Kevin Davis - Speaker, Social Media Expert, Marketing Consultant | Salt Lake City, Utah

Converting Info Product DVDs To MP4V with Handbrake

Kevin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:30:17 +0000

A lot of times in Internet Marketing, we recieve DVDs as part of a physical homestudy course, instead of digital versions in a members area. The main reason, is the thud factor of a big box of stuff showing up on your doorstep. While that is great, if you have a an iTouch, iPhone, or iPad, you may be thinking, how do I get these converted over so I can actually watch them on my device.

Lately, I have dug out my 2nd Gen iTouch and started watching some DVDs that I recently converted over to iPhone compliant MP4V format. It is great to watch and listen on my iTouch while at the gym on the treadmill or bike. To convert the files I used some free software called Handbrake.

Handbrake is super fast, and can actually separate out the chapters too. It comes in all flavors; Windows, Mac, and Linux.

It has also been a vlauable tool when working with customers that had a DVD mastered, but now wanted to be able to offer a digital downsell, and we used Handbrake to create the digital versions for them.

To your success,
Kevin

Numbers To Consider When Optimizing Your Sales Funnel

Kevin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:27:53 +0000

Running through some pricing and conversion models today in Excel, I stumbled on a really interesting fact.

When optimizing a sales funnel, we have a tendency to focus on improving the optin conversion, with the idea that more people on my list. That makes sense, because the more people on the list, the more sales I’ll make right?

Well, do you think it would be easier to improve the optin conversion by 20% or the initial sale conversion by 2%?

What I found as I was running the numbers, those two improvement yied exactly the same results!

Now, I am not saying you shouldn’t try to improve every touchpoint in your sales funnel, but you need to look at where is the best area to improve in order to give you the best results in the shortest amount of time.

Initial Sales Funnel

Increasing Optin Conversions By 20%

Increase Initial Sales By 2%

As you can see from the screenshots, both optimizations had exactly the same result. Pretty crazy, huh?

This is one the things I’ll be talking about this week at my Meetup on Thursday night here in Salt Lake City.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Thanks,
Kevin

Viral Videos – How To Make An Interactive Adventure

Kevin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 02:51:15 +0000

Anyone that is posting videos to Youtube, I think is dreaming to find that special incredient to make the video go viral and get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views. Well Chad, matt and Rob from ChadMattandRob.com have put together a great tutorial on how to create what they call interactive adventures.

Basically, an interactive adventure is a series of video episodes on YouTube that give the viewer choice at the end of each video what path the story will take in the next video.

The videos are linked together using the annotations buttons within YouTube to let the viewer choose the next video they want to view.

To help explain how to create your own interactive adventure, they put together a very humorous instructional video giving you an overview of the concept and the process.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMrMEydnFFA

The most popular interactive adventure they have done is “The Time Machine” which has over 1.5 million views for the first episode.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8rJ1WML60Y

Their most popular video is not an interactive adventure, but it is a hilarious video, I have included it as well for an example of a viral video that got over 16 million views.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWqI0U3pBdA

I am planning on doing some viral videos later this year with Spencer Shaw from PaidIn14Days.com and Neil Bryce from Surface 9 Studios.

What Is Foursquare, And Why Should You Care

Kevin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 01:03:09 +0000

Chances are, you may have already been exposed to Foursquare.com in the last month or so. The official Foursquare day was 4/16/2010. If you haven’t been exposed to it yet by one of your over-excited foursquare friends as they became mayor or unlocked another badge, consider yourself lucky.

Foursquare is a location based, social media “community” that allows you to check-in at the places you frequent and earn points for doing so. The points, check-ins along with other criteria, are used to determine who is the “mayor” of a given location. Some consider this a game, I consider it a waste of time.

Where I do find it useful is for local retail businesses, especially restaurants, bars and coffee shops.

As a business on Foursquare, you have the ability to provide members specials as they checkin to your business.

We offer a few choices for how foursquare users can unlock your special:

Mayor specials can be unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days).

Count-based specials are unlocked when a user checks in a certain number of times.
(“… on your 10th check-in”)

Frequency-based specials are unlocked every so many check-ins.
(“… every 5th check-in”)

Wildcard specials are always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the special.
(“Free drink with purchase of an entree when you check in”)

This is a great way to reward your best customers, as well as those that are most likely to spread the word about your establishment through word of mouth as well as the tips section on Foursquare associated with your business.

Like anything, Foursquare is not for everybody. Being a Blackberry user, it takes to much effort for me to start the app, and go through the check-in process the few times I remember to do it.

The second reason I don’t favor the app, is I don’t really want to broadcast to the world, or even my friends where I am throughout the day. For social people, it may seem awesome to find other people in your immediate are to connect and Foursquare bond with, for me, not so much.

If you are a local bar, coffe shop, or restaurant in Salt Lake City and want to learn more about how to use Foursquare to promote your business you should contact Nigel Swaby. You can reach Nigel by phone @ 801-634-4950.

To your success,
Kevin Davis

Creating Clear User Interface Designs With Mockflow.com

Kevin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 06:43:48 +0000

One of the challenges in outsourcing is describing how you would like a website or application to look visually.

Sure, you could mockup a site in Powerpoint, Frontpage, or Word but I have found a great tool that we use at GurusForHire.com that really helps speed things up and define the interface crystal clear.

It is from a site called Mockflow.com.

Mockflow is software that helps you create what is called a wireframe. Basically, it is the layout of your website or software interface. You can also interlink multiple screens to create a workflow and test interactions between the screen to make sure the flow seems right before you get into heavier development.

Mockflow Wire Frame 1

The software includes many of the building blocks for user interfaces for various platform including Cell Phones, Facebook, websites, and Windows or Mac software.

We used it when designing our user interface for our Facebook Squeeze Page Generator software. It allowed me to create the interface that made the most sense to me with very little effort, and ten turn the design over to our graphic designer to flesh out the actual design in Photoshop. After the design was done in Photoshop, it was then handed over to our developer to slice it and put the logic behind the application to generate the FBML code for the squeeze page.

We have also used it with a few local clients here in Salt Lake, modeling a website in real-time, and then turning the wireframe design over to the designer/developer to turn it into a reality overnight. Mockflow has both a free version and paid version. I have upgraded to the paid version for the added features. Note: none of the links included in this post are affiliate links and I am not being compensated by MockFlow.com.

Sidenote: If Mock Flow would like to send me a t-shirt or some other SWAG, that would be awesome!

Mockflow Wireframe 2

The tool I use the most in working with our outsourcing team is Jing from Techsmith. Jing is one of those free tools, I couldn’t live without. It is installed on all my laptops and desktop, and I use it many times a day. Basically, it is a mini Camtasia that record shorter clips and sits on your desktop ready at the flick of the mouse. Jing is great in conjunction with Mockflow to walk through your thoughts of the wireframe design before you turn it over to the designer.

To your success,
Kevin

Creating A Custom Background For Your Twitter Profile

Kevin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:15:48 +0000

While content is king, presentation is queen, and that goes for Twitter profiles as well. While people are interested in what wit you can provide in 140 characters, they are also more likely to remember you, if you are branding yourself and your business as well.

Twitter is more limited than most social media sites, but one way you can brand yourself, your business and your website is with a custom Twitter background. While you cannot include active links as part of the image background, you can include URLs, and Bio to help people find your other websites even if they have to type it in. A photo or logo as helps connect with the Twitter follower that is reading your tweets.

Custom backgrounds don’t stop with Twitter either, at GurusForHire.com we also provide our clients custom backgrounds for Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and Ustream.

Here are a few examples of backgrounds we have done:

My Twitter Profile
My YouTube Channel
My MySpace Profile

Bob Pendleton’s Twitter Profile
Bob Pendleton’s Custom Blog Design

90 Day Social Blueprint Twitter Profile

Trading Trainer Twitter Profile
Trading Trainer YouTube Channel

As part of the Blog 30 Challenge, we are currently offering a 25% discount on any of our services at GurusForHire.com. This also includes backgrounds for Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and Ustream.

To get the discount, simply enter the coupon code blog30 when checking out on Google Checkout.

We will probably run the discount through the end of the month, so don’t miss out.

To your success,
Kevin

Mobile Social Media With Tarpipe.com

Kevin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 21:41:27 +0000

Many times when I am away from home & the computer (it does happen), I will find something that catches my interest that I want to share with friends and followers. A lot of times, it is something to do with good marketing or bad, or “offline social media” such as a bumper sticker or sign.

While I have have the Twitter and Facebook app on my Blackberry the easiest way i have found to share photos is through a site called Tarpipe.com. If you have heard of Yahoo Pipes and how it can be used to aggregate RSS feeds, the tarpipe interface is very similar. Some people find it very confusing, but once you get the hang of it, it can actually be pretty easy.

I have setup a workflow in my Tarpipe account to accept an email with a photo attachment. basically the email I send has a headline/title for the subject line, the body contains the tags I want to use, and then finally the photo attachment.

Tarpipe then gives me a special email address to send the photos to the new workflow. I simply add that email address to my contact list, and give the name Flickr Twitter to remember it.

Now when I send an email to the new email address the following process gets kicked off.

Tarpipe recieves the email
The attachment gets sent to Flickr using the subject line as the title and the body text as the tags
The attachment gets sent to 23HQ using the subject line as the title
The attachment gets sent to Photobucket using the subject line as the title
The attachment gets sent to Pikeo using the subject line as the title and the body text as the tags
Next the picture url from Flickr is sent to my Bit.ly account and shortened and then forwarded to Twitter
At Twitter, the Subject of the email is used for the status update along with the shortened URL from Bit.ly
Next, the Status URL from Twitter is sent over to Delicious.com
A new bookmark on delicious is created using the Twitter status URL, the subject from the email as the description and the tags from the body of the email as the tags.
Finally at the end, seconds later, the workflow sends me an email letting me know that everything has been processed.

So now, with one photo email, I have updated 4 photo-sharing sites, Tweeted on Twitter with a shortened bit.ly tracking link back to Flickr photo and bookmarked my Twitter status update on Delicious.com.

Below are a couple screenshots of the workflow on Tarpipe described above.

Cellphone Picture Workflow - Part 1

Cellphone Photo on Tarpipe - Part 2

Since I am also using the Twitter application on my Facebook profile as well as LinkedIn, the tweets and a link to the photo shows up there as well.

Hope you found this post useful. Check out Tarpipe.com when you get a chance.

To your success,
Kevin

Managing Your Social Media

Kevin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 03:28:10 +0000

As usual, I got a product launch email today, this one came from John Reese but was promoting a new product being released by Ryan Deiss and what used to be an out-of-work housewife. As the story goes, she now make $10K a month from her iPhone. The product is involving Social Media Management, the flavor of the year along with local marketing.

We also provide social media management with our team here at GurusForHire.com. The video got me thinking what other social media tasks could we be providing as a service, and I came across a blog post from John Jantsch on DuctTapeMarketing.com with his Social Media Schedule.

John brought up several things that we haven’t yet started using, but will be starting Monday. The first is Backtype.com, which tracks engagement for a website. Below is a graph showing the impact of daily blogging on KevinHDavis.com and I was shocked to see some of the retweets and sharing of my posts outside of the #blog30 community.

Engagement for KevinHDavis.com

For press releases each month, he recommends Pitchengine, or PRWeb. We use PRLog.org on a monthly basis more for an SEO strategy. We have many press releases on PRLog that have been holding positions for local keywords for over a year.

For Twitter, we no longer use Tweetdeck, and now mainly rely on HootSuite.com for managing not only Twitter, but Facebook profile/fan page and Linkin status updates. Our team used to post daily success quotes for me manually each morning, now we have streamlined the process and once a month they schedule all of the quotes for each day in Hootsuite.

While I have an account on FriendFeed, I haven’t been consciously using it too much. I am planning to look more into that in the near future.

Today, I uploaded a few new presentations to Slideshare, and several ebooks/reports to Box.net. Both of these integrate with my LinkedIn account so as I add files, they automatically show up on my profile. They can also be setup to notify Twitter and Facebook when new files are added.

To assist people I meet to connect with me on the different social media sites I belong to, I have setup a separate website Kevin Davis Online.

If you would like help branding yourself on social media, or with web/graphics design be sure to visit us at GurusForHire.com.

I really appreciate everyones sharing of posts this month. I know some people in this months challenge are wondering whether or not they will stick with it after the 30 days is up, but I can tell you from past experience daily blogging is worth it if you are looking for more traffic to your site.

To you success,
Kevin

P.S. What is your social media schedule/strategy? Please leave a comment and let us know.

Tool To Integrate GotoWebinar with AWeber and 1ShoppingCart

Kevin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 04:09:00 +0000

With the local launch of my 90 Day Social Blueprint course, and our semi-weekly tech Thursday webinars, we have been doing a lot of webinars. 6 a month to be precise. I have also been talking to several local marketers here in Salt Lake about integrating more webinars into their sales funnel to improve conversions.

One of the challenges in using GotoWebinar is how to put those webinar registrants on an autoresponder to list to follow up and get them on the webinar. In the case of webinars for existing members, that’s a little more easier, but new leads coming in, in the past you would only have them sign up on the GotoWebinar registration page, and then not follow up.

So tonight I queried the mighty Google to find a solution. First solution was from well known Robert Plank. Looks like a solid solution and works with any autoresponder that uses an html signup form. Price tag… $97.00. If you were able to snag it during prelaunch on Warriors forum it was $47. Sadly, I spend very little time in Warriors these days.

If you want to check out Robert Script, CLICK HERE. Note, that is not an affiliate link I just think this is a solid solution with support if the next one doesn’t work, and you don’t have development staff to make it work. you could probably still get it fixed on Rentacoder.

Anyway, the second solution claims to work with both AWeber and 1ShoppingCart. I have downloaded it, but haven’t started testing it yet. The price is right though…FREE! OK, you do need to optin to download and in some peoples(Google) eyes that is not free. So, if you want to give the free script a go, you can download it by CLICKING HERE.

If you are using webinars on a regular basis, I think these scripts are an awesome solution to increase your list and get more people on webinars through effective followup sequences.

Hope you find them useful,
Kevin

The Results Are In…

Kevin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 07:56:12 +0000

You may have noticed a sudden increase of blog posts here on my blog at KevinHDavis.com. If you are enjoying the new flood of content, please let me know in the comments. Sometime at the end of May, I was talking to my good friend Robby LeBlanc on the phone and he mentioned he was going to start blogging daily as part of a 30 day blog challenge Jeanette Cates was co-hosting. I had never participated in a 30 day blog challenge before, but I have done several 30 day Squidoo challenges with Tiffany Dow in the past.

With a Squidoo challenge, you pick a topic, build a lens and then do everything in your power to increase it’s lesrank or traffic and the one with the top lensrank or traffic at the end wins the bragging right. Through the process you learn many new things along the way. The spirit of the challenge brings out the competition in you.

A blog challenge is a little different, it is more like a marathon. The challenge here is to post at least one blog post each day. The idea behind it, at least on my side is the 30day of repetition will create a habit that I then continue after the 30 days. I used to run my blog using RSS2Blog, an auto blogger posting articles several times a day. When I felt like it, I would make a post here and there.

Late last year, I recieved an email from another friend here in Salt Lake that attends my monthly training, Sara Lambrinos from Sites By Sara. Her question for me “When are you going to start posting real stuff instead of these articles from 2 years ago”.

Ouch! So in December I shut the autoblogger down and commited to blogging on a regular basis. January started OK, and then quickly went downhill. Thanks to the challenge, I am now starting to actually enjoy writing each day.

So, back to the title of the post. How has the challenge affected my site stats?

May/June Stats Comparison

As you can see from the screenshot of analytics, everything has improved but Pages/Visit, however this is pretty close to the same period as last month.

Traffic is up 55%
Bounce Rate down 12%
New Visits up 14%

Now my blog isn’t some super popular one yet, but it has basically been dormant for 6 months. Nothing like a good challenge to put some wind in my sails. The blog posts are also going out to my fan page at http://www.facebook.com/onlinemarketingconsultants through the Networked Blogs application on Facebook, and of course the #Blog30 updates on Twitter.

I also gained 31 new subscribers to my list so far this month with 10 double optins. Hopefully they are continuing to get some value out of the new posts.

My RSS feed subscribers has actually gone down according to Feedburner from 1391 on June 1st to 1374 on June 16th, which I think is kind of strange but Feedburner reporting can be kind of glitchy sometimes.

UPDATE: Also checked banner ad stats for the blog

Banner Ad Stats for KevinHDavis.com

Anyway, a big thanks to Jeanette Cates, Robby LeBlanc and Sara Lambrinos.

Keep on blogging,
Kevin

Kevin Davis - Speaker, Social Media Expert, Marketing Consultant | Salt Lake City, Utah

Converting Info Product DVDs To MP4V with Handbrake

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