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.
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.

Related posts:

1. How to Add Video to WordPress
2. Podcasting
3. How to Edit Your Navigation

1. How to Add Video to WordPress
2. Podcasting
3. How to Edit Your Navigation

Widgets are like a bookshelf, and you can choose to put any book(s) you like in it. Here’s how to edit and use SwiftCMS’s / WordPress’s widget system.

This page coming soon. Need it? Request it – we’ll wrap it up.

Related posts:

1. Replacing Images
2. Twitter

1. Replacing Images
2. Twitter

This screencast covers how to add video from the simplest to more customizable / powerful methods, all of which are fairly simple. The methods are:

1. Simple direct addition of a youtube link. Super simple. Not very customizable but fast and easy.
2. Widgets (for sidebar, footer). Also very, very simple, fast, and a bit more customizable.
3. In-Content Widgets + VTubeTools.com
4. Snippets Plugin + VTubeTools.com
5. Lightwindow Plugin. More customizable but takes a few steps and some attention.

Note: In all cases we upload to youtube and embed from there. The upsides to this: (1.) It’s a “streaming server” vs. “progressive download” – meaning it optimizes to suit your bandwidth (2.) It plays on everything, regardless of flash installation, including iPhones and iPads. (3.) YouTube is the #2 Search Engine in the world, ahead of Yahoo and Bing, and thus having keyword-optimized videos on youtube is a traffic method in itself (4.) It is the simplest method, and free. (5.) It’s simple to upload, including from your phone – using iPhones and Android phones you can shoot, edit, and upload all from your phone – hands down the fastest, easiest way to get nice looking video online.

TIP: See this article - http://swiftwebdesigner.com/youtube-tips - YouTube Tips – for advice when uploading to youtube.

METHODS of Adding Video To Your SwiftCMS + WordPress Website:

1. Adding Video into a Page or Post (Easiest)

Just add the video on it’s own line, NOT linked (click the chain-breaking icon if needed to remove any hyperlink) into any post or page and it should work. Note: as of this writing, youtube.com links work, but youtu.be links do not BUT the code is the same for either case, so if the link you have is youtu.be, replace it with “htttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” before the unique code.

2. Adding Video to the Sidebar (or Footer or Header) (also very easy)

The below graphic sums it up, but there’s just 3 easy steps to embed:

1. Drop the widget in. A “widget-area” is like a bookshelf – you can easily put any type of book into it just by dragging and dropping. Go to Appearance >> Widgets
2. Open the video you want to drop in, on youtube, and copy the URL (right-click “copy” or Control-C (Windows, Linux), Apple-C (Mac) to copy. Grab the whole URL or just the unique portion at the end.
3. Drop in the code into the widget-controls like you see below. Remove the first http://youtu.be/ portion if needed.

 3. In-Content Widgets

This is for people who need greater control over how the video is embedded. By the way, this can be useful for embedding webinars with a button that’s hidden for most of the video, then at the end it appears. Deal with the video and button separately – but first, the video: –  Steps are…

1. Enable in-content Widget. Go to SwiftCMS >> In Content Widgets. Click the box. You’ll notice that next to each of the possible in-content widgets is a short-code, i.e. [ content-widget:1 ] BUT without the space before content or after 1 (we can’t do it here, because we use these on our site!) – copy this before you leave the page.
2. Next, go to Appearance >> Widgets. On the far right, you’ll notice “Content Widget 1″. You can drag any content into this widget, by the way – including the youtube widget referenced in method 2 above. Assuming you want greater control, then drag in “text” – this will give you a simple text-widget which isn’t “code-checked” by WordPress’ formatter, meaning, WordPress doesn’t check the contents for errors, it just dumps any of this text into the page verbatim – just what you need.
3. Drop the embed code into the page where your media will go – simply type  [ content-widget:1 ] (without the space before content or after 1 (we can’t do it here, because we use these on our site!)), plain text, probably on its own row.
4. Last, generate the embed. Use this to embed from vimeo, youtube, hulu, or any other widget-source. If your video is on youtube, go over to VtubeTools.com to quickly and easily customize the embed code – this allows you to embed at high definition, hide the youtube logo after a few seconds, etc.  Paste this code into the text-widget, the whole bit starting with <object… or <iframe… etc. through the entire bit.

 4. Snippets (Moderate to Advanced)

Snippets are very powerful for dropping in advanced media with absolute control. Generally, this is for people who know some at least basic HTML. Note that snippets can also contain variables inserted on-the-page, making it even more possible to make a pseudo-database style website.

To use this:

1. Enable the plugin “Post Snippets”
2. See documentation on the original author’s site at http://wpstorm.net/wordpress-plugins/post-snippets/

5. Lightwindow Plugin (Moderate to Advanced)

Lightwindow is another flavor of lightbox, thickbox, etc. and it supports video embed. See a  working example at http://InfinitySolar.net. This requires your ability to generate the icons separately as well as advanced understanding of video embeds, but that said, if you understand those concepts and have the ability to work with them, it’s actually quite simple. We’ve done the hard work of testing many different types of pop-ups, and using it is actually pretty easy. To use:

1. Enable the plugin “Lightwindow”
2. You’ll probably want to enable “Post Snippets” as well, or wordpress is likely to strip out the actual HTML code in an effort to protect you from messing up the page.
3. Below is an example of the actual post-snippet we created that may help you:

Then on Settings >> Post Snippets we have a snippet that titled “videohome” that contains

<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/KLtap-v_QXg?&autoplay=1&rel=0&theme=light&showinfo=0&modestbranding=1&hd=1&autohide=1&controls=0&color=white” class=”lightwindow page-options” params=”lightwindow_width=800,lightwindow_height=450,lightwindow_loading_animation=false” title=”Solar Starts at Home” >
<img title=”solar-panel-installer-orange-county” src=”http://7149218168.swiftwebdesigner.com/files/2011/06/solar-panel-installer-los-angeles.jpg” alt=”" width=”350″ height=”250″ />
</a>

Questions? Need more help? Ask below and we’ll update this page.

Related posts:

1. WordPress 3.1 Upgrade
2. Phone Editing
3. Problem: Custom Page Types not showing up in WordPress

1. WordPress 3.1 Upgrade
2. Phone Editing
3. Problem: Custom Page Types not showing up in WordPress

Podcasting is like blogging: You simply tell the world (and/or Apple’s servers) that you’ll be posting / publishing a stream of files (audio and video for podcasting, text for RSS / blogging) at a given location and that they should keep an eye open for it.

People then subscribe to your podcast / blog (also known as an “RSS Feed”), telling it “hey let me know anytime there’s a new video / audio / blog-entry-article” – then pull it down to their device (often an iPhone, reader, etc.)

First, the basics: see this video

Second, we have several plugins pre-installed (but you need to activate; login to your website admin then go to Plugins, just click “activate”), specifically

• WPAudio // a simple plugin that converts any mp3 into a web-based-player
• Blueberry Powerpress http://www.blubrry.com/powerpress/

Additional information:

Related posts:

1. Blog Options
2. Multiple Languages
3. Twitter

1. Blog Options
2. Multiple Languages
3. Twitter

Essentially we need a staff designer to replace me so I can focus on marketing and sales.

Needed:

1. First priority is a good designer with a good general aesthetic sense. You must be able to design websites, landing pages, banner ads. you know photoshop very well, can pick out good stock photos as needed, have designed logos, maybe (optional) know video editing – in general, have good art sense and are capable of top-tier advertising creative work.
2. Individual person. No companies. Non-negotiable. Companies will be ignored.
3. Decent spoken english. Doesn’t need to be flawless just decent enough for skype or google chat voice conversations.
4. You know some CSS. You probably don’t like it, but can do basic things like make a header taller, shorter, change the margins on some things, etc… we don’t need fancy, but you must know basic CSS enough to modify one website to build another, which is usually just some basic adjustments. For tough CSS we have expert coders, but need you to handle ~80% of it (simple sites 100% based on cloning a similar-structured theme, complex ones less but work with coder to make it happen)
5. You freelance, but need and want one solid client who can supply a steady stream of work. In return, you’ll keep us posted of availability. We guarantee X hours a week of work, you guarantee to be available for Y hours a week (more or less, i.e. vacations are fine with notice)

IF that above is a match, I’d love to hear from you. This bid is for $50 in paid test work, just let me know you’re interested, then I’ll propose a small project you can accept or decline. If it works, we’ll do another, then another, and keep rolling.

Ideally this will be 20 hours/week/avg by Nov and 40/hrs a week by Jan-Feb, doing mostly small business websites using SwiftCMS wordpress “mega-theme” i.e. 100% of settings are control-panel driven like thesis etc.

Related posts:

1. custom web designer

1. custom web designer

Timelines on Swift Web Designer / Swift Marketing projects can look complex – but it’s designed to empower you, the client, to take control over delivery dates & budgets.

Also, note fast, quick, easy projects i.e. < 4 hours have little risk of delays, while large complex projects have more moving parts, more chances of interruption, more communication required and thus are exposed to greater risk of delays. We are scientific about managing the time required for a project and aim to put you in control.

First, projects get delayed for 3 possible reasons, generally speaking:

1. Queue. At any given moment we have multiple projects in process, and so getting to top priority takes a bit of time. We’ll do our best to communicate where you are in the queue. We are experimenting with 3 time “modes”, each reflected in the budget:
   1. Urgent / Emergency / Top Priority (100% of Required Time). This has to be done yesterday AND you’re willing to pay more for this. There’s no queue: we start immediately, however, we can only take this if someone else isn’t already on this plan. If they are on this plan, we’ll advise you of the expected completion time.
   2. Normal Mode (200% of Required Time), which includes 2 timelines: Target (slightly optimistic best guess (but not overly optimistic) timeline), and Commitment – we’ll guarantee to be done by this date, or have financial repercussions.
   3. Pre-Emptible (400% of Required Time). If you beat us up on rate and truly want to save every penny, AND have some time, this allows other higher-paid projects to cut in line in front of you, though we’ll still have a guarantee date. As your project gets closer to the Guaranteed Delivery Date, we’ll make it higher and higher priority. As the old phrase goes, “Good, Fast, or Cheap – pick any two”. We only do great work, which leaves “Good and Fast” or “Good and Cheap”. “Fast and Cheap [meaning it's not good, it's bad]” is not ever an option for any Swift company or product.
2. Feature Creep. This is when bells and whistles get added to the project after starting, and/or there is more micromanaging over details – which is fine, you just have to pay for it. As bells and whistles are added, it adds time.
3. Wrong Direction (Rare) and/or programming not going as expected. On occasion, it happens (less than 5% of projects), the design goes “sideways”, meaning we’re given some ideas and notes, then need to trash some work and back up and pick a new direction. If we are on the wrong path, i.e. from a design perspective, don’t wait. We’d rather have too much info than too little – show us stuff you love, stuff you hate (because that’s useful to show us “not that”).. the more you show us, the less we have to read minds. While we try to be psychic, and most of the time we’re on target with minimal direction, on occasion a client doesn’t love our first sketches, so we get back on track. Note that we are pretty good at picking this out up front, and depending on your design package (see methods below). From a programming perspective, we have a lot of experience, and most of our projects involve minimal programming, and if there’s any programming, it’s “standing on the shoulders of a giant” i.e. our existing code base, so the risk here is minimal. Nonetheless, it could happen, though 9 times out of 10 we don’t have bugs, but “mis-configuration” meaning the programmer’s code is fine. The problem arises from communication – nonetheless, this can be minimized through “good specs”. For simple projects we’ll skip right to “beta’ – a basic working version and you’ll see it develop, while complex projects might have “alpha” then “beta” – a more crude skeleton that works, usually building just “the heart” first then adding limbs and other functions. Other times, certain components are beyond our control – i.e. use of APIs (application programming interface, a way for computers to talk to other computers directly) so we’re giving a best guess about how complex a task will be.

We spell this out to put you in control. From our perspective, we need to run a healthy business, and you’ll benefit from our critical mass of constantly incoming projects. We often go back, months later, and upgrade clients (for free!) to better systems, because we developed related code for some other industry and/or territory.

In the coming weeks, you’ll see what might seem like a lot of information, and moving forward, our project quotes may get a bit more complex around the timelines, however, we believe this is the only path to keeping clients happy and delivering with integrity. For clients who need faster turnaround, you have the power to get that with a corresponding budget, and for clients who push for a lower price, we then need the ability to prioritize higher-paid projects.

No related posts.

This page is pending revision to allow multiple options and multiple systems.

Until it is revised, start with the simplest e-commerce method, paypal. Please click over to http://SwiftWebDesigner.com/paypal

Related posts:

1. Paypal
2. Cancel
3. I have a domain already

1. Paypal
2. Cancel
3. I have a domain already