But for those of you that have “informational” sites, sites that have content on a specific topic but not on specific products, you might be missing the boat with most of your traffic.

So what do I mean by informational sites? Well I have a passion for kit cars. My dream car is a 1966 Shelby Cobra that I had built from a kit a few years back. It’s a beauty! That car inspired me to create a site dedicated to all things involving kit cars. I didn’t set out to make it a money maker but rather to be a “go to” source for anybody who had an interest in kit cars.

Because it is my hobby I found myself adding a ton of content and videos. Because the site is content rich, it ranks well for its niche. Our videos also rank on the first page of YouTube.com.

If you have a site like this, even if it’s about dog training, photo retouching or travel deals and it’s getting decent traffic, let me share how another “information rich” site discovered its true value as a revenue generator.

Let’s take a walk in the park

Recently I had an opportunity to interview Aric Boyles the guy behind CentralPark.com. Aric is a Central Park fanatic. He really enjoys the park and is thrilled that he can make a living working on a project about the object of his love.CentralPark.com is the go to site for all things about the park and is chock full of quality content and photographs.

Because of the quality of the site, Google rewards him with roughly 250,000 visitors a month who view over 1 million pages…that’s a lot of inventory.

But the site was more than just a passion for Aric, it was also his principal source of income. When he started, the only product that he had to sell was an aerial photograph of Central Park that he had converted into a really cool poster.

The posters sold well but he knew with the kind of traffic he was getting he could sell other things as well he just wasn’t sure what. The quick answer was to sign up with an affiliate advertising network like Commission Junction and that’s exactly what he did.

When it’s so obvious it defies explanation

CentralPark.com has enviable demographics. The visitors are better educated, more affluent and split about 50/50 male/female. It stood to reason that this crowd would have an interest in higher end offers so a network that could automatically rotate these types of offers seemed like a natural solution.

But it wasn’t.

The network ads fell flat on their faces with the exception of a notable few. Ads for NYC tour lines and local hotels converted nicely.

That’s when Aric realized the real interest that his audience had. It was right there all along but he had allowed himself to slip into a traditional “portal” advertising system rather than focusing on what the visitor actually wanted.

Tip Number 1 – Never forget why your visitors are visiting

In Aric’s case, his audience was seeking information on Central Park. Their attention is focused on all things Central Park and it is unlikely that they would pay attention to a skyscraper ad for Coach Purses or Mercedes Benz yet that’s what the ad network was displaying.

By partnering with other companies who provided services to visitors of Central Park, Aric was able to offer bike tours, carriage tours, hotels, wedding services and even products like his Central Park poster that all enhanced the Central Park experience.

Not surprisingly, these offers that compliment the main theme of the website do very well.

Tip Number 2 – Stay in touch with your visitors

Aric knew his shift in topic centric offers was paying off when he received a message from a visitor asking where he could find a tour of Lower Manhattan. Aric’s ticket service has a feature that allows visitors to send messages and communicate with the site.

The request for the Lower Manhattan tour was followed by others for the East Side, helicopter tours and even Broadway shows. His visitors were literally telling him what they wanted to buy. And the range of products and services expanded beyond just Central Park but was still focused on the NYC experience.

The feature that allows communication is key. You can do the same thing with a blog and of course through newsletters. Allowing your visitors to interact is key to keeping them engaged.

Tip Number 3 – Test, Test, Test

No serious marketer, be they online or off, just sets up a campaign and lets it go. For some of us testing and tweaking is fun because you get relatively quick feedback on your actions. For all of us, like it or not, it’s a necessity.

Google Analytics has made it extremely east to do split testing on literally any page of your site. Little things like the size or location of a graphic can impact on conversions.

In Aric’s case it was his “sign up now” button that he used to get subscribers to his newsletter. He had been using a green button but then switched to a PayPal orange button and subscriptions climbed 28%. Think about that for a minute. A 28% increase in a newsletter that is critical in driving traffic and promoting offers simply by changing the color of a button.

You think testing might be worth the effort?

These three tips apply to any type site be it about infrared photography, Photoshop tutorials, or wooden park benches, and when you use these tips you’re going to end up with a far more focused marketing effort.

That’s my take on it. If you have tips you’d like to add or if you have questions please share them in the comment box below.

How good is the SEOPressor WordPress plugin?  Chances are you arrived at this site after clicking a link to this page that appeared as a result of doing a Google search.  You probably typed in something like seopressor review or seopressor reviews.  You’re arrival at this webpage is no accident – in fact we deliberately planned to bring you to this blog at this specific time and to this specific product review.  Am I pulling you leg?  Nope.  That my friend, is the power of SEOpressor.  What is SEOPressor?  It’s a full featured, unique, and powerful SEO plugin for WordPress that helps you to write search engine optimized blog posts that Google, Yahoo, and Bing will eat up and rank you ahead of the competition.  Our writers additively use this plugin to make sure that each of our posts are optimized as best as possible before hitting the “publish” button.  In other words, if you found this review by clicking on a Google search result – you can thank SEOpressor for bringing you to this site.

Why use SEOPressor As Your SEO Blogging Tool?

SEO consultants can be costly and if you want to learn how to do SEO yourself, well, you should be aware that really developing a deep understanding of how to optimize a website to rank competitively and consistently in the search engines can take months, if not years, of training.   SEOpressor gives website owners the best of both worlds.  It provides blog writers with clear guidance that is specific to the content being written in the same way that an SEO consultant would if one were standing right over your shoulder.  But it doesn’t just stop there – SEOpressor also gives you instant feedback and optimization recommendations that update as you type.  The SEOpressor plugin is dead simple to use and is ready to go right out of the box requiring minimal configuration.  In other words, SEOpressor tells web content writers step-by-step how to write a blog post that is optimized for Google.  Now that’s one powerful plugin!

Advantages of SEOPressor

SEOpressor works by creating a dashboard within your post creation screen of your WordPress admin area.  The plugin automatically calculates your overall SEO score which is based on what SEO experts have been able to backward engineer about Google’s search engine ranking algorithm.  It then provides intelligent, easy to implement suggestions about how to make your post more search engine compliant.  As you create your post, SEOpressor does the following:

• Analyzes title tags and header tags for keyword usage
• Detects keyword density and content length
• Analyzes placement of keyphrase to ensure it is placed strategically throughout the post for maximum effect
• optimizes images alt attributes and title attributes
• automatically underlines, bolds and italicizes in-copy usage of keywords

Installation of SEOPressor is simple.  Plus, you try it out using their 60-DAY Iron-Clad 100% MONEY BACK GUARANTEE. If for some reason, you’re not satisfied with the performance of this plugin, just get your money back.  Also, I encourage you to learn more about SEOpressor –> check out this video demonstration.

Disadvantages of SEOPressor

SEOpressor is not an all-in-one SEO solution.  This plugin is strictly designed to help you to optimize your individual posts by ensuring your keywords and links are placed in prime areas that help the search engines understand what your blog post is about.  Search engine optimization covers many areas including – keyword research, website architecture, coding, sever optimization, SEO site auditing, and linkbuilding.   SEOpressor won’t aid you with these things.  However, in terms of creating posts that are aligned to Google’s ranking algorithm there is no plugin available on the market today that does a better job. The plugin effectively guides you toward writing search optimize content to drive more traffic to your blog in a way that even the most novice content writers can understand.

SEOPressor Review Conclusion

While SEOPressor is not a free WordPress plugin, you can test it out for 60 days.  At only $47 for a single site license this plug is a steal when you consider not only what it does but also the amount of targeted traffic it has the potential of attracting to your website.  I’d highly recommend this WordPress plugin to any blog writer who is serious about improving the Google rankings of their articles.

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Modern blogs have to perform a lot of different functions that are not native to WordPress.  Over the years, I have tried literally hundreds of different plugins in order to extend the functionality of my own blog, promote better search engine optimization, and to extend value to my visitors.  Since WordPress’s inception, there have literally been thousands of “top free WordPress plugin” post published in the blogosphere.  So today, in that tradition, I’m going to tell you about the best free WordPress plugins I have encountered.  Be warned: a few of these plugins require some level of technical proficiency to use.  Enjoy!

Post,  Page and Sidebar Customization WordPress Plugins

• Add Widgets to Page – This plugin allows you to add widgets to pages or posts using an easy to insert shortcode.  This is handy when you want to add the same images, text, and other elements to a group of pages or posts to create a uniform look.
• AVH Extended Categories Widget – Sometimes you need more power than WordPress’s standard category widgets can provide.  This plugin gives you just that in a way that is highly customizable.  AVH Extended Categories Widget plugin also has advanced features that allow to designate “category” groups for better fine-tuning of the display of categories in your sidebar.
• Flash Video Player with HTML5 – This allows you to add a highly configurable video player to your blog. It’s easy to use once you get the hang of using the different shortcode parameters.
• Flexi Pages Widget – Another highly configurable WordPress widget that allows you to lists pages and subpages in the sidebar of your blog.
• Simple Post Template – WordPress allows webmasters to specify a template for a page but not for a post. This plugin allows you to assign a template to a post. It takes technical knowledge to use it properly, but if you want to do some advance things such as create a landing page or squeeze page without a sidebar then you should give this a try.
• Subheading – This plugin gives you the ability to add a subtitle to your posts and pages. You’ll have to make some adjustments to your WordPress templates, but it’s an easy way to add an engaging subhead or SEO keywords to the start of your blog post. Moderate WordPress and HTML knowledge is required to set this one up.
• WP Hide Posts – Sometimes you need to create a post or a page that you just don’t won’t users finding. This plugin adds itself to the post editor page. If you wish to conceal your post or page, simply check the “hide post” box and no one will be able to find it unless they have a direct link to the page.
• Frontpage-Slideshow – If you are looking to add a professional looking slideshow to your homepage, consider using this WordPress plugin. This Frontpage Slideshow allows you to designate images from posts and pages to display in a dazzling interactive slideshow. The blogmaster is given full control over the buttons, colors, size, and timing of the slideshow.

Search Engine Optimization WordPress Plugins

• Dragon Design Sitemap Generator – this is by far the easiest way to create an HTML sitemap that will enhance your SEO by helping all your pages and posts to get indexed by Google and other search engine.  It packs a ton of great features, yet remains easy to use.  This is highly recommended for all blogs.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Google, Yahoo, and Bing allows webmaster to report the location of new pages through the use of a feed called the XML sitemap.  The Google XML Sitemaps plugin allows you to establish this feed and to connect it with your Webmaster account.  This plugin is recommended for all WordPress blogs.
• Plus One – In June 2011, Google announced it’s answer to the ubiquitous Facebook Like button – called the Plus One button. Plus One has an impact on your blog’s search engine optimization. When a user clicks the Plus One button on your site, people within the voter’s Google social network see it as a vote for the webpage’s content, just like on Facebook. This plugin allows you to add this feature to your blog with ease.
• HeadSpace2 – Now this is the mother of all SEO meta data management plugins.  This is free plugin, but like many of this list, it’s probably shouldn’t be.  First of all, it integrates with most major SEO WordPress plugins like All-In-One-SEO and pulls in the customizations to your post’s meta tags that you’ve already made.  It then uses a highly sophisticated command console to allow you to set meta tag information at the global, group, and post/page level.  HeadSpace2 also has a rich lists of other features that lets you get greater control of your WordPress SEO.  INSTALL THIS PLUGIN RIGHT AWAY AND RID YOURSELF OF BULK ALL-IN-ONE-SEO.
• SEO Friendly Images – This plugin automatically adds alt and title attributes to images in your post/pages so that you can be more productive and do more critical tasks. This plugin allows for the placement of several variables to assist your image optimization efforts.
• SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 – Here’s another free SEO WordPress plugin that is a bit out-of-the-box. When a visitors comes to your blog using a search engine this plugin records the referring keyword and adds it to the bottom of your post page automatically. SEO SearchTerm Tagging 2 also has the ability to add the search term to your post tags. Going one step further, this plugin installs widgets that allow you to display your top search engine keywords with a link back to the post at the category level. Webmasters can set their own filters to guard against profane search terms. This plugin gives you a great way to add keywords to your post pages… just don’t overdo it.
• Redirection – Time to get some real control over the SEO of your WordPress blog with the free Redirection plugin. Redirection allows you to set up 301, 302, 307 HTTP redirects fast. Additionally, it has modules for monitoring 404 errors, reporting, and managing your .htaccess file. This plugin takes some getting use to, but just reference the documentation. Once you get the hang of it you’ll be ready to install redirects and resolve 404 errors without hesitation. The Redirection plugin was engineered by the same folks who gave us Headspace2. I encourage you to donate to the developer of this plugin.
• SEO Smart Links – Don’t attempt to do SEO on your blog posts without this free plugin handy. SEO Smart Links saves you the haste of having to manually create links within your blog posts and pages by doing it automatically based on options you set. In other words, you can use it to quickly link every instance of a keyword in your blog posts to any location you desire across your entire WordPress blog. It has a lot of options you can toggle to get the desired results.

Social Networking WordPress Plugins

• Feedburner Feedsmith – Chances are if you’re using Feedburner than you’re already using this plugin. If you’re not using Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds then you may want to take a look at it. Anyway, this plugin detects all the ways to access your original WordPress feed and redirects it through Feedburner.
• BlogGlue Related Posts Network Plugin – This plugin is designed to be used with a blog traffic exchange network called BlogGlue. At the end of your blog posts (and optionally, pages) it suggests related posts on your blog. It then connects your website to the BlogGlue network and syndicates links to your blog posts on other people’s blogs in exchange for allowing other people to place links to their posts on your blog. The technology is a little clumpy and it takes you about 72 hours for your posts to get indexed and begin appearing on the network but nevertheless it does send an appreciable amount of referral traffic to your blog.
• RSS Footer – Use this plugin to amend a message to the top or bottom of your RSS feed. It’s a straightforward plugin that can be used to encourage readers who may be signed up for your RSS feed to register for your website and become a lead. The plugin also allows the use of variables such as “postname” – so you can do some pretty creative things with your feed. This plugin is free.
• Odiogo Listen Button – The Odiogo plugin is nothing short of amazing. After you register for a free account install the Odiogo plugin and listen in awe as this plugin translates your blog post from text to speech and reads itself to you. Your blog post is also made downloadable as a podcast.
• Simple Facebook Connect – I give high praise to this free plugin.  Simple Facebook Connect takes the agony out of trying to connect with Facebook.  It’s actually a package of 20 or so mini-plugins that help you to easily do things like add a facebook “like” button, allow users to register for your blog using Facebook Connect, add a user status widget, and lot’s more.

Administration WordPress Plugins

• Header and Footer – Stop downloading plugins to allow you to install Google Analytics, conversion optimization code, CSS, Javascript and all the other types of code that need to be inserted between the <head> and <body> tags of your webpage. This plugin is all you need. It’s clean and highly effective.
• My FTP – This free WordPress plugin adds FTP capabilities right inside the admin area of your WordPress installation.  No more downloading desktop FTP programs to upload and download items to your server,  My FTP provides an easy-to-use interface that lets you do just that as well as to edit files right inside WordPress.
• Exec – PHP – This is a simple yet robust plugin that allows for the execution of PHP code in your posts, pages, and text widgets. If you’re looking to do more advanced things on your website with PHP then you’ll need to install this one.
• Crony Cronjob Manager – If you need to schedule regular maintenance for your blog, I’d recommend using this plugin. There are several extremely powerful membership management platforms that require to set-up of cron-jobs as part of their installation. Rather than going through the trouble of setting up the cron-job using SSH, you may be able to use this plugin to simulate a cron-job at the WordPress level rather than on the server level. One of the set back of this plugin is that it appears to be a bit server intensive and there doesn’t seem to be any identifiable way to disable event reporting.
• Users to CSV – Need to get a quick export of the people who have registered for your blog or left a comment but don’t want to mess with your WordPress database?  Download this handy little plugin and export your members in a handy CSV or TSV file.
• WordPress HTTPs – Adding HTTP to your WordPress installation can be a bit tricky.  That’s why you should download WordPress HTTPS.  This free plugin helps you to adjust your blog so that you can use SSL on your website.
• Contact Form 7 – Form creation used to be tedious and difficult.  Contact Form 7 is the go-to form creation plugin.  This plugin utilizes a powerful administration console that allows you to easily create rich HTML forms.  After you save the form, you then add the resulting shortcode to the post or page of your choice.  And just like that you have an instant contact form.  You can have the plugin email the form information to the address of your choice.  The list of possible things you can do with this plugin is virtually endless.  Contact Form 7 is another plugin that we should all be thankful is available for free.

Other Plugins

• Quick Adsense – Right now should uninstall whatever your using to manage your Google Adsense placement because I’m confident it has nowhere near the power of the Quick Adsense plugin. This plugin is highly versatile and it allows you to rotate Adsense code, precisely control where your ad code should be placed, as well as the number of ad units to be placed on the page. It says it’s designed for Adsense, but you can plug code from any ad network you wish in there. INSTALLING THIS PLUGIN WILL LIKELY BOOST YOUR ADSENSE REVENUE.

*Bonus Paid Plugin

• PopUp Domination – This is a paid plugin that allows you to great visitors to your blog with professional designed pop-ups that encourage them to sign up for your newsletter. PopUp Domination comes with about a dozen templates that blend seamlessly with the look and feel of your blog. When and how often the popup appears is up to you. This plugin is great for building your email list and works flawlessly with major email list management services like Aweber.

Today’s video topic is how to make a review video. I am going to give you lots of different tools that you can chose from to make your review video and then additionally different tips that I found from doing reviews – kind of some best practices – some stuff that will save you a lot of time when you get up and go in trying to do your own to start off with so.

Video Recording Tools – Which Should You Choose?

If we go ahead and get into it the first thing we need to go over is Tools and of course the first thing you are going to need is recording software. Now this applies if you viewing a website a web service, video games – something on the computer you would need that otherwise you are going to need a camera. But for this I am going to go over recording software and there is really a lot of choices. I my myself am using CamStudio it’s free and opensource.

Fraps

There is also Fraps which you will most commonly see people use with video games – it’s really meant for being able to handle the type of refresh involved in video games. Adobe Captivate which is kind of like the Mercedes of screen capture software, it runs about $700 so you might want to start with CamStudio, Fraps or something first maybe work your way up to Captivate.

Jing

And also Jing is a new software that is come out recently from Techsmith they are the same people that produce Snag It which is a screen shot software and it’s got a lot of nifty features too.

CamStudio

I have gone with CamStudio simply because it lets me do recordings as long as I want without any watermarks and save them in the AVI format which all three of those things you cannot do with Fraps or Jing on their free versions and I haven’t worked up the money yet to or really the need to upgrade to Fraps or Jing. CamStudio does everything that I need. If you look at any of my other review videos you will see that the quality seems to be just fine, it keeps up with the type of screen recording I am doing and that might change if I decide to go and review a site that has a bunch of flash or flash video or something on it, I am sure CamStudio won’t be able to handle that type of motion on the page because its recording at a very low frame rate. But at any rate for what I am doing this works great and so I figured I would go ahead and give you guys a quick view of what cam Studio looks like.

It’s got a very simple interface here, by default it is going to record to AVI which is what you would normally want to save into. Places like YouTube, Vimeo, Etc, aren’t going to accept SWF or Shockwave Flash videos anymore which is the other option in CamStudio so just leave it to record on AVI. You will want to change a few of the default settings before you get started. For region the region option will let you make a box anywhere on the screen and it will record whatever is within that fixed area. But it will let you change it every time you go to record a video it will ask you what part of the screen do you want to record. The other customizable one is fix region which you go and create that once you say I always want to record this particular square of my screen and every time you go back to record it will just assume you want to record that exact same location. You can also do window and full screen fairly self explanatory.

Then you will want to make sure and come down and click record from microphone. Sometimes I think by default it does not record audio so you will just want to check that and perhaps come into audio options and make sure the right microphone is selected sometime it might choose the microphone built into your monitor and not your external microphone so you want to make sure that is checked to get your best possible audio quality out of it. Then a few of the little options are just a minimize program on start recording which I usually have enabled but I disabled it for this video so I could show you the Cam Video Software. You will also want to set a directory from the save to otherwise it is just going to save it in a temp directory which is going to be difficult to go find and bring out later so you can upload it to Youtube or Vimeo or whatever your preference is there. And then I additionally have it ask me for the file name so it doesn’t record it say like time stamp.AVI after I am done recording it will ask me what I want the name of the video file to be so I can easily recognize it later on when I go to grab that. And then lastly you can set up some keyboard shortcuts so by default you can hit F8 and CamStudio will start recording. But there is no option no key binding to stop the recording so I went in and set a key binding for control shift Z stops my CamStudio so I don’t have to open the software and hit the stop button when I am recording and then edit that part out later it just makes it a little bit easier for me. That is really all you have to configure in CamStudio everything else is pretty much standard right out of the box. It a nice little piece of software that has actually this version of CamStudio is an open source rendition of an old commercial product that was actually sold two or three times and eventually got turned into Adobe Captivate now obviously the features of CamStudio don’t compare to what Adobe Captivate does but its just nice knowing that it has some good solid roots like I said it works for what I want to do.

If you are interested in these other ones Fraps, Abode Captivate, Jing almost all of them have free trial you can go download so if you are not happy with one of the features of CamStudio go ahead and download one of their demos they will either put a watermark or time limit on your video but you can get a feel of what type of subject matter there ok with recording whether they can record a lot of flash being on the page or a video game or something like that and it always best to try before you buy it right.

If you don’t like CamStudio go try one of the others and get whatever works for you because you are the person that is going to have to be using this on a regular basis so if you are using software and you don’t find it easy to use you are not going have fun doing it take you longer and you want to make sure you are using tools that making it as easy as possible for you to get done what you need to do. That is probably enough on recording software.

Video Recording Equipment

Microphone

The next bit of tools you are going to need is a microphone. I can’t stress how important a microphone is to doing this type of review process because people are really more than half of what the video is, is your voice so video quality is one part of it audio quality is the other and if you’ve got a noisy poppy crackly muffled microphone in your video no one is going to want to watch it, no one wants to listen to that. When you are going to pick out a microphone a couple of rules to keep in mind are you get what you pay for.

The $8 microphone that you find at Best Buy or the one that came built into your monitor laptop or what not is going to have awful audio quality I wouldn’t even start with those its really not worth it. Lots of them have popping calking you can hear your hard drive or something whistling in the background. So go out and get a microphone and be willing to spend a little bit of money you don’t have to go out and spend hundreds of dollar but even if you go out and buy a thirty forty dollar microphone you are going notice immediately a much better quality in the audio that you are getting out of it and that’s going to help your voice and your presentation come across that much better.

Secondly, get one [a microphone] that you are comfortable with, if you get yourself some boom microphone hanging that is standing off of your desk and you have to lean over to talk into all the time again its not going to be comfortable its not going to be easy you are going to feel like you are forcing yourself to do it and if its especially if it uncomfortable and you are moving back and forth from it or what not that is going to effect the other quality to. Then lastly if you can now this is a big if is get a condenser microphone, most of the microphones that are in the consumer type microphones headsets desktop microphones and what not are very cheap relative to condenser microphone. A condenser microphone is a little difficult to explain but it’s a much higher quality, it’s the type of microphone you would use in radio ads and what not and they are going to run a lower condenser microphone at least $150 probably $200 but if you really getting into doing reviews or your audio quality is just paramount to you go out and find a nice condenser microphone preferably one that hooks up via USB so you don’t have to have a sound board or something to adapt the condenser microphone into your audio input and give it a shot. Spend a little bit of money on you microphone it will be worth in it the long run get one that you are comfortable with and you know that you will use and if you really are concerned about your audio quality spend the extra money and get a condenser microphone you will never have to buy another microphone as long as you are careful with it.

PC Requirements

Our last tool is a powerful PC. Screen capturing like this takes a lot of processing power, a lot. If you are recording in 720p so you can think of that as 1024 x 768 about there, if that the screen area that you recording I would recommend that you have at least 2Ghz dual core processor, you will have one core to run your browser or the game or the video or whatever it is you are recording and another processor core to do your recording on that end. That is what I am running my system on seems to work ok the video doesn’t always have the highest frame rate but I don’t have any audio jittering problems which is what you will see if your machine was severally underpowered for the type of media you are recording. 720p is respectful that is what a lot of people are going to watch on Yutube they might even watch it lower at 480p. But 720p is your first high definition resolution that is probably where you should start for your recordings but if you really want to get out there and do 1080i and that would be if you had a 1920 x 1080 resolution monitor and you were recording the whole screen that would be a 1080i video and there you are going to need at least a 3Ghx dual core or more to be able to do that and really if you are recording at that high of resolution you probably want to dish out the money for something like Fraps or Adobe Captivate because they are much more efficient things like Jing and CamStudio and other software aren’t going be able to keep up with that amount of recording so keep that in mind when you are going to start up doing a review or something you don’t want to have to go out and rebuild your entire machine so if you know something like this up front you can down scale the size of your screen that you are going to be recording so that the video comes across clean and the audio comes across well also.

Additionally to our list here you might need some video editing software. I don’t use that myself for these I do all of my videos in one take but video editing is a pretty big topic I could probably spend a whole another segment just talking about all the different video editing options that are out there the pros and cons of those and what is going to work best for your particular use case but I will definitely save that for another time.

Preparing for and Recording Your Review Video

Our next subject is prep work this next to the tools making sure you have quality tools the next biggest thing is going to be your prep work. The one that I can’t stress to people enough is get to know your subject matter. I don’t know how many times I am reading a review on line or listening to someone’s review on YouTube and they get a fact wrong about the product that they are reviewing and it just really goes to their creditability they have done a review on something and they don’t even know all the details of it so if you are going to review something don’t just pull out of the box or pull it up on a webpage and do a review 10 minutes later. Get out there and really use it feel like you are intimate with the product the service whatever it is you want to be reviewing, spend a day or two with if it’s a web service and its free sign up for it set it up, go through all the options, try and customize it, if it’s a product spend a day taking picture with it or playing games on it whatever it might be and make sure that you know the intricacies of it enough that you aren’t going to be reading from a list to point out qualities from it and you also not going to goof up and say something about the product that might not be actually be the case.

Second is write yourself an outline of its qualities. So don’t go through and list everything about the site service or product but write yourself an outline of its really excellent at this it could use some work on this aspect of it service, here is the three things that I really liked about it. Just a general outline of what makes the product stand out what could be improved upon, etc. so that you are not doing your review and having to come up with stuff out of your head end up with a lot of “hmm, ummm”, stutters and pauses that you might have to edit out later. If you write yourself an outline get to that point you can glance over at it and see what outline was and keep the flow of the video going and not have to stop and try catch up where your thought process was.

Last of all is do not make a script. I don’t know how many times I have listened to reviews and people are reading off of a script and they get into that mono tone voice because they are reading off of a piece of paper. Its not fun people don’t want to spend their time learning about a product just to have someone ramble on in a monotints tone just reading off of a script that is the problem even if you take all those qualities that you have picked out and then you make a script about them you lose all the flare, the emotion of why you think the product is really great or perhaps why its really bad and so try not to make yourself a script try to get to the point comfortable enough with product that you can go out there and its like you are talking to your viewers because that is what you want to be talking to them, forming relationship with them have that emotional connection and reading off of a script you might as well just take that script and put it up on your web page as an article because it is not going to do any good as a video review.

Additionally to this prep work you could bounce stuff off some other people you know get on line, look at forum post, look at some other review not the plagiarize but just to see if they had any strong opinions one way or another because they might have found something that you’ve missed a particular use case or what not. Maybe run it by some friends there’s all sorts of options out there for you to get a lot of this stuff done before you even hit the computer and start doing the recording so that the video turns out that much better.

Lastly, just a few additional tips that I have run into so I will try get them out of the way for you so you don’t run into the same hurdles is check your microphone volume. Every time before I actually go to record a video I do a few tests here and there placing my microphone with my surrounding audio environment sounds like and then play it back to myself because there is nothing worse than going to watch a video and you can barely hear the person you have to crank your speakers all the way up to try to hear the person because they didn’t make sure their volume was normalized. Additionally if you’ve already been watching a bunch of videos on YouTube and then you click on someone else’s video and your speakers are just blaring because this guy had his volume cranked way up that is going to be an annoyance to and a lot of people will be turned off by that. Take the extra minute to do a couple test runs position your microphone make sure everything is normalized will save you a lot of headaches down the road.

Check for artifacts/tearing. Once you have done your video go back and watch it a few times make sure that any video on the screen or your cursor scrolling down the page isn’t tearing either too bad or at all. That’s going to really effect how people are thinking about your video if they are trying to watch it and there is all this pixilation and screen tearing while they are trying to pay attention to it to figure out what you are talking about that’s really goanna take away from their objectivity when they are trying to absorbed the information you are giving to them. So take the time to go through and proof your video before you put it up there can save you a lot of time and that is the other thing have someone else proof your video. You know, you are always going to think that what you’ve done is probably the best that can be done but the amount of quality, the amount outside perspective you might get just from having someone else take five ten minutes and look over you video to see if you missed a fact, you stuttered too much, you made some type of verbal typo in video that is going to save you embarrassment later all you have to do is redo the video or edit that part out if that kind of thing happened versus to go back and put in something type update or redo on you video online.

I think what I have given you here is a good set of tips and basic best practices for doing a video but I really think you should be able to go out there and do your own now. If you just want to get started just go find a web site or service that maybe not everyone knows about obviously don’t go do a review of eBay but go out there find a website pick out five six things you really like about it, maybe a couple of ways how they could improve down load the software, hook up your microphone write yourself an outline and go ahead and try it. That’s all I have for you on this I will probably do a video later on video editing software, that’s something people want to see. Otherwise this will probably wrap it out I want to thank you for your time again this vide was brought to you in part by DigitalSapien.com your source for everything SEO, SEM eCommerce and more. Signing of this Evan Dean from the bog cheers.

Thanks to Evan Dean – DailyNerd.net Tech Blog

What is the topic of my blog?

Yes, it is a simple question but you’d be surprised by how many bloggers do not fully answer this question before writing their first blog post.

Online journals verses a blog about a specific topic

At this point, let’s draw a fuzzy distinction between an online journal and a blog.  An online journal is a type of blog that can be thought of as an online version of a personal diary.  It may speak about the personal experience, thoughts, and insights of individual as they go through life.  Online journals are awesome, and the information found on this site can help you to put together an online journal to a certain degree.  But StarterBlogger is mainly concerned with helping you to create topically themed blogs, that is a blog about a specific topic.

Selecting a general blog topic

It is well known that the most successful blogs target a single theme and discuss it from multiple dimensions.  Off the top of my head, I do not know of any successful blogs that discuss completely unrelated topics (i.e business server administration and knitting).  However, choosing a topic does not mean you’re “locked” in to writing about one thing forever. What selecting a topic does is to help you to attract and retain visitors who are interested in hearing what you have to say.  It helps you to formulate articles and to promote your blog in a consistent manner, which puts you on the road to building authority and credibility about your knowledge of the selected topic.  The most respected blogs are based on one or more closely related topics. By now you’re probably thinking about your blog topic.  You have probably chosen a general topic at this point.  Later in this tutorial, you will learn how to select a niche and integrate it into your blog’s mission statement. As a learning example, The general topic of StarterBlogger.com is “blogging”.

Select a subtopic for your blog

General topics are just that, general.  Let’s say your general topic is automobiles.  But the automotive world is so vast, ranging from anything from car repair, car shows, in-car technology to buying and selling a car, customizing your car, and on and on. As your blog’s only writer it will be difficult to create this breadth of content.  This is why you must select a subtopic for your blog.  The subtopics for StarterBlogger “is introduction to blogging” and “how to create a blog”. Notice how StarterBlogger address two closely related subtopics.  You may choose more subtopics under your general topic but they should be related to each other in some clearly connectable way.

Deciding on a niche for your blog

A subtopic describes what your blog is about, a niche describes who your blog is geared toward within that subtopic.  A niche is a distinct segment of a market.  Don’t worry, this is not a business course and we’re not going to start talking about market segmentation, economics or any of the like.  Think of a niche as definable characteristics of your ideal reader.  For example, StarterBlogger falls under the general heading of “blogging”, and the subtopic of “how to create a blog”, however its niche is “new bloggers” because it targets people who want to learn how to blog. Focusing on a niche can help you to cultivate a specific audience for your blog.  One who will be apt to participate in discussions and revisit your blog again and again to check for new content.

What is the purpose of your blog?

Now if you’re going have a blog it’s got to have a purpose.  Not to go too “wise old man” on you, but a blog must have a purpose else it will serve none.  Ask yourself – what need does your blog serves to 1.  you and 2. your readers. StarterBloggers allows me spread my joy of blogging.  It allows people who are interested in learning how to set-up a blog to use a proven methodology.

Creating the mission statement for your blog

A mission statement is a formal short written statement of purpose for your blog.  A blog’s missions statement helps readers understand what the blog is about and what to expect from it.  As an author, the missions statement gives you a goal. The mission statement for StarterBlogger is the following: Starterblogger is a collection of tutorial and articles designed to introduce people to the world of blogging.  It teaches them how to create a blog and gives them a proven method for becoming a successful blogger. This mission statement will govern the content I create.  It will help to ensure that I am faithful to my niche.

The Difference Between Hosted and Self-Hosted Blog Hosting Solutions

Now that we have learned what blog hosting is, next we are going to discuss the difference between the types of blog hosting solutions.  Hosting is generally divided into two groups:

1. Self hosted blog.  In a self-hosted set-up, you control the hosting environment.  Building on the analogy of the TV studio, the productions studio is owned or leased directly to you – you are the one on the lease.  I HIGHLY RECOMMENDS SELF-HOSTING YOUR BLOG.  Some common characteristics of self-hosted blog solutions include:
   • You pay a fee for hosting, usually monthly
   • You are responsible for customizing server configurations, installing a content management system, upgrading applications, etc.
   • There are no restrictions preventing you from advertising on your blog and the only ads that appear on your website are of your choosing.
2. Hosted blog.  In a hosted blog set-up, someone else in the primary leaser, renter, or owner of the hosting service and they allow others to use it under specific conditions.  In many ways a hosted solution can be compared to borrowing or renting a production studio from a friend for a day.  Some common characteristics of hosted blog solutions include:
   • Hosting is usually free
   • Fast and easy set-up, including preinstalled software.
   • A preinstalled content management system or blog platform
   • Your blog is usually placed in a sub-domain or directory on a domain owned by someone else
   • Guidelines preventing advertising or ads from a third party are inserted on your website as part of your service agreement

Which Hosting Solution Should You Choose?

Here’s how to decide if a hosted or self hosted solution is right for your blog.

When to choose a self-hosted solution

Pick a self-hosted blogging solution if you want greater control of your blog.  If you plan to incorporate advertisements into your blog or participate in affiliate marketing programs.  Additionally, if you are already tech savvy or desire to develop a better understanding of the Internet, a self-hosted package is the way to go.

When to choose a hosted solution

Selected a hosted blogging solution if you want a no hassle, plug-and-play blogging experience.  You’re intention is just blogging for the sake of blogging, without any intentions to monetize your blog.

Why is picking the right domain name for your blog important?

Not only does a domain name tell users how to access your blog, but a domain name give your website an identity and helps you to establish a brand on the Web.  Your domain name will have an impact on your blog’s search engine optimization strategy, the implications of which we will discuss later.  Lastly, a competitive domain name can have value.  It’s not uncommon to hear domain names being sold at auction for $5000.  So it’s in your best interest to spend a little time thinking about the domain name for your blog.

What is a top-level domain name?

Digitalsapien.com is the domain name of this website.  The “.com” in this example is referred to as the “top-level domain” (TLD).  Common top-level domain names include .com, .net, .us, .org, .info, .biz, .name.  Please note: that yourwebsite.com and yourwebsite.org are two completely different website names and will require two different registrations.

Top-level domain names can give some indication about who owns the website or what the site is about.  Here are some common TLDs for blogs and their traditional usage.

You will have to select both a combination of a domain name and a top-level domain name for your website.  If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t be.  You’re already half way through your crash course in domain name registration for blogs.

Blog domain name ideas

There are many pointers to go about selecting a domain name for your website.  Here are a few of the most popular ways:

Here are some more tips for selecting a domain name:

• Avoid using dashes in your domain name.  For example, you should reserve financeblog.com over finance-blog.com when possible.  This is a preference, not a hard and fast rule.
• Avoid registering domains that are more than 5 words long as they tend to be less memorable to users.  For example, thisdomainiswaytoolengthy.com isn’t the best choice.
• Use keywords in your domain name when possible.
• Registering a .biz top-level domain name is not recommended.
• Big companies are protective of their trademark, so avoid registering domain names that sound like another companies website name.  For example, do not register ebayy.com.

Search engine optimization (SEO) considerations for domain name selection

  Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo are able to read the keywords in website domain names.  Many use keywords in domain names in order to rank websites relevant to a user’s search.  Search engines also use domain names to as cues to understand the topic of the site.  Again, this helps them to present better results to their searchers.  Therefore, incorporating keywords into your domain name can benefit your search engine rankings, help you to attract people who are interested in your blog topic, as well as your search engine referred traffic.

Let’s say a person goes to Google and searches for “blogs about cars” and there are two (there are really millions, but for this example we will say two) possible websites to return as the top result.  The domain for one website is carblogs.com and the other potential website is airportcarrentals.com – both competing for the #1 position on Google.  All things being equal otherwise, carblogs.com is more likely to be in the #1 position than airportcarrentals.com because the keywords in it’s domain more closely mirrors the user’s search query.

Go ahead and reserve a blog domain name!

Take a few minutes and generate a list of possible domain names for your blog.  Done?  Good!  Now use the domain availability tool below to see if the domain names on your list are available.  Don’t get discouraged if the domain name for your blog has already been reserved, there’s still plenty of really good domain names still left.  Use this super handy tool to register a domain name for your website.

Be realistic

However, even if your production can be erratic with periods of higher and lower output, that doesn’t mean your blog updates should be. It’s important that you continue to add new content to your blog on a regular basis, rather than in spurts with dry periods in between. You want to give your readers a reason to check back regularly. If you have long periods where there is no new content, readers who visit your site several times in a row with no new updates may lose interest and start visiting your site less often. Additionally, regular updates are helpful for search engines. Search engines generally like fresh content, and by updating on a regular schedule, search engines will learn when to visit your site and will index your new content faster. The best way to resolve the differences between your production schedule and the need to add new content to your site is to create a publishing schedule for your blog. By planning out in advance when you want new posts to be published, you can write content in advance during your creative periods but still keep up a steady, regular blog update schedule. There are several factors to take into consideration when creating a publishing schedule for your blog.

How much content can you create?

Most importantly, how much content can you create? There’s not much point to creating a publishing schedule if the schedule doesn’t match the real pace of content creation. It’s all well and good to say that you will post every day, but if you have a difficult time keeping pace, you will inevitably start falling behind. On the other side, if you are a prolific writer, you might simply have too much to say to limit yourself to just one or two updates a week. Match your publishing schedule to your production schedule.

Think about when your readers want to read your blog

When do your readers read your content? By looking at your traffic data, you can determine when people tend to visit your site. Early on in your blog’s lifetime, you might not have enough traffic to see any real trends, but over time this data will be valuable. Depending on the topic of your blog and the types of visitors you attract, your visitor traffic patterns might vary significantly. For example, Travel content tends to get more traffic on Fridays, when people are planning for weekend trips. New video game releases typically happen on Tuesdays, so a blog about gaming can expect to see additional traffic for content around new games during the middle of the week. Tailor your publishing schedule to when your readers are looking for your content.

What’s on the horizon?

What items are upcoming that you want to write about? Developing an editorial calendar can be an extremely helpful part of your publishing schedule. By determining what you want to write about in advance, you can help make sure that you don’t miss a story about important topics, and help overcome the problem of sitting down to write a blog post but not knowing what to blog about. Create an editorial calendar for at least major items.

Think beyond your blog

What else is happening around your schedule? Blogs don’t exist in an isolated environment. Keep track of other news and events in your field. It’s easy to write a great blog post but have it lost when some other big event drowns it out and takes precedence. Breaking news and big events attract attention by their very nature, so don’t compete with them unless your post is about that news and those events. It would be a shame to write a great piece on an iPhone app the same week as Apple’s annual developer conference and have your blog post completely drowned out by news on the conference. Publish your content when it has a chance to be heard. Finally, be flexible. A publishing schedule is there to make it easier for you to keep your blog fresh and add new content on a consistent basis. If you have a lot to say in a particular week, or if you have breaking news that you want to report, go ahead and write a blog post about it. Ultimately, you’re writing your blog to make your voice heard and provide content for your users. Don’t force yourself to slow down just to adhere to your schedule – your schedule should be a baseline, not a straitjacket.

What is search engine optimization?

To understand search engine optimization, one must first understand what a search engine is.  Chances are, you found this blog by typing “seo sem ecommerce” into the Google search bar.  Hopefully, Digitalsapien.com was one of the top results for this search.  You then clicked on the search engine listing and found yourself here.  Google is a search engine.  Search engines are tools that find and index documents (usually web pages, but may also include PDFs, images, etc) on the World Wide Web in order to help a user locate the information they are looking for.  Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask are four of the word’s best known search engines. In brief, search engine optimization is a branch of online search marketing in which marketers attempt to influence the factors that search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) use to rank results in response to a user’s search query in order to drive targeted traffic to their website.  In order words, the goal of search engine optimization is to get a website as close to top of the Google results as possible for a relevant body of keywords.  Because it is a discipline within marketing, search engine optimization is both an art and science.  Search engine optimization is not to be confused with paid search advertising (also called PPC, pay-per-click).  Paid search advertising is exactly as it sounds – website marketers pay search engine to post an for a keyword in the search results.  We may address paid search advertising and how to use it to market your blog at a later date. The graphic below shows how Google displays paid advertisements and natural (or “organic”) search listings.

Search Engine Optimization and Blogs

Blogs are a type of website.  As search engines are a huge source of free traffic, generally all website (including blogs) should employ at least the bare minimal SEO tactics.  For many, “natural search referred traffic” (traffic that comes from a search engine’s natural results, not it’s paid advertisements) will provide the largest source of traffic to their blog.

Building a Keyword Strategy

Since search engines depend on users to type in keyword phrases, the backbone of an effective search engine optimization campaign is a well-developed keyword strategy.  You should start by brainstorming a body of keywords that aptly describe your blog topic. For example, let’s say you just set up a blog about making homemade ice cream.  Now it’s time to build your keyword list.  You undoubtedly want your website to rank highly in the SERPs (search engine result page) for the search phrase “making homemade ice cream”, but there are tons of related terms you may want your website to appear for in the search engines.  Here are some keywords you may want your blog about making homemade ice cream to rank for:

• “make homemade ice cream”
• “homemade ice cream”
• “homemade vanilla ice cream”
• “homemade vanilla ice cream recipe”
• “how do you make homemade ice cream”
• “how do you make ice cream at home”
• “how to make homemade ice cream”
• “make homeade ice cream (*note the common misspelling)”
• “making homemade ice cream”

Of course you want to select keywords that searchers actually use to search for the information you offer on your blog.  The Google Keyword Tool is a great free keyword discovery application.  The Google Keyword Tool aids you in in finding new keywords by:

1. Scanning your websites and suggesting a body of appropriate keywords
2. Multiplying your list of keywords quickly by recommending other related keywords
3. Offering estimated search frequencies

I’d highly recommend conducting a round of keyword research using the Google Keyword Discovery Tool and assembling a list of 20 – 50 keyword phrases related to the topic of you website.

Adding Keywords To Your Blog

You’ve completed your initial keyword research, so what’s next?  Next you want to do the following:

• Place 1 – 2 of your keywords in the title tag (<title>) of your blog posts
• Use 1 at least 1 keyword in the URL of each of your pages
• Use 1 – 2 keywords in the header tags (<h1> – <h6>) of your blog posts
• Sprinkle your keywords throughout the copy of your post, being careful to maintain the readability of your entry.
• Use 2 – 3 keywords in your Meta Description tag to create an inviting search engine listing
• Use 1 – 2 keywords in the Alt Attribute for important images featured on your blog
• For keywords used in the copy of your blog post, link them to other blog posts you have already written – just make sure the keyword you are using as anchor text is appropriate to the post your are linking to.  As a loose guideline, create one in-copy for each 150 – 200 words in your post.
  • For example, if your post is 600 words long, create 3 – 4 in-copy links to other posts on your website using keywords as anchor text.

Adding keywords to your blog content and to these HTML elements helps search engines determine what your blog is about.  Once a search engine associates your blog with a targeted body of keyword phrases, it is more likely to present your blog on the search engine result page when a person incorporates them in a Google (or other search engine) search query.

On-site Factors and Off-site SEO Factors

Search engine optimization involves more than simply adding keywords to page copy and source code.  There are is a rather lengthy list of additional factors that search engines consider.  Early, I mentioned factors that influence search results.  These factors can be divided into two categories: on-page and off-page.  We’ll address how to optimize for specific on-site and off-site factors in later posts, but for now here’s a high level overview:

On-site SEO Factors

On-site SEO factors are those criteria on your website that you, as the website administrator, have direct control over.  On-site SEO factors consists of things like content, how your pages are linked together, keyword usage, and server codes.

Off-site SEO Factors

Conversely, off-site factors are things that influence your search engine rankings that you cannot control directly.  Off-site factors include things such as external links to your website, characteristics of your competition’s website, and the behavior of the searcher.

SEO Resources

If you would like to learn more about search engine optimization, here are some resources to check out:

• Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (pdf)
• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Google Basics – How Google Works
• SEO Fast Start
• SEO Book by Aaron Wall
• SEOMoz