http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/ en Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:06:50 GMT vBulletin 10 http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/images/adminaddict/misc/rss.jpg http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/ http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/how-get-backlinks-through-social-bookmarks-5539/ Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:15:59 GMT Have you ever wondered why so many people around you are talking about *social media* and bookmarking networks like _Twitter_, _Stumbleupon_,... Have you ever wondered why so many people around you are talking about social media and bookmarking networks like Twitter, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Dig and more? They can turn fortunes of your website in few days. To your surprise you can get a good amount of traffic and might even notice an increase in page ranks. This is because most of the popular bookmarking networks can provide quality backlinks to your website and route quality traffic who are interested in your website.

However there is no dearth of social bookmarking networks available on date. Not all would be the best ones to go with and neither can I provide a whole list of all the good social bookmarking networks. Some of the preferred social bookmarking networks are as below:

·Twitter. Twitter is a hugely popular microblogging cum social bookmarking network where marketers can share their news, stories and articles with their followers. Its tagline “What are you doing?” has been a standout.
·Stumbleupon. It comes with a simple interface where you can enter the Title, Tags and Description about your content and start sharing with the world. You can give a thumbs up or down, review depending upon your evaluation based on site or content.
·Delicious. Like Stumbleupon it offers similar functionality and is one of the most popular social bookmarking networks.
·Yahoo Buzz. This is a social bookmarking network with a subtle difference. They concentrate more on news pieces than general story content. You could find huge collection of latest news - political, sports and general.
·Reddit. This is another social bookmarking network viz. hugely popular and allows marketers to tag their stories with keywords.

You can create thousands of accounts if you have the patience and resources on different social bookmarking sites to promote your stories. I would strongly recommend focusing on some 5-10 social bookmarking websites and providing quality content to your readers. ]]> Promotion and Advertising Brandon Sheley http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/how-get-backlinks-through-social-bookmarks-5539/ http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/how-link-build-bing-5085/ Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:24:01 GMT Bing is Microsoft's latest re-branding of their search engine and it's starting to pick up steam and market share each month. Bing uses its own separate algorithm to return search results but its basically driven on links coming to your site as well.

It has been noted in numerous places, that Bing traffic is converting better for many internet webmasters, and there isn't any reason to ignore this trend or free traffic by also optimizing your link building strategies for Bing! as well as other engines like Google and Yahoo.

With Yahoo's search market share slipping and Bing gaining, if their search marketing deal goes thru, expect Bing! to have roughly a 30% market share of searches, that will surely put a small hurt on Google

Bing's policy on link building:

Bing's position on link building is straightforward - we are less concerned about the link building techniques used than we are about the intentions behind the effort. That said, techniques used are often quite revealing of intent. Allow me to explain.

Bing (as well as other search engines) places an extremely high priority on helping searchers find relevant and useful content through search. This is why we regularly say that search engine optimization (SEO) techniques oriented toward helping users are ultimately more effective than doing SEO specifically for search engine crawlers (aka bots).

The webmasters who create end user value within their websites, based on the needs of people, are the ones who will see their page rank improve. So where does that value come from? Content. Good, original, text-based content.

Authority sites:

So what links are valuable? That's pretty easy, isn't it? If relevance is important, the most highly regarded, relevant sites are best of all. Sites that possess great content, that have a history in their space, that have earned tons of relevant, inbound links - basically, the sites who are authorities in their field - are considered authoritative sites. And as authorities, the outbound links they choose to make carry that much more value (you don't get to be an authority in your field by randomly linking out to irrelevant, junk sites). Good SEO practices, a steady history, great content, and other, authoritative inbound links beget authority status. The more relevant, authoritative inbound links you earn for your website, the more of an authority your site becomes in the eyes of search engines. These are the natural results of solid content and smart link building.

Going unnatural

So what does it mean to go unnatural? It means you're trying to fake out the search engines, to try to earn a higher ranking that the quality of your site's content dictates as natural through manipulation of search engine ranking algorithms. This chicanery can range from relatively benign but useless efforts to overly aggressive promotion to outright fraud. And as the major search engine bots are continually crawling the entire Web, we see what is being done, the relationships between linked sites, the changes to links over time, which sites link to one another, and so much more, we account for these cunning behaviors in our indexing values applied to those pages.

Examples of potentially conspiratorial hocus-pocus that might be perceived as unnatural and warrant a closer review by search engine staff include but are not limited to:

* The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
* Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites
* Using hidden links in your pages
* Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known "bad neighborhoods" on the Web
* Linking out to known web spam sites

When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.

Suggested Links:
Bing Webmaster Central
Web Hosting Reviews For SEO Friendly Hosting
Learn about Bing Webmaster Tools
Some of the useful information in this article can be found: Bing - Link building for smart webmasters (no dummies here) (SEM 101) - Webmaster Center Blog - Bing Community ]]> Promotion and Advertising David McHenry http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/how-link-build-bing-5085/ http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/forum-promotion-forums-4668/ Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:51:39 GMT [ This may be a "negative" article in that it details what should presumably be avoided, but does not offer alternatives. I do not bother because I think such advices as the following have been covered here well enough: submit contributive content on a regular basis, participate in discussions, visit like-minded forums, and etc. That said, my article covers a very particular type of forum that I feel too many people think is a decent answer to the problem of promotion. In detailing what I see to be the flaws in that assessment, I hope that my article may be of assistance to a new generation of hobbyist message board administrators (the demographic I feel is prone to buy in to the use of forum promotion forums). ]

When I say "forum promotion forum," I mean a forum set up specifically to promote other forums, and provide a number of "services" to assist in development, such as the "post exchange," reviews, and forum-related discussion. I should probably note, however, that I am most definitely not referring to webmaster or administrator resource forums (such as AdminAddict), which differentiate themselves by being for more than promotion and promotion-related services (such as post exchanges and signature ad placement), and in another important way detailed next.

Unlike a webmaster or administrator resource forum, a "forum promotion forum" often does not consist primarily of established administrators who are secure in the promotion of their forum, and are genuinely interested in assisting others and providing input without blatantly waving an advertisement. This brings me to the Catch-22 of the average "forum promotion forum": the members attracted to such forums want to promote their forum, but are not interested in joining other communities (unless it will further promote their forum). That said, when you submit your topic in the advertisement section, it falls on blind eyes because the readers are only other promoters.

Another notable promotion service is the post exchange. Post exchanges may help with activity, but they are much more likely to do so when coupled with more up-front tactics like simply submitting quality content or regularly submitting thoughtful replies to your members. However, as is known by some forum administrators, there are paid posting services out there that guarantee a certain "quality," which should be all I need to say about that to make the following point. Post exchange participants at forum promotion forums tend to be low quality, as those participants are, as I said, mostly inexperienced administrators who haven't gotten their forum off the ground, and so are not likely to have the necessity of quality content nailed down as something they should be contributing to at their forum, and therefore yours.

What about non-promotion related services like reviews and forum-related discussion? I will respond to the latter example first. Forum-related discussions should theoretically help administrators because they are engaging in, or reading, feedback with fellow administrators. The problem, again, is the demographic of the community: administrators who do not already have established communities, and are primarily around to promote their forum, rather than engaging in interesting forum-related discussions. Sure, there are jewels to be found among the rubble (in regard to content), but the prevailing demographic greatly contributes to an atmosphere where posts tend to only be good enough to count toward the attaining of services, rather than the attaining of knowledge.

As for reviews, it is hard to find quality because you are not often enough crossing paths with people who are genuinely interested in and passionate about reviewing forums. Who are the type of people there should be more of? As I alluded to earlier, people who have communities that are already established, are confident about their knowledge, and do not simply seek post count.

Certainly, reviewers should not be expected to give top-quality reviews for free, and [insert amount of posts here] may certainly not be worth a well-thought-out, several-paragraphs long review. The problem is that, at forum promotion forums, reviews are more like categorized one-liner praise for what's there (you have a favicon, you have posts, you have topics), whereas criticism is lacking and extremely generalized (you need to get more posts, you need to get a better logo). What makes reviews worthwhile is this: the people giving them have built communities that have "taken off" and that don't grow primarily from leeching off the desire countless people have to promote their own forums. Your time would be better spent seeking the people who will help you at administrator resource forums.

By Kevin Malone of The Infinity Program ]]> Promotion and Advertising Mudora http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/forum-promotion-forums-4668/ http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/tips-writing-effective-newsletters-4314/ Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:56:26 GMT *Tips on Writing an Effective Newsletter* I saw a request in the forums for a little tutorial on writing an effective newsletter, so I thought I... Tips on Writing an Effective Newsletter
I saw a request in the forums for a little tutorial on writing an effective newsletter, so I thought I would give it a shot.
I’ll spend a day or two writing and putting together the pieces our vBulletinSetup Newsletter. Articles and written and rewritten after thought of the whole layout may change with some event or special that we have to get out in the newsletter. I try to remove all spelling and grammatical errors and usually try to get a staff member or two to look over it before posting it live. Our newsletter page is a little out of alignment at the moment, but in the emails they look great. I guess I’ll just start listing off some tips and we’ll see how this goes.

• Always keep your audience in mind: For obvious reasons, all the content in the newsletter is directly related to vBulletin news, vBulletinSetup news. This can work with any niche, if your site is about ford mustangs, then post the latest news in regards to that car.
• Email newsletters should be simple: If you are pushing out an email newsletter, you should try to keep it as simple as possible. Don’t put many images in the email and use all text. Your content should speak for itself, when I do add images, I try to make them very small in compared to the text.
• Take your time composing the newsletter: As I started above, it takes me a few days to actually put together the newsletter.
• Only publish the best: This is where I’m lacking a bit. I’m lucky enough to have a wife in advertising and plenty of members that will look over our newsletter. This really should be the #1 goal in a newsletter.
• The newsletter must be readable: Don’t stuff 20 full stories in your newsletters, no one will read past the first sentence before deleting the email. I will post a snippet then link to the full story in the forums.
• Choose the lead stories carefully: This is your “front page” if you are thinking like it’s a newspaper. You only want to post the stores that will be attractive to the largest number of people.
• Build up the newsletter: In the beginning a newsletter will most likely be very simple, a few lead stories , some short news, and then a message from the admin. As your publication grows, you can add some featured stores, banners or columns to split the page up, rss feeds even for other news sites in regards to your niche.
• Include the source: Our newsletter is full of links back to the stories in the forums.
• Use catchy captains in the title: This is something I don’t take advantage of, but I need to start. This is your first impression on the member reading your newsletter. If the title is boring, it will most likely be deleted.
• Ask your readers what they think: Ask your readers what they think of your newsletter. They are the reason you post them aren’t they? This is a great way to find bugs that you may not see.
• Offer incentives for newsletter writers: I tossed this in here because this is something we have been doing on our blog. You may have noticed a few more authors other then myself lately. bdude, David and Blake have been helping out with the blog post. This would also work for newsletter, to get a collaborative process for a better product.
• Don’t sacrifice look for readability: You don’t want so many banners, tables and columns on the newsletter that it makes it hard to read. Keep it simple.
• Enjoy the praise: Once we started getting threads of users saying “great newsletter” and “thanks for sending” I knew I was up to something good.

A well written newsletter can generate a great deal of traffic, always try to improve your issues and don’t forget to ask for user feedback. I’m trying to think of a few more tips, I’m a bit stumped right now. This should be a good start.
If you have a news letter, I’d love to see a link to it. Seeing what’s working for other people would really be appreciated.
cheers
-Brandon @ vBulletin Setup ]]> Promotion and Advertising Brandon Sheley http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/tips-writing-effective-newsletters-4314/ http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/forum-promotion-tips-3153/ Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:06:47 GMT This is a short article containing various ways of promoting your forums: When promoting your forum always abide by other websites rules. If you... This is a short article containing various ways of promoting your forums:

When promoting your forum always abide by other websites rules. If you are not allowed to use their site to promote your site, simply do not bother, you will only end up banned.

Your Forum and Their Forum Methods

• Signatures - Sign up to forums within your niche and use a signature link or any promotional material you have such as banners linking back to your own forum. Always read their rules before doing so as you may not be permitted, some forums do permit this, not all. Make your promotional signature look presentable with a good quality fast loading graphic. Keep any additional text links small. Remember this isnt just about gaining backlinks so even if they do have vbseo installed continue to post as your signature will still be noticed by the members.
• Posting - When posting on there forum create interesting content for them, you both gain something that way, you gain exposure, they gain content, it is a win win situation. Always post decent content, dont reply to a thread for the sake of it with a poor reply, try to become interested as much as possible and help their members, after all these members are the ones you are interested in.
• Making Friends - Sneaky as it may sound but making friends on similar forums within your niche is great. They are more than likely to sign up and become a regular member over the rest who view your signature.
• DONT SPAM. Spamming will only give you a bad name. I am sure many of us have attempted it out of desperation but do not do it.

Social Websites - Make your forum name viral

Get yourself on ALL of the best social networking sites. Create pages on Facebook, a channel on YouTube, a Myspace account, LinkedIn, you name it, get on it and add up your URL, make friends and promote your website.

Dont spam these social sites, just be a valued part of their community, and their members will also value yours too.

Utilise these social networks to your best ability, if youre on YouTube, make good videos and include links back to your forum in the description. When on Myspace make a linking back banner right at the top, on Facebook make groups and tell your friends all about them and include links every now and then.

Allow your members promote you!

On your website ALWAYS include a page where members can easily download banners of your forum, we do this on our website on this page:

http://www.teenforumz.com/creativity...tml#post148080

As you can see we provide them the code for both forum signatures and the code for their blogs and sites. Make it easy for them, they are not going to come to you asking for a banner to be made.

Print off flyers and posters if possible and hand them out yourself locally and do this targetingly, dont give a teen a life insurance forum leaflet ;)

Offer to send your members these promotional items for them to hand out where and when they can. If possible give them something with your forum URL and logo printed on it like t-shirts, mugs or any other related to your niche items.

The main thing to remember when promoting your forums is not to look desperate by spamming, show your dedication to your site and its members and people will catch on and follow.

Thanks for reading and if you found this useful or liked it, hit the rep buton :) ]]> Promotion and Advertising Michael http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/forum-promotion-tips-3153/ http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/some-tips-promoting-your-forum-1874/ Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:28:00 GMT Your marketing approach needs to target the exact people that you want to visit your site. That sounds pretty simple, and it is. You would not show... Your marketing approach needs to target the exact people that you want to visit your site. That sounds pretty simple, and it is. You would not show up at a Bar-B-Q cook off and advertise your sushi bar. That is the wrong place, the wrong time and the wrong group of people.

Sources of traffic:

Directories:
When I first launched my site 2 1/2 years ago I spent about 8 - 10 months submitting my site to every directory I could find. Even though I provided a backlink to the directory, most of the time the directory never published a link to my site. Those that did publish a link to my site - the link was never picked up be google. So I wasted 8 - 10 months on bad advice. Keep in mind, most of the people that promote directories, own directories. The advice they give is self serving.

Most people that visit myspace, facebook and youtube do not even know what a directory is. By hanging out at directories and submitting links to your site - your in the wrong place and at the wrong time. The time for directories was 10 years ago, not today and certainly not tomorrow.


Forums links - are ok, but its unlikely you are going to attract a lot of members from other forums. A happy member will stay with the community. Most people these days are hanging out in social networking sites, such as youtube, myspace and facebook. Forum links have VERY limited scalability. Meaning they are target a very limited market.

Blogs - Now we are getting somewhere, but we dont know just "where" yet. Blog is a webpage where you can post stuff. You post your opinions, pictures and videos - hang on just a second, but what pictures and videos? Hummmmm, lets talk about this.

Setting up a blog portal:

1. Buy a domain name that is close to your forum and install wordpress on it. Wordpress has some good built in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features. You can set up URL rewrite so the article title is the same as the page URL, wordpress has good keyword options, and some other cool features. Wordpress also leaves a small footprint on the server, a lot less then joomla, mambo or drupal. So you can run several wordpress sites and have a very small impact on the server.

Since the wordpress page (aka forum portal) has a domain name that is close to your forums name, you will be able to grab more search engine results pages. For a certain key word in google (my forums nitch) my forum is listed in the #1 spot, and my forum portal is ranked # 5 or #6. The results pages of google only shows 10 results at a time - so I control 20% of the first page results for my targeted keywords. At one time another one of my portals was ranked on the first page, so I controlled 30% of the first page of google for my forums nitch. But that second portal has slipped to page 2 or 3.

Set the wordpress blog (forum portal) so people can not register, and turn off comments. Some wordpress templates show when comments have been disabled. Edit the templates and remove the comments section and the "Comments have been disabled" message. You want visitors to think of your "blog" as a website.


Video promotion:


NEVER upload copyrighted videos that belong to someone else. We are professionals here, we do not steal and we do not borrow anything that does not belong to us.

Film all of your own videos - this means use a digital camera and actually film the video. Do not take someone elses video and splice it in with someone elses. This goes back to the copyright issue.

For music - find "real" royalty free music. Some people will make "royalty free" music and say its free to the public. But if you use the music for commercial purposes, the owner of the music can sue you for part of the profit. Before you use any so called "free" or "royalty free" music, you be sure to read and print out the terms and conditions. Print these conditions and file them away, just in case you need them later. Use music that is in the public domain. this includes authors like Mozart or Bach.

When you post a video on youtube, make sure a link to your site is the very first line and the very first words in the description.

In the introduction and closing credits of the video, put something like "this is a (your website name here) production.


Combining all of this:

Embed the video into your forums - you will need to make sure the video is viewable from the forum, and not just a link. Videos provide instant content for members and guest alike.

Write up a small article on your blog and embed the video in addition to the typed article. Disable comments in the post, and provide a link to the thread where the video is posted. From there visitors can register and discuss the article or the video.

These videos are reusable. Just because you post them in one thread does not mean that you can not use them in another post.


If you are trying to target a certain market or keyword, you can use this same suggestion. Instead of "forum" - just replace it with what ever you want.


RSS Feeds: The home page on the portals can utilize an RSS feed straight from the the real forum that updates every few hours. This provides visitors instant access straight to my forum threads from 2 different sites.

When people search google for "forum" and find their way to the /forum page on the portals, they find an RSS feed. Click a link and straight to the main site they go.

Just so yall will know, the forum page is the second or third most viewed page on both portals. The bounce rate for traffic referred from a portal to the main forum is around 8%. How would you like to have an 8% bounce rate, and with 3,000 - 5,000 people referred monthly from a single site?


From here, you now have at least 2 sources of traffic to your forum:
Where ever you uploaded the video to - youtube, dailymotion, .........
The portal

The more video sites you sign up at, and the more videos you post, the more sources of traffic you have. I have about a dozen video hosting sites that provide a steady stream of videos, traffic and new members to my forums.

The more articles you post on your portals, the more keywords you grab, the better you rank in search engines, the more traffic you get. The more traffic the portal gets, the more people you can direct to your forum.

These two sources can target two totally different groups. One group is the people that hang out in the video hosting sites, and the other group are the ones using search engines to find information.

Google loves youtube - when your searching for something, sometimes google will throw in a couple of videos from youtube. These are sometimes on the first page results of google - those could be your videos. But instead, they might be your competitions videos. ]]> Promotion and Advertising kevin http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/some-tips-promoting-your-forum-1874/ http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/how-diversify-your-backlink-keywords-1875/ Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:28:00 GMT Meta description, content keywords, image tags all play an important roll in how search engines see your site. But keywords in your backlinks are... Meta description, content keywords, image tags all play an important roll in how search engines see your site. But keywords in your backlinks are very important and often over looked. Putting a keyword into the link tells the search engines "what" your site is about.

Lets start off with your google webmaster tools:
Go to - Google.com - my account - webmaster tools - domain name - Statistics - What Googlebot sees - In external links to your site. In that column, there will be a list depending on how many backlinks you have. This is what google sees as to the content of your site.

Are the keywords listed there the most important ones to your sites nitch? If you have never checked this list, chance are you will have "visit my site", or "my website" listed. These keywords are taken directly from your backlinks.

In that whole list "In external links to your site", where does your keyword rank? If your most important keyword is not on that list, you and your site have problems.

My top 4 keywords for example:

These are the results to one of my wordpress websites

1. survival gear articles and information
2. barricaded store fronts during a disaster
3. visit poster's website
4. hurricane ike video series part 1

Some forum I posted in has a link to my site with the keywords "visit poster's website". The only thing I can do there is remove the link to my site from my profile on that forum. Its doing more damage then good. My most important keywords are #1. Now I have to work on the rest of the keywords.


The problem some people run into, they use the same exact keyword phrase in every link. I am guilty of that myself, and this is how I learned from my mistakes.

Take a look at the chart in your google webmaster tools, each phrase is only listed once. Even if you use the term "widget blog" or "widget forum" in 1,000 backlinks, it only gets 1 slot in that chart. After that, google will start filling in the other rows with the sites name, "visit my site", blah, blah and more blah.

Lets say we have 1,000 backlinks spread over 5 forums with dofollow signatures. So we have an average of 200 post per forum.

1st forum signature - widget blog
2nd forum signature - widget forum
3nd forum signature - widgets
4th forum signature - how to build a widget
5th forum signature - widget building

The same thing goes for directory submission. If you submitted to 100 directories and used the same phrase in every submission, you have done little good to help your site. It would have been much better to use several different phrases in those 100 submissions.

From here yall should get the idea of the keyword structure. So you have just given google keywords to fill in the top 5 rows of the "In external links to your site" column.

By not checking your google webmaster tools and tweaking your sites backlinks, you have done damage to your sites ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages. Even if you started right now, its going to take weeks before you see any real results.


So what do you do now?

First - check your google webmaster tools and see where your important keywords rank in that list.

Second - get a piece of paper and a pencil, and write down every forum, directory and anywhere else you have a link to your site posted.

Third - if you used the same phrase on every backlink, get those links edited and diversify the keyword structure.

You should start seeing results in a few days, weeks, maybe a month or two. A lot of it depends on how often those other sites with your backlinks are scanned. Sites that use a sitemap generator and submit their pages to google, yahoo and msn are the better ones to post in. That way you do not have to "wait" for google to find you backlinks.

The intended goal of this is to populate the "In external links to your site" list with keywords that are important to your site. Not with keywords pulled from random links.

This article is an original and is not copied from another website. And I wish to retain ownership of this article. ]]> Promotion and Advertising kevin http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/how-diversify-your-backlink-keywords-1875/ http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/how-make-your-own-videos-1862/ Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:21:00 GMT Before we begin, allow me to get your attention. It does not do any good to post this if your not going to take it serious or even read it. My... Before we begin, allow me to get your attention. It does not do any good to post this if your not going to take it serious or even read it.

My youtube account was created in April of 2007. In the past 24 months I have posted 320 home made videos. This has provided my site with a steady stream of targeted traffic. The bounce rate from my youtube account is around 18%. My bounce rate from generic google search results is around 48%. That is a 30% difference. When someone lands on my forum from my youtube account, they are 60 times more likely to create an account then someone from google.

Every 30 days, youtube sends about 10,000 uniques to my forum, its my 3rd highest source of traffic and has the second lowest bounce rate.

In other words, youtube videos can provide your site with some VERY targeted traffic.

Do I have your attention now? If so, lets get to work.


Items needed:

Digital camera that films in mpg or AVI format and films video in at least 30 frames a second. These are usually standard features. Except maybe kodak, some of their cameras film in a MPG4 format.

For filming a stationary target, I recommend getting a tri-pod. Cheap ones can be found for maybe $20.

Windows XP service pack 2 or 3 or vista (I dont know about windows 7). Included in those operating systems is Windows Movie Maker. WMM is a free basic video editing platform. It will do the basic things such as splicing, adding credits, adding music,,, but no real special effects.

Film the video, import it to your computer and edit with windows movie maker.


Optimization:

At the start of the video, insert a title with the name of your website. Make this is contrasting color, maybe white text on black background. There are some effects that you can do with the text, but sometimes less is more.

Make the introduction no more then 8 - 10 seconds. Keep it short and sweet. My personal videos have about a 5 second introduction caption with my website name.

Do not try to act too professional. Viewers will be able to tell when your trying to fake it. Just be yourself.

Split apart long sections of video. Put in a slice, cut out a few seconds, do something to give the viewers a break from just watching your boring self stand there and talk.

Do something different, get outside, go to a park - but do "something" to get you away from the computer desk. There are tens of thousands of videos on youtube of people sitting there, at their computer desk, using their webcam. Your videos have to stand out to be noticed.

State the facts in a clear manner.

Think about what your going to say before you say it. But try not to use a written script.

If you lose track while filming the video, take a deep breath, think about what your going to say and then say it. In the editing phase, edit that pause out. This will provide you with one of the "breaks" that was mentioned earlier.

Provide quality information.

When you save the video to your computer, save it in a high bitrate. There is an option to make the video fit a certain file size - that is the option I use. And increase the file size until its maxed out. This should be around a 2 meg bitrate.

Upload the video:

The most popular video site is youtube, but its not the only one. To reach maximum exposure, sign up for at least 6 video sites. Here are some examples - youtube, break, yahoo video, metacafe, veoh, vimeo, my space video, daily motion,,,,,,,

Title - short, sweet and use targeted keywords.

Description - Your sites web address goes on the first line. After that, use targeted keywords in the first couple of sentences.

Tags - keywords


Multiple video sites

My videos to youtube first and given a certain title. Then I use a service called tubemogul. The video is uploaded again to tubemogul, given a different title then the youtube video and then pushed out to 9 different video hosting sites.

The last video I uploaded was last night and was 96 megs. It took around 30 minutes to upload to youtube, then another 30 to upload to tubemogul. From there the video was pushed out - that took another 20 minutes or so. In an hour and twenty minutes, I had my video posted on 10 different video hosting sites.


The future of your site:

Go to yahoo news - its loaded with videos. Go to foxnews - its loaded with videos. Go to my blog and forum - and its loaded with videos.

What are you waiting on? Videos are a growing trend in all aspects of websites, forums and blogs. In comparison, videos are like the car. When the car was introduced to the public, the horse and buggy owners thought it was just a fad. Nobody will ever buy a car. Their noisy, you have to buy gasoline, they get stuck in the mud,,,,,. And we see where we are today. The car won and the horse and buggy lost.

With anything else on the internet, your either head of the curve, in the curve or behind the curve. If your not publishing videos, your behind the curve. This trend was taking a strong foothold at least 2 or 3 years ago. But, some website owners are still behind the times.


My Personal Experience:

My original forum was started in April of 2006. From April 2006 - March 2007 the results were really poor. I tired all kinds of stuff - link building, directory submission, posting articles,,, all of the stone age suggestions. But nothing I did ever brought my forum very much traffic.

The market niche I was trying to tap into was already flooded with sites that had thousands of members and had been online for years. So I knew that I had some tough competition.

The forum was closed in March 2007, reopened in April 2007 with VBulletin. And this is when I opened my youtube account. The first 3 or 4 months showed the typical results, with very little to no traffic. Somewhere around 4 to 5 months traffic started picking up. People were signing up and posting that they saw my videos on youtube - or some site that was leaching videos from youtube.

2 years later my forum has - 625,282 post, 15,634 members, 51,055 threads, 4,404 active members (visiting every 30 days) and around 1,300 - 1,400 members visiting every 24 hours. On average my forum gets 1,500 - 2,300 post every day.


Notice:
I (Kevin) is the owner of this article. ]]> Promotion and Advertising kevin http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/how-make-your-own-videos-1862/ http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/promoting-your-forum-372/ Fri, 15 May 2009 14:22:47 GMT Sometimes people look too hard to get ideas on ways to promote their forums or websites. Some of the most effective ways to promote sites are right... Sometimes people look too hard to get ideas on ways to promote their forums or websites.
Some of the most effective ways to promote sites are right under our nose, yet we continue to look beyond them.
The main goals when promoting a website, are:

• Capture somebody’s attention
• Present what you have to offer
• Get them to remember your site
• Get them to visit your site

All of that can be accomplished when advertising your forum, whether it is by word of mouth, on paper, or on the computer screen.


I, myself have engaged in the following promotional techniques, and while some are more effective than others, they have all benefited in some way.
For the examples, I am going to be referring to a no-longer-existent pet forum that I used to operate.


One of the most effective ways to promote is by word of mouth, or in person. I printed myself a ton of fliers that have my site URL at the top (in a fancy, WordArt kind-of-way), with a short paragraph, and a list of key points as to why readers should visit the forum. I always carry the fliers around and give one to everybody I see that is walking their dog, shopping in a pet store, or doing anything related to pets. I often go to Pet Expos so I have a wide audience there. People always give the positive feedback: “Oh wow! I will be sure to check it out!”


Another way is to stand out on the internet, and then present your forum. For example, if you visit other forums that are similar to your topic and you participate in many discussions to demonstrate extensive knowledge, then people would be interested in checking out your site. I like to do this on ‘Yahoo! Answers’. I always head straight towards the pet section, answer as many questions as possible and include a link to my forum in the “sources” box. But don’t answer questions just to show your link; be sure you are actually answering the question in full and have written a quality response.


Another idea is sell and use some promotional products. Create a CafePress online store, and imprint your logo on the items. Buy some of the items (like t-shirts, tote bags, etc.) and give them to your family and friends as gifts. Now you’ve got walking advertisements! Be sure to give them a few fliers to keep with them for when they wear the promotional items out in public.


Another wonderful idea is to write articles related to your topic and submit them to Ezine and similar sites. Include your forum link at the end of the article. If you write many articles, at least one of them is bound to be read by a potential forum member. When someone sees your link, they are going to go straight for it, provided they are pleased with your article.


And finally, another very effective way is to visit large stores related to your topic. For me, that would be PetSmart, Petco, etc. Bring a couple hundred of your fliers, and ask if they will place a stack on each check-out register. This way, when people are leaving, they will see your flier and be interested.
You could also just post fliers in general areas, like the community pool, etc.


And then you can focus on Google AdWords, and other online advertising.


I hope these tips can help you, and I wish you all good luck with your sites.
]]> Promotion and Advertising Nick http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/promotion-advertising/promoting-your-forum-372/