Using a green screen can allow you to step up the professionalism of your videos, with just a little work and not too much money.

Rather than trying to regurgitate Steve’s article, just head over to his blog and learn how to add a green screen effect to your videos.

I’ve only by trying to use the Pomodoro Technique for a few days now but it does seem to be helping me to be more productive.

Here’s a link to the Pomodoro Technique website where you can read about it and also download a pdf that explains it. Here’s a little to give you and idea

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method. For many of us time is an enemy. The anxiety triggered by “the ticking clock” and deadlines to be met leads to ineffective work and study habits and procrastination. The Pomodoro Technique transforms time into a valuable ally.

Francesco Cirillo created the Pomodoro Technique in 1992 after a long search to improve his own study habits. Starting in the late ’90s the technique was embraced by professional teams. It can help us accomplish what we want to do and chart continuous improvement in the way we do it.

Lifehacker recently posted this video that clearly explains the Pomodoro Technique in less than 5 minutes.

Greg Jarboe is president and co-founder of SEO-PR, an SEO firm that specializes in optimizing press releases, videos, etc. He is the author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day and in this interview he explains just how important the use of YouTube is for your business.

In this video, PR expert Greg Jarboe talks with Dr. Ralph Wilson about using press releases to build links to your site.

She discusses the Google Keyword Tool, that shows search numbers and search trends month by month over the year. Google Insights for Search helps you spot trends from year to year. In the recession, keyword search trends have changed dramatically, so you may need to update your keyword research. Google Insights for Search also shows geographical use as well as rising search terms. Google Sets helps you quickly expand your keywords by helping you find sets of keywords, when you put in a few keywords in a set, such as car brands. Paid tools to consider include Trellian Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. These draw on different databases and help you determine the rank order of keywords, unaffected by artifacts introduced by spiders running ranking reports, etc.

Paid tools are worth the cost because (1) they offer management capabilities, such as the ability to manipulate lists, and (2) they are usually parts of larger sets of SEO tools that increase your capability. Manipulating keyword lists into “buckets” can be useful to manage your account. Microsoft Excel’s concatenate function can help you build keyword lists rapidly.

Christine Churchill is the president and CEO of Key Relevance, a full-service search marketing company based in Dallas, Texas that does both paid and organic search as well as consulting and customized packages for clients. This interview was recorded on August 12, 2009 at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, California.

recent industry research from TrustWave’s Spider Labs showed that hackers went after hotel networks more than any other destination in 2009, accounting for 38% of all known security breeches, more than the financial services industry (19%) and retail industries (14.2%) combined.

To make matters worse, the hotels didn’t discover that the breeches had even occurred for an average of 156 days, leaving plenty of time for the cyber-criminals to use stolen credit card information, or take advantage of the personal data harvested for any number of identity theft scams.

Just this week, Wyndham Hotel & Resorts, operators of hotel chains Days Inn, Ramada, Super8 and Howard Johnson, reported that their central hotel network had been compromised, with hackers stealing customer’s names, credit numbers and expiration dates.

You need to read Hackers Lurking in Hotel Networks, twice.

“We really don’t manage the conversation,” says Evans. “Rather, we manage our participation in the conversation and the experiences we create.” Through the social media marketers and small businesses can begin to understand what they do as a product or service to drive the conversation in the first place. It is a place to listen and understand.

This conversation is new in the sense that (a) more people are now connected to it in digital media, and (b) marketers can go back to the conversations to research them and learn from them. Consumers are talking to each other, says Evans. Marketers can now join the conversation and have a voice with the customers. Even if your business is rather small, you can learn from conversations about your business as well as from other businesses like it, so that you can get insight into how things work. If we’re truly listening to what is actually being said, concludes Evans, our businesses, products, and services can improve.

Dave Evans is the Consulting Director of 2020 Social and the author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day (Sybex, 2008). This interview was taped in August 2009 at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, California.