The Highlights

• Video is being discovered through search engines as much as through social networks
• YouTube is the second largest search engine. Would people find anything of yours on YouTube? Or just your competitors?
• 50% of visitors watch the home page video before taking any other action
• 46% of shoppers who view video have a larger order value
• 40% of total video viewership occurs outside the original posting of the video

Check out the slides if you want a quick reference and you have already watched the video too many times! Thanks.

What are you thinking right now?

Snow Leopard comes with screen recording, or screencasting, capabilities natively! Open QuickTime player and under file you will see “new screen recording”. The recording will be saved as a quick time file and can easily be posted to your YouTube account through the share menu option.

It’s incredible how easy it is to make a screencast out of the box now with a mac. You have the isight camera, native screencasting software, and imovie if you want to spice it up. Once it is made, it’s just as easy to share it on YouTube and other sites.

I will make a screencast on how to do this in the near future. Be sure to check back!

For my first post I will list my own 10 reasons to blog. They should hopefully provide you with good reasons why you should blog. I would like to point out this idea came from an 11yr old blogger, Gloson Teh, from Malaysia who posted his list of reasons to blog (image taken from his blog).

Here is my list!

1. Keep a Record of My Progress

A blog is a great way for me to see where I have been and how I am improving. With my blog, I can see results! I can measure many metrics like number of visitors, average time on site to show how interesting my writing is, number of subscribers who think my stuff is good enough to have it sent to them, what my popular categories are to see what areas I am gaining ground in, and how many links I am getting to see how my content is spreading. There are so many other ways to look at metrics but those are just some to name off the top of my head. I am also excited to look back in a few years and see the journey and all that I have done thus far!

2. Learn, Learn, Learn

An interesting blog has to have interesting stuff! By having a blog I get to continually learn new and interesting stuff, so I have something to write. I also get to learn things that I am passionate about and share it immediately with others.

3. Connect With Others

Blogging opens you up to a community. I enjoy finding blogs about the same or complimentary topics that I am. There are a lot of great people out there who love to share and just be friends. One day, one of them might help me out with something important that I would have not received help in without meeting them through my blog.

4. Improve My Writing Skills

Writing is an important skill for everyone to have. Blogging will help me learn to write clearly, develop an engaging vocabulary, and be able to illustrate complex ideas with a textual brush (how was that writing!) Although, I’ll cheat on occasion and use video because it is so powerful.

5. Inspire / Influence

The idea of being able to help someone or inspire someone to take action in a positive way because of something I said or did has always been a motivation for me. I hope I will do just that for a few people with my blog. I am excited to share my ideas with you, and I think some of them will be pretty good . If nothing more, I’m sure I’ll share great ideas that I have learned from others and pass them along to you.

6. Better Use of Time

Obviously the reasons listed so far are pretty good, which probably means blogging is a better use of my time than a lot of the other things I do. The coolest thing is I can actually blog while I do my other wasteful hobbies like watching TV. Until I become a master multi-tasker, at least I will be making good use of my time during commercials!

7. Earn Chocolate Shake Money

I absolutely love chocolate shakes. With this as my goal, it is obvious money is not my focus with this blog. Some people do care about making money with their blog and are very good at it, but a fair amount also fall into the trap of get rich quick. Blogging takes effort, of which I am going to put forth for all these reasons, and if I can earn a few chocolate shakes along the way bonus to me!

8. Have Fun Experimenting

Running this blog is going to be a lot of fun trying new things. I’m going to have fun seeing which topics people react to better, trying different writing styles, using different forms of content (videos, screencasts, images, maybe even some podcasts), dabbling with adsense and adwords, etc… You can count on me having fun!

9. Make a Front Door to Me Online

A blog is the best place to unite your online-self. I have my domain as my name and I have tried to use that same name across the web in all the networking, sharing, and user sites where I am involved. This way I can present myself in a consistent manner in so many different places and strengthen my own image and personal brand. My blog becomes the single place that I have complete control and can be the hub for all my digital interactions. My blog is the single place where you can find everything about me, my latest doings, where I am, and how you can best contact me.

10. Be Me

You will see me just be me in this blog. I will not be hiding behind any technological veil of anonymity. You will come to learn my real personality, beliefs, quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. I hope to get to know many of you as well.