so I’ll just add here that as part of his deal, Dave Guindon includes free upgrades for all new releases of CamStudioPro.