Adding Images to Your Blog Post

Every blog post you write benefits greatly if you add an image, video, clipart or graph. Engaging your reader on more than one sensory level peeks their interest, understanding and assists in eye comfort while reading text online.

In this short video, I tell you how to upload an image, show you how to resize it and how to move it from side to side.

Categories and Tags

Are you paying attention?One of the confusing issues that clients run into, is understanding categories and tags. It’s very easy to immediately get into too much detail trying to list topics when worrying about SEO (search engine optimization).

To get beyond the fear of not having enough words to trigger better SEO, think of your categories and tags in the same way you’d think of a good, clean, filing system. For instance, the word “State” could be a category, with a child categories of “California”, “Colorado”,  and “Texas”.

Your keywords, or tags, would be, “Denver”, “Los Angeles”, “Dallas”, “Fort Worth”, etc.  In addition to these tags, you would also list what topic was that you were discussing in regards to those categories and tags. If you were a mystery shopper, you’d mention specific malls, clothing items, restaurants, etc.

When the search engines index your website, having good categories and tags makes it clean and more efficient to list the content of your site in a more complete and in-depth manner.

When ever you post your blog,  select your category or categories, add your keywords, then save. When keywords are used often, they will automatically start showing as suggestions below the field that you’d enter a new keyword. Select those first, before you make up new keywords. Having more keywords is NOT the way to attract a search engine. More keywords without strong keywords (that appear consistently) start to look like spam and your site could suffer in its ranking because of this.

Believe it or not, you can lose your readers too, when there are too many keywords listed at the end of each of your blog posts. Your site starts to appear technical and more geared towards search engines than it does for the reader. Having clean, consistent categories and tags helps the reader to find what they need without leading to confusion. It also keeps the visual clutter down!

Here’s a great video I ran across on YouTube from Corey Dolbey on Categories and Tags. Enjoy …

 

How to Spot a Scam Email Link

WorriedMost people are good people and are very trusting. They wouldn’t dream of harming someone else on purpose and stealing from them – especially over the holidays, is the lowest of low.

However, every major holiday brings a massive push by the scumbags of the world to do just that – steal your money, your identity and your peace of mind.

This is a very easy, simple trick that you need to know about if you don’t already. Even if you get an email that looks like it came from a friend, DO THIS. Hold your mouse over the link to see what the REAL link actually is. It will pop up in a little comment window as your mouse is held over the link listed. EVEN IF the URL looks legitimate, that is only text. The actual link will be embedded inside that text.

(You might need to turn your sound down a little bit. The recording is louder than I intended it to be.)

Understanding Your Google Analytics

Google AnalyticsHaving statistics and understanding your statistics are two very different things. Many of my customers are concerned that their site is being tracked so that they know how many visitors have visited their pages.

The problem is, that just knowing how many people have visited your site is really information that you can work with intelligently. After searching for many different video tutorials, I’ve landed on one that is rich with information and is very easy to understand.

It’s important that you pay attention to what is being explained in this excellent tutorial so that you can better understand better what you are looking at and what you need to change and why.

Each target market is different and behaves differently. Understanding your target market will help you to identify and clarify what you need to do when you compare your online efforts with your stats. Keep in mind that your website is like a growing organism. What worked this month or season, just might not work the next season. It takes a lot of tracking over a period of time to reveal these trends.

Google Analytics help you to see visually, these patterns, over what period of time and in conjunction with your specialized marketing efforts. Whether it’s a Craigslist ad, a paid advertisement, Googe AdSense, or word of mouth, or even a Google search – you’ll be able to determine what is the most successful and then focus on continuing to build that marketing strategy.

About 20 minutes long, you’ll want to keep your paper and pen handy, because while he’s explaining these analytics, he’s also giving you terrific insights and marketing tips that you need to pay attention to.

The Magical Marketing Power of Videos Online

The old ways of doing business are rapidly changing which makes old, static websites obsolete. As a business owner or hobbyist that desires an online presence along with the ability to earn extra income, a mind-boggling number of tools have entered into our Internet lives.

WordPress is one of the leading tools that continue to keep pace with this ever-changing cyber-landscape. Even though the platform is relatively simple, many people resist making the change because they are fearful of accepting the responsibility of updating their own sites or having the control to change their pages as they need to. Now that control has been placed back in the hands of the business owner many shutter at the thought of yet, “another learning curve” as they learn how to post their own blogs or update pages.

The beauty of WordPress is that any level of student or professional can update their site and do anything from edit simple text to editing code. It’s up to you how much control you want over your site and how it functions.

Imagine bearly knowing how to use email, yet being able to update your own website!

Video tutorials are the perfect solution for beginners and for advancing users. Whether it’s learning how to post your blog on your own website or learning how to create your own WordPress theme – there are tutorials available online.

As a service to my clients, I’ve created quick, easy tutorials on simple WordPress tasks that every user needs to know.  The beauty of a video tutorial is that you can replay, stop, backup, and follow along—something that any student hesitates to bother their teacher with!

You can find these tutorials HERE.

YouTube has hundreds of tutorials on everything you can imagine, including WordPress. Be sure to look there as well, and when you find a tutorial that you like, be sure to subscribe to their channel so as not to lose your place when you want to go back and learn something else.

As a bonus thought, while you are enjoying the free tutorials, notice how people present themselves and their subject matter.  Do you find yourself engaged, or put-off by several seconds of introductory music? What background music did you find the most complementary to your tutorial? Personally, as I noticed my own reactions, I found myself annoyed with music beforehand, but would tolerate it to some degree. It really turned me off if there was a long introduction from the person that was in essence, an advertisement about how smart and qualified they were. (I just wanted to know the information, get in and get out.)

That’s why my videos contain just the basic bits of information that get right to the point. Now, understand that doesn’t mean this is the right way – its just one way, and you may find that you like more of a production in your video tutorial.

Why do I mention this? Because while you are receiving the benefits of someone else’s work, notice the immediate value that providing that video has added to that particular person’s business.

If you are interested in making videos from your desktop computer but don’t have the software, here’s a free software that you can use: http://camstudio.org/ (you’ll notice me using this software in my own video tutorials)

In the WordPress videos, you’ll see me showing you how to do something directly from the WordPress Dashboard. The software is simply capturing what it is that I’m doing (or seeing) on my computer. Do you have a PowerPoint that you wish was a video? Set up your PowerPoint slide show and just narrate it while the recorder captures your desktop presentation and ta-da! You now have a narrated video of your PowerPoint presentation.

Now that you’re thinking in terms of personally providing tutorials – what else can you do with them?

Continue noticing what you like and what you don’t like, such as:

  • Video length
  • Narration, or no narration
  • The “flavor” of the narration (formal or casual)
  • Music or no music?
  • What kind of music?
  • Website address before or after or just in the description of the video?
  • Credits?
  • Edited or non-edited (formal or casual)
  • How does the video make you FEEL?
  • How does the video make you THINK?

Next, think about the delivery of the video. How did you like going to a website to view a tutorial section?  Would this work on your site? Would you want to add a membership site feature to your site where clients would pay a modest fee to access your materials?

What would it be like if you had a series of tutorial videos and visitors could subscribe to them for them to be delivered straight to their inbox without having to hunt through YouTube for them? This allows you to build your database of names for future marketing – and this database is direct to your target market who value the information you are providing, or they wouldn’t have subscribed!

Now think in terms of educational or motivational videos. Begin with free and build your database, then introduce or up-sell to video products that your customers purchase and have delivered directly to them.

Did you know that by the year 2014 videos are expected to represent 90% of our Internet communication and represents over $50B in expected business? Even Amazon is already accepting video reviews as an option instead of written reviews.

What would you rather do, read emails or watch a video? Think about it! How would video revolutionize your newsletter? Your online products? Video blog? Online conferencing?

The opportunities are endless now to not just make simple tutorial videos, but to communicate to a worldwide audience in real-time and through videos with web-conferencing (which can be recorded and repurposed as a video product)

The opportunities are endless for us now as we enter into a whole new world Online of communication and interaction. Nothing builds a relationship with your audience like personally interacting with them face-to-face except with a video.

Call me to brainstorm the possibilities for your specific product, book topic, or service. In the same way that I graphically record conference sessions, I gather information and resources to visually communicate your business to others.

Contact me for a FREE ½ hour consultation.