Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

Earlier this week I noticed a little box in the bottom right corner of my Facebook window telling me about Facebook chat, but I didn’t end up trying it out until just today. Although it seemed slow a couple times, I really like this new feature.

Facebook chat reminds me a lot of Gmails built in chat feature, which has become my most often used form of IMing. One thing I really like about Gmail’s build it chat is that I am able to catch a lot of friends who don’t usually log into IM clients. I will probably catch a lot more friends now through the Facebook chat feature. Facebook has already replaced email as my primary form of communicating with friends online. This new chat feature will likely take that a step further.If you’re on Facebook let’s chat sometime. I like to keep in touch with friends and love to meet new people. If you aren’t my friend yet, send me a friend request.

I’ve had problems with embedding Youtube videos in Wordpress blog posts in the past, and since I don’t post videos often enough to remember the solution I end up researching my problem each time. Now that I’ve got the solution down I figured I’d share it with you in case you run into the same trouble. I haven’t upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, so I’m not sure if the fix is already be built in the newest version. If it is fixed in newer version then this only applies to older versions of Wordpress.

There are two solutions to the problem:

1. Turn off the Visual Editor in your user options

2.  Keep Visual editor on but switch to Code mode when posting YouTube embed code

Turning off the Visual Editor

What seems to be messing up embeded YouTubed videos is Wordpress’ Video Editor. The simple solution is to just turn the visual editor off. To do this simply go to Users -> Your Profile,  then uncheck the box that say “Use the visual editor when writing”. This may be a hassle if you want to use the visual editor to edit the post or even edit other posts, because you would have to keep turning the visual editor of and on. The other solutions is to…

Keep Visual editor On But Switch to Code Mode When Pasting YouTube Embed Code

To do this just write your post as you usually would, but wait until you are just about ready to publish your post to insert the Youtube video. When you have done everything except insert your Youtube video, just switch to Code mode (click on the tab next to “Visual” just below the Title box), and paste your Youtube embed code while in Code editing mode. Then click the publish button without going back to Visual mode. It is important that you do this very last, because if you go back to Visual mode your Youtube embed code will get messed up by the Wordpress Visual Editor.

So, basically just avoid using the Visual Editor if you don’t want your embeded Youtube videos to get messed up. If you need to ever go back and edit a post with an embeded YouTube video make sure to re-paste the emded code while in Code mode if you use the Visual Editor to edit the post.

I plan to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 in the coming weeks so if there is simpler solution or if the problem has been fixed in that version I will let you know. Please comment with your own experience if you have already used Wordpress 2.5 to post Youtube videos.

I’ve found myself using this sample size calculator quite a bit recently. Thanks to Hawaii SEO for first telling me about this tool through Twitter. The calculator helps you determine the sample size required to reach a certain degree of confidence about the results of an experiment, or the confidence interval for a given sample size. This is extremely useful for internet marketers. It can be used to determine how certain you should be of the results of various campaigns and experiments you may conduct as an internet marketer, such as the click through rates in Adwords campaigns and ads on a website, conversion rates for various traffic sources and landing page versions, etc. The calculator does require a little knowledge of statistics to use effectively, but there are explanations on the page for each of the terms used to help you understand it all.

A common mistake I see among internet marketers is that they think that since they got two different results for two different campaigns, then in the long run those result will hold true, and they assume that the “winner” at that moment will be the true “winner” in the long run. I don’t blame marketers who make that mistake though, I have found that in general most people are clueless when it comes to Statistics. I am amazed at how often I see statistical fallacies used in the media from what are supposedly reputable sources. For an interesting read on this topic and a good introduction to statistics I recommend the book How to Lie with Statistics.

A few weeks ago at Russell Brunson’s 12 Month Internet Millionaire Workshop, one of the speakers said something to the effect of: if you are not successful it’s all your fault. This implies that you have control over your future, meaning that if you really are not successful you have the control to change it. Success doesn’t happen immediately but by taking control of your life and taking the actions necessary to become successful, you will become successful.

Sure, you may encounter circumstances in your life that may slow you down, or set you back, but if you have an attitude of being in control of the situation you begin to take action to change your circumstances immediately. Whereas, if you blame your circumstances on factors outside of your control you’ll be stuck in the same place because you won’t have the motivation to make the changes necessary to be successful.

So if you are not where you want to be in life right now, It’s All Your Fault. Now take action to make change, and Choose To Be Successful.

I love the book Oh, The Places You’ll Go, by Dr. Seuss. It seems to well represent the way I look at life—a journey where one should look forward to the experiences one will encounter, and even take action to seek out new experiences. I like the message it conveys that in life there are no guarantees and despite one’s ambition and confidence, one will still fail at times when striving to excel, even after experiencing great success and having been “on top”. Failure isn’t the end, however. One can always just pick one’s self right back up and start going to new places, experiencing new things, and eventually, succeed once again. Oh, the places we’ll go!

I have been over in the Philippines for the past eight months working with a webmaster outsourcing company as an SEO trainer. I have just arrived back home to Utah, and plan to write a lot more on this blog now that I have more time. Some topics that have been running through my mind recently which I would like to discuss here are:

Leveraging Analytics for SEO purposes

Using Facebook for marketing

Social Network Analysis

Outsourcing webmaster tasks

The business environment in the Philippines

My plans for the future

More stuff related to social networking, seo, and outsourcing

Please come back regularly, or subscribe to my feed to discuss the above topics with me in the coming weeks.

I have been in the Philippines for the past several months working for an outsourcing company helping to train workers here to do internet marketing. As a result I have been too busy to blog as much as I would have liked to. However, I have learned a lot here and would like to share the knowledge and insights I have gained with my readers. I see blogging as a big part of my plans in the future, but I still won’t have enough time to blog regularly for the next couple months. I would just like to tell all my readers to look forward to what I will be sharing come November and for now stay subscirbed to my feed. I will be posting when I have some time every once in while and have asked Reah, who blogs about Korean Dramas, to share a little about her experiences and insights about blogging and business. I hope you can all benefit from what she will share.

A few of my favorite links from the past week or so:

• John Chow is asking for FaceBook friends. Feel free to add me as a friend on FaceBook too. If you do please introduce yourself so we really can be friends.
• Brian Clark shares his advice on launching a blog. Brian always has such great content, and this post is no exception. Coppyblogger is one of my favorite blogs. Keep up the great work Brian.
• Neil Patel announced that Crazy Egg has launched a very cool new feature called confetti. This feature allows webmasters to see where users clicked. The cool thing about confetti is that you can sort your users interactions based on several factors such as referrers, search terms, operating systems, browsers, time before click, and window size. You can also compare two or more elements against each other.
• Brian Gilley reviews the top blog review sites. A few sites I am aware of that were not on the list are Linkworth, Loudlaunch, and Creamaid.
• Rae Hoffman tells us how to survive the affiliate evolution. A lot of what she suggests is very similar to what Yaro Starak writes about in his Blog Profits Blueprint.
• Lee Oden shares the results of his Best Keyword Research Tool Poll. My personal favorites on the list are Keyword Discovery, the Google Keyword Tool, NicheBOT, and SEO Digger(which I just discovered due to this poll).
• Andy Beard explains how to avoid being banned on Technorati.
• Graywolf is offering to answer questions on the condition that you pose the question in a blog post. I have posed my own question for Graywolf here.
• Aaron Wall announced he is closing Threadwatch, claims an RSS subscriber is worth 1,000 links, offers advice on tracking the growth of competing sites and outlines the evolution of a profitable site. Wow, it seems Aaron has been posting some great content to have gotten that many links from me in one post.
• Seth Godin tells us how to make a million dollars. Sell expensive stuff to a few rather than trying to sell cheap stuff to the masses. It is easier to focus on a small group rather trying to market to thousands because a small group likely talks to itself and can easily spread the word about your business, and by charging more per sale you can afford to modify your offer sooner to be more effective.
• Avinash Kaushik explains why bounce rate could be the sexiest web metric ever. I’ll definitely be looking at my bounce rates a lot more closely from now on.

I just found out that Dave Bascom’s Web Targeted was sold to WashingtonVC who was able to acquire the domain name SEO.com for $5 Million. Dave seemed pretty excited about this news on his blog, and I am happy for him. He is a great guy and a very knowledgeable Search Engine Optimizer. They have gotten a bit of exposure (and will probably get more) from this news in the SEO blogosphere. I have found commentary on Search Engine Land, Marketing Pilgrim, and Threadwatch, which are three very popular online destinations for SEOs. It is cool to hear this news happening in Utah (I am from Utah in case you haven’t figured that out).

Yaro Starak just announced that his much anticipated Blog Mastermind will launch this Thursday. Yaro has offered a lot of great advice on his blog for quite some time so I am sure his Blog Mastermind will be well worth the money. A couple weeks ago I blogged about Yaro’s free Blog Profits Blueprint, which offers a lot of great blogging advice for free. I recommend reading it to get a little taste of what Yaro will offer in his mastermind.