http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi-0lko9tsA

This is a video about some of the most used wordpress widgets.

I take a look at the Archive, Category, Tabs, Recent Comment, Recent Post and Links widgets.

It helps to know what they are and more importantly how some folks use them.

So we take a look at some sites that are using them to get a better fix on how and what you can get out of them.

So take a look at the video.

Don’t forget to “tweet”,”like”, ” Google +1″ or otherwise tell you friends, if you find this video helpful. 

Many Thanks.

Here’s the transcript of the video if you prefer reading the post. Enjoy.

Hey Claude Pelanne of Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is going to be

video 5 on the WordPress Widgets video series and this is going to be the

last one for this part for a while. And then I’ll come back and do some

updates if we need to, but here are some widgets that we didn’t cover in

the first 4 videos and you should be aware of. The first one is called

archives. By the way, the widget dashboard page displays differently on

this particular website. It looks like this on my blog, it displays a

little bit differently. So you get used to that and depending on the theme

you’re using and the version of WordPress that’s in there it may display

differently, but the basic availability of the same Widgets are there

anyway. So archives, remember you can drag them over. In some of these new

formats you don’t drag them over, a dialogue box opens up and then you

click it to move it over. Archives will give you information on your

website organized by date. So if you have a website that’s been around a

long time it will organize it by year, by month, by day, and it allows

people to access their information chronologically and we’ll see a sample

of that shortly.

Categories. A lot of people use categories to display on their sidebar. It

allows people to see what their website is about and it organizes things

very clearly by category. So they can access information based on how you

have your site organized. Now you organize your categories by going up to

the posts tab here, clicking on the categories page when you design your

site and then you name your categories and you organize your site on the

categories dashboard. When you drag the widget over to the sidebar it will

then access that information and display it just how you’ve laid it out on

your category dashboard page. What’s another good one? Links. Links are

links to other sites that you find interesting, better known as a blog roll

and you organize your links, again the widget will display the links as

they have been organized up here in your links page. So if you have a links

page and you organized your links it will show you what they are, you add

new links to the links page by clicking add new link, filling in the name,

the web address, etc. So that’s how the links get organized and your

widget. Then there are some others here that people do use. Recent

comments, people like to put recent comments. This is a widget that will

organize the comments that come onto your blog from the comments dashboard

page and put them in here and you can organize the number that you have.

You can title all of these widgets, custom title them if you want, so it

doesn’t have to say recent comments, it can say whatever title it is you

want. Recent comments, recent posts.

People like to put samples of their most recent information in the sidebar

so that people can gain access to it, so you just drag it over and then tag

cloud. The tag cloud is another one that comes in handy. It organizes the

information on your website by keyword. As you create the content on your

website one of the things you should do when you’re creating a post is put

some tags that are relevant to whatever that post is about and that way if

you put the display the tag cloud and people click on the tag they will

access your posts. Those are some of the samples of the widgets that we

didn’t cover that you should be aware of. Tags, tag cloud, recent posts,

recent comments, links, categories, archives. Let’s take a look and see how

some people use them. Here’s a website, sugarray.com, a very prominent

well-known expert in SEO and affiliate marketing. She has the categories

here laid out so you can see how her site is organized and if you want to

access information related to those categories you can just click on the

categories. She also has top posts. These are the posts that she wants to

highlight, popular reviews or reviews she has made.

Glenn Allsop, he’s got popular posts. So you just see how the recent posts

or popular posts, you can rename these as you want, will emphasize

information you want to make available to your viewers. Topics is just

another way of calling them categories, and you can see how it’s organized

here on his sidebar. Eric Nagel, another well-known affiliate marketer and

SEO expert. Now here he has the tags, so if I were to click on data feeds

it’s going to take me to all of the web posts that relate to data feeds if

I were interested in that subject. Recent comments, he’s got them there.

Categories, he’s got his stuff organized so you can see how his website is

organized.

The most recent comments, blog roll, so now these are all the people that

he recommends that you know about. Recent posts, this is the most recent

information he has and then his guest posts where he has written

information on other posts. So you can see how those widgets are working.

Then Guru Bob, another SEO expert. He’s got categories, he has the blog

roll, he has his most recent posts and then here you see the archives

organized by year. It takes you right down the line and if you can click on

any one of these and delve in, he’s got his tags. His tag roll is right

here, so you can see the way these widgets and the way this information is

organized. Some of these widgets can be dragged into the sidebar and some

of them can be dragged into the footer depending on the type of

configuration or theme you are using and we’ve just seen samples of that.

All you’ve got to do is just drag and drop. So that’s it. These are some

of the samples of widgets you should be aware of. I hope this video has

been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne at Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with

it, stay well and we’ll talk to you soon.

Smart YouTube Widget – The Problem

I was trying to demo how to set up a video in my sidebar and was getting no where.

It seems the Smart Youtube widget would take the code and not render the video.

It would display the code.

At first I thought it was a conflict with the Thesis theme and changed and tested with the Magazine theme…

The problem persisted.

Tried a couple of other themes and confirmed that the themes were not the issue.

Smart YouTube Widget – The Solution

With the themes out of  the way, I went to the Smart Youtube Pro plugin settings.

One by one I tested each setting until I found the culprit…the WiziApp Support setting.

The WiziApp Support setting has to be disabled.

It has to be unchecked or it will prevent the Smart YouTube Pro widget from functioning.

There it is pure and simple.

Take a look at the video to see what I am talking about and then go and use the plugin and  widget if that makes sense for you.

As always if you find this information helpful, give it a “tweet”, a “like”, a “Google +1″ and tell your friends!

Many Thanks as always

I had a transcription made of the video for those who prefer a written post. Enjoy

Hey Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome.This is going to

be a continuation of my Widget’s video series, and this one is going to be

about a widget called Smart YouTube What it allows you to do is put video

into you sidebar if you so desire. Why would you want to do that? Well you

might find a reason for it. Here’s my blog and if you see here on my

sidebar about Affiliates Starting Line, I have a video here so it kind of

takes care of, if anybody wants to find out what the sites about, you’ve

got your main content here and then in the sidebar you have a video and

don’t forget on the right-hand side here if there’s any expansions, so when

you play these it’s really kind of small. You don’t want, you can’t see

much but you click the expansion full screen and it takes it full screen.

So how do you set that up, well down here is a widget called Smart YouTube

and you can just drag it over to your sidebar. Now it’s going to present

you with a title that you can put in here. Mattcutts, and search, that’s

my title. And then down here it gives you a box where you can put in your

code. Now where do you get the code? You get the code by going to YouTube,

you find a video that you want to share, you click the share button, and

you can lift this code right here, copy it, bring it over to your widgets

and … I’ll just do it the old fashioned way, copy it in now. For a Smart

YouTube, if you look at the instruction, I’ll show you, you have to add a

designator after the HTTP, you can be a v or a VH. I add VH, because I

shoot in high def.

So you add that designation, you click save, and then you go take a look at

your website and there’s its Mattcutts, and search and there’s the video.

Now if I click play, It’ll start playing. Now you can’t see anything there

so you want to come here and click full screen. It takes it full screen, so

that’s how you use this widget. Now there’s a thing about this, to use this

widget and to make sure that it plays properly you come down to your

settings here, now when you, to load in the plug-ins Smart YouTube, which

is how this widget gets embedded into your widgets page, you come to the

setting’s for Smart YouTube Now I have video done on Smart YouTube, but

this one is an updated version that allows you to put a video in a sidebar.

What you want to do is, you come down here and pick your selections, you

video settings, so I displayed videos and posts, I don’t display them in

comments. I can use iframe embed code, Google, YouTube gives you the

ability to either pick up this URL, or pick up an iframe code, if you want

to use that in your post or blog, so that’s what that does.

Video appearance I wouldn’t worry about it. Here you select which formats

you want to use when you embed a video so depending on the theme you have,

you can decide which size box works for you, that’s a matter of

experimentation. These are sizes that work for me based on the theme that

I’ve been using. I can change these, now for your sidebar you select what

size box you want that video to appear in. So you can change these to

whatever values you want, 300×225, whatever. I picked 150×125 because it

fits into the sidebar of the theme I’m using. I choose not to use related

videos and then the rest of these you can decide whether you want to auto-

play, I never want to auto-play I don’t want to display the search box, I

don’t want the color box, I don’t want ratings, remove titles and ratings,

I like to do that. Remove animations, yes, hide the YouTube logo, yes, and

so on.

Now down here there’s a couple of things here, Wizzy App Support, this

helps you publish your blog as an iPhone app. If you turn this on, if you

enable Wizzy App it will disable the sidebar search capability, the play

capabilities so I’ll show you. If I click Wizzy App Support, and refresh

it, I come to my screen here, if I refresh, gone. It’s showing me the code,

it’s not setting up properly. So you need to come down here and make sure

that you have not selected Wizzy App. You deselect it, make sure that it’s

not selected and click updates and then your video will appear. So that’s

the basic lesson, take away from what I’ve just told you, it took me quite

a while to figure this one out because I had to go through all these

options, enabling HTML, it’s OK, I’m enabling all the others, it’s OK, but

if you enable Wizzy App, you’re going to turn off the sidebar capability.

That’s the whole point behind using that widget. Let me get back to the

widgets page. So that’s how you use the Smart YouTube widget and I’m going

to continue, with one more video that shows some of the other basic widgets

that are available. But in the case of using video, the Smart YouTube plug-

in is great and the widget in the sidebar widget is great also as long as

you have it set up properly the way I showed you. So that’s it, I hope this

helped, this video has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne, Affiliates

Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well, and we’ll talk to you soon.

I just produced video #3 in the WordPress Widgets series.

This one is an overview of the widget page.

It goes over the standard widgets that you get by default and gives a quick run down of what they are and how you can use them.

Take a look at the video to learn the basics of the world of widgets in WordPress.

If you find the information helpful, don’t forget to “like”,”tweet” or “google +1 the video. Many Thanks as always.

Want to read the transcript of this video. Go to the full version of the post.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliates Starting Line. Welcome. This is going

to be part two of the Widget series, and in this particular case I’m going

to show you different widgets that are basically always there. Then there

are going to be other custom widgets that appear depending on the plug-ins

you’re using and the theme you’re using. This is a typical widgets page in

a WordPress website. The first thing you see here is a kismet. A kismet is

a spam catching piece of software. It comes in automatically when you load

up WordPress. Again, I use it, a lot of people use it. In order to use it,

before you use it, you have to get a key, a piece of code that a kismet

gives you when you sign up for them. Now, if you’ve been with a kismet long

enough, you have that code. It used to be free. Today I think if you sign

up for a kismet, there’s a monthly charge. That’s what a kismet is.

Custom menu is just what it is. You can go back into your menu screen and

create custom menus for your website. Again, that depends on the theme

you’re using and when you do that, this is the widget that you’ll use if

you want to put that custom menu into a sidebar. Recent posts, you’re going

to get that on all the sites you get. If you add that it will load into the

sidebar. Your most recent posts, you can select which sidebar you want it

in, depending on the theme you’re using. Here you can select a number of

posts that you want to have appearing in your recent posts widget. In this

case, the default is at five.

These thesis widgets are all specific to this theme that happens to be on

this website. Archives, if you’re archiving and you’ve got a lot of stuff,

and your site is old you might want to put an archive in your sidebar. This

allows you to do that.

Links are also very important. If you want to set up a blog role that has

links to other websites that you think are important, and that you have

relationships with. This is where you will add the widget for the links.

You’ll actually create the links over here under the links tab, and that

would be subject for another video.

RSS, real simple syndication. This allows you to load in an RSS feed, a

real simple syndication feed, that allows people to subscribe to you. So

that when you add content to your website, they get automatically notified

and they can link to it, and never even have to visit your website after

that. They just click the content and it will show up in their RSS reader,

and that’s subject for another video.

Calendar, this just allows you to add a calendar. Meta allows you to put

the admin, the feed, and where it’s certain ways to get into your site,

onto your sidebar. Frankly, I never use this one. I prefer to log in the

old fashioned way, and I don’t like the idea of having meta information

sitting on the sidebar. You won’t find this meta widget used very often.

Search allows you to put the search box into your sidebar so other people

looking for specific information on your website can just type in the

information.

Categories, you can put a category widget. It will lay out all the

categories on your sidebar if you want to do that. If you’re not organizing

your nav bar at the top of your website by category, then maybe this will

come in handy. Pages, this one I do use. It allows you to put pages in the

sidebar, especially my disclaimer disclosure. If I want people to be able

to find them more recently, I’ll put them in a sidebar, not in a footer.

Recent comments, a lot of people use this. It show if the site is current

and up and running. That can go into your sidebar. Tag cloud are when you

tag posts. As you enter them, you should be tagging your posts. This will

create a list of all the tags you have on your website. So if somebody

clicks on a tag, which is another fancy word for keyword, they will go to

the article that’s related to that tag. Or, they will go to a series of

articles related to that tag, if that’s the case. It’s a very useful tool

that can come in handy. That’s something for another video.

Down below here, you’re going to see inactive widgets. These are available

widgets. These are the ones that are available that are not being used in

the sidebar. Inactive widgets are widgets that have been used, and

withdrawn from the sidebar. They’re in here, and very often some of them

may have the code still in them.

For example, in my RSS feed if I click edit, I can see that my RSS feed is

already here loaded in. This URL is the RSS URL for creating a feed. All I

have to do is select which sidebar I want it in. Let’s say I want it in

sidebar one. I can save the widget. Now my RSS feed, as you see over here,

just appeared. Let’s take a look and see what order I want it. Position

number five. I want it at the top, so let’s put it in position number one

and save it. Now you see my RSS feed has appeared here in position number

one. If I go to visit the site, there it is. There’s the RSS feed right

there, appearing at the top.

So there you have it. Available widgets. Inactive widgets. Obviously I’ve

used the tag cloud before, so I have tags in there. Oops, I didn’t want to

do that. Save it, and there we are. That’s how the widgets screen displays,

and what it means. I hope this video has been helpful. This is Claude

Pelanne at Affiliates Starting Line. Stay with it. Stay well, and we’ll

talk soon.

The Text Widget

I just made video #2 of the WordPress Widget video series.

You’ll learn how versatile this widget is.  It allows you to embed code from an affiliate network if you want to sell a product or service.

Depending on the theme you are using and the size of the sidebar you have, you can put in banners of different sizes and test to see what works best for you.

You can also create your own advert by writing your own html code.  Or you can have an advert written for you.

The text widget will take copy pure and simple if that suits your need.

Take your pick.

Just take in the video and see what the text widget can for you.

As always, if you find this video helpful don’t forget to “like”, “tweet”, or “Google +1″ it. Many thanks for your support.

PS- Here is the transcript of the video for your use and enjoyment.

Hey, Claude Pelanne at Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is going to

be video two of the Widgets Series. This one is about the text widget. In

the first video we explained what widgets were, and it’s just a word for a

piece of software that adds functionality to your sidebar. What is a

sidebar, you might say? Here is a website. It has a main content area

here in the middle. Then on either side of it, it has a left sidebar and a

right sidebar. That is how this one is configured.

These are called sidebars. You’ll see here that it says: pages, about,

contest, disclaimer, recent posts and has a calendar. The information in

these sidebars was put in there by widgets. If I go to the widgets

section, you’ll find the widgets, as I explained, by going to appearance

tab, and then clicking on widgets. You come up to this back office that

shows you all the widgets available for the particular theme I’m using.

You’ll notice here on sidebar one, we have pages, and on sidebar two we

have recent posts and a calendar. These widgets are already installed

here. If I wanted to get rid of them, I could click the edit button and

click delete. I just got rid of the widget in the sidebar here, and it’s

gone down here to the inactive widgets and parked itself.

I am going to be talking about here, the text widget. The text widget is a

very versatile, arbitrary text, or HTML.

How do you use a text widget? You click the add button. This is brand new

in the latest version of WordPress. In the old days you could drag them

across and put them up there. They just changed. It gives me a widget

editing box, a title, then it has a box, then the choice down here of

sidebar. I can put in sidebar one or sidebar two. It has inactive widgets

if I want to put it away in the inactive part and so on. I want it

positioned in sidebar one. It will default to position one because there

is no other widget in there now,I cleared that, and I am going to put some

information in here.

What am I going to do? I went over to Share-A-Sale where I have an

account. I’m looking for an advertisement for this travel site, Sandos. I

found this particular banner, a 125 x 125. Here’s the code. I’m going to

lift this code, then come back to my widget, and I’m going to put it right

in here. Then, I’m going to say, "Beautiful Sandos Vacation". That’s it.

I’m going to sidebar one, position one, then add a title to it and click

save. Now it’s put the text widget right up here in sidebar one. What

does that look like? You’ll notice this is the one we took out. We have

to refresh the page, and now I have an ad for Sandos. If I click on that

add it will take me to the Sandos site. If you buy a vacation from having

clicked that add, I get a commission. That’s how affiliate marketing

works. That’s the text widget.

The text widget can do more than that. Let’s say I want to add another

one, and I want to go below that and add a couple ads. I will come in here

and put it in position two. I will come up in here and come over to my

code that I’ve lifted, and I’ll try this one. Let’s see what this one is.

I’ll copy that, put it in, save the widget, and it’s now put another piece

of code in there.

Let’s take a look, go back to the site, refresh it, and now I have another

Sandos ad running, exactly the same one. That gives you an idea of how to

do that. I don’t want to repeat the same ad, so I would come down here and

I’d delete it.

Let’s say I have some specific copy I want to put in. I’ll add this. I

will now come down here to some code I’ve already created. I’ll take an

image. I created this image of a travel bag. I put it in HTML, copy it

with control-C, put it in here. Now I know I have an image there. I’ll

come down here and say, "This is the best travel bag I own. Get one".

Then what I would do in this particular case is, I have a piece of code, of

anchor text, again, in HTML I wrote that goes to my blog, it would go to an

affiliate site. Now I’ve created my own little advertisement here on my

own. I’ll come up to the travel site and refresh. Now it’s in position

one. I have the bag that I put in here, "This is the best travel bag I

own. Get one", and if I click it, it takes me, in this case, to my blog,

but in other cases I would put in a piece of code here for an affiliate

product that I’m associated with.

You can create your own ads, actually, and put your copy in here, put in

your own code and do that yourself. That’s what the text widget does. It

allows you to put ads and copy. If it’s not an ad, it could be a piece of

copy you want to put in there. What if I want to write a little of my own

post? "This is the best site for travel information. Please leave your

comments and queries. Thanks." Put whatever you want to in there. Then, I

would select that.

Let’s put it in position three, and I’ll save the widget. Let’s go up to

the site, refresh, and there’s my copy.

There are lots of ways you can use the text widget. It’s very versatile,

very useful, and I think you should learn how to use it, and you can become

a much more effective communicator and marketer. That’s it.

I hope this video has been helpful. This is the one about the text widget.

Go for it. This is Claude Pelanne at Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with

it and stay well. We’ll talk with you soon.

If you find this information helpful, don’t forget to “like”, “tweet”, or “google +1″ the post. Many Thanks.

WordPress Widgets

I just did this video at the request of an ASL community member who said she took my YouTube WordPress video series and was looking for the videos on widgets.

Well I hadn’t made any wordpress widget videos so this is the first one.

In this video you get a very general definition of what a widget is and what a widget does.

The next few videos will show specific widgets and how to use them.

So take in the video above and leave a comment or question.

Here is the transcript of the video. Enjoy.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here from Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. It’s going to be a first in a series of videos about WordPress widgets. Somebody emailed me and said, “Gee, I took your series, and you mentioned in there that you would do some stuff on widgets. What are widgets? Can you do some?” So, I guess I will.

What are widgets? Well, widgets are pieces of software tools that you can put in your sidebars. Now, what do I mean by that? If we take a look at this website, I want to go to the website. Let’s try that again. There is a main area here that has content, then on the right-hand side there is a sidebar. This sidebar is populated by widgets. That’s what widgets are.

Where do you find widgets? When you come here to the left-hand sidebar of your dashboard in WordPress and then here under appearance, you go to widgets. Here is a typical kind of widget page. Now, what defines a widget page is the theme that you selected for your website. Different themes call for different widgets, so you’ll find different widgets populating back here, although there are some very standard ones that always are there. They are, let’s me see. They are categories, links, meta tags, all of these basically you will always find them in Recent, Tag Clouds, Pages, etc. The most important widget, I think, the one you’ll use the most, will be the text widget and we’ll take a look at that in a video.

If you’ve used widgets and then put then to rest, you have a second part down here that says Inactive Widgets. That tells me that I’ve used these widgets before on this website and then I pushed them off for whatever reason, so they are kind of in here and very often, sometimes they get populated with code and then it keeps the code, other times they’re not. In this case, the text widget I did.

So, widgets. Now, why do they call these widgets? I have no clue. It’s just in the vernacular of WordPress. Widgets are software. In this particular theme that I’m using, I have two sidebars. One of them is being used, and the other one is dormant, but in this particular sidebar, I have a custom menu and create information, check it out. I rolled in a widget called Custom Menu. See that here? I didn’t put it there.

Different widgets have different functions. If I wanted a text widget, I could bring it over. Now, the way you bring a widget over is that you take it and you drag it over to the sidebar that you want it in. Now, this has a text widget in sidebar one. If I wanted a text widget in sidebar two, I just drag it over there and then if I don’t want it there anymore, I just drag it and put it back and it will bring it down into the inactive widget and the same holds true here. If I don’t want this text widget, I just drag it out of there and it de-populates.

That’s the extent of this video. A widget is a piece of software that you use to populate the sidebar of your website, and it brings different functionality to that sidebar. You find the widget by going to the Appearance tab, pick selecting widget and it opens up the widget editing page in which you can then take a widget and drag it over and do whatever you want, depending on what you are trying to accomplish on the website.

The next videos, we’re going to start showing what these widgets do exactly, and we’re going to start with a text widget. That’s it. I hope this has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne, Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well and we’ll talk to you soon.

If you find this information helpful, don’t forget to “like”, “tweet”, or “google +1″ the post. Many Thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwdOENKNyPM

I had to close or disable comments on some of my Posts and more importantly on my Pages.

The only problem was I had forgotten how to do it.

I figured it out and then made this video. Check it out and if you prefer you can read the transcript below.

Enjoy

Transcript of how to disable comments in WordPress.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is going
to be a short video, and I just want to explain how do you get rid of the
comment box underneath a page or a post. In this case, it’s a page and I’ll
show you how you do this.

I have a website that has a disclaimer, and on the Disclaimer page, you see
this Leave a Reply. I really don’t want that on there because you don’t
need it on these legal pages. How do you get rid of it?

Well, you come in to your Edit Page for the page and you come up here to
Screen Options on the right-hand side and click it. This is going to
display what is showing below your content box. So you can activate or
deactivate. For example, I don’t know need to show Platinum SEO because I
have Yoast. But here see my Discussion, it needs to be checked. Now, when I
check that, that means a discussion box is going to appear down here and
here it is right here. See Discussion? It says Allow Comments, Allow
trackbacks and pingbacks. I don’t want any of that for the page. So I’m
going to click these and then I’m going to come back up here. I’ve
unchecked them. Click Update. Now, when I go to view the page this time, my
Disclaimer will be there, but the reply box below has disappeared and
comments are closed. Now, I’ve cleaned it up and I have it the way I want
to see it. That’s how you do it.

To recap quickly, you come to your page. When you want to lose the reply
box below your page or post, you come to the Edit Page for either your page
or post. Come over here to Screen Options, and then you have a menu
selection up here, checked or unchecked. You want to make sure that you
check the Discussion box. That will allow the discussion tab to be
displayed, and then you’re going to come down here and uncheck these two
boxes here, which are checked by default. Then you’re going to come back up
here and click Update, and then that’s how you will eliminate the reply box
in your page or your post.

That’s it. I hope this video has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne at
Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well, and we’ll talk to you
soon.

If you found this post helpful, don’t forget to “like”, “tweet”, or “Google +1″. Many thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd9nOZd9iJw

Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line. This is going to be part three of the Google Calendar video series. I just found a very interesting feature that I think I should point out. That is when you come to your main calendar page and right below the mini calendar you get My Calendars. You hit the right click here.

Whoops, sorry. This is the settings for all of your calendar, your whole setup. You want to come to Settings. Here is where you manage everything you want. Over on the right-hand side, Browse Interesting Calendars, click it. What you’re going to get here is in this tab, Holidays, you’ll get all the holidays from countries all over the world.

Now, why is this important? Because if you’re a marketer and you’re marketing to certain markets, holidays are sales days. You have here, I just subscribed to the US holidays, but you have all the holidays you can think of – Jewish holidays, Japanese holidays, Philippines, French, Christian, Canadian. A lot of interesting categories of holidays.

Over here, under Sports, if you’re a sports fan, now you can follow and if you’re marketing to these markets, you can get the baseball major league calendar. You can get Asian series, Caribbean world series. If you’re in the major leagues, let’s take a look. Now you can drill down. The Red Sox or the Yankees, or the Chicago White Sox, all the teams here you can load up on their calendars.

You can actually custom . . . you’ve got more. So here you’ve got day of the year, phases of the moon, star dates, Hebrew calendar. There’s a wealth of stuff you can do here. As it all relates to marketing, you can create specific, targeted calendars for your different marketing campaigns and they can incorporate these characteristics.

How do you get it? You go to your calendar. Go down to your My Calendars, to your main control tab for everything. Go down to Settings and then come over here to the right, Browse Interesting Calendars. It will get you to here, and then you can go to Holidays, to Sports, to More and keep drilling down as you check things out. Preview it.

It’s interesting. That’s a very interesting way to do it. I hope this has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne with Affiliate Starting Line. Go down here and browse interesting calendars. Take care, talk to you soon, and stay with it.

If you found this video and transcript helpful, don’t forget to “like” it, tweet it or Google + it. Many Thanks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR0w2nNySo0

Here is a transcript done by speechpad.  This will get you going on how to optimize your Google Calendar for search results.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is going to be part two, Google Calendar video series and a couple of things that I want to show you that I found and they come in handy.

So to find your Google Calendar, you can log into your Google account, and there’s a nav bar up here. You come up here and click “Calendar.” This will get you to the back office for your calendar. We already did a video to show you how to set this up, but I’m going to be talking about how to optimize your description. I’m going to be talking about, in Gmail, how you can create an event from an email that you get. I’m going to talk about the widgets and the capabilities on the right-hand column here that I just found before.

So when you’re creating an event, and let’s create one. Let’s say Google Calendar video launch. We’ll pick a day. Today is the 19th. I’ll launch this on the 22nd. I’m going to launch it 9:00 a.m. So it sets an announcement now that I’m making. Where am I going to launch this? I’m going to go launch it from the Affiliate Starting Line YouTube channel. If you had several calendars, you would take this drop down and make sure you pick the right one.

The description here is where it’s important. The description you want to put in stuff that is keyword rich. So “how to optimize your event in Google Calendar.” Then what I can do here is put some URLs that will become clickable links, so that when this appears in my calendar that’s clicked on by somebody who sees in on my blog or whatever I put the code, these two links will be clickable links.

I come down here if I want a pop-up reminder, I can put that and indicate the time I want. But what I’m going to do is come down and click the public option here, right in here. And that’s because when it goes public, that means that Google will put this out to the world, but it will also mean that Google will index this information. If there’s a relevant search for somebody coming up and looking for Google calendar or how to optimize your event in Google calendar, there’s a good chance I could get this optimized and ranked. Of course, if they come to my event here and they see that I have a Google Calendar launch, I’ve got a couple of links that will send them right where they can find it. So that is why you want to go public, and that is an interesting capability of Google calendar. Click “Save.” And here we see my Google calendar set-up for Wednesday.

Now if I had an event that was going to be a month or two down the line, which is even better, I would do that, optimize it, load up that description with something that’s keyword rich, and see if I could get it indexed. That’s what you really want to do.

Now there’s another thing you can do. If you get an email in GMail, now I’m in Gmail, and let’s say I just got this announcement and it’s an email that I find important. I can create an event. I come down here to “Create Event.” It will create an event for me, and I could say whatever, let’s pretend this was Twitter launch or whatever, and I could create a whole new event in my Google Calendar right off of this email, enter it in, get it all set up, get the description optimized, do everything we decided, go public with it, and click save, and this email event now goes right into my calendar. That’s a great, great capability. So Google mail, Gmail, come down to “More,” go down to “Create an event.” That’s pretty cool. I think that is cool. Now another thing you can do is come over here to the right-hand tab, and you’re going to see you can pick different templates, but that’s not what’s interesting. Down here at Labs, if you go to Labs, you’re going to get different functional widgets that do different things in your Google calendar. You can hide morning and night. You can get gentle reminders, which I’ve put in there. They remind me of what things are coming up. You can automatically decline events. You can get attachments for events to attach a Google document. I’m going to enable that one, that’s a good one. Event flare, I’ve put that in. I can add these little event flares to mine. And so on, right down the line. I picked up next meeting. I enabled the world clock. I jumped dates, so I can move around and then, as you just saw, I can event flare, I can add attachments, etc.

When you do that, once you’ve selected the ones you want to enable, you go back to your Google Calendars. Let’s get back to the calendars here. There on the right-hand side here you now see event flares. You see year-view end, next meeting, world clock, etc. So I can jump to start. I can world clock this. I see what time it is anywhere. And you can open them up. My next event is 2 days, 18 hours away, that’s the Google Calendar launch. Event flare, if I see this here, I select this event, and I can put a flare on it to indicate its importance. I just did that. Let’s save it. So now my event has this little flare on it, etc. So that’s what Google Labs allows you to add some functionality to your calendar right here on the right-hand side bar.

So that’s really what I wanted to show you. I wanted to show you how to optimize your description box, let you know that when you’re in Gmail you can actually create an event of something that’s in your Gmail inbox, and that’s important to get it onto your calendar, and you can add some functionality by going to Labs and adding some of these functions on the right-hand side bar. And that’s it.

So I hope this video has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne at Affiliated Starting Line. Stay with it. Stay well. If you found this helpful, go down below and select a like or share it. And that’s it. Stay with it. Stay well. Talk soon. Take care.

How to set up Google Calendar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH2dPAJicAM

I had to set up Google Calendar for a client who want to have Events publicized for a membership site.

The calendar needs to be posted on a primary website and on the blog.

It needs to have live links to the events page of the author of the event and has to be easy to manage.

So I figured we’d give Google Calendar a try and made a video to show how to set up Google Calendar.

Take a look and see if you can use Google Calendar for your bsuiness.

That’s it.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

If you find this video helpful, don’t forget to “tweet”,”Like” or  ”Google +” this post. Many Thanks!

For a transcript of the video read on.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is going to be a video about Google Calendars. There might be more than one, depending on what we get done here.

Google Calendars is an offering by Google. It’s free and you can create calendars. In this case, I have some folks who want a community calendar, an events calendar, to put up across a couple of sites. They were wondering how you could do that using Google Calendars. Let’s take a look and see how you find it and to it.

First you have to be logged in to your Google account so if you want to use Google Calendars, log in through your Gmail account. If you don’t have one, get one, and then you’ll have a Google account. Once you’re in and you go to Google.com, you’re going to come up to your Nav bar up here. Click ‘More’ and you’ll find ‘Calendar’ right here. Click on calendar and it will take you to the Google Calendar home page.

The Google Calendar home page consists of a couple of areas. There’s a left-hand sidebar, just like in WordPress, where you do all the functions that you need to do. The right-hand area here is your Calendar area. There are selections up here on these Nav bars where you can choose whether you want to see days, weeks, months, four days, or agenda. I take the week. You can print and refresh. You can pick different types of themes that you want for it. Let’s stick with the default.

On the left-hand sidebar you have the mini calendar. If you select that, it displays the calendar for the month that you’re in. Below it is your ‘My Calendars’ dropdown, where it will display all the calendars you’ve created. On the right-hand side of ‘My Calendars’ there’s another dropdown. Click it and you can create a new calendar or go into Settings.

‘Settings’ is where you manage your calendars. You can come in here and delete them or create a new calendar. You can do all sorts of stuff from this screen right here. Let’s create a new calendar. We’re going to call it Affiliate . . . it helps to spell it . . . hard to type when you have a band-aid on your finger. Affiliate Calendar of Events. Then you can fill in a description. You want to pick your country, your time zone. If you want to share it with somebody, you can put their email address in there. If you want to share it with coworkers, there’s ways of doing that. We’ll talk about that in another video.

Come back down here and you can create your calendar. We’re calling this Affiliate Calendar of Events. Create it. Now we’re going back to our main . . . ‘There was a problem saving your settings. Please try again in a few minutes’. That’s interesting. So we’re going to come back into ‘My Calendars’ and create a new calendar. We’re going to create Affiliate Calendar. Let’s go into the description. You can be much more, thing about the description. You come down to your settings, setting your events. You create the calendar. It’s going to create the calendar and you’ll see now in the left-hand sidebar it’s popped in.  You’ve got ‘Create Calendar’.

The thing I want to show you is this. If you come here to this right-hand dropdown for the calendar you just created and click it, you’re going to get a bunch of options here which we’ll go over in another video, for setting the different colors and schemes. You can play with those. If you click ‘Calendar Settings’ you’re back with a similar box. You’re going to come down to ‘Embed This Calendar’. Right here will be the code that you’re going to want to embed your calendar.

You do all your setups and your colors and all that. Then you take this embed code and bring it to a notepad and drop it in. And of course, it didn’t do that. So let’s go back here, and Control C, bring it into your notepad, Control V, and now you have your embed code ready to go.

I want to point something out. It has a default width of 800 by a default height of 600. So, it’s 800 x 600. That’s going to be too big. You can customize that and we’ll see how we do that in a minute.

Let’s come to a website. I’ve got a website here. It’s a WordPress blog. I’m going to come to ‘My Appearance’, I’m going to go down to ‘Widgets’ and select it. It’s going to display my widgets screen. I’m going to come here and take a text and put it into my sidebar. I’ll put it into this particular sidebar. Then I’m going to come in here and do a Control V and there is my embed code. I’m going to change this width to 350 and I’m going to change the height to 400. So I’m going to make this a little bit different. I’m going to save it and I want to title this ‘Affiliate Calendar’ and I’m going to save it.

Then I’m going to refresh. Now this is the bottom widget. You know what? Let’s do something. Let’s put it at the top, right up here. I’ve just put the calendar at the top and we’re going to refresh that. Take a look, and there’s the calendar sitting here, right here. You can see it’s fitting in. It’s got the couple of things here off-setting, missing, that I would adjust. That has more to do with the theme than it has to do with your code.

You can also, if you want – and I’ll do this quickly – put your calendar into a page. Again, this is going to be too wide, so I’m going to make it 500 x 500. Let’s make it a square and see if it fits into this. Then you want to title it, ‘Affiliate Calendar’, and save the draft. Let’s preview the page. You can put it into a page, and there it is in a page. Then you can put that page in a menu, etc. So there you go. That’s how you embed your calendar into a page.

When you want to add events to it, you come up here and create an event. Let’s say ‘Affiliate Lunch’, or whatever the name of the event is. We’re going to go from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. The thing you want to do is type in ‘Joe’s Restaurant’, for example. You’re going to want to come down to this dropdown if you have several calendars and pick the right one. I’m going to pick Affiliate Calendar. That’s going to put this event . . . I want to make sure it’s a one-hour event. Let’s come down here and make it on the 9th. So you’ve picked your date, you’ve got the time, you’ve picked your place and you selected the calendar. The event color: you can assign a color to it. You can put reminders. There are other capabilities here, but for the purpose of time, I’m going to click ‘Save’.

Now I’ve created this lunch. This will now embed itself into this calendar. It’s going to take a little while to populate. It’s not going to populate right away. Well, there it is, it just went in. This calendar is displaying this lunch. Somebody can click on it and they can see what time it is and where it is. You can have more details and fill in stuff as you need. When you create the event, there’s a little box where you can add more information.

The point behind this was to show you how to find the embed code. To get the embed code for a calendar, you go to the right and click here. You go to ‘Calendar Settings’ and then you come down to the embed. This is the embed code for my other calendar. I would pick this and go and embed it in a different site. This would be a different calendar for a different site. I control what goes on those calendars from inside my Google Calendar account.

So that’s it. That’s how Google Calendars works. I hope this has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne at Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Market Samurai Review – SEO competition module

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P1dDq71L90

Market Samurai SEO Competition Module

I was doing backlink research in Market Samurai and noticed that it was no longer using Google pagerank in the backlink data tool.

Instead, I found Majestic SEO’s ACRank tool and had no idea what the data meant.

Market Samurai Blog

I first went to the Market Samurai blog ro read over the post on the new recovery changes the Eugene Ware and his team had implemented.

And in there I found the reference to the ACRank tool mention, but still had no idea what it really meant.

Majestic SEO Glossary

So I went to Majectic SEO and found the glossary of terms and went over a few hundred times to figure out what it was measuring.

That’s when I decided to do what I always do when I want to learn something.

I made a video.

Take a look and make sure I got it right. I’m pretty sure I did but you never know. There is always a nugget that passes through the sieve and I am fallible!

If I got it , the ACRank tool parses external links going to a web page into 15 different number sets.

A scale from 1 to 15, 15 being the most authoritative since in order to rank there you need over 1,417,176 incoming links.

Anyway you get the picture, the more you have links going to a page from an external root domain, the higher you move up the scale.

So Market Samurai, takes those ACRank data and uses that to measure a page’s link source to show a level of difficulty or lack thereof in your analysis.

It is not as accurate as Google pagerank but it is good enough for now until Market Samurai comes up with something better some time soon.

So there you have it.

Take a look at the video, you’ll see what I mean and I hope this will make it easier for you to evaluate what the numbers mean.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

PS. As always, if you find this info helpful don’t forget to “tweet”,’like”,or Google + and tell all your friends.Many thanks.

New YouTube Channel Design

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1UjeEyZkrw

The sidebar of the new YouTube Channel design has a lot of functionality that might interest you.

The video highlights what you can do.

You should fill in the text “About” box with a description of your channel.  Optimize it with keywords that let the visitor know what your channel is about and that uses terms being searched for on YouTube.

You can also insert links to sites that you own or are of interest to your visitors.

There is the option of linking to FaceBook, Twitter and Google +. You should take advantage of that to establish some linking and increase your chances of getting noticed and ranking.

And there is another option of highlighting other Channels that you think are relevant to what you are doing and that might be of interest to your audience.

So take a look at the video and take action.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Don’t forget to ‘Like”.”Tweet” or Google + the content. Many Thanks!

NE Emmies I Won

I came across this video from Khan Academy in the comments of the issue on Matt Carter’s blog and am embedding it so you can get informed about this very important issue.

It has serious implications for how information is shared on the web.

Now I understand the concern Hollywood and the big media companies have. They don’t want folks stealing their content.

I produced content for television for over 25 years so I get their point.

I just think this approach is not the right way to go about it.

While the intent of these laws is benign and understandable, the devil is in the details and this video illustrates the dangers by citing some of the language of the proposed law.

Now, for the moment, the law has been shelved. But rest assured, this issue will come up again. So you should be aware of what is going on and contact your Congressional reps if you are a US citizen and stay informed.

Stay with it stay well and talk soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzqMoOk9NWc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAJCoXHfoh8

The YouTube New Channel Design has some customizable features that you will want to be aware of.

Edit Channel

In the video above you can see how to set up and using the “edit channel” function select the different features available.

Edit Channel Nav Bar

Once you are in the edit area, you can start with the appearance screen under the Appearance tab and select the color schemes and graphic background for the site.

I go over this in another video.

In the Info Settings tab you can set up your meta title, meta description and you Feature,Feed or Video tab selection.

I also show you how to do this in greater detail in another video.

And finally you can go to the Featured tab and select which template you want to use for your Channel.

Don’t forget to check the “enabled featured tab” box if you want the “Featured” tab to appear in the main nav bar.

The other thing you want to do when you are done with the edit channel function, is go back to the main back office screen, go to the right sidebar and edit in a description of the Channel in the “about ” section.

This is important so you have your Channel properly optimized for your main and secondary keywords that define the site.

Don’t forget, YouTube is a search engine and needs all your meta titles,descriptions and keyword in order to serve up your channel for relevant queries and searches.

So take a look at the video and see how it can get you started.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Don’t forget to “like”,”tweet” or Google + this post if you can. Many thanks.

Video Management To Optimize Your Content

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DspiBIJwkaA

In this video we take a look at the new video manager interface and what it can do for our video management.

Select Video Manager

To go to the Video Manager, your go to your main drop down box in the upper right corner of your main nav bar with the box of your channel name and select Video Manager from the drop down.

Left SideBar

The main Video Manger page will have a left hand side bar and a main column showing all your videos in chronological order.

At the top of the left sidebar is an “upload” button that is self explanatory.  There are other functions also there such as setting up to record with your webcam, creator tools and promoting your ads.

Under this button is a array of functions:

YouTube Video Manager Sidebar

You can select any of these functions. So you can check out your uploads, playlists, history, your watch laters, your favorites or your likes.

This gives you a lot of options to manage your video needs in one easy place.

Main Column

The other thing is that the video manager gives you a lot of information in the main channel column in the page.

The column header has two buttons in the nav bar, “Add To” and “Actions” that activate when you select a video from your upload list.

The Add To lets you add your video to a playlist or whatever list you want.

The Actions button lets you delete your video, set your privacy setting or select your copyright preference.

There is a search box on the right that comes in handy when you want to find a video from a long list of uploads.

And there are some icons in the video box that tell you if the video is public, if it is monetized, and all the way to the right, how many times it has been viewed and how many comments there are.

Edit Button

The main button of interest is the edit button in a video box.

Click that and you go to an edit screen that lets you review and change all sorts of information form the description and tags to privacy, geo targeting, and how the public can interact with your content.

In the main nav bar on this page you will be able to go to Info Settings, Monetize your video, technically enhance, annotate, set captions, view your video on the youtube search result page and return to the video manager homepage.

All in all the video manager function offers a lot of options for optimizing the video experience. So you should check it out.

Check out the video and you’ll get a much better idea of how it all works.

In the meantime, stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Don’t forget to “like”, “tweet” or Google +1 this article if you can. Many thanks

New YouTube Channel Navigation Bar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75Dfr2sdf8A

The new YouTube Channel Navigation bar is a compact three tab nav bar that offers a streamlined way of managing your channel.

The three tabs are the Featured tab, the Feed tab and the Video tab

Featured Tab

If you select the Featured tab as your default, what you will see when your Channel page displays is your latest uploaded video in the featured video display at the top of the channel and your uploaded videos listed in chronological order below.

This is what I have chosen for my channel.

The right sidebar displays my about information and a run down of my featured playlists and featured channels of other YouTubers who I think offer a good insight into how a successful channel is organized and designed.

Feed Tab 

Feed tab is probably the most popular as a selection because it shows all the latest activity of what you have been doing on YouTuvbe.  It shows the videos you have liked, commented on, favorited,uploaded subscribed to or added to a playlist.

Anything of note that you have done on YouTube will show up in the feed.

It’s a great way to let your subscribers know when you have new material and offers a great way to follow you on YouTube.

The right sidebar under the Feed tab displays the About information and Featured channels but does not show any Featured playlists that you see with the Featured tab.

Videos Tab

The Videos tab is self explanatory.  It displays all the videos you have uploaded to your Channel.

There is no right sidebar displayed when the Videos channel is loaded.

How To Configure The Navigation Bar

To configure the Nav Bar you go to the Edit Channel button on the upper right of the Main Nav bar and click it

You then go to the Info and Settings tab and select it.

And then you go to the drop down menu on the right under the Defautl Tab heading and select the default tab you want.

That is how you select the default tab you want for your channel.

You’ll note that the default tab that is selected will have a black background while the other two tabs will have gray backgrounds.

There is a check box under the Default tab drop down that you can check to send your subscribers to your Feed tab. This overrides whatever selection you have made in the drop down and ensures your followers will see your latest activity. That is an option you can take if you so choose.

And there you have it. The Channel Nave bar and how to use it.

Hope this has helped. Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

If this post and the video have help don’t forget to give it a “like”, a tweet or a Google +. Many Thanks

YouTube Channel Redesign

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVwVU7Gidfw

The Edit Channel Function

One of the things about the new YouTube channel redesign is the ability to customize the look and feel of the channel, the ability to optimize the title, description and the nav bar and the ability to pick a site template that suits your needs.

Appearance Tab

The first tab you see once you click the edit channel button is the Appearance Tab.

The first option you have is a button that lets you go back to the old YouTube channel look and feel.

Old Channel Button

If for any reason you find the new look not to your liking, then this is the option for you.

Avatar Button

The next option offered is the avatar loading button.

This lets you load an avatar from your computer to use as a marketing icon for your channel.

If you are like most channel creators, that is something you will do.

This feature is easy to use and will give you unique branding of your channel.

Custom Background

The last offering is the background color selection tab.

Here you can pick a color for your channel background.

Or if you have a custom background you would like to upload, you can select a menu choice from the drop down button and insert a custom background.

Default Tab

The last option you have available is the default tab button.

Here you can select which tab, the feature, the feed or the video  that you want as your default display when your channel loads.

The feature tab will load your latest video at the top of the content and display your playlist videos as a list under the main video.

The feed tab displays all you activities that you have had in your channel. All the videos you have liked, favorited, comment on; channels you have subscribed to and uploaded, basically all of your recent activity on your channel. This is the default of choice of a lot of channel owners.

And finally, the video tab displays all of the videos you have uploaded to your channel.

These are the basic choices you have under the default drop down menu.

There is one added function.  There is a check box you can check that will load the feature tab when any of your subscribers come to your channel.  That is because whenever you make a change to your channel, your subscribers are automatically notified and the thought is when they come to your channel, they will want to see your featured content and this selection will make sure they do.

So there you have it.  Take a look at the video above and you will get a visual rundown of  how all this works.

In the meantime, stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

PS. If you find this post helpful give it a “like”,a tweet or a google +. Many thanks.

For more information you can check out YouTube help about the Youtube Channel Redesign.

 New YouTube Design

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulw1g53ReLg

New Channel Design

If you have a YouTube channel then you may have noticed that there is a new YouTube Channel redesign that has happened in the past couple of weeks.

The new look and feel makes it easier to find and watch the content you have to offer, or at least that is its intended goal.

It offers you the channel creator a better way to organize and showcase your work and give your viewers the information they are looking for.

In YouTube’s own words the benefits are the following:

• A more streamlined and consistent design
• An easier way to find and view videos
• New, more flexible layouts for featured content, and
• A way to keep your audience engaged even when you don’t have new uploads

There are some things that don’t change. Again, according to Youtube, here is the list of things that stay the same:

“The following will remain intact and will not be altered as part of the Channels migration:

• Videos
• Playlists
• Comments
• Subscribers
• Likes
• Account Settings
• About this user
• Title
• Tags
• Visibility
• Redirect URLs
• Vanity URLs
• Tracking Pixels
• Google Analytics Account ID number
• Avatars, and
• Backgrounds images

All of these elements can be updated in the new design.”

So what does this all mean to the channel creator.

I think it means a better way to showcase your videos and organize them so that your best material gets highlighted.

The Header

The header is clean and gives a quick view of the channel’s view count.

Four Template Formats

And the format is offered in one of four templates each w ith its own way to present your channel content and the content of other channels you think your viewers would enjoy looking up.

The Video

The video above is an overview of the new channel design and what it has to offer you. So take a look and see for yourself.

And if for any reason you are not satisfied, there is the option of going back to the older design if you so choose.

So take a look, give it a try, check out what some of the leaders on YouTube are doing and go for it.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

If you want to read up on it you can read the YouTube Help document on the New Channel Design.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja6CM6ni1TE

Posterous – Content Curation and Content Sharing

In my first video Posterous Bookmarklet Set Up, I showed how to get a bookmarklet up to your bookmark menu bar in the new Posterous user face.

This allows you to access Posterous from the web page you are viewing if you find you want to share that web page with any number of sites you have configured on Posterous.

In the second video, Posterous – How To Set Up Posterous, I showed you how to set up an account and configure that account using the “autopost set up” button and the “add service” button.

That is how you choose which services you want to auto post to, be it twitter, facebook, your blog or which ever service available in the long list of services that appear in the selection box.

In the third video above, I show you how you can access Posterous from any page on the Web and from your Google reader.

This ability to post dynamically from wherever you are gives you tremendous leverage in sharing with your core audience and followers. So take advantage of it as you establish yourself online.

Have a look and see for yourself. The video lays out much more succinctly and clearly how to do all this.

So have a look. Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

If you find the video and this post helpful, please give it a “like”, a “tweet” or a Google +1. Many thanks.

In the first video I made about Posterous,I showed how to set up a bookmarklet.

The Set  Up

This is because a tutorial I watched showed how to do it in an older version and the new user interface is different.

But how do you set up Posterous?

Posterous – How To Set Up Posterous is a video that does just that.

It shows you how to create an account.

It makes sure that you know that what you use as a username will become your first Posterous “Space”.

A “Space” is  a site. That is what Posterous calls a its proprietary web sites just like Squidoo calls its sites Lens.

Profile Set Up

Once you have your account set up, you want to fill in your profile information.

Make sure you create a back link in your profile to one of your authority sites.  Posterous is a great source for back links.

With your profile set up, you’re now ready to set up your “Space” for autoposting.

AutoPost Set Up

To do that go to your “Space” on the Manage Space page and click the floral button to see the drop down menu.

Go down to AutoPost Set Up and select it.

Then select the “Add Service” Button.

Adding Services

Here you’ll have a ton of services to select from. For each one you select it will ask you for your log in information for that service.

Once you go through the process you will have a bunch of services you can autopost to through Posterous.

In the video above, I show you how to set up a WordPress blog to autopost to.

Once you have done that your are ready to go and use Posterous to  autopost information you find anywhere on the web.

There is a third video that shows you how to do that so if you are done here just check that one out.

That’s it. I hope this was helpful.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

PS- Don’t forget to give this post a “like”, a “tweet” or a Google +1. Thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtaJZJBWu_s

cPanel Problem

No print description under the icons

I had a problem on both my iMac and my PC laptop.  When I would go into my cPanel using the chrome browser, my cPanel would render with out print descriptions under the icons in the panel windows.

My cPanel felt very naked. Just icons to information about what they stood for.

So if fooled around clearing the cache and looking at the preferences in Chrome and just trying to figure out what could be causing the problem.

Things were OK in Firefox and Safari so I knew it wasn’t the cPanel.

I called Hostgator and asked what they thought and my customer service rep told me to check my extensions. That in all likely hood one of them was in conflict with Chorme or cPanel or both.

So I went into my extensions and disabled all.

And guess what?  Problem solved. Print descriptions reappear in cPanel.

Now the task begins. Turning the extensions on one by one to find the culprit.

Low and behold, about  a dozen in, the culprit causes the descriptions to disappear.

It was “Show Title Tag” version 1.6.1.  Disabled it and bingo, things are back to normal.

So here’s hoping this information can help you avoid wasting any time when if this happens to you, you have this post and video to see how to fix it.

That’s it.

Stay well, stay with it and talk soon.

PS. If this information helps, hit the “like”,”tweet” or Google +1 buttons. Thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69oJJ1OLHfc

Twitter Sign In

I read an interesting article about your twitter username and how you can change it without affecting your followers and your twitter account in general.

While I was reading it I thought how much easier it would have been to show the information in a video. It would have been much more complete and easy to understand.

So I decided to do a video about changing your username.

While doing the video I realized that the distinction between your username and your twitter site name were two different items controlled from two different places in your twitter account.

That is what this video is about.

How to Set Up and Sign In To Your Twitter Account

The first step is to sign up for a twitter account and there is where your will find it is important to think it through.

In the sign up screen the first field to fill in is the name field. Here you fill in the name of your twitter site. Some folks may use the same name for the site and username but generally they are often different because the username is limited to 15  characters and the name site can be longer up to 20 characters.

The second field is the email address field and that has to be an email address specific to that twitter account so you have to have a unique account set up for the purpose. I have a web site specific email address for each web site I build so I use that email address when setting up a twitter account to connect to that site.

The third field is the password field and there you create whatever password you want.

The fourth field is the username field. Here you are limited to 15 characters and this is the keyword that will appear in the URL of your twitter account in the address bar. So you want to take some care to make sure your username is keyword rich so that it appears in the url. It may not be the most important factor for ranking or SEO but it’s just good to get into the habit of thinking keyword and relevance whenever you can.

Twitter Confirmation Email

Once you have filled in all the fields and the information has been approved you submit and will go to a screen that will tell you to check your email box and to confirm your sign up.

Once confirmed you will go to a twitter sign in screen where you will log into your new twitter account.

Twitter Account Name

To control you twitter account name you want to first click the settings tab in the upper right hand screen drop down menu.

Once in the settings screen you want to click the profile tab in and fill in all the information on the page.

Your Twitter Account name  is the first field and it will reflect the name you chose when you sign up for the account.  You can choose to leave it or change it. Remember you have 20 characters to play with and that includes spaces.

The other fields to fill in are Geo location, web address for an associated website (this is important so do it, great for back links) and a bio box that you should fill with keyword rich descriptions of your business.

Twitter Username

Your twitter user name is very different from the twitter account name because it is shorter and because it appears in the URL for your account.

Here you should pick a keyword associated with your account, your business, your brand and make sure it is relevant,

The place you control your username in in the settings tab but under the account tab.

Here you can change your username to fit your business objectives and you can do it without affecting your existing Tweets, @replies, direct messages, or other data.

After changing it, make sure to let your followers know so you’ll continue receiving all of your Tweets with your new username.

Conclusion

There’s a lot more to setting up and using your account than what you find in this article and in the video above, but the point here was to draw the distinction between your Twitter Site name and your Twitter Username.

I hope this information does that and take a look at the video above to see all this in action.

So there you have it.

Stay well, stay with it  and talk soon.

PS – Don’t forget to “like”,”tweet” and Google +1 if this helped you out. Thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgcIhWajw9Q

Posterous Bookmarklet

I was trying to figure out how to set up the Posterous Bookmarklet after watching a Challenge 2011 video and finally figured it out.

So I decided make this video about it.

Basically what you do is go to Posterous help and type in Bookmarklet.  

The url is http://www.posterous/help/bookmarklet/ .  Once three you click on the button on the upper right and drap the icon into your bookmark menu bar of which ever browser you are using.

I use Chrome.

And that’s it.

Once there if you find anything you want to forward to any number of platforms, be it  twitter, facebook, your website and so on, you can do it by clicking the bookmark and filling in the post box that appears. ( I’ll do another video about that).

And so there you have it.

I hope this is helpful. Check out the video above. Don’t  forget to “like”, tweet or +1 if you can. Many Thanks.

Stay well, stay with it, talk soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRUzevLibzQ

Amazon S3 Video Series

In the first video of this series, we saw how to set up an Amazon S3 account.

this video we learn how to create buckets, upload data and set permissions to make our selected files public.

Create Bucket

Once you have logged into your S3 account, you’ll find a sidebar on your left and at the very top is a “create bucket” button.

When you click the button, it will open a dialog box in the middle of your screen and offer you options.

One option is to pick a name.

Now when you pick a name, you’ll have to pick something unique to Amazon S3.  All names are checked against the entire S3 database for duplication. That means if someone else has used the file name you will have to come up with something else.

S3 will suggest you use a company name as a prefix or something unique to you or your company as you search for a bucket name.

Once you have a bucket name, the ne In xt thing is to select a “region” that corresponds to your own geographic location or that closely matches the area from which you will be doing most of your business.

This has to do with where the data will be stored and where it will be served to maximize speed and minimize load times.

When you have a name and region picked out, click the “create” button on the lower right corner of the dialog box and your bucket is created.

Upload Data

To upload data to your bucket, select your bucket and then click the “upload” button on the upper left corner of the bucket menu bar.

You’ll notice the menu bar offers a list of functions:

• Upload
• Create Folder
• Actions
• Refresh
• Properites
• Transfers
• Help

The one we are interested in now is ‘upload”

When you click upload, you will be taken to new “Upload Select Files” dialog box.

Here you want to click the “add files” button.  When you do click it, it will open you computer file system and you navigate to the data you want to upload.

When you select the file you want to upload (you can shift command several files) go down to the lower right and click the “open” button.

You will see the files appear in the ”Upload Select Files” dialog box.

Go down to the lower right of the  ”Upload Select Files” dialog box and click ‘Start Upload”

When you do, you will see new “Transfer” area appear below your ”Upload Select Files” dialog box. It will display the file that is uploading and in the upper right a progress button showing how far you are into completing the task.

Once the transfer is done, your new file appears in the file area of your bucket.

Set Permissions 

When you upload data to your Amazon S3 account, all of the permission settings default to private.

That means that only the account owner has access to the data.

If you want to distribute the files for public consumption, like embedding videos or making reports available, you have to reset the permission of the file you want to make public.

To do that you have two ways to do it.

Right Click File

You select the file you want to make public, right click it and in the drop down menu select “make public”

That is the easy way.

If you want a more detailed approach, you can select the “properties” command in the drop down instead.

That will open up the “Properties” screen below the bucket where you will see  an information sidebar giving all the information about your file.

On the right is a box with a menu bar with three tabs: Details, Permissions, and Meta Data.

The Details tab gives you the link you will need to serve up the file you have made public. I would not change the default settings for storage or encryption.

The Permissions tab is where you will set the file to go public.  If you have already selected the “make public” command you will see a setting for “everyone” under the “grantee” box already in your data screen.

If you haven’t used the “make public” command, you can click the “add more permissions” command and open a new “grantee” command line, open the drop down, select “everyone” and check the “open/download” box only, move to the lower right and click “save” and you are done.

You now have a file that can go public.

You want to go back to the “Details” tab, copy the link and paste in your browser address bar and make sure it opens or plays if it is a video.

Conclusion

So there you have the basics on how to create buckets, upload data and set permissions for your Amazon S3 account.

All you have to do is take action and get going.

If you want to see how it’s done , just watch the video above and take it from there.

I hope this has been helpful.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

PS. Don’t forget to “+ one “,” like” or tweet. Thanks.

How to Set Up An Amazon S3 Account

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDbSsUabGkA

AWS S3

Amazon S 3 is one of the services offered by Amazon Web Services that you should know about.

It is a great solution for storing all your data usingin a secure and safe environment and all for a very low price.

It is easy to set up but takes a little time to figure out just to get used to the user interface.

The video I just produced shows you how to find the main page and how to find the link for the Amazon S 3 product page.

You should take the time to read through it to see what the service has to offer and to check out the pricing.

Amazon S3 Sign Up

Once you have got a good idea of what the service has to offer, you can click on the sign up button and begin the sign up button.

You will be asked to sign up using an email address and a password.

Once you have selected your email address and password, you will be directed to enter credit card information and then you will need to confirm with  an opt in email.

Once that is all done, you will be able to log in to your new account and check things out.

Amazon S3 Account

Amazon S 3 uses a hierarchical structure to organize you data.

It calls its folders “buckets”.  These “buckets” are the main folders in which you will load in subfolders with will hold your data in folders of their own.

It is all pretty self explanatory as you set up your account.

Safe and Accessible Data

Amazon S 3 is a great way to keep all your data in a safe and accessible environment either as back up or as a distribution center for your key data,

It is free to upload data and free to set up. You only pay when you download files and data. The product page shows the pricing so there should be no surprises there.

So there you have it.

In the next video we will see how to upload data and create buckets. We will see how the file structure works and learn how to set your permissions to allow the data to be distributed to the Web.

In the meantime, stay well, stay with it and talk soon.

Utube – How to set up a playlist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDhUzzBg5oE

YouTube Playlist Set Up

If you have a YouTube Channel, chances are you have picked and saved some of the videos you have viewed to a playlist.

I have too except I never categorized my videos, I just dumped them into a general playlist without any discrimination between music and marketing or anything for that matter.

In the video I made I show how you can create a list of playlists that are organized by keyword.

Keyword Playlist

In my case I had about 200 videos and they were all lined up in chronological order.

The thing is I have created video series around WordPress, cPanel, ScreenFlow, SEOmoz, Google SEO guide and on and on.

So  what I did was go to the search box in my video back office and type in a keyword.

The search returned all videos relating to that keyword and then I would create a playlist for that keyword.  Then I would select the videos for that keyword  and save those videos to the playlist.

In the video above I show you how to do that and you’ll see how that can come in real handy when you are searching for a video from a long list.

It’s just easier to find what you are looking for when it is organized to be found.

I actually refer to my videos all the time when I need to remember how to do something.

YouTube Playlist – Traditional

The traditional way to use the YouTube playlist is to watch a video and select the playlist button under the video window and save that video to playlist or create one to save it to.

Under this scenario you can create you playlist by whatever category or keyword you choose and organize your material to suit your way of thinking.

Conclusion

However you set up your YouTube playlist, you should make a point of starting and using a playlist system to get more out of the videos you have in your YouTube account.

That way you can optimize the use of the information you have at your disposal and see if it can help you better enjoy or even make you some money along the way.

So there you have it.  How to create a YouTube Playlist and make it work for you.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Screen Capture Software Review

Screenflow 3.0 update

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J55bPfoQobU

I finally figured out how to video the update of the Screenflow 3.0 Callout Properties.

Video Inside a Video

I had to video a video in order to demonstrate how the new Callout features worked because Callouts only activate on a pre-taped screen capture.

That means I did a video in Screenflow ( I didn’t import a video from my video camera) and than pulled a Pirandello… I made a video from inside a video!

Classic Callout (Circle effect) Mouse Cursor

Anyway…I show how the classic Callout works as a circle effect you can magnify and resize.

Freehand Callouts

And then I show how the new freehand feature works to let you draw a square/rectangle instead of a circle.

There is also a spotlight circle cursor that lets you draw a path you want to highlight. And I show how it works.

ForeGround Window

The only thing I didn’t demo is the Foreground Window Callout since I couldn’t figure out what to use it for.

Once I figure that out, I’ll make a video to demo that feature.

So take in the video and have a go at Screenflow 3.0 Callout Properties.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

PS. This is a great piece of software so click here to buy it and enjoy making really cool videos.

Screenflow 3.0 Screen Capture Software

A Look At Google

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BILHob14LzU

I just read In The Plex by Steven Levy.  It’s the story of Google and much more.

Whatever you think of Google, this book gives you a great insight into how the company came about, how it thinks and how it operates.

If you are in Internet Marketing or Affiliate Marketing this is important because it makes you aware of the depth of talent and competence behind the machine.

It saved me some time, effort and money when I was watching a video for a product I am certain the engineers at Google will most certainly nail when they find it.

Take a look at the video if you haven’t already and get yourself a copy of the book.

It will put things into perspective and I think will help you make better decisions in growing your online business.

Stay with it, Stay well and talk soon.

Learn YouTube For Marketing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1rIlEXcXaw

If you want to use YouTube for marketing,  then the YouTube Browse tab in the main menu bar is something you should look at.

I have a series of marketing videos with plenty of YouTube tips on my YouTube Channel, ClaudePelanne.

Don’t forget to use the search box in the upper right of the channel, type in YouTube Marketing and you’ll see the videos appear.

The video above this post will take you through the Browse function in YouTube.

Tip 1

It’s great because it allows you to drill down in the category of your selection.

You can choose between videos, music, movies, trailers, and live streaming shows.

Just take you pick and then on the landing page hit the category button and start searching.

Tip 2

When you get to the first page after your subcategory selection, look for a more info link and click it.

This will take you down to more subcategories in your area. In my video we chose Sports and found videos on sports I would never have guessed would have anything on YouTube.

Tip 3

When you get to the subcategory you want click it and see how many videos appear.

Go through any or all and make sure you click the “more info” on the description box to see what keywords and tags are being used. They can give you ideas for what you can use when you broaden you reach in your niche research.

YouTube Browse Marketing Conclusion

The Browse function can be used as a marketing research and niche research tool to give ideas about material to cover and keywords to select as you develop your own website or your own product to sell.

So take a look at my video and make sure you give it a “like” or a “+One”, that would be greatly appreciated.

That’s it. Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Oh. Just had a transcript done of the video. So you can read that if you prefer.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is going to be a video, an update really, on the YouTube channel of the browse function. In the old YouTube display, channel view, channel design to be more specific, there you used to get most viewed and most subscribed and that sort of thing. But it’s changed now, so let’s take a look.

So, you get to the YouTube browse function by coming up here. I’m not signed in so this is my YouTube home page straight up. And then, see the browse function here up on the menu. So, you click it. So, this is going to take you to the browse screen. Now, the browse screen, the reason I’m doing this is somebody asked me a question as to how they could track their YouTube videos on YouTube and how the browse function would help them do that. It really doesn’t.

If you want to track yourself on YouTube, just come up here and let’s say Google–I do it this way. I type in the keyword of a video that I’ve done, Google calendar browse. I just did a whole series on Google calendar, and I hit search. Then, I come looking here. Here’s the search results and here I can see these are paid results right up at the top and in position number one on the organic search is Google calendar browse, interesting calendars and guess what? That’s my video right there. So, it’s been up for a couple weeks but it’s hit number one. If somebody wants to know how to use the browse function in Google calendar, I’ve got the number one video right there and right now I’ve got 27 views. Not bad. It’s not Ray William Johnson, but it’s not bad.

So, the browse function has two areas you want to pay attention to. There’s the nav bar up here that show’s you video–it defaults to videos. But you have music, movies, shows, trailers, live, sports, education and news. And then under videos, you’ve got all these categories. Now, in the most case today, most viewed today, these are the videos that are the most viewed, obviously, over the last 24 hours. This one’s been up for two days, already has four million views. Two days, three million views. Two days, 3.8 million, 3.7 million. These are highly, highly viewed videos. Very popular.

So, you  can browse these and see what people are looking–here’s an iPhone. So if you’re researching iPhone, maybe you want to sell accessories to iPhone, man, this tells you right here that there’s an enormous interest in the iPhone. 3.8 million views in two days for this offer for iPhone accessories.

And then, down below it has recommended videos based on my viewing habits. And then, auto vehicles, comedy, entertainment, film animation, gaming, how-to, non-profits, people in blogs and so on. All the categories, Adele, music. Big Time Rush. So, iPhone right there. Look at that. So, this tells you right off the bat what’s going on in terms of videos. And then, you can go down, depending on where your niche is if you’re marketing, and check out these different categories to see what you can find out about your niche.

Now, if I click music, it’s going to browse in music. Now here, you can select your genres of music. So, if I’m into R&B, I click R&B and I’m going to get results for R&B. And, if I go back to all, it’ll give me what I started off with. And I really don’t want to do that. Sorry about that.

Movies, same thing with movies. You can look at all the new releases, all the types of different movies there are. And you can always come down here to categories and select the category of movies you’re looking for. Television shows, same thing. Look at your category. Look at the number of categories you can drill down on in this. And so on. And then, you can always scroll down and take a look and see what they’re selecting, top episodes of different shows. You’ve got an enormous amount of information here.

Trailers, this is movie trailers. Live shows, these are always fun because they’re always scrolling live. Again, these are live events. Check these out. You’ll find some interesting live events across a number of different categories. They’re from all over the world. And then, this is pushing live events coming up.

So, if you’re really doing some research and marketing, if you’re into sports, there you go. And you can drill down to all the different sports right here. And then, there are more sports. Look at all these sports you can drill down to. So, free running, enduro, basketball, auto racing, cross-country cycling, sailing. I mean, there’s a wealth of stuff you can browse for.

Education. School break, you’re right. There it is, in the middle of a school break. So, in education. Let’s go back. SomehowI, it blew out of browse. Let’s go back here, go to education. Now, you’ve got all the education categories: primary and secondary, lifelong learning, university. That sets what these three information screens are here. You can scroll through these information screens to see what they have to offer.

And you can go down here on the verticals and take a look at the different categories that’s offered: science, engineering, math, business, lifelong learning. And the different–Khan Academy is fantastic. It’s really got everything you really want to know in there. My kids use it and I use it. Lifelong learning, so you’ve got Google. This is really a fantastic resource.

And then, for newshounds, you’ve got all the news here. Top news, local news from my community and so on. So, this is very interesting, the way it’s set up. So, even though it starts and defaults on videos, when you use browse you really want to come down and navigate through all of these different headers in the nav here, in the nav bar. And you’ll find you can drill down and learn about your niche, and you may be able to find some interesting videos about your niche that you can embed. And if not, they’ll give you ideas to market for yourself.

So, that’s it. YouTube browse in the new channel design. Very useful tool. I hope this video has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne of Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well. And don’t forget to like it, tweet it, and comment on it. And that’s it. So, have a great day. Talk soon.

How to use the Annonations Function in ScreenFlow 3.0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMdU4tdkPao

In the video I show how to use the annotations feature in ScreenFlow 3.0

Media Tab

I start the video with a recap of importing media using the media tab functions.

Text Tab

I also do a quick recap of how to insert text in a lower third position on the screen using the text tab function

Annotations Tab

I then go into the annotation tab and show what the arrow, line, filled square, open square and circle look like and how you can modify them.

I show how you can set the time for the effect in the timeline and how to put in dissolves if you want to.

If you haven’t yet seen the video, just take a look and see how you can use this really useful feature.

If you find this video helpful don’t forget to click the “like” button and the “+ One” button. I thank you for that.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

PS- check out my YouTube Channel for all sorts of useful videos and you can check out my other videos on ScrrenFlow 3.0 right on this site.

ScreenFlow 3.0 Review Part 1

and

ScreenFlow 3.0 Part 2 Media Properites

How To Use The Media Properties Function

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baqTwWTYaww

I made video 2 to show the two functions of the Media Properties tab.

The first is a button at the bottom of the Media Properties box that lets you import media ( videos, photos, audio files).

The other lets you select your record functions.

I show how to import videos from your computer, or anywhere else for that matter.

The nice thing is you can select a video you have imported, wait a couple of seconds and you’ll see a play button appear on the video, and then hit it to see the video run.

This allows you to check out the video before you start editing.

There are two ways load a video into your timeline channel.  You can drag it over or you can double click it and it will install on a dedicated timeline channel.

When you are in the timeline channel you can right click the video and select to separate the audio and it will then install audio on a dedicated timeline channel.

Nice functionality that makes it easy to edit sound.

Anyway I have a video so check it out and don’t forget to like and plus one if you find the information helpful. That would be greatly appreciated.

I also have a video Part One called Screen Capture -ScreenFlow 3.0 Review if you want to see the first video of the series.

I have a 6 part series on ScreenFlow on my YouTube Channel. Just type in ScreenFlow in the search box and it will pull up all the videos for you.

Thanks and Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Enjoy.

ScreenFlow 3.0 Review

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHOQLyLht6I

I just upgraded my screen capture tool ScreenFlow to the latest version 3.0.

It has some very interesting and new features. For example under the files drop down you now have a New Empty Document function that opens a new screenflow document Main Window.

Remember how you use to have to record something to open a new document? Well the New Empty Document selection means you don’t have to do that any more.

When you load in a video into the channel below the timeline you can right click the channel and select to separate the audio and it automatically sends the audio to new channel below.

New Features

Call Out Properties

In the Call Out Properties tab of your palette you can now select different regions on your screen with a paint brush tool, blur the content, add shadows, and create a default style.

Annotations

In the new annotations tab, you can draw circles, squares, lines and arrows on your video and adjust the size, color, postion and thickness. You can also define annotation styles.

Improved Timeline

You can add a timeline from the Preferences window,set a default height, set default duration of still images and use SMPTE timecode.

You can also reorder tracks,resize them,delete them, insert space and set your duration of your transitions from the inspector window.

Media Library

You can now preview video or audio in you media library.

You can also resize the library items.

Audio

You can view audio waveforms and clipped audio peaks in the timeline and edit accordingly.

You can smooth audio levels, remove background noise and convert text to synthesized speech…Not bad!

Export Improvements

You can customize you export presets and see the time remaining in exports.

You can export to iPad with an iPad preset. 3.0 will export to vimeo and YouTube.

It has 720 and 1080 support for YouTube Publishing.

Video Canvas and Lion OS

3.0 also has some canvas improvements that let you move video clips around, set the position for an object by entering the coordinates into the inspector and change the background color of your canvas.

3.0 also is compatible with Lion OS with features like Autosave,Resume,Versions and full screen mode.

I am going to be doing a video series and with that in mind, follow this post is the first video intro of Screenflow 3.o.

So have a look and remember if you find it helpful, please give it a Like and a Google +1.

Stay with it, Stay well and Thanks and Enjoy

If you want to see the full series of videos I have on ScreenFlow go to my YouTube Channel and type in ScreenFlow the search box on the upper right of the Channel screen and you will get all the videos.
[wdgpo_plusone]

There is a great way to get started that costs you absolutely nothing and it is called The Challenge.

The Challenge with Ed Dale

It is a program offered by Ed Dale, Dan Raine, Robert Somerville (better known as Guru Bob) and it is designed for the beginner who is looking to build a business online.

Now there are many programs that are great and I am going to do a series of reviews of the ones I have taken and continue to use.

But The Challenge is the very first one I took back in August of 2008 ( it was called The 30 Day Challenge back then) that I found the most helpful in getting to understand this thing called Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing.

It was free and continues to be free so there is no risk to you at all.

What does cost is some of the steps in the process that involve domain name registration, hosting and buying tools like Market Samurai if you choose to do so.

The thing is that this program has grown for about 900 people who took the first Challenge in 2005, to 35,000 who took it in 2008 when I first found it, to an expected 100,000 who will sign up this year.

The course material is really well designed by a team of Internet Marketers who are actually practicing what they are teaching, so you will get a full array of options of tactics and strategies to develop an online business.

And remember, the operating term here is ONLINE BUSINESS.  This is a business not amateur hour. So you have to be prepared to invest time and money over the long haul if you expect to see results.

But this program will get you started on the right footing while you get to meet interesting folks along the way.

I am no longer new to the business, but I am still a ways from being a super affiliate. So I plan on taking this and I hope to get my family in with me like we did last year when we put together my daugher’s site OrigamiGift.co.

You will learn something no matter what your level of expertise so take a look at this program and take it at your own pace and on your own schedule.
The Challenge

Take the Challenge and learn how to make your first $1 online.

PS. The links here are affiliate links so if you take the course and sign up I will get a commission if you purchase anything through the program.

Early Bird Whiteboard

In the first video reviewing Affiliate Summit East, I mentioned the early bird whiteboard that I thought was a real gem for attendees to take in.

It started at 8 am on Monday and Tuesday and was a really great session critiquing web sites and offering really helpful information.

It was run by Eric Nagel, but there were other knowledgeable people in the room who were experts in their own right so that made for some very good feedback.

But there were a couple of other really good resources.

The Bloggers’ Lounge ( also the Press Room)

The bloggers’ lounge was a room set aside for the press and bloggers covering the conference and was a place where you could find people who are nice to know.

In my case I ran into Vinny O’Hare by chance walking down a main lounge and introduced myself. I listen to his podcasts that he produces with Deborah Carney and wanted meet them to tell them how much I appreciated their work.

Well he invited me to stop in and see him and meet Deborah in the Bloggers Lounge when I got a chance. And that’s what I did.

The place was where presenters and big industry names hung out and blogged about what was happening.

So that was another great opportunity to get to meet really interesting folks.

Ask The Experts

The third resource was called Ask The Experts and was an end of the second day event where you could join a group run by an expert and ask any questions you wanted.

In my case I wanted to get information about setting up a Facebook page properly and I went to the Facebook table and learned a hell of a lot in the hour I spent there. It was run by Justin Rondeau who was a great presenter. Lots of questions from the group made for a really great session.

So there you have it.  I made this video to fill out the information about what was available to you at Affiliate Summit and hope this will help in planning your own agenda if you decide to go to Affiliate Summit West or if you return to New York for Affiliate Summit East next year.

Take a look at the video and enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr1mC1oQyQ0

Affiliate Summit East 2011

I just spent last Saturday through Tuesday in New York City attending the Affiliate Summit East conference at the Hilton in Manhattan.

It was a great time in which I sat in on a bunch of conference presentations, all well run and well attended.

Some were more interactive than others but the presenters were all industry names with a lot to offer.  So all you had to do is show up and soak it in.

There were three full days of conferences, working the merchant and affiliate network expo areas.

I met some really interesting people and was there from 8 am until 8 pm on one day.

If you are in the business or just starting out, this is a great event to attend just to meet the best and brightest and learn a whole bunch while you are doing it.

I made a video so take a look and enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVXVYkZr3CY

Voice Activation for Google Search

I was doing some searching for things on Google and I noticed this microphone icon in the search box.

I hadn’t noticed it before even though the feature has been out for about a month.  I figure it might have been in beta and I wasn’t one of the lucky few.

Anyway I made a video demo so take it in and enjoy.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCCLq7MGt1s

Organic Link Building

An Answer To Article Marketing Sucks

How This Started

I found a video shortly after watching the GoogleWebmaster Help video on article marketing.

I think it is a great follow up to the article marketing video even though it pre-dates it by a year.

The information is an answer as to how to build organic links.

This is all assuming that you are creating original great content in the first place.

There are eleven points made by Matt Cutts and lets take a look at them.

Controversy

Nothing attracts attention like a good rant. And some people make it their stock in trade to rail against the world. But too much of anything can eventually lead to a loss of interest so if you want to rant, make sure it is an honest beef that will help your audience with a solution or beneficial outcome. It is also nice if humor is part of the process. I guess a little sarcasm can go a long way.

Community Participation

Participating in a community by giving help to others is a great way to build authority and get quality back links. There are public forums and private forums that are authority centers for information that can go a long way to serving community needs. So find a group of like minded people around your niche area of interest and see how you can offer whatever knowledge you have to help others out.

Original Research

Doing some research and experimentation and publishing your data for all to see is a great way to generate interest and establish your authority in a subject or niche. It is a way to get recognition and build a following and Google will recognize that in the process.

Newsletters

Newsletters are another way to build relationships and followers who will organically link to your website. This kind of link building is what adds value and authority to your site.

Social Media

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are all great ways to distribute content alerts and link back to your site. The recognition generated is genuine and carries weight with Google so it is in your interest to have a social media strategy in place.

Articles

Articles still work. As long as they are unique,well written and add value to the conversation. So make the effort to create valuable content and get it to your site and you will be rewarded with return visits while you build a following.

Blogging

Blogging is definitely a must and WordPress is a great platform to use. This is one suggestion that you will not want to ignore because it is very clear that the folks at Google love blogs. New content and fresh content are the order of the day, so this is one activity that is a must.

Whichever platform you choose is your decision but you will want to set up a blog to be in the competition.

Tutorials and How To’s

Tutorials and how to’s are a great way of building a following that will send you solid and natural organic links. Anything you can demonstrate to your community or target audience will enhance your ranking as an authority.

Create a Product or Service

Creating product or service builds a list and an income stream. One common characteristic of successful marketers is that they are creating plug ins or themes or tools that help build businesses online or solve problems.
In the process they get a trusting group of followers to buy the products, spread the word as affiliates and funnel back links to the marketer’s website in the process.

Site Architecture

Design and maintain good site architecture to make it easy for users to navigate your site. A rewarding and pleasant experience on your site helps build links.

Video

A very effective way to build links is to make and distribute videos. Some people learn visually and so videos should be part of any information distribution system.
Check out YouTube, Vimeo, Ustream and all available video services to see which one can help you build community and back links.

Conclusion

So there are the eleven points raised by Matt about ways that Google likes to see people build back links.

No link exchanges, link farms, link buying need be used. Just good solid organic link building will do.

Hope this review has been helpful.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

If you want to check out the video, here it is:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkLFlaWxgJA

Article Marketing Sucks?

According to whom does article marketing suck?

According to Google, That’s Who!
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-v53nH3zXw

I was checking out things with Google on YouTube and came across this video by Matt Cutts from April of this year.

This was about the time of the Panda update and pertained to something I like to do. Write and push out articles to create some back links.

Indeed, I was writing articles for the hell of it before I even had a web site and would push them to a bunch of article directories.

So imagine my deep disappointment when I came across the video below.

Google Does Not Like Article Marketing

What you will hear in the video is that Matt Cutts and Google are no longer great fans of article marketing.

That’s because these articles are written for the sole purpose of creating back links through content farms or article directories.

For the most part, they are often poorly written with lousy content. They define duplicate content at its worst and duplicate anchor text that goes with it.

None of the links you get from article marketing have great value and you are much better off creating your own original, unique content that generates a natural volume of links from people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say.

Since there is no value add to the process of article marketing as it was practiced in the past, you are going to a lot of wasted effort in pursuing it

How Disappointing

I guess things are changing and the Farmer/Panda marches on.

I see the point though I’m not sure I understand completely.

Not all the content in article directories is garbage. I find good stuff there when researching topics though there is a lot of garbage also.  Not everything in the NYT is fit to print either!

That said, when the big guerilla speaks, you have to pay attention.

So what is the solution? On another tape I’ll post where Matt tells you what he considers value.  Stay tuned for tomorrow!

Here is the video about article marketing below. Check it out and tell me what your take is.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY

How To Use YouTube Browse for Market Research

I just had a comment from a YouTuber about a video I did on the Browse function in YouTube.

When I reviewed the video I saw that some of the Browse feature had changed so I made the video below to go over the changes.

Channel Listings Gone

Basically the main change is that Channel listings of the most viewed and popular Channels no longer appear in the results.

What you now get are the following headings:

• Videos
• Music
• Shows
• Trailers
• Live

Each one of these heading has an option to dig deeper by categorie in a drop down or as part of the selection in the landing page that is broken down into different headings.

You’ll see what I mean when you screen the video.

Market Research Using YouTube Browse

The point is that the Browse feature can be used to see trends and what is moving and hot on YouTube and it comes in real handy as an out of the box way of researching niches and products that might be great to market.

So take a look and see if you can use this in your online marketing efforts.

That’s it.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqVFF2U-MGk

Google Sets Tool

I was reading  my rss feed of Viperchill where Google Sets was mentioned as a nice tool for market or niche research.

I took a look at it and found it can come in handy to get ideas of related keywords and niche ideas.

What it does is drill horizontally as opposed to vertically so you get an idea of what may appeal across the niche or keyword you are researching.

I made this video below so check it out and see for yourself.

The down side of the tool is that is does come up with single word returns that make no sense.  You will see a “of” , “and” , “the” as well as other prepositiona,articles and conjunctions appear in the results.

But you will also find suggestions for keywords or related niches that you would not think of at first.

So all in all it is worth a quick look since it is a simple tool and very easy to use.

There you have it.  Take a look and see what it can do for you.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCCFyqfHWQw

Speed Matters

Google announced the roll out of a new feature on the Chrome platform called Google Instant Pages.

What is Google Instant Pages? Well it’s a way for getting you to results you are looking for a lot faster than it otherwise takes right now.

And if you get to those results faster, you will be a happy user and do more searches than your counterparts who have to wait longer for their search results.

More searches for Google means more eye balls, and more eye balls looking for longer periods of time at more results means more ad revenue for all.

Load Time

A key factor here is the load time you experience when you are searching for information. Or even more importantly, the time it takes for your customer to get information from your website.  That is because Instant Pages will apply to all searches and sites when it is fully rolled out and that can mean more conversions if your site is set up right.

In the video below, there is the Google video that shows you the difference in load time between a site with Instant Pages and one without it.

So take the time to take in my review and then go to Webmaster Central to see for yourself if you want to process all the information for yourself.

There you have it.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV4c_xDPXqk

Google Webmaster Central

Speed Matters

 
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Google Webmaster Central Blog

What Are The Farmer/Panda Guidelines?

There has been a lot of ink spilled about the Google Farmer/Panda algorithm update and what it all means to Internet Marketers and more specifically to Affiliate Marketers.

Well there is a post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog about what specifically the Google team wanted to achieve with these changes.

I just recorded a video that takes you through the information about what Google wants you to do when you create content for your websites.

They list 23 specific points you should be aware of and implement if what you are doing is relevant to each one of these points.

They also give some more pointers of what affects your site ranking in the closing paragraphs of the post.

Suffice it to say, that you should be writing or researching your content to make sure what you present is unique and adds to the body of knowledge of your niche or whatever it is your site is about.

They are looking for good writing, grammatically and stylistically.  And they are looking for material that is well developed and given the length and time to offer value to the reader.

This is all about the user experience and the importance Google places on giving people the information they are asking for.

So take in the video and see for yourself straight from the source what Framer/Panda is all about. I think that is more valuable than letting someone else do it for you and you may see things that others don’t.

So have a look and I hope this helps you succeed online.

CloudBlueprint is a 100% free video course on how to make a living online. 

CloudBlueprint Video Course

I make a point of learning as much as I can from people I trust.  Here is a course that is just out and I know there is going to be some really great information about making money online.  Not BS but useful actionable information.

I follow Glen on all matters about affiliate marketing and blogging and always come away with something new.

Now if you want to find out more about this guy just go to Viperchill and check him out.

For now here is what he is offering and all it will cost you is your time and effort.

Go for it.

CloudBlueprint: Intro from ViperChill HQ on Vimeo.

.

Affiliate Marketing Is More Than 9 Simple Steps

In my previous post I put up a great graphic offered by Rae Hoffman Dolan that shows 9 basic steps in the affiliate marketing process.

The graphic is a easy way to understand the basics in getting your head into affiliate marketing. And in that sense it is helpful in getting the newcomer to the business thinking more clearly about what is involved.

I thought I’d take a stab at filling in some of the blanks, given I have been at this for three years now and can shed some light on how to set up your expectations of what it takes to learn affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing: Early Learning Phase

I think before you do anything you should do a lot of reading and observing.  That’s because affiliate marketing is a sophisticated and tricky business that calls for technical knowledge of how the internet works along with business common sense on how to set up and run a real business.

The temptation is to dive right in and start launching sites and stuff online.  While that is a noble instinct, I think you are better off just watching how the game is played before you get on the field and try out a few shots.

How long should you wait?  That’s up to you.  You will find plenty of people ready and willing to teach you for a price and I found it real hard to figure out who was right for me and who was just interested in taking money off my hands.

With some time just watching and seeing what people are saying about products and services, you will find out soon enough who is the real deal and who you should avoid.

Whatever you do, pick a program that fits your level of understanding.  Move to more sophisticated programs once you get a grasp of the basics.  For example I stayed away from Pay Per  Click at first because it was way over my head and it can cost a lot of money if you don’t know what you are doing.  You might want to do the same.

I have a list of people listed in my sidebar that you can take a look at.  I wish I had known about these folks in my first few months and that would have saved me time and money.

So there is my rant about the early learning phase.

[Image provided courtesy of the Sugarrae affiliate marketing blog.]

Let’s look at the steps of the How Affiliate Marketing Works graphic.

Affiliate Program Sign up

This first sounds simple enough, but it really is the last step in a multi-step process.

Before you can sign up with an affiliate program you have to decide what you want to sell.

Before you decide what you want to sell you have to do some market research.  More specifically you want to do some keyword research to determine the level of demand and the level of traffic your keywords can gererate.

All of this requires some experience and knowledge of what keywords are; how they work; where they are in the buy cycle and how you can use them to your advantage given the competition there is for them.

You are going to want to learn how to register a domain name. You are also going to want to learn how to set up a web site to go along with that domain name and you are going to want to create articles and content to put on that website in a way that optimizes what the search engines are looking for.

You get the picture?

This is a real business that takes time and effort to master.

Now we are still at step one.

The thing is this is a crucial step to get right because it makes a lot of difference in whether you stand a chance to succeed at making some money.

Affiliate Link

When you get through all the steps in phase 1 and succeed in getting approved, then you get your product or service affiliate link from an affiliate program.

This is a piece of code that has an identifier on it that is specific to your account with the merchant.  It tells the merchant that the traffic it is receiving with that code on it is traffic you have sent to the merchant.  If that traffic buys you get a commission.

You put that affiliate link on your website.  Your link can take different forms.  Sometimes it is a visual banner display that a visitor can click on. Other times it can be a product image that is clickable. Or it can be a text link in the copy of your site content in an article or in the product description.

Whatever the form, it is a link that sends your visitor to a merchant’s site and with some luck or good pre selling you get that visitor to buy the product or service.

There is a whole body of information about masking or cloaking your affiliate link to prevent bad guys from stealing your link but that is something for another time.

Customer Visits Your Website

The next step is pretty straight forward.  You set up you website, get traffic and visitors are coming to your site.

Customer Clicks Your Link

You have a visitor arrive at your site. He/she reads what you have to offer and clicks on the banner, text link, product image and is sent to the merchant site.  Bravo! You got a click.

The Cookie

When the visitor clicks on one of your links, a piece of code is put on his/her computer with your identifier on it.  It is called a cookie. It tells the merchant who belongs to the link and who should get a commission. It also tells the merchant that the cookie is good for 30-45-60 days so that if that visitor doesn’t buy right away you still have a shot at getting a commission.

Vistor Buys on Merchant’s Site

You luck out and the visitor buys a product or service and your cookie is still on his/her computer.

Merchant Checks Cookie

When someone buys something from the merchant and the transaction goes through and is confirmed, that merchant looks for an affiliate link and a cookie to find out who referred the sale.

Merchant Confirms Cookie

When the merchant finds the cookie and ties it to the confirmed sale, that sale generates a commission for you the affiliate.  The amount is determined in the affiliate agreement which you have read and are familiar with.

Commission Report

A record of all your sales and commissions is filed in a report kept by the merchant in your affiliate account.

Payment Period

At the end of the payment period specified in the affiliate agreement, you will receive a payment by check or direct deposit or by whatever means agreed to in the affiliate agreement.  This payment reflects all the commissions generated for that period of time, usually on a monthly basis.

Conclusion: The Affiliate Marketing Process

This whole process takes time to learn and digest.

As was mentioned earlier, the research and set up of an affiliate relationship takes time and effort. You have to learn a whole bunch of things about keywords, domain names, web site set up and design and content creation.

There is the issue of getting traffic and getting links to your site that haven’t been covered here but that you will also learn how to do.

Take Your Time

The whole point here is to take your time and learn to take in information in small digestible pieces.

It took me just about a year before I began to put things together and the next two years of trial and error to feel confident I could work in this business.

Now my experience was starting from total ignorance and going in the wrong direction more than once.

So just give yourself plenty of time and plenty of slack in learning how to do affiliate marketing online.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Here is a graphic that shows how affiliate marketing works.

The diagram below is a visual rendition of the process that unfolds when you sign up with a merchant to sell his or her product/service. It takes you through the various steps that occur and lead to your receiving a commission.

It was commissioned by Sugarrae, aka Rae Hoffman Dolan, a professional online marketer – ( I’m really tired of the term super affiliate since I’ve been taken by a few) – who is happy to see it propagate far and wide.

It’s a great short explanation of the essence of affiliate marketing.

Sugarrae is the real deal and you should read what she has to say. You’ll learn more in one paragraph from her than in some 80 or 100 page ebooks. Her site can be found at  http://www.sugarrae.com/

This graphic is one sample of that.

Enjoy

Click here to view a larger version.

[Image provided courtesy of the Sugarrae affiliate marketing blog.]

Index problem

Google Webmaster Homepage

I was checking out my website to see what Google was indexing and had a research tool return that I had only one indexed page in Google.  I was really surprised so I went to the browser and typed in  site:www,affiliatestartingline.com.  Sure enough, the only return was one indexed page.

I really got worried and tried to figure out what was going on. Then I remembered I sometimes use my domain without the prefix www.  So I tried the same command without the prefix site:affiliatestartingline.com.  And boom, there were all the indexed results.

Lesson learned is this.  Google sees your prefixed domain and your un-prefixed domain as two separate domains. So you might find yourself with indexing one or the other or a mix of both.  You don’t want that.

Index Solution

The solution is found in Google’s Webmaster tool.

You need to have a Google account and then you need to sign up in the Google Webmaster area.  Register both your prefixed and unprefixed domains.

In my case I had already signed up the prefixed domain in the Webmaster tool for my account so I added the unprefixed domain.

Once you have registered your accounts, click on one of your domain names to go to the Webmaster tool dashboard for that account.

On the sidebar on the left select the Site Configuration tab.  Scroll down and select Settings.

This will take you to a screen with the preferred domain function ready for your use.  Select a domain as your preferred domain.

When you do that, Google will index all pages to that preferred domain regardless of whether the prefixed or unprefixed domain is used.

Redirect Your Domain

There is one last step Google wants you to take.  Go to your Web host, go to the domains panel in your cPanel and select the Redirect icon.  This takes you to the input screen where you will select the domain that is not preferred and redirect it to the preferred domain.

Complete that step and you are done.

Now all your indexing will be directed to one domain and your data will truly reflect the latest status of your site.

If you want to see this in a video, check out my video on Preferred Domain set up, that should make it easy for you to take the steps to solve this problem.

I hope this has been helpful.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous.

Read a nice article about brevity.  It comes compliments of Copyblogger and you should check it out.

Looking to build some back links.  Try this tool it’s called BackLink and it’s an incredible way to build back links.  It costs $20 and it’s worth much much more.

That’s the Tip of the Day.  Enjoy.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

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Google Instant Preview

Google Instant Preview – What is it and what does it mean to the Internet Marketer?

Google has a feature called Instant Preview and I made a video review what it is and what it means to you as a marketer.

You find the Instant Preview icon in the search results at the right hand end of title line in the form of a magnifying glass.

When you click it, it renders a page of the website for that result.

What this means is that you want your website to be optimized for the Instant Preview.

You want your titles and headlines clearly visible and easy to read.  There has to be instant recognition of what your site is about and what it can do for the reader.

It also means that results in the lower listings may have a better chance of getting looked at because I found myself checking out the sites on the first results page.  It was so easy to do I went right down the page in no time.

So there you have it. Check out the video below and see how Google Instant Preview can work for you.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

• LOVE

• MAKING MONEY

• BEAUTY

• ENTERTAINMENT

• HEALTH

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

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Claude Pelanne YouTube Channel

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners- A Great Source of Free Tutorials  – YouTube

Over the past week I have received two emails from a membership site that I have paid to join. They both offered video tutorials.  One on setting up a confirmation page to capture names and email addresses before sending prospects to a merchant’s landing page and another explaining why your should use a robot.txt file to streamline search engine indexing of your blog or site.

The content of the videos was useful and certainly something I wanted to learn.  The only thing is I had already found these tutorials on my own some time ago.  The place where I found them was YouTube.

The lesson here is a short one.  Why pay for content that you can get for free?  So before you go out and pay good money, try going and doing a search on YouTube to see if a video tutorial exists there.  There is a reason why YouTube is now the second most active search engine on the Web.

If you want to see how to create a robot.txt file and upload it to your root directory of your site or blog, I’ve posted the videos on my YouTube Channel.  Check it out it’s free.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

How to Configure Your Home Page to Hide Live Chat and Open a New Window

I had an irritating problem with my iGoogle homepage.

When I would log in I would get this ping and my freindfeed chat box would pop in.

I would close it but it might reappear at any moment or if I left and would log in again.

So I did some clicking and finally figured out where to find the link for iGoogle settings which I clicked.

Once in my iGoogle back office I found a button defaulting to open the chat feed.

I then selected the button to hide the chat feed and while I was at it I checked the box for opening a new window when clicking links in my iGoogle homepage.

I then looked for and found a save button and voila, the problem was solved.

Take a look at the video and you’ll see how to take care of this irritation if you have this problem.

And that’s it.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sB4NPJ6XS4

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners  -  Tip of the Day

Hope the New Year has started out on  a good note.  Thought I’d let you know of a great WordPress plug in I found called reposter.  It takes posts from your blog or web site and re-posts them on a schedule of your choosing.

For example I had 30 or 40 postings from my first blog that I imported to my new blog.  They were articles and tips that had run once but had been archived and never used again.

This plug in allows you to pull them from your archive or category and schedule them in for reposting unassisted.

It’s a great way to keep content flowing without the need to actively be there to do it. This comes in real handy if you are going flat out and are short on time to post fresh content everyday.

It’s called Reposter and it’s free compliments of Kathy Burns-Millyard at Reposter Plug In

Enjoy.

Claude Pelanne

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Web Site Analytic Tools

The following video explores web analytics and all the software and website analytic tools you have available to get data about your site.

Once you have the data you want to go through it and analyse what it means to your site and how it is working to give you the results you are looking for.

Have a look at the video and then use some of the tools to see how your site is doing.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Q5JOIB_f8

Image by TaopaiC via Flickr

Organizer Tip

Having trouble keeping track of your affiliate links along with all the other important information? Set up a spreadsheet or try out Affiliate Organizer to keep track of all your affiliate business information. It will make things easier and prevent any slowdowns in your business growth.

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Need a logo?

What Are Keyword Metrics?

Keywords and Traffic

This video looks at a metric that tells you what keyword or term or phrase has sent traffic to your site.  You also want to know which search engine has generated that keyword, term or phrase visitor.

You want to see a count and see what secondary keyword or phrase has sent you traffic.

A great tool for this kind of traffic analysis is Google analytics. This tool will show you which specific keyword or term is sending you traffic.

It’s interesting because you will find keywords and phrases that you may never have thought of and which you can them optimize for to increase visitors to your site.

Keywords and Conversions

A second metric is to see the conversions you get, whether it be a sale or a sign up through an opt in box, and find out which keyword or phrase is driving conversions.

In Google Analytics you can do that by setting up goals and measuring your keyword against the achievement of that goal.

Number of pages receiving at least one visit

Google Analytics will show you pages receiving at least one visit and what the keyword or phrase is that generated that visit.  It also will tell you which pages have received no visits.

This is a great way to see which part of the site is receiving interest and which part your visitors are not interested in at all.

There is also a tool in beta that will give you a visual of your site and show you a measure of visitor interest for that particular page.  It is a great way to get a visual confirmation of what part of your site is of working and which part is not.

The video below goes into more detail so have a look and then give the guide a read.

That’s it. Hope this is helpful as a preview to the actual read.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJDUkN7DMtA

Ctrl-A Select all

Ctrl-B BOLD

Ctrl-C COPY

Ctrl-D BOOKMARK

Ctrl-E CENTER

Ctrl-F FIND

Ctrl-G GO TO

Ctrl-H REPLACE

Ctrl-I ITALICIZE

Ctrl-J FULL JUSTIFY

Ctrl-K HYPERLINK

Ctrl-M INCREASE INDENT

Ctrl-N NEW DOCUMENT

Ctrl-O OPEN DOCUMENT

Ctrl-P PRINT

Ctrl-R RIGHT JUSTIFY

Ctrl-S SAVE

Ctrl-T TAB

Ctrl-U UNDERLINE

Ctrl-V PASTE

Ctrl-W CLOSE DOCUMENT

Ctrl-X CUT

Ctrl-Y REDO/REPEAT LAST ACTION

Ctrl-Z UNDO

Website Analytics

The Guide presents five key tools to track website statistics and measuring how traffic finds your site.

In this post and video you will see what the first two tools are.

Metric Tool 1 – Search Engines

How Traffic Comes To Your Site

1. Direct Traffic – User types in your url
2. Referral Traffic – Traffic coming from links – email campaign,PPC or other branding method.
3. Search Engine Results Page – Organic search results from user typing in keyword.

You need to know what percentage comes from these three sources. This will help you plan how to get traffic to your site.

Metric Tool 2 – Search Engine Percentage Benchmark

How does the search engine referral split look between Google,Yahoo and Bing.

Measure the specific share of each search engine against the benchmark percentage that comes from each search engine on a normal basis.

Those numbers will show you how you are doing against the traffic referral you should be getting from each engine.

The video below covers this material in greater detail so have a look and then use the tools to see  how your site is doing.

That’s it. Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gDt0NeJieU

Tags: affiliatemarketing, affiliate marketing for beginners, online affiliate,

The video below explains how to figure out if you have been sandboxed or banned. It also lays out steps you can follow to get back in with Google and reappear in the index and the SERPs.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgnOOnAIAks

 
[ad#ASL01Linkad]

SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO – Spamming

How Do Search Engines Find Spam?

They use two tools that measure relevance and trust.

TrustRank – An algorithm that measures how close or removed a site is from trusted benchmark sites usually .edu or .gov sites.

HITS – an algorithm that measures link quality.

Page Level Spamming

Search engines look for the following practices that lower site quality and the user experience:

Keyword Stuffing

Manipulative Linking

Link Farms

Paid Links

Low Quality Directories

Cloaking

Low Value Pages

Domain Level Spamming

At the Domain level, the search engines look for the following indicators:

Linking Practices

Trustworthiness

Duplicate content

Check out the video below and get more details on what these spamming practices are and why you want to avoid them.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdksRfu4-eQ

[ad#ASL01Linkad]

To find independent merchants for a product you want to sell add the + sign in front of your Google search term. That will bring up sites in the search list pertaining to that specific term. For example to search for independent merchants for remote control airplane you would type +remote+control+airplane into the Google search box.

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This video goes over chapter 9 of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO.  The videos cover the chapter in two parts. Part starts with 6 basic myths.

Six Basic SEO Myths

These are some of the most basic myths according to SEOmoz that their research has confirmed.

Search Engine Submission

This is the practice of submitting your site to search engine directories and is something that used to be normal practice. Today search crawlers do all the heavy lifting to index your content as long as you set yourself up properly (ie:xml sitemap etc…). So there is no need to submit to a search engine directory any more.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are important but are not the only consideration anymore.

Your Meta Title tag and Description Tag still carry weight in SEO.  The Keyword meta tag no longer has much authority. That said I still put in Meta keywords for the discipline of doing it and because if things change and they come back into vogue, I won’t have to go back and add them.

Keyword Stuffing and Density

The practice of loading your content with lots of the same keywords is no longer effective.  In the old days people would game the system by loading keywords in the meta tag and cloak them. None of that works any more, so don’t bother.

Also, the practice of using a keyword with a frequency as a percentage of your word count, the practice of keyword density, no longer brings any advantage either.  This according to the testing done at SEOmoz.

Paid Search Helps Organic Results

If you run a paid campaign (PPC) and rank on  page one for that ad and keyword, your organic ranking will also be helped for that keyword.  Wrong!  It doesn’t work that way.

Personalization

With the introduction of personalization, you results in organic returns are skewed and you don’t see clean results. That is only true for the specific and repeated searches you perform during the course of your activity online. But since your activity covers only a fraction of the total searching going on, your results will not be greatly affected overall in the organic returns.

My personal experience does not bear this out.  As a marketer I search far and wide looking for niche possibilities, so to avoid skewed results I always log out of my personal account and look at results with out personalization turned on.

Reciprocal Links

The practice of exchanging links with another webmaster is no longer effective. So don’t waste your time with it.

The Video

The video below goes over these points in greater detail so have a look.  It should help you determine where to put your efforts and make better use of your time.

That’s it. Hope this is helpful.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUcSEoFfcjg

In Chapter 8 of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide To SEO, you get to learn what tools and services are available to you so that search engines can find you and index your content.

The Guide basically lays out four tools and lists the three Webmaster tools for the three major search engines.

Tool 1 – Sitemaps

SiteMaps are very important in getting indexed because they are the tools search engines need to read what is on your site.

There are different types of sitemaps so you need to load each one on to your site to maximize ways to be found by the major search engines.

For those of you using WordPress, there are plugins for all of these types on site maps and on my YouTube Channel, I have videos explaining how to set up and configure your xml,text,image and video sitemaps.

xml sitemap – This is the first sitemap you should install since it is essential to the search engines for finding you.

rss sitemap - rss feeds – This is a great tool to use when you want to index an interior page or post that has no ranking yet with the search engines.

txt format sitemap – This is a great way of creating a visual sitemap for visitors to your site to use. Google and company like these because they enhance the user experience.

Tool 2 Robot.txt

Robots.txt files – This is a way of telling the search engines that you do not want a certain page or post on your website crawled and indexed.

disallow indexing – You can choose which part of your website, which specific page or post that you do not want indexed.  This comes in handy if you have duplicate content on several pages.

location of sitemaps – The robot.txt also tells the search engines where to find sitemaps that will help them index a site.

speed of crawling – Robot.txt can be configured to tell the search engine what speed to use when crawling a site.

Tool 3 Meta Robots

Meta Robots

Page specific robots.txt info- Meta robots are used to tell search engines which specific page, post or information that you don’t want crawled.

Tool 4 NoFollow

nofollow attribute – Another you can do is tell the search engines if you do not want to pass on any of your link authority to people who link to you.  You do this by putting a piece of code, relnofollow, onto your page. Again in WordPress there are plugins that make this very easy to implement.

Webmaster Tools

There are sites at all the major search engines available to you for the purpose of getting data about what is indexed on your site and what people are typing in to find you. You will have to follow the set up process specific to each search engine Webmaster site, but once you have done that, these tools can be very helpful at making sure your site is properly optimized. These site are listed below:

Google Webmaster Tools

Bing Toolbox

Yahoo Site Explorer

SEOmoz Webmaster Tool

Take in the video below and you should have a good idea of the tools and services available to you for optimizing your websites.

That’s it for now. Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR-6Ip7DtxI

Image via CrunchBase

One of the hardest parts of getting started in affiliate marketing is deciding what to pick as a niche or product. Don’t let this slow you down. You don’t need to feel a passion or dire need to excel. What you need is the desire to find something you can build interest in. Everyone has that ability to find a point of interest and build on it. So go to Amazon, pick through the magazine or book section and choose whatever strikes your fancy. That’s all you need to start.

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This video and this part of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO lays out five key strategies for building links.

allintitle: attribute

For example, you can use the allintitle: attribute to find sites online that have your main keyword in their title.  These would be natural sites for getting backlinks because they are relevant and have authority.

Customer Linking to You

Get your customers and followers to link to you. One way is to create a badge and have your customers or follower post it on their sites.

Build a Blog

Build a blog that is informative, helpful and adds value to your customer and follower experience.

Viral Sharing

Create content that can be shared virally.  An ebook, a video, a podcast are all products that can be easily shared.  Protect your content by registering with Creative Common

Creative Common

Create a product that can be shared through some form of licensing. There is an organization called Creative Common that offers several licensing options for you.  Protect your content by registering with them. It’s free and a very good way of making sure your products are safe from copyright infringement.

Don’t buy Links

The last part of the chapter strongly suggests not buying links.  The search engines are all getting very sophisticated and if they suspect that links are artificially appearing they will delist or enact penalties that will hurt your efforts to succeed.

That is a quick summary of this very important chapter.

Take a look at the video and see how this information can help you move forward.

Stay withit, stay well, and may your travels be prosperous

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdFlfQC1E9A

Here is a list of 8 Great Resources that I use to find out what people are searching for online today. In the spirit of sharing and giving back I offer you the following:

1. Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

2. Yahoo! Buzz Index
http://buzz.yahoo.com/

3. Lycos 50
http://50.lycos.com/

4. AOL Search <<Hot Searches>>
http://hotsearches.aol.com/

5. Ask.com Top Searches

http://about.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml

6. Amazon.com Hot New Releases
http://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases

7. eBay What’s Hot page

http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/whatshot.html

*** Make sure you click on eBay Pulse and eBay Pop

8. Google News – Most Popular

http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=po

BONUS:

Also take a look at the most popular sections of digg.com, netscape.com, reddit.com, and del.icio.us.

Enjoy!

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How to figure out the value of a link?  The SEOmoz beginners guide gives you eight different ways to do it.

Here is the list of link metric tools:

Page rank for relevant search terms

Google pagerank

SEOmoz rank

SEOmoz domain authority

Google Blog search

Yahoo Site Explorer

Number of links on a page

Potential referral traffic

The video below givens an explanation  for each of these definitions of how to measure link authority and link juice.

So take a look and use these tools in your research.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYgI9B-TjR4

The SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO lays out in Section 7 information you should know about links and link building.

Links should build back to your site over time and in a natural way.  They should come from a broad a varied mix of high and low page rank sites.

They call this a robust link profile coming from a vast and varied site.

3 ways to build. :

Editorial Link Building- Building links back to your site over time and on the strength of your quality content. People are finding and following you organically and naturally.

Manual Suggestion and Approval - Here you are emailing bloggers, article writing and submitting to directories and even paying for listing or Pay Per Click to drive traffic to your site. You are manually inciting and bringing traffic to your site.

Self Created and Non Editorial – This method involves working forums and group gatherings and using a profile or signature to link back to your site.  There can be spamming here since there are programs that can go out and do that for you. So you have to be careful how you implement this method.

The video below goes into more detail about the guide so check it out.

That’s it. Hope this is helpful.

Stay with it, stay well and  may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOh4Vi-Mksk

Market Reasearch Resources

www.commscore.com

www.forrester.com

www.jupiterresearch.com

www.online-publishers.org

www.clickz.com

http://prweb.com

http://pages.ebay.com/marketplace_research

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I had a problem on my iMac when I got a message my hard drive was full.

I have another video on how to diagnose and deal with that by connecting and formating an external hard drive.  You should check it out.

But in this video post I show you how to upgrade memory in your iMac.

One of the solutions suggested at the Genius Bar where I took my iMac and myself was to upgrade memory.

It appears my 1 GB of memory no longer did the trick and upgrading was in order.

4GB was the recommendation and so for $70 I went to Crucial.com and ordered a two chip 4GB kit.

It arrived in 3 days, well before the promised 5-7 day period mentioned on the confirmation of purchase so I was ready to move forward.

Upgrade your computer memory for like-new performance today with Crucial!

The installation was pretty easy.

Begin by disconnecting the iMac from power and all accessories.

Carefully lay it on a towel screen side down with the pedestal facing towards you.

Get a small phillips or flat head screw driver ( I used a flat head when my phillips wasn’t doing the job) and on the flat edge right under the apple logo you’ll find a small panel.

Take it off and pull out two tabs to see which one houses the 1 GB chip.  Theoretically the chip should pop out. Mine didn’t so I got a small needle nose and carefully loosened it so I could get it out by hand.

Pay attention to which side faces up and which down when you take out the first memory chip.

Then simply insert each 2 GB chip into the two free slots.  Re insert the plastic tabs and you are done.

Put the plastic cover back on the panel and tighten the screw.

Reconnect the accessories and the power and you are good to go.

The video below shows you how to do it all so check it out.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKQxSWZq7ys

Look for products and services at affiliate network sites, affiliate directories and in house merchant sites. Make sure your Web site is functional and running because merchants are looking for pros.

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Don’t overdo postings to social sites. Their like delicate flowers to be treated with care. Linking  to yourself is spam…Google doesn’t like that at all.

Tags: affiliatemarketing for beginners, internet marketing program, article marketing

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Link Value

Links are the lifeblood of a site and the way search engines determine the value and authority of a website.

There are different attributes a link can have that will signal how authoritative and popular a site is with its community of followers.

Here is a list of those important link attributes:

Global Popularity

Local Popularity

Anchor Text

TrustRank

Link Neighborhood

These attributes are vital to understand and the video below explains it all for you.

So take a look and see what you need to know about links and link signals important to your success.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU3G8XG4RDQ

How easy is your site to use?

How user friendly is it?

What kind of experience is the use going to get when visiting your site?

How is your content fitting the need your user has for that information?

There are four kinds of searches:

Navigational Search

Informational Search

Commerical Investigation Search

Transactional Search

The better your understanding of these four types of search, the better you can plan and deliver content your visitors will look for and find on your site.

The video below goes into detail about usability, user experience and relevant content. Check it out.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBEqOhuk51A

Welcome to AffiliateStartingLine.com.

You’ll find information here for the beginner and for marketers that are beyond the beginner stage. I think you’ll find it useful and it should help save you time and money along the learning curve.

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

If you are just starting out, go through and read the posts and watch the videos. Cherry pick what you want in the order that makes sense for you. If you have any questions leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Keep your data and information organized by using a spreadsheet like Excel, Neoprint (for the Mac, it’s free) or Opensource (free for PC users). Use a system that makes sense to you. If you are not familiar with excel, Neoprint or Openoffice, you can find ebooks online to teach you how to use them.

How relevant is a keyword to your site?

Does that keyword have a lot of ads on a SERP?

How much traffic does a keyword get in EXACT match?

What is the ROI calculation for that keyword?

What I think is one of the most important pieces of information comes from the keyword graph that shows 70% of all searches are in the long tail.

This video highlights some very important concepts of what makes a keyword valuable.

It also shows you the free tools at your disposal to check out the value of a keyword.

Check this video out. I think you’ll find it useful and helpful in understanding how to value a keyword.

Stay with it, stay well and talk to you soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UivVzW-kjq8

Market Research and Planning Online can be time consuming and tedious.The payoff is that you will offer what the visitors to your site are looking for. This will mean great conversion rates and great income.

To help you with your research you can use a variety of tools.  A place to start are the Google tools, Google trends, Google Insights and many of the options tools available in the organic search window.

So give it a try.  Experiment with them and see what works for you.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous.

Tags: affiliatemarketing for beginners, internet marketing program, market research

How to Use Keywords

This video is part 2 of the review of Chapter 4 of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO.

I think Chapter 4 is one of the most important so you should spend some time getting through it and understanding the various elements in executing on page optimization.

It starts with Indexable Content which we covered in the previous video post and then introduces Keyword Usage and Targeting.

Keyword Usage and Targeting

Keywords are the building blocks for search.  They are at the foundation of the language of search and are what we use when we are looking for something on the Internet.

They are the feed stock for the databases search engines use when they store a keyword and the associated meaning or searches tied to that keyword.

Keywords are used to correlate to a search. Where and how many times a keyword is used on a page is important.

One myth addressed in the Guide is that of keyword density.  There is no correlation between a specific number of times a keyword is used on a page and relevance or page rank.  The whole theory of keyword density is a myth according to the Guide.

On Page Optimization

The next part of the chapter goes into on page optimization and how to do it correctly.

Use your main keyword in the title tag.  Put it as close to the beginning of the tag as you can.

In the body of the text use your keyword at least 3 times, more if it makes sense and goes with the flow. Bold the keyword at least once for emphasis; the search engines like that.

If you are using images, use the main keyword in the alt tag and of course you want to get the keyword in the URL.  With WordPress that is easy if you set up your permalinks with the /%postname%/ attribute.

Get the keyword at least once in not twice in the meta description.

The Guide then goes on in detail to cover critical areas for Optimization:

• Title Tags
• Meta Tags
• URL Structures
• 301 Redirects
• Pingbacks

The video below goes into greater detail so take a look and see for yourself.

I think you will find Chapter 4 a very important resource for optimizing your sites and getting better results from your online efforts.

I hope you find the information helpful.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6WpF7bYFXA

How to make your website friendly to search engines.  Use HTML content and links.

The video looks at what works and what doesn’t when it comes to search engine figuring out what the content is about on your website.

There is some information search engines can’t read; video, images, animation, forms, javascript and flash are all types of information that search engines cannot read.

Links are another important concept to understand.  Links are food for the search engines and they are vital for establishing your presence and authority online.

Without a solid link structure you will not be found, indexed or succeed online. So that’s another important part of this fourth chapter of the guide.

Check out the video. It goes into greater detail about all this.

That’s it. Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwOY2pgWP5M

How do people use search.  This part of the guide takes you through the process of how people use search to find information.

You get statistics on the volume of search and the trending upwards of the search volume.  You’ll see how the three main engines perform.

You’ll find out what search engines CAN’T do.  What content they do not see and how they focus on what people are typing in.

You have to learn what search engines see and how they understand what users are looking for.

Only an SEO expert can do that and that is why you need to learn Search Engine Optimization.

The video below takes you through Chapters 2 and 3. So have a look.

That’s it.  Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3hTzV4Rm_s

This is part 1 of a video series about the SEOmoz Beginners Guide To Search Engine Optimization.

The video series reviews each chapter of the guide, sometimes breaking a chapter down to several parts to make it easier to follow the information.

It’s a great way to get otherwise dense material broken down into easy to understand parts.

How Search Engines Work

The first video takes you through Chapter one and how search engines work.

It lays down the foundation for some of the concepts, techniques and strategies that will follow it the Guide.

So have a look and see how search engines work; crawling and indexing, following links and the communication “roadways” the search engines use to find and store the content you are creating.

Relevance and importance are the name of the game. Sites linking to your site are critical.  How the information is presented is also a big factor.

Lots of good information about what you have to know to succeed online.

So there you have.

Stay with it, stay well and talk to you soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fjq32BPr_tU

Before you approach a high end merchant to sell his/her product for your affiliate marketing program, make sure your Web site or landing page is ready and fully tested. The top merchants will check to see if you are up to professional standards.

Tags: affiliatemarketing, affiliate programs, internet marketing program, affiliate marketing programs

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This is the fourth video on Google Insights for Search and how to do product research looking for a product or niche.

It is a way to get ideas for marketing a  specific product and  a way to look for a niche to exploit.

I use this feature to see what is moving or to get an idea of how to positon a product or niche I am interested in.

The video is short but I think you will find it helpful and useful.

So take a look and prosper.

Stay with it, stay well, and talk to you soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvRzbTituRA

In this video, I take a look at using the time frame feature to track trending demand for a product.

You can take a product and track the demand by the year.

That means you can see how demand has grown or dropped on a year by year basis.

You can also track year by year data by country, region and even state.

So there is a wealth of data you can get to target geographically how to sell and WHERE to sell a product.

So take a look and go for it.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

Talk to you soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BiVi2Cykk4

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

When I first started my business, I attended a class at the Small Business Administration on “Starting a Business”. The instructor, a professor from a nearby business school, came into the room, introduced himself, and then told us we would begin with a little exercise.

He asked the first two rows of the class to remain seated. He then asked for the remainder of the class to stand up. That was about two thirds of the people in attendance.

He then went to tell us that those standing represented the number of businesses that would fail in their first year.

With that sobering point well illustrated, he went on to discuss the importance of developing a business plan. Get all the information you can possibly think of and put it all on paper. The most important being your market research.

As the saying goes a failure to plan is a plan for failure.

So before you go to all that trouble of designing and loading up your Web site. Do your keyword research, set up a test blog, and see if there is any interest. You will be glad you did.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

In this second video, I use the location feature to research my product and see how to target geographically.

Geo targeting is a good way of getting your product in front of your customer base and Google Insights location feature is a great way to see where to place your ads and target your efforts.

Take a look at the video and go for it.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U2kgVsLWu0

How it  Works

I‘ve done a four part video series on Google Insights for Search.  This post is part 1 that gives an overview of what you see on the homepage and starts of with the search function.

Google Insights can be used a number of ways when doing market research and product research.

It’s free and comes in real handy.

So take a look and go for it.

Remember, stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

This is a great tool for building backlinks to your blog or web site.

Backlink Agent.com

I produced some podcasts in Garageband and needed to convert the audio file to MP3. I looked at all the menu bar selections and after a while remembered a podcast the mentioned it.

I gave it a listen and then produced a video that makes it easy to SEE how you do it.

So there you have it. Check out the video below and then check out my other videos for tips on SEO and other stuff as well.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

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I came across the announcement of a new YouTube service on the YouTube blog called YouTube Trends.

It is a way of seeing what is trending and what is hot.  You can get informed about all this trending activity at http://youtube-trends.blogspot.com/ which is the blog for the service.

It’s a great way to find out what is going on with YouTube videos and see what people are interested in and what they are watching.

Also, there is a button on the right hand side of the header called “Discover video trends near you…, when you click on it you are sent to a screen where you can filter videos that are the most shared or most viewed.  You can also filter by geography and by age group.

Another feature offers a way to compare three different locations on the same screen.

I think this is a great way to do some market research when looking for ideas and niche possibilities.

Anyway, I did a short video on YouTube Trends, so check it out below.

That’s it. I hope this is helpful. Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

The last section of the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide lays out how to promote and grow your site.

Backlinks

Google uses backlinks as a way of judging the popularity and authority of a web site so it expects you to try to get backlinks to establish yourself online.

One way to get backlinks is organically over time.

Blogging

Another way is to create compelling content on a blog and announce it to your readers with relevant blog posts.

RSS Feed

An RSS feed is a great way to let people know when you have created new content and so you should make a point of setting up a way for your readers to subscribe to an RSS feed for your site.

Google Places

For local businesses Google Places is a must.  It is a great way to connect with the customers in your local geographic area on Google Maps and web search. A good resource with tips on how to promote locally is the Webmaster Help Center.

Offline Promotion

Google reminds you not to forget all the classic offline ways to promote your business and website. Business cards,letterhead, posters, newsletters all embedded with your website URL can go a long way in getting traffic to your site.

Best Practices

In Best Practices Google brings up social media sites as another important way to promote your site.  In a recent interview, Matt Cutts confirmed that the search rankings are affected by twitter and Facebook data regarding followers and fans.  So it is important to establish a presence on those and all other social media venues in promoting your website and online business.

Avoid announcing trivial content and also avoid auto posting and phony reciprocal devices to artificially inflate your results.  Those tactics are found out over time and the penalties are not worth it in the long run.

Finally, you should reach out to those in your community and build relationships on the strength of your content and contributions to the common good.

Avoid spammy link building schemes or buying links.  These tactics are also discovered over time and result in sandboxing  and penalties.

Webmaster Tools

The final couple of pages go over the free resources available at the Google Webmaster Tools Center.  Google Analytics and Website Optimizer are but two of several tools available to help you get your site set up for success.  There is a Webmaster Forum, Blog, Help Center, Tools Site along with the already mentioned Analytics and Optimizer resources. So you have a lot of means available to you to make your site something worthy of promotion.

So there you have it.  Check out the video below to learn about the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide and go from there.

Hope this has been helpful.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

I did a first video on the importance of setting up a mobile site map of your site as part of making your site mobile ready

In this post, I offer a video showing the plugin I use to set up my site for mobile access.

The important thing in choosing a plugin is to see if it grants access to the major mobile bots that crawl the web.

Once you have the majors covered you can then add user agent information to the list to expand the mobile reach of your site.

So take a look and see if the plug in I suggest works for you.

It’s called WordPress Multi Site Mobile Edition and it works well for me.

Take a look to see how to configure it and get your site mobile ready.

That’s it. I hope this helps you out.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.