Mainly, what they don’t want you doing is to create an iTunes library of say, a gazillion songs, and synch them up with your iPod, then take it over to your friends computer and dump those songs into his iTunes library. 

You might remember the problems that Napster had with peer to peer sharing in the 90’s.  Well, iTunes protects their songs a couple of ways.  For one, if you buy a download from the iTunes store, it appears in their proprietary format known as an ACC file. 

This is one way they prevent you from sharing it.  Next they don’t allow your friend to hook up his iPod to your iTunes account or vice verse.  That is why your iPod will only work with your iTunes account on one machine. 

Well, that got me wondering;  since I have an early version of the IPod Touch and I am thinking about getting an iPhone,  will I be able to put songs on both devices out of the same iTunes account? 

I did a little research and found a way to create a separate library.  In method 3 of Apple’s support article called, “How to Use Multiple iPods, iPads, or iPhones With one Computer” they recommend setting up a separate library.

To do this, close out your ITunes if it is running.  Now while you re-open it, hold down the shift key on your PC. 

When prompted, click Create Library.  Now you must name the new library with an alternate file name like itunes_2011. 

Now to prevent iTunes from populating your new library with all of the old library media, I find it best to make a change under preferences. 

So, in iTunes click edit and trace down to preferences and click to open it.  Then find the advanced tab and look for a checkbox next to the line that says: “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library”. 

Here, you want to deselect that checkbox if it is already checked. 

Now you are ready to add media to your new library.  Click file> add file to library or add folder to library and choose the songs out of your existing iTunes media folder. 

You can manually drag and drop to make this faster. Once you have gotten the new library just right, synch your device. 

Once done, quit Itunes.  Next hold down the shift key like before, while you open the program.

Now you will be prompted to Choose Library. Here is where Apple’s directions get a little murky.  They say you can switch back and forth by clicking open. 

Really, what I found is that you had to actually find the new library listed under my music > iTunes_2011.  Then click the itunes library file to open iTunes with the alternate library.

To open the original library, follow the same steps but choose the original iTunes folder when prompted.

With the availability of two libraries, you should be able to customize them so you won’t end up with duplicate libraries on two devices unless that is what you prefer. 

Hope this gave you some insight into how to work around the heavy safety precautions that Apple has in place for their products. A second library should help as you add iPods, iPads, and iPhones to your arsenal of media devices.    

By default, the latest version of WordPress comes with a standard header within the generic theme known as  – Twenty Ten 1.1 by the WordPress team

This might very well be all you want to bother with, and it looks much nicer than any other one that WordPress has used in the past.  Here is a picture of the default header graphic in the wordpress twenty ten theme.

If you want to be more adventuresome, you can add a header graphic to this page quite easily.  On your wordpress dashboard, go down the left sidebar til you see the word “appearance”.  Click the dropdown arrow and select header.

Once you have opened the custom theme page, you will see the default header graphic and some options below it.  You have the option to upload a .jpg image that will overwrite the existing one.  Just be sure that the dimensions are 940 x 198.  That is 940 pixels wide by 198 pixels tall.

The other options are to activate one of the other graphics by clicking the radio button next to it and click the save changes button at the bottom.

Once you have loaded the new banner, you will have the stationary and you are well on your way to publishing on the web.  Happy Blogging!

Landing pages, also known as squeeze pages, are unique in that they focus on just one aspect of what you have for sale. 

For instance, if I am selling healthy pet food, I may have a squeeze page that sells the benefits of pet food enhanced with probiotics. This page will be optimized for key words. 

That means that your page will be sprinkled with some of the most highly sought after key words and key phrases so when people search google for pet food with probiotics, your page has a higher likelihood of being found. 

Another reason you will be more easily found is because you will be using the blog as your platform to build this page. 

WordPress blogs from www.wordpress.org are the most common blog pages out there. 

I know there are many of you wondering why you would want to use a blog instead of a typical web page.  

Well, there are several good reasons but the best one in my mind has to do with ease of use. 

The wordpress platform is known as a content management system.  A typical blog has pages upon pages of content which can be organized like an e-magazine. 

Creating these pages can be as easy as writing a handful of emails.  These pages or blog posts can be formatted nicely into a theme provided by WordPress. 

What that means is that you don’t have to know anything about coding or web design.  You just merely choose a free theme from the multitude (in the millions) of themes.

The second good reason to have a blog instead of a web page is that a blog is dynamic and interactive and most webpages are static and one directional. 

Think of a typical webpage as a brochure.  These pages are expensive to set up and cost you money every time you want to update the content. 

Usually there is no place for a visitor to comment and this creates a barrier between the reader and the publisher. 

The dynamic, interactive nature of blogs allows for a conversation to occur and this can mean constant changes and updates to the content on the blog/website.  

Because the content is ever changing, the search engine must send its robots over to index the content after every change.  

So what does this have to do with making a squeeze page?  Well, most of the benefits to blogging mentioned above will apply to the single page with video that we will be making. 

There will be search terms within the page that will help you get found by the search engine. 

There will be links to an order form and thank-you page that will be indexed by Google as well. 

And thirdly, we will be putting video up at YouTube and linking to it.  Since Google owns YouTube, this will also work in your favor. 

So, go ahead, if you haven’t already…register a domain name and have it hosted. 

Once you do this, have the blog attached. (download latest software at www.wordpress.org )

Keep in mind that we want the blog to be your homepage so when you attach the blog, it should be part of your address.

For instance, make it look like this www.yourname.com  Not, www.yourname.com/blog  I hope this helps. 

Tune in next time when we will talk about how to put a custom banner on the WordPress theme and add video to the body of the page. 

You might be wondering what will I want to do with a landing page.  Well, the purpose of a landing page is to attract traffic to some information that is narrow and specific. 

The way you will do this is to first determine your field of expertise.  This is where you are going to build a page around a specific topic within your field of expertise. 

For instance, this blog post is about my passion in Internet Marketing but the target audience would be for those searching in Google for terms like “landing page”, “squeeze page”,   

The most effective landing pages also known as squeeze pages, involve some search optimization.  What that means is that the key words or key phrases you will be using in your page are targeted to what people are searching for on Google. 

“SEO”, or search engine optimization, is the science of designing the page to fit a niche or area where people are searching. 

It is a delicate matter since you want it to be broad enough to be very popular but specific or narrow enough so that it can be found in a sea of hits from the search engine.      

There are shelves and shelves of books on the subject of SEO and it really goes beyond the scope of this article. 

Suffice it to say that although it is an important subject, our focus will be more on how to get the page up and what to do with it once you do. 

So, let’s say you want to create a page for an information product that teaches people how to broadcast a live webinar. 

Through the SEO we talked about earlier, I found the keyword “webcast” to be a strong term for broadcasting on the web.  So, I went over to godaddy, www.godaddy.com and found that the URL www.webcastworkshop.com was available.

I went ahead and registered the domain name and had a wordpress blog attached as described in my previous post. 

These are the preliminary steps involved for building a homepage and more specifically, having the wordpress blog act as a landing page. 

Join me next time as I take you through the process of doing the instructional video, adding some ad copy, then putting a form in your call to action at the bottom of the page. 

Until then, be thinking of a particular niche within your field of expertise, where you can build a page around it.  Once you have an idea, go ahead and secure a domain name.

That’s half the battle.  Once you have that set up, you are well on your way to having a tremendous sales page with video.  Stay tuned.

Many of you don’t realize that WordPress makes a good landing page for people who want a place to publish some sales copy with video.

Most of you know WordPress for its blogging capabilities but what I want to show you in this tutorial is how to use it for a sales page.  

You will need a couple of things to get started. These are basic things that everybody who wants to do business on the internet needs to have anyway.

 First, you will want to have your own domain. Once you register and host a domain name you will need to attach the latest version of WordPress to the domain. Www.wordpress.org  

Most hosting services like blue mountain, or host gator can have this attached in just a few minutes. If you want to pay me I can have this part set up for you, email me at jazzkat@comf5.com and I will get you up and running. 

Keep in mind, your domain should be your own and not part of the free blogging services like wordpress.com The reason is that you will want to have full control over your website even though you are using a blogging platform.

 Next you will need a camera to create a video. The webcam on your laptop works fine for most talking head videos. I like the flip camera but mainly you will want to create useful video files, most commonly called .AVI or .MOV These are the most common formats for windows and macs.  

So, finally, you may want to brand your page. Here is where you may want to enlist the services of a graphics design artist. I know you are thinking that this must be expensive. 

 Well, you will only need to be spending money on this, one time, and it will become your brand for your landing page, blog, newsletter, email template and so on.

Think of it like a letterhead for office stationary. This one-time expenditure will build you something permanent and it will become your branded logo so it is money well spent.  

My mentor does graphic design and you can find him at www.alberthallado.com He has built several brands for me and you should stop by his site. 

So, for a recap, here is what you will need to get started: 

1. Register and host your website name. www.yourname.com  
2. Set your webcam to record or use a camcorder or flip camera to record some video. 
3. Finally, have a banner graphic designed that represents your brand. See www.jazzkats.com or  www.multimediaprofessor.com  

This may all seem a bit daunting to you at first but you will soon find that there are close to a billion blogs on the web and many of them have this setup in common.

The final product will be a laser targeted landing page that will be optimized for the search engines and will have an obvious call to action at the bottom. There, you will have them join, sign up, buy, subscribe, or simply become a member of your mailing list.  

I will give you the basis of a one page sales letter but you will easily be able to revert it back to a blog or e-zine once the page has served its initial purpose. 

Today I am going to backtrack a little and show you how to upload and host a video of your own content at YouTube.

There are three very good reasons why you might want to do this.  One is for convenience.  YouTube has made it extremely easy to open an account, set up a channel and upload video.  Once you have posted video on YouTube it is a simple process to move it to your blog.

Another positive feature is that when you post on YouTube you increase your chances of being found by Google since Google owns YouTube.  And as a search engine, YouTube is now second only to Google in popularity.  It has climbed ahead of MSN and Yahoo. 

Thirdly, the encoder at YouTube handles high definition and encodes those big files on the fly.  This also means that you won’t have trouble with bandwidth since you will be hosting the clips at their server and linking to them.  More on that in a moment.

To get started at YouTube you will need a gmail account.  The nice folks at Bright Hub give you directions if you need them.

http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/1817.aspx

Now log into YouTube, www.youtube.com  and set up an account there.  Your new Gmail account will link you to YouTube and you should be good to go.

Once you have your account customized, you should create some video and make sure the clips are in the right format for upload to Youtube.  They accept many types of video files including these…QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files

According to the folks at Youtube they recommend the following:

“We specifically recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 640×480 resolution with MP3 audio.”

To simplify the process, I am going to recommend that you work with AVI files and you can shoot beautiful clips with a camera called the “Flip Mino HD”

The Flip cameras allow you shoot and upload as easily as anything out there.  I will probably do an entire blog post on this camera soon.

So, over at YouTube, once you

click on the upload button:

Then browse to the clip where you will then click upload:

It takes a few minutes depending on the size.  YouTube limits the size to 2 GB and 15 minutes.  This is 30% more than they were offering just a short time ago.

You should then title the clip and give it a description.  Videos themselves are not searchable so Google depends on the tags, title, and descriptions to do their indexing. 

This is all I want to hit you with today because I don’t want to overwhelm you with much more. This info will get you up and running.  And because this is such an important topic, I promise to go into some detail as it relates to information marketing and getting your business found on Google. 

Stay tuned…

First, you should choose a relevant video from YouTube. Once you have opened it, you will see a group of icons just below the controls on the video. They say “like” “add to” “share” and “embed”. You should click the button that says “embed”.

Next you will get an embed code with some options just below. These include dimensions for the player and color schemes for the controls. You should pick the dimensions 640 x 505. This is one that is big on the screen but doesn’t overlap the sidebar. Then choose a color that fits the theme of your blog.

Finally, click within the embed code field and it will turn blue. You want to copy that code using <ctrl + c> or <edit + copy>.

Then you will go to your blog dashboard. Create a post and open the HTML tab on the editor.

Place the cursor in the blank field and paste the code into it. <ctrl + v>, or <edit + paste>

Next, you must click “save draft” button on the right. Before you publish, you should view the post to see if it is positioned right and if it correctly embedded.

Once satisfied, click publish and you will have it playing on your blog.

So, please go to www.divshare.com and test out this freeware. I haven’t checked out if there is an affiliate program but I think it is worth looking into.

Once you set up an account you will be prompted to leave a cell phone number so they can text you a pin number along with a cell phone offer which I chose to opt out of. Enter your pin to confirm your account and then you can go to your dashboard and use their uploader tool to browse to an MP3 file on your computer that you want to upload.

1.

Next go to your uploaded media (the MP3 ) to load it into a player.  This is done by right clicking the embed link next to the MP3 file.

2.

The next screen will give you a choice of players and skins.  By clicking a radio button you will be given some embed code. 

3.

Finally, you will take the embed code you have just copied to the clipboard and past it into the exact place in your blog post where you want the audio player to appear.  Be sure to use the html tab to insert this code.

4.

5.

Enjoy your new audio player!

By the way, if you like the music visit Mike Stewart’s site for podsafe music you can use on your site @ http://twobuckthemes.com/1dollar/