Sunday, February 1, 2009

How to get traffic to your web site

By Rick Lomas

Since fast and affordable broadband internet connections are now commonplace, it makes sense to use the power of video to get traffic to your website. Statistics indicate that people, especially the younger crowd, spend more time online than watching TV. Video on the internet is not new, but it was traditionally just for entertainment. Now video is used widely for entertainment, instruction and to increase traffic to a website.

When making a video to drive traffic to your website consider this: Take a look at how other top ranked websites are using the power of video to increase traffic and sales. A video is an ideal way to demonstrate your product or service and get those important visitors to your website.

Keep in mind that the video is a representation of your company. Choose the people or images in your traffic driving video with care. Make sure they are pleasant. People are more interested in watching something pleasant. Using neutral accents is recommended. Keep in mind that humans listen faster than they speak, so don't speak too slowly; it will irritate your viewers. Try not to be too pushy with your sales message, aim for gently persuasive. Video works great for showing rather than just telling. Remember, a picture paints a thousand words!

Keep in mind that the video is a representation of your company. Choose the people or images in your traffic driving video with care. Make sure they are pleasant. People are more interested in watching something pleasant. Using neutral accents is recommended. Keep in mind that humans listen faster than they speak, so don't speak too slowly; it will irritate your viewers. Try not to be too pushy with your sales message, aim for gently persuasive. Video works great for showing rather than just telling. Remember, a picture paints a thousand words!

To realize the maximum benefit from your video you should consider posting your clip to mutiple video hosting sites. Some of the hosting sites provide a revenue sharing option. Posting your video to all of these available sites can be time consuming, but it is very effective.

Since you are using the video to get traffic to your website, be sure to show your URL at both the beginning and the end of the video clip. It is also possible to watermark your URL into your video. Once the video is produced, it is time to get it to the masses and use that video to increase your website traffic. Now is the time to get started. Jump in and produce a video that will effectively promote your site. Using video will increase traffic to your website, especially if it is picked up by other webmasters, and goes viral. Using video to get traffic to your website is effective and fun.

Once the video has been made you can download it and submit it to video hosting platforms all over the web. I find that with carefully chosen keyphrases you can get a number one in Google in less than 2 hours. The Animoto Software is online and free to use if you are only doing short videos, but I recommend getting the 'All Area Pass' which is very cheap and even cheaper if you use this Animoto referral code: 'xklrsoeg' which gets you a $5 discount

The fastest and most cost effective way to get your videos online to multiple video hosting platforms, automatically converted into podcasts and well distributed to multiple podcast directories, social bookmarked and automatically blogged is by using the awesome online service, Traffic Geyser, which has enabled me to get a Google number one in less than 4 minutes. - 16039

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Computer Tips - An Abundance Of Pyramid Schemes

By Rudolf Bauer

Are you a candidate for working at home on your computer? You might just be, but there are some hot issues you need to understand first. Not all companies or job sites have legitimate offers. This has become a hot topic as more people have become frustrated after finding out you have to pay so much money to work online. The advertisements in your email box tend to arrive quickly, but the money just never appears. One thing many are unaware of is that you never should pay to work online. You are supposed to be paid for work you do.

One issue that never seems to go away is the pyramid schemes. If you receive an email to join a program free and earn money from your down line, this sounds like the easiest way to make money. In all reality, it is a nightmare. You have to sign up and then "upgrade to a status member" by buying the product in question, whether you want it or not. After that, you are told you can make money from those under you, but only if they in turn buy the product as well. Now the pyramid scheme is taking place.

Therefore, to have twenty dollars, we might have to outlay sixty dollars. There is no pledge which someone underneath we is starting to buy a product. We could wait for until a pyramid intrigue falls detached as great as sense a profitable lesson, or we could stay divided as great as demeanour for a some-more bona fide approach to have money. Companies which compensate for work finished have been upon an Internet; we usually have to know where to demeanour as great as how to discuss it if they have been legitimate. A bona fide association already has people operative for them as great as has a great station upon an Internet as distant as people practice with a sold company.

There are many websites that offer opinions and advice for working at home and these websites or forums as they are called, offer some valuable information about specific companies and there reputation. A few years back, you may remember hearing about pyramids schemes and other types of moneymaking ideas. If everyone can make money then why are there so many people losing money on these types of pyramids? The answer is quite simple, who has money to buy sixty dollars worth of product that you will never use to make a few dollars.

Therefore, people may be hooked into signing up because the advertisement does not tell you that you have to buy something in order to make money. After you sign up, they continue to send you emails, telling you that someone else has joined under you, "upgrade now" to start making money. Well, in order to upgrade, you are going to have to buy that product and take a chance that someone else will feel the same way. In many cases, you are going to find out that you were the only one to do it.

After waiting to make money, you will give up and be out the sixty dollars for a product you never used. If people would just understand that pyramid schemes only benefit the original product owner, then maybe it would be easier to find real work at home jobs. The Internet would then become a place to find work at home jobs without the need to investigate before applying or signing up for anything. - 16039

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Ten Tips to Optimize Your Website Video Content

By Marcus Richard

People usually love video, millions of Americans consume videos online and same is the case world over. A consumer is most likely to keep in mind and refer to a video in comparison to a print advertisement. These days video making is very economical as compared to the cost of a traditional commercial. Broadband is getting enormous popularity worldwide. Now people can watch videos without long download times or quality issues. Present generation considers video to be a reliable source of news and information. Online video for them is second to nature. Here are a few tips/hints for optimizing your video:

1) It is recommended that you create and submit a transcript for users and the search engines, add a transcript to each video file you've uploaded via your Video Status page. Create a Keyword Rich Title for your Transcript; include a brief introductory paragraph/synopsis that describes the subject matter of your transcript (and video) and be sure to publish your transcript.

2) Make sure to include the keyword that you are targeting visitors for. Most often users will use the word "video" in conjunction with their search if searching for videos via the search engines. Therefore, it is important to use the word "video in your title, description, meta tags, and any other on-page text that you include with your video.

3) Off-page SEO, or, the techniques that one uses outside of the actual coding of the site itself (links, etc...), is just as effective for online video content as it is with any other webpage. Therefore, do your best to develop inbound links to your videos with the keywords that you are targeting in the anchor text of those links.

4) Video sitemaps are a great way for you to tell the search engines where all of your video content resides. With video sitemaps, you make it much easier for search engines to discover and index your online video in a rapid manner.

5) When hosting video content on your own, keep in mind that flash is next to impossible for search engines to read and understand. Try to work with a format that is not flash. However, the simplest way to enable video on your site is via the popular flash players. That being said, do your best to take advantage of the other tips for SEO so that search engines can easily understand what it is your video is about.

6) Keep a keyword friendly URL structure that uses a few of your main keywords in the url string. For example - website.com/videos/car-racing-video/ is much better than website.com/videos/?videoID=123kjh

7) The first thing that users see when browsing for or searching for videos is the video thumbnail. Research shows that the thumbnail you choose for your video can really effect the number of viewers that watch the video itself. Try to experiment with the thumbnails that you choose to see which ones create more interest and get seen more often by viewers.

8) When hosting videos on your own site, keep your videos one per page and put all the pages with videos into one directory. This combined with a video sitemap will help search engines find and index all of your important videos.

Besides the tips mentioned above for Video SEO, there are a few other guidelines to keep in mind:

9) With any SEO that you do online, choose keywords that you know users are searching for. Use keyword research tools to discover keywords and phrases that are most often searched for when looking for the information that you are creating.

10) Viewers who offer feedback are most likely to take the desired action on your video. This could be a good opportunity for you to submit fresh content, if the most popular videos were included months ago, it really helps. - 16039

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Adobe Photoshop Tips - Getting more info on Photoshop

By David Peters

Color Model: When you hear the term color model we are referring to the method from which we define or classify the color we are to work with. Examples of such are RGB, LAB, CMYK, etc. Color Space: A color space is simply a variation of your color model. For instance, within your RGB framework some common variations are, sRGB, Adobe RGB, and so on. Some of these spaces are better for display e.g. sRGB and Wide Gamut RGB while other color spaces are more suited to printing e.g. Color Match RGB and Adobe RGB. Now, it is important to note that every device in our work flow utilizes it's own unique color space. Meaning, while your monitor, scanner, and printer will base their color spaces basically on what we can see their actual gamut (range of colors) will differ. This is where we lose our consistency across devices. This is the problem we must attend to.

This is where professional level CMS's and entry level ones differ. At this point with the entry level you will scan in the printed target and the CMS will actually use the before generated scanner profile to correct the scan, so it can the correct your printed target. A professional level CMS will have a separate hardware device designed specifically for reading printed media targets.

Okay, now that we've created all of the profiles, time to implement them. You monitor profile should be getting applied upon start up by your operating system, so let's move on to your scanner. Scan in an image-once again using the exact same settings that were used to create the profile (other than resolution). In Photoshop choose Image Menu - Assign Profile. Then choose Profile: Your Scanner Profile. Having done all of the previous steps in Photoshop correctly, you should now be amazed at how your image colors changes to appear incredibly like the original that you've just scanned in. From here go to Image Menu - Convert to Profile and choose working RGB from the profile selections. This will convert your document to the native RGB working space of Photoshop. When printing you will apply the printer profile by once again choosing File - Print with Preview, select Document as your Source Space (which this time should be your Working RGB space) and in your Print Space choose Profile: Your Printer Profile. Remember once again to disable any color options in your printer driver. Finally, Print!

For those who do not know, Adobe Photoshop is a program designed to let people edit various images on their computers. Its primary purpose is to let people perform touch ups on pictures before printing them. Of course, each succeeding version of Adobe Photoshop included more and more tools which let people add effects and do various other things to their photographs. The Adobe Photoshop of today actually allows people to add sound and animation to their photographs for sharing on the internet. In the past, people who took bad pictures were stuck with them. A lot of things can go wrong in a picture. There's the usual red-eye, skewed angles, shaky focus and others. Adobe Photoshop was the tool that made all of these things disappear. With Adobe Photoshop, people can take pictures like amateurs and still produce images like pros!

Are you amazed by the awesome pictures posted in magazines and various Internet sites? Believe it or not, but even if you are not a professional photographer, you could also come up with similarly fantastic pictures. Introducing the Adobe Photoshop CS. The Photoshop CS is the more advanced and updated versions of the Adobe Photoshop software that has been around for quite some time. During the pre-computer era, you were perhaps engrossed into the hobby of cutting out pictures for better album presentations. But now, everything can be done using the computer. Even the cameras with negative films on it are slowly becoming obsolete, in favor of the modern camera types, where images are stored not on films but virtually through computer memories. In that case, how could you make good albums or edit pictures?

Perform non-destructive scaling with Smart Objects. You know how it is: You try to make an imported object larger, and it goes all blurry and pixelated. With Smart Objects, that's a thing of the past, because you can scale, warp and rotate vector graphics in a non-destructive way. Do neat things in perspective with the new Vanishing Point feature. With Vanishing point you can cut and paste in perspective. Now you're able to turn a photograph of a wall into a "virtual art gallery" with all the pictures correctly skewed, or move a window from one side of a building to another and, because the perspective is correct, have it look like it's always been there. You can also draw lines that taper off into the distance - wide nearest the camera, narrow further away - just like in "real life". Get more accurate printing. With Photoshop CS2, the people at Adobe have improved the printing workflow. Now it's even easier to configure your inkjet printer to get more accurate colour printing.

Graphicsoft.about.com: If you like free online tutorials, check out this site. All tutorial video clips are taught by Deke McClelland, who is also the trainer for several Adobe Photoshop CS2 training CDs. He's offering a free sample of his lessons on this site - you won't have everything you need, but the tutorials are enough to teach you some very important things and get you started. Included in the tutorial video clips are: learning about Vanishing Point, Camera Raw, Image Warp, Smart Sharpen Filter, Smart Objects, Adobe Bridge, Match Color and Shadow Highlight Filter. If you want to buy his tutorial videos, you'll get an exclusive 20% discount if you use the promotion code. PhotoshopSecrets - CS2 for Digital Photographers: If you want to learn how to maximize your digital photos with the use of CS2, this video tutorial is for you. Learn how professional photographers produce better-looking photographs and use their tricks to turn your photos from blah to blast. This tutorial video is a CD-ROM format, has 43 lessons and runs approximately 3.5 hours. - 16039

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Creating Presentations With PowerPoint's PhotoAlbum Feature

By Andrew Whiteman

PowerPoint presentations are a great way of communicating and influencing your clients, work colleagues or audience. One of the most important components within presentations are images. This article will show you how to take a group of images and turn them, as if by magic, into a PowerPoint presentation.

Naturally, creating a presentation in this way can only be done if the pictures relate very closely to the main content of your presentation. One example might be a presentation given during product training which requires detailed photographs of each product.

You begin by choosing New from the File menu which displays the New Presentation task pane on the right of your screen. In the New Presentation task pane window, you click on the option marked "Photo Album".

When the Photo Album dialogue appears, your first task is to locate the images. Images can be loaded from disk or imported directly from a scanner or digital camera. To specify where your images are located, just click on File/Disk or Camera/Scanner as required.

The imported images are ordered alphabetically, so you will almost certainly want to reorder them to coincide with the narrative of your presentation. This is achieved by selecting one or more images and clicking on the arrow icons to move them up or down in the order. You can also highlight one or more images and click Remove to delete them from the presentation.

Is the orientation of any of our images not quite right for this presentation? No problem. Just highlight the image then click on the rotate icon to change it. Not happy with the tonal qualities of an image? No problem. Click on the appropriate button to increase or decrease the contrast or brightness levels.

Not many presentations will consist solely of images. So the next step will be to specify the layout of text and images. The Picture Layout drop-down menu lets you choose one, two or four images per slide either with or without a title and a separate check-box lets you specify whether the title will be displayed below the image or above it.

Next, there is the shape of the image. In the drop-down menu labelled Frame Shape, you can choose rounded rectangle, bevelled, oval, corner tabs, square tabs and plaque tabs. If you don't want anything fancy, just leave the shape set to the default value of rectangle.

That's pretty much it. Click OK to exit the Photo Album dialogue box and PowerPoint will go ahead and create your presentation using the images and parameters you just specified. Add some text into the title box on each slide and your presentation is good to go! - 16039

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Division Of Labour With InDesign's Book Command

By Carol Alexander

Each you choose New from the File menu in Adobe InDesign, you may have noticed the option to create a new book without ever knowing exactly what a book is. Well, in fact, books are a really useful feature: they allow you to take a series of related InDesign document and process them as a single entity called a book. All documents in the book can then share the same resources such as paragraph and character styles, swatches, master pages, sections and page numbering.

Having created a book, by choosing File-New-Book, the Book panel is displayed. It contains a panel menu with all the necessary options. The first task is to add documents to the book: from the Book panel menu, choose "Add Document" and select the documents you want to be treated as part of the book. The book panel can now act as a launch pad for each of the documents it contains: simply double-click a document to open it.

The book file can now be saved. The book is a separate entity to the documents it contains and the documents in a book do not have to reside in the same location as the book or as each other. To save the book, choose Save Book in the Book panel menu.

Next, you need to specify which of the documents in the book will be treated as the style source. The document elected as the style source will be used as the master document in the process known as synchronisation whereby InDesign replaces the styles and colour swatches of all documents in the book with those in the style source document.

To control page numbering across the whole book, choose Book Page Numbering Options in the Book panel menu. The default behaviour is "Automatically Update Page & Section Numbers": this will number pages in the documents within the book according to the order in which they are listed in the Book panel.

Books are a great tool for division of labour since the fact that a document is part of a book does not stop it from being a regular InDesign document. If a book contains five documents, five different people can work on each of those documents and then, at the end, the whole book can be preflighted, printed and output as PDF as a single unit.

Both indexes and tables of contents can also be generated for an entire book as well as for a single document. Simply design and create the table of contents or index in the normal way but activate the option "Include Book Documents". - 16039

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An Honest Review Of The iPhone DVD - TheiPhoneDVD Software Pack

By Ronny Holson

Being a Mom with teenage kids, naturally I wanted to break into the iphone world to fit into the modern category. Not to admit, that is was great way to keep in touch with the kids and stop the excuses of "gee Mom you weren't home when I called".

Having said that, it didn't take long before I could see why everybody just has to have an iPhone. These gadgets are amazing. Being an "all or nothing person", not only did I have to have the iPhone I had to have whatever bells and whistles I could find. So while surfing the net to see what add ons there were, I came across the iPhone DVD. Now this really seemed intriguing. After reviewing all the information that was available I came to some conclusions.

What I Like About It: First of all I was shocked to see just how much one could download onto such a tiny little item. Having a basic knowledge of computers, I knew what their capabilities were, but I had no idea of the capabilities of the iphone.

The next impressive information I came across was that there was a company that had actually compiled a vast amount of information into one simple DVD, that I just would need to download. I proceeded to see exactly what was on this DVD, fully expecting that I wouldn't have any use for the majority of it. To begin with I knew I wanted the ring tones.

I was getting sick of hearing the same ones all the time. If you were in a crowd and an iphone rang three different people would go to answer their phone. So the Iphone DVD had me attracted to this feature, although I wouldn't need 30,000 of them. Then there was the wallpapers they would come in handy. To my surprise there were lots of things on this DVD that I was looking forward to having.

The more I read the more I knew I wanted it. My biggest drawback, was not wanting to get to the bottom of the page, where the cost of it would be. I pretty well figured it would be beyond my budget. Needless to say, when I finally did get the courage to look, and found out that sale price was less than $30. it didn't take long for me to place an order.

What I Didn't Like About It: It probably seems like I have said so many good things about the Iphone DVD, there is nothing left to be said. Well there's just a few things I didn't care for. The biggest issue was the adult content that kept showing during the advertisement.

My personal opinion was, that perhaps this could have been advertised a little more discreetly. Maybe it could have had a hit button to take individuals to another landing page that was interested in that segment.

Summary: Naturally you can see how impressed and excited I am about this product. I would recommend it for any age groups of teen on up provided some segments could be excluded. The one thing I need to research further is segments that I would deem inappropriate for young teens can be blocked somehow. If so these would make great Christmas or Birthday gifts for the teens.. - 16039

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