Note: This method works and is simple. We are working on more sophisticated options using both dropbox and Google Docs, but so far, this is the best and only method, which is creating a direct URL to a public-enabled Google Docs folder.

1. Login to Google Docs (Free; just go to docs.google.com and login using your gmail address; if you don’t have gmail you’ll need to set one up (free)).
2. Create a folder called “_Public_Incoming” just like that, with underscores.
3. Click Share – like this…
4. In the popup, copy (control-C) your unique URL – you’ll add that to your page and hyperlink it. Then click “Change” like so…
5. Click “Anyone with the Link” and be sure to allow anyone to edit. Don’t worry, they can ONLY see this folder that you’ve created (which, at the moment, probably contains nothing).
6. Last, add a link to your page and/or navigation as usual. You should probably prompt users/uploaders to click the + sign in the top left. If you want to add a link for “Deliverables Upload” for example, you’d go to Appearance >> Menus >> Custom Links, paste in the URL, then click “Add”, drag it to where you want in the menu, and click “Open in new window”, since it’s an external site (this will leave your site open in the background, generally best practices with all external links).
7. Test it.

Done!

Here’s ours – FYI – for demo purposes.

To Upload, Click the + in the top left.
http://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B22l866a07VDRFlKeUU2ZUJzcFk/edit?pli=1 

We may in the future update this to create widgets and/or use 3rd party plugins for cloud storage systems like Google Docs, Amazon AS3, and Dropbox, but for the moment, this is simple, reliable, free, and it works. Other systems, as of this writing, have not yet proven reliable so use this – until we update this page.

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1. Go to Plugins >> “Store Locator for WordPress” and click activate
2. In the admin panel, you should now see a “Store Locator” section. Fill this out with your store’s or dealer’s locations.

Additional documentation:

Plugin Help File: Store Locator WPress documentation

Questions? Contact us through /Support and we’ll update this page.

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Warning: Something's Not Right Here!

or like this (in Firefox)…

reported-attack-page malware removal

or similar in other browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.) then this post applies to you.

The bad news:

Your Site Was Hacked!

The good news: (1.) it was probably before you moved your site to SwiftCMS, so you just need to get Google to re-spider your new site, and (2.) we ‘ll help you fix this. (3.) It was most likely for “malware injection” of which the goal is to install a virus and/or profit-yielding-cookies (such as ebay-affiliate code for example), and not a personally-motivated and/or not likely there to obtain personally sensitive data of your customers.

Note that one of the benefits of SwiftCMS’s monthly support system is hacker insurance and security procedures. There are a lot of things we do behind the scenes to keep your new website safe, so it’s very very unlikely to happen in the first place, simply because there are millions more easier targets for the hackers. In addition, if this did happen, we’d probably know before you, and remove it, and last, if we do remove it, it’s at no additional cost to you – a form of insurance.

This is beyond budget hosting. 

A typical budget host will send you a help file and tell you “go get ‘em tiger. Good luck”.

Did I mention if you have this warning Google’s also telling the world? Like this…

this site may harm your computer

Anyway, let’s get it fixed.

First, this post assumes the actual damage, the actual malicious code is already removed. If you’re reading this and your website is not on SwiftCMS + WordPress (i.e. hosted on SwiftWebDesigner.com servers), then today and now is the perfect time to upgrade – and you’ll get this fixed as a side benefit. Otherwise, go to http://www.stopbadware.org/home/badware and FTP in, find the injection, and remove it. Tip: The hackers are smart; they 1. encrypt the injection, so you can’t just search for the offending code, it’ll be hashed or disguised as serialized php, 2. it may not even be in the code, it might be in the sql database, 3. they tend to look for files labeled index.* in my experience i.e. index.php etc. 4. backup the site first, even with the malware in it, as you may need to wipe your entire website. 5. If you’re not fairly expert, and familiar with reading code, including php, this is not something you’re likely to succeed at. 6. change all your FTP passwords immediately, then use a superior method to connect such as SSH / SCP; some hackers use “FTP port sniffers” which transmit the FTP data to a malicious party, who then just walks in and adds it, and 7. the hackers are even smart enough to hide the intrusion from you, if your PC is infected, which prolongs the lifespan of their hack, since you don’t see it, therefore, you’ll need several computers to work on this, ideally one of them linux (more virus resistant; macs aren’t virus-proof any more since they switched to intel chips).

Or, call us, or your Swift Consultant, and get a new site – we can clone your old one + upgrade it faster than you might expect (and fix the problem).

So the info below is really just removal of the message / warning. Here’s how to get Google to re-spider your website (and thus see that it’s been cleared).

1. Login to https://www.google.com/webmasters and add your site by clicking in the top right. On the next screen click “Alternate Methods” upper left, then “Add Meta Tag To Your Site’s Homepage” as you see below: Copy the string of gibberish (control-C to copy or right-click).

2. In the control panel of your website, which is usually http://YOURPHONE.SwiftWebDesigner.com/wp-admin or http://YourPhone.SwiftCMS.com depending on your website, go to Settings >> Fast Verification, and drop this into the box that says “Google”

3. Return to Webmaster Central and click “verify”. This may take 2-3 tries at first, be patient and let it run.

Next, you might see this:

.. so click “more details”… then if you’re sure it’s gone (it will be if it’s on our platform), click “Request a Review”.

A human will review your site, ensure it’s gone, then remove all the notices.

Done!

For Swift Clients, doesn’t this give you a sense of relief? Why not take a moment and recommend us on Facebook or Twitter?

For not-yet-Swift-Clients, why not give us a call and upgrade your website today? We can help.

Note: For people who need malware removal but don’t want to change their code, the initial consultation _starts_ at $500 minimum, and doesn’t include a guarantee of removal. Once your site is hacked, the offending party can “create secret trap doors” for themselves to get back in – it’s much easier to keep them out than it is to get them out once hacked.

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You have 2 choices of how / where to add, and can use either or both:

1. Widgets (i.e. Sidebar(s), Footer-Widget-Area, even header-right-side-widget, post-header-widget, etc.) (Reminder: A Widget is like a bookshelf, you can drop any book(s) into it; see Appearance >> Widgets)
2. On the main page, using a plugin called “Better RSS”

First, on a page or post. It’s easy.

1. Step 1 is enable the plugin. Go to “Plugins” and hit Control-F for search and enter “Better RSS”. Click “Activate”
2. Go to Pages or Posts and locate the page on which you want to add your RSS feed.
3. Copy and paste this bit of text, but put a brace [ ] around it (we can’t do it here, or it’ll create an RSS feed!):
4. better-rss feed=”http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=e&output=rss” items=5 show_date=1 show_author=1 show_summary=1

1. Remember: Bracket before + after, no spaces [likethis].

1. Copy the above; the colored text won’t work below it’s just included here for illustration. better-rss feed=”http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=e&output=rss” items=5 show_date=1 show_author=1 show_summary=1

• Revise the blue underlined portion to contain your RSS feed. If you choose, you can revise the number of items to show (i.e. from 5 above to 10), show_author to 0 (disabled), etc.
• Preview your page – you should be done. Not working? Perhaps you forgot to add [ before (no spaces!) and ] after (again, no spaces)

In a Widget (usually a Sidebar or part of the Footer)

1. Also easy. Go to Appearance >> Widgets
2. In the middle, you should see a widget called “RSS” – just drag it over on to the right-column possible widget-areas. Usually this will be either the right-most-area called “Primary Sidebar”, or on the footer areas at the bottom.

Problems? Questions? Tips? Contact us and we’ll update this page.

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That should sum it up!

Search terms for which this video might help:

• How to delete gallery images
• How to remove images in gallery

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This video sums it up – it’s not complex.

Your FROM (Outgoing) account is probably at

http://Google.com/a/YOURDOMAIN.COM

Once there, login with just your name – i.e. just “Bob” not “Bob@YourDomain.com”.

Terms you might have searched for to find this page:

• How to Forward Email
• Email forwarding
• how to send email to some other mailbox

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1. Plugin: Enable “Shortcode Magic”. It will enable dozens of powerful shortcode options specifically for the internet marketer. Here’s a quick demo:

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This plugin is in beta, but below are the shortcode tags for client reference.

Installation Steps:

1. Create 3 pages (blank at first):

1. Registration (can be on any page, sidebar, etc. too if you prefer)
2. Webinar-NAME (assuming you might have more than one webinar type)
3. Registration-confirmed. This is your “thanks page” i.e. what users see after registration.

• On the Webinar-NAME page, paste the code below. Use a placeholder for the video. For the moment, we’ll presume you know how to embed video, and to make it look like a webinar, hide and disable all controls. We recommend hosting it on Amazon AWS (free for a basic account) for smooth and reliable playback without eating your bandwidth while protecting your content. If your webinar isn’t done, use a placeholder just to get things roughed in.
• Write your thanks page i.e. registration-confirmed. Keep it simple. You can add viral share tools, free bonuses, etc. later but rough it in and get the basics set up fast (sketch it in) then go back and make it better.
• Registration Form: Login to Aweber (for the moment, our plugin only handles playback, so the actual registration is hacked together – but it works). Create a new list called “XYZWebinar” for example, then you might create sublists, one for each event, if you have multiple concurrent events (thus that list can refer to a specific event, specific webinar). Add a custom variable called “localwebinartime”, and generate a basic form (name, phone, email, localwebinartime) for example.
• Use that to set up your event-registration-form. This will require some HTML so it’s not for rookies; hire our team if needed to install and set up.
• The basics should be done at this point!

Paste this section into your page and edit from there:

Each WED 3pm-5pm

[event starts="WED 3pm PST" ends="WED 5pm PST"]

[before] This event will start in [countdown][/before]

[after]This event ended[/after]

[content] html – video, whatever [/content]

[/event]

You should get the idea.

Actual commands breakdown:

• [event starts="MON 4pm PST" ends="MON 6pm PST"] - everything should be nested within the [event] tag i.e. after [event] and before [/event] – USE YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM or for cycle – MON 16:00
  
• [countdown] – shows a javascript countdown to the actual event.
• [before] This event will start in [countdown][/before] – everything between these tags will show prior to the event.
• [after] This event ended [/after] – Everything in this section will show for 24 hours following the event.
• [content] html – video, whatever [/content]
• [localwebinartime] – This is displays the time registered for (by reading a cookie from the user’s computer). It is used for 2 things:

• to pass to your autoresponder as a hidden variable i.e. in Aweber, in the registration form, we can include (in the HTML of the form) <input name=”custom localwebinartime” type=”hidden”  value=”[localwebinartime]” />, then in the autoresponder write “Hi {firstname_fix}! We look forward to seeing you at {custom localwebinartime}!” and it will output something like “Hi John! We look forward to seeing you at 3pm Thursday!”.
• To use on your thank-you-page, which might also have the same message, and perhaps a fancy coupon-style or reminder. Later we may get fancy and create some code to “click here to add to calendar” .ics format, etc. but for now, manual reminder it is.

Future Enhancements / Development Roadmap:

• Div-Appears-Time. We should be able to use the above code for this and just add another div at the same time as the primary, but we need to be sure; this will allow a “buy now” button to appear at a certain time i.e. toward the end of the webinar without distracting the audience.
• Unique URLs for each registrant. This is very important to see who shares it, and to trigger automation based on either showing up or not showing up.
• Autoresponder Integration with SwiftMarketing’s Marketing Automation Suite (in development). This will send reminders prior to the event based on calendar-time i.e. X hours prior, and even Y hours after IF they didn’t attend.

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This is how to control the URL of any page in SwiftCMS websites, sometimes referred to as the “slug”. Note: if you’re reading this and not on SwiftCMS but using a raw installation of WordPress, you’ll probably need to adjust your “permalinks” which requires editing .htaccess in most cases. SwiftCMS residents – we’ve already done this for you to make life easy – along with over 100 other little things you don’t even know about.

Anyway, it’s easy. You just need to know where to look – this graphic sums it up:

Note: in many cases the entire permalink will say:

Permalink: http://8005551111.SwiftWebDesigner.com/page-url-here

The blue section, 8005551111.SwiftWebDesigner.com will get replaced with YourDomain.com automatically. That 800 bit is just a unique identifier for where the files actually reside, but don’t worry – the world (and Google / Yahoo / Bing / etc.) will see only yourdomain.com for the first part.

Unhappy with the 2nd part (red above)? Just click edit. It’s that easy. You cannot edit the blue section (it’s yourdomain.com), but the red section you can – BUT don’t have spaces. Only underscore or dash (which Google / Yahoo / Bing count as a “space” for SEO purposes)

Remember to click “update” or “publish” as needed. You can edit a permalink anytime.

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These are notes for myself, but I’ll make ‘em public so they can help you too, right? By the way, check out articles like this – stating, with reasonably reliable source verification – that Ray William Johnson is making over $80,000 a Month (!!!) off his YouTube channel – that’s $1,000,000+ a year for you back row seat kids. And that’s without endorsements, movie deals, etc. – as the web takes over TV, or at least more entertainment is distributed online, we’ll see bigger numbers, bigger stars, and more cross pollination with conventional media.

I’m also predicting 2012 to be the breakout year for online video, led by a massive coming battle between Apple TV (relaunching, and spearheaded by Steve Jobs before his passing), Google TV, Playstation 4 / Sony [Update: Looks like Sony is out of this battle, but probably just waiting to see how the landscape plays out], and Microsoft (with it’s 360 / Kinect system). In short, we’ll see more websites consumed from the couch (easy navigation, big pictures, etc.), and a lot more video online. Add in Amazon’s Kindle streaming to pads, video on phones and tablets and PCs, and you’ve got more media choices than ever to pull you away from old-school “nothing’s-on” channel-surfing TV.

This is hands down the best time in the last century, in my opinion, to be a director / actor / etc. as an up-and-comer, as instability favors non-incumbents i.e. the bigger stars currently will give way to a new batch, just as happened with silent movies giving way to “talkies”, and black and white giving way to color.

Anyway, enough grandstanding. Here are some specific youtube tactics below. Think of these as “best practices for youtube” to maximize views.

If you haven’t already, be sure to study the YouTube Playbook here – it’s excellent, and compiled by youtube staff.

1. The icon is generated based on 25%, 50%, and 75% of the timeline. Make sure it’s compelling. Adjust the outro-credit-roll, or call-to-action, etc. – add space to the end if needed. NOTE: The icon should contain promise i.e. should be visually arresting itself. See http://www.youtube.com/charts/videos_views?t=a and you’ll see what I mean – those are the most-viewed videos of all time. Just as the movie poster was incredibly important at luring audiences into theaters 50 years ago, the icon is not to be overlooked in importance.
2. Notice the red click-to-subscribe at the top of this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOgLIyxPIjA&feature=relmfu
3. The youtube playbook really pushes hard on making the first 10-15 seconds fun, funny, interesting, scary… in short, compelling. Everything is a click away. Once people get past that first part, they’re likely to keep watching, but they’ll bail quickly if the intro is weak.
4. From watching plenty of Ray William Johnson videos (fun!) I think he’s adding the “next video” button to the top right, slightly before some dropoff point. This is done using annotations by the way, after the video is uploaded. At times it comes earlier, other times later, but seems to be on the older videos so clearly he’s going back and adding it. Example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOgLIyxPIjA&feature=relmfu
5. In all cases the video needs to be compelling, in Ray’s case, he adds sound effects and graphics, but also finds very highly viewed videos and comments on them, which is a sort of proof it’s viral i.e. the original video gets tons of views, so he rips ‘em off (I’m not talking about whether it’s right or wrong here, or even legal, but notice the pattern).
6. In the case of FreddieW (currently #6 on http://vidstatsx.com/youtube-top-10-most-subscribed-channels ) he doesn’t have the same pops and graphic overlays, instead, he likes special effects and makes quick videos that are fun to watch, if lacking much of a story – but obviously his audience doesn’t care. Notice he starts with an annotation overlay of…<continued below / next item>
7. Prompt people to subscribe by copying the URL of your own subscribe link, and adding it into the actual video via annotation after upload
8. In ray’s case, he almost always asks a question that simple to answer, with a request to comment below. Comments help promotion, and also, humans like to feel heard so they feel like they’re actually engaging. It also feeds Ray a non-stop diet of comments, even if negative, to riff on.
9. All have some time for outro, sort of like the “soft curtain” of a feature film, where it’s not the main content but still fun to watch – this is purposely done for people to decide what to do next, which, the producer hopes is engage in some fashion: comment, tweet, share, facebook comment, etc.
10. Notice in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcQG2Ulm198&feature=relmfu the carefully formatted description text (everything below the video starting with “click to tweet”) – make it easy for people to engage.
11. This guy – Ryan Higa – seems to have rose to #2 mainly through cross promotion, simple charisma, and tapping into a younger (and thus spending more time online watching youtube videos) audience. Cross promotion is, _after_ you have some compelling content that is *proven* to be viral, the fastest way to get a huge audience fast. The trick: Don’t blow it on weak content.
12. Smosh styled the header to prompt subscribing, but the fully-styled page seems to only be offered to “full partners” i.e. an invitation-only status for established producers.
13. FreddieW is excellent at content promotion at the end of all his videos – see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iuEYDFpP5M at ~ 2:43 – he edits the promo-clip into the actual source (moving video can’t be done via annotation, but a clickable clear area can) i.e. the 2 clips of other videos he wants you to watch, creating a self-serving circle of content. I assume / hope he generally puts his best performing content there, which is then more likely you hook you in and cause you to subscribe.

Further Watching:

Excellent Interview at USC – prestigious film school by the way:

Additional general observations – this is like the internet in 1999, right?

1. Notice the high percentage of musicians: this is presumably because people watch the video several times to listen to the music. Is this a viable revenue model for up and coming musicians? Who knows… surely the internet made a big difference in Adele going from zero to megastar practically overnight, as did Lady Gaga.
2. The content is of more of interest to young people, but this is the future generation, and simply early adopters. As more people consume youtube from the couch, we’ll see this skew upward.

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