In my last blog post, I mentioned in passing that I had blown a major fuse and promised to bring you up to speed on this momentous event.

Before I do it, let me ask you a question:

Have you been had recently? Have you, too, bought yet another report that promised the world, real fast, and produced absolutely no results?

I have to put up my hand to that. There are many reports on my hard drive that promise easy SEO riches, Internet mastery and profit domination, which on closer inspection are not even useful for recycling. I mean, how do you recycle binary code?

With my hard disk creaking under the burden of accumulated reports, courses and guides, time had come to put this huge collection of virtual pages to the test.

Before I go into detail, a word of warning. If you are wedded to believing the gurus, to the veracity of Internet marketing ebooks, especially those that promise the world for $17, READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK. You may come in for a rude awakening from a slumber that thrives on the acquisition of the next shiny new thing. I know what this does to you. I was woken up rudely, very rudely, indeed.

Here is what happened:

To relieve the “creaking hard disk” syndrome, I took the most “promising” (in both senses of the word) and serious looking reports and condensed them into a compilation. The best of the self-acclaimed best found themselves together between the virtual covers of my very own step-by-step how-to-guide.

I decided put these methods to the test.

I had a brand new website that I had not yet promoted. Of course, I had done all the On Page SEO for this site, but I had not started yet on Off Page SEO with one exception: I had registered the sitemap with Google’s webmaster tools. Time to start testing.

How do you test stuff like this and, more importantly, what do you test for?

This part is actually quite easy. All these rapid-fire super-hyper push-button methods promise that it takes no time at all to index your sites all over the internet. They claim that your sites will be indexed instantly and will start popping up in the Search Engines between right now or, at the very least, within 24 hours.

All I had to do was follow instructions, check in a short while later, and then again 24 hours from now. It’s a wrap. Well, I thought, I have a few minutes to spare now, so let’s do it.

I set out to do as instructed. That is, I registered and pinged my site left right and center. I also submitted the sitemap to Bing and Yahoo and, for good measure, added a video sitemap to all three search engines. So far so good, I thought. Being a tad suspicious, though, I did what I hadn’t done previously. I checked.

Oh boy! Why didn’t I stay in make-believe land and dance with the Internet fairies? Instead, I actually had to go and check whether what the gurus and their imitators taught was true!

Because of this, the few minutes it should have taken to register my site with all these fabulous super-easy tools turned into hours, six hours, to be precise. Eventually, I began to scramble for a few extra valves to let off the steam that threatened to blow my mind because, on closer inspection, most of these so-called indexing sites simply did not do what they were supposed to, while a few sites came up with somewhat less than confidence inspiring statements like: “This domain is for sale. Submit your offer now.” !!??#@@?# Whatever!

When I finished dealing with all the indexing sites I began to check for results. After all, a few hours had passed since I had started the “five minute” registration process. According to Yahoo and Bing, my site did not exist. Google was slightly different as I had registered the sitemap a week earlier with Google Webmaster Tools. But none of the results from the indexing sites were anywhere to be seen.

Result? Well, yes, I had sort of a result. When people tell you to register your site with Google Webmaster Tools, do it. It isn’t instantaneous but it works. But as far as all the other, super-hyper 5-minutes-work-and-your-site-will-be-indexed-right-now stuff goes, don’t believe it. I found no trace of it, neither 24 hours later nor 48 hours later. I guess if I had gone out for a coffee and an ice cream instead of slaving away for pretty much a whole working day, at the very least I would have had a nice taste in my mouth.

What does all this have to do with video marketing I hear you ask? Please, indulge me another minute and all will be revealed. After all, this is a serious issue.

I got so fed up with the total absence of results… Actually, fed up is probably THE understatement of the century. I had a major crisis of confidence in anything that was being touted as information on and about the Internet. To put it plainly, my continued online existence was at stake.

To help me let off steam I decided to have fun. I made a video, right there and then. I took a few pictures with my 5 year old Canon Powershot (an anti-diluvian digital camera by today’s standards; it was new in 2006), knocked out a few text slides with PowerPoint and combined the lot into a 30 second video; nothing fancy but satisfying. And, to add to my amusement, I uploaded it to Youtube.

Then the unexpected happened!

Indulge me yet again and let me digress once more, please. I had read a number of ebooks on video marketing, I had watched training videos and heard those in the know speak about how fast you can get videos listed on Youtube, the second biggest search engine after Google.

To be honest, after my still smarting experience with fast-indexing-guru-advice, all I was able to come up with about this sort of talk was “go ahead and pull the other one.” I suppose more out of instinct and habit than for any other reason I added tags, title and a link in the description to my little fun video.

Yes, don’t worry, I will tell you what the video is called and where to find it: It’s called “Money Laundry” and here it is.

By the way, the last thing on my mind when I uploaded this video was getting it ranked. I just wanted to be able to show it to a few friends and, of course, to my daughter.

Here is the chronology of events:

I had created the video in the morning, uploaded it to Youtube and checked half an hour later, just for fun. By checked, I mean “searched for >Money Laundry< on Youtube." It was nowhere to be found. Cool. A couple of hours later, I showed the video to my friend. After all, I had photographed her, and it was her artwork that I had used for it. I opened Youtube, entered Money Laundry… My jaw came crushing to the floor. Frankly, I was flabbergasted, gobsmacked, and you could have knocked me over with a feather, all at the same time. The video was now ranked no. 2 on Youtube against 3,100 competing videos for the search term ‘Money Laundry’ (broad search, to be precise). I had done nothing special to get it ranked and certainly a heck of a lot less than I had done to my website that still was AWOL in the search engines. I put this down not as a result but as a freak occurrence, a Darwinian mutation leading nowhere. We went out for lunch. Later in the afternoon, I modified the video to respect my friend’s wishes. The next morning, I deleted the video from Youtube and uploaded the new version but kept the same information I had used for the previous one, that is to say, the same title, tags, link and description. Youtube did not like this one bit. When I looked for the video a couple of hours later, it was nowhere to be found. Even worse, when I searched for my channel without being logged in, Youtube, utterly refused to acknowledge the existence of the video. I couldn’t blame Youtube, though, not after having confused it thoroughly by first deleting something and then uploading the exact same thing again. Of course, when I logged into my channel, the video was there. I left it at that. Frankly, I couldn't care less about ranking this particular video. Or so I thought. However, vanity and obsessiveness never let go, don’t they? Late that night, just before going to sleep, I checked it again, this time from my my ipod. About 14 hours or so had elapsed since I had uploaded the new version whose mere existence Youtube had refused to acknowledge earlier in the day. The impossible had happened. It had risen back to no. 3. The next morning, I checked again. It was still no.3. Absentmindedly, I sort of pondered the description and suddenly realised that it did not even include the keyword, Money Laundry, that I had listed in the tags. I quickly edited the description: I entered the keyword just after the link, saved it and checked back a few minutes later. What do you think had happened? Literally, within minutes the video had climbed to no. 2 again. I don’t know what you make of it but here is my conclusion from this roller coaster weekend: Unlike some other stuff that shall go nameless, Video Marketing methodology for Youtube WORKS! If ever there was a test without any preconditions, this was it. It showed conclusively that following standard procedure for Youtube will generate results, and it will generate them fast. Trust me, I’m no guru. Let me anticipate a possible objection: I had done all this not from my home ISP, so the result is not skewed by Youtube recognising a familiar address. How had I done this? That was easy. I had gone for a break to a different city in a different country with a different language and staid in the apartment of a friend with a wireless connection. I had gone to Paris, but don’t tell anyone. This happened about three weeks ago. And the outcome of it all? The very same day I decided to return to video. I picked up where I had left off nearly a year ago, and now my video guide is almost finished. It will be different from the usual offerings. It will be… Check back, or even better, watch out for my next video and blog post. All will be revealed. If you had experiences similar to mine with guru reports, I’d love it if you could share them with us here.