In a new 21st Century world where Baby Boomers are retiring without enough savings or pensions and jobs are being outsourced to emerging countries, it is becoming more and more important for people to become work independent -- and one way is to have a thriving Internet business.

But... to do that you must effectively market yourself and your business. You must understand Internet marketing and how to use it for your and your customers' benefit.

In this Hub, I'll try to guide you through the process. This will be oriented more toward the business aspects rather than the technical side -- though I will touch on that periodically also.

Stay with me on this and we can both prosper.

Streaming videos on the Internet is a relatively new marketing form. Currently, most websites and newsletters are using text and pictures in combination to attract a consumer's. Some pictures are a combination of still and animations to better the chances of attracting a prospective customer. But, if there is anything advertisers and consumers have learned about marketing, television adds are still the best way to attract attention for a product and keep it the consumer's focus. Now a niche of that market form has arisen and its called "Ghetto Video Marketing".

To understand why internet streaming videos are the next step in online marketing, we need to be able to appreciate the objective of advertisers and the effects of the different techniques of advertising.

To begin with, online advertising began mainly with newsletters in the form of emails or pop-up screens containing pure text and some inanimate pictures. As Internet users became accustomed to surfing the net, these newsletters and pop-up advertisements gradually turned into irritations. Marketing newsletters started to look like junk mail and pop-up screens became similar to billboards that you see everyday.

In short, these common forms of advertising soon became such aggravations that anti virus software developers soon added pop-up blockers in their products thereby drastically reducing the number of consumers that these pop-ups were able to reach.

The same kind of problems occurred when spammers started flooding peoples' emails.

This is where streaming video comes in. It is undisputed that television commercials are still the best way to attract attention. The advertiser needs to make the product look good on TV, but their primary objective is to attract the consumer's attention. Their second goal is to make the video memorable enough so that the customer remembers the brand name when they want the product. The most famous brand names like Marlboro succeeded in their advertising campaign videos so much so that people still remember the Marlboro man.

With video beginning to take off, it is actually becoming harder to brand yourself. There are, however, a few individuals who are doing something different. They are using ghetto video marketing. The guy who coined this term is Jason Moffatt. He now lives in Oceanside, CA but he used to live in a little lean-to kind of shack. He has some "ghetto videos" about it. Jason now teaches video marketing. Another fellow, Roy Fielding, has been making a splash with his videos. I don't think he calls them ghetto videos but they would fit the definition. They are at least guerilla marketing. He uses them to get sales attention and he tells me that his Google rankings have gone up dramatically.

So what is ghetto video marketing? Its down and dirty videos made for the purpose of providing information without all the fancy glitzy frufru stuff. It gets the viewer interested because he/she is seeing something real and relates to it. Think of how popular "reality" TV is.Ghetto video has the same effect.

This is the strength of internet marketing through streaming videos. It immediately grabs attention. The only thing that you as an advertiser have to do is to make the video interesting enough that it maintains or improves on that initial level of interest. When the video is old enough to become common place, you replace it with a new one. Unlike pop-ups or spam messages or newsletters, they cannot become an annoyance because the first thing it does is to grab the consumer's attention and curiosity.

With the use of ghetto videos, the consumer gets a clear picture of what you and your product or idea is all about. This is an added bonus to the attention grabbing feature of using videos for your marketing or advertising campaigns. When a consumer knows you, he or she can begin to trust you. After all, having the trust of your customer's is better than the bottom line. A trusting customer is one who will patronize you over and over again. As good as your advertising video is, it is still the quality of your product that matters in the end.