Posts Tagged ‘HOW TO’

Have an awesome presentation that you want to share with the world?

If you’ve already posted the presentation (could be a Power Point presentation) to Slideshare.net then you can embed that presentation into your WordPress.com blog. I’ll show you exactly how to do that in this video. This process also works for WordPress.org blogs.

I appreciate and value your Comments and feedback.

[Update 6/5/2010: Added captions (English) to the video, click on the "CC" popup button on the bottom right of video. I also added a transcript of the video to the end of the blog post.]

Have you ever tried using Google to find answers to complex and niche business questions? I have, but sometimes the questions are so specific that they require custom answers from an expert. When that happens, I turn to my secret weapons, LinkedIn and Aardvark (Vark.com).

In this video, I’ll show you how to use the one-two punch of LinkedIn and Aardvark to get answers to tough questions from an army of experts in a matter of minutes.

I skipped over some of the nuances of using each tool so I included some best practices for using each network at the end of this blog post.

LinkedIn

This Question was posted on LinkedIn under the “Internet Marketing” category.

LinkedIn’s Q&A feature allows users to post questions by category then allow LinkedIn members to answer them. Members usually provide rich and in-depth responses because they care about the subject and also to share some of their expertise.

Results
As of May 26th, 2010, the question has received 13 high quality responses. The answers started rolling in shortly after it was posted.

Learning Points

• The Question should be brief and clear with personal side to it.
• If you’re going to eventually blog about a Question, mention that in the Question. Most people love being mentioned in blog posts. It’s great for PR and further establishes the responder as a topic expert.
• Follow up on each and every response. On this Question, I communicated with each responder via LinkedIn’s private message system. I asked follow up questions and requested permission to use the response on my blog post.
• The Q&A process is also a great opportunity to connect with responders and add them to your LinkedIn network. I often extend an invitation to responders.
• LinkedIn responses usually provide amazing feedback on difficult questions.
• This is a link to my LinkedIn profile. Check it out and let’s connect.

Aardvark

This is the question I posted to Aardvark.com.

You may not have heard of Aardvark. Aardvark is a crowdsourcing Q & A site. I first heard about it via technologist Robert Scoble (@scobleizer on Twitter). To use Aardvark, you have to sign up and become part of the Q & A community. To ask a question, you just go to vark.com, login, and submit your question. Aardvark figures out the related category then emails potential responders that have expertise in that field.

Results

• The question received four highly relevant and almost immediate responses. That’s the main forte of Aardvark – you get answers fast.

Learning Points

• Make sure the question is brief and to the point. When people receive the response, they will most likely make up their minds in a second as to whether or not they are going to respond. If they have to figure out the question, they’ll be less likely to respond.
• While Aardvark provides rapid responses, it limits the number of responses. There is a “resubmit” feature though.
• I communicated with each person that responded and asked for permission to mention their response in the blog post. This is a great way to extend the conversation and get more helpful information.
• CAUTION: I’ve only used the Q&A feature a couple of times and I did not realize that the conversation was all posted online. Make sure you review your privacy settings and be careful what information you transmit.

Video Transcript

WordPress just announced its new WordPress.com Slideshow feature. This is an AWESOME update.

You can now select photos to upload then quickly add them to a blog post as a Slideshow. [Update: And, I forgot to mention that the Slideshow is iPhone and iPad friendly!]

I did a video on the process, so check it out then see my notes below the video.

Notes:

As soon as I saw the email from WordPress.com, I jumped in and started testing things out.

I found the following:

1. There are several paths you can to get the Slideshow up and running. The video above is by far the easiest.
2. You can use images that you have previously uploaded to your WordPress.com blog and that are already in your Media list. But, they cannot be “attached” to a different blog post or page.

   My lovely wife suggested a workaround here. If you really want an image to stay in a blog post or page and want to use it elsewhere in a Slideshow, just upload the image again and use it.

3. If you only add one image at a time via the “Add an Image” button on your blog post page, you will not have the option to insert the slideshow as I demonstrated in the video. You’ll have to go back and use the Gallery tab then insert the slideshow from there.

   The Gallery tab appears next to the “From Computer” tab (that I pointed out in the video), but only does so after there is an upload or an unattached image has been added to the post.

Here are some more resources to help you troubleshoot any problems:

• Information on Images and Galleries
• All about Unattached Files in WordPress.com

So now you have everything you need to go out and create an awesome new slideshow on your blog. If you want to show off your new creation, come back here and post a link in the Comments field. M’Kay?

Google Analytics allows you to collect and see statistics over your blog site traffic. You can see the number of visitors, referral sources, and the keywords that are driving people to your site.

I’m going to show you how to set up Google Analytics on a WordPress site. This video only applies to WordPress.org blogs, not to WordPress.com sites. Click here if you are a WordPress.com user. Otherwise, enjoy the video:

WordPress.com
Because WordPress.com does not support JavaScript, you cannot load Google Analytics. As of now, there is no way around this. If you have a WordPress.com blog and want to capture some statistics then you can use GetClicky. This site allows you to get some site stats but nowhere near the kind of information you can get from Google Analytics.

The other way to get site statistics is to use the built-in stats viewer in WordPress.com’s Dashboard. Here are a couple of views:

The Dashboard view:

Part of the “More Details” WordPress.com view:

So there you have it, installing Google Analytics on a WordPress.org and tips for checking stats on WordPress.com.

Do you have any questions? Leave a comment and don’t forget to squeeze the tube below and subscribe to my YouTube Channel (cinemaluna).

YouTube allows you to create a custom video player but the process doesn’t include an easy way to set the player size. I’ll show you how to do both.

Create the custom player
You can create a custom player by logging into your YouTube account then selecting “Account” link next to your user name at the top right of the page.

From the Account page, click on the “Custom Video Players” link under the “More” column.

Click on the Create Custom Player button, add the player name and description, select the layout, then select the video(s) you want to include. If you want to create a player for only one video or for a specific group then you can save what you have at this point and create a Playlist with those videos. Otherwise, select the video(s) that you want to include in this player.

Click on the “Select” button once you selected the videos(s) to include in the player.

Once things look good, click on the “Generate Code” button then you’ll see the Embed Code box with the HTML code in it.

At the time of this post, the default player size is 416 by 337 pixels. You probably noticed that the Create a Custom Player process never allowed you to set the player size. I’ll show you how to edit the code so you can get the right player size.

Edit the Embed Code
Copy the Embed Code and paste it into a Notepad or Text file for now. Now, we’re going to change four parts of that code, the two “width” and two “height” parameters which are both 416 by 337 respectively.

To avoid strenuous math at this point, I included a data table that has the width and height at different percentages of the original player size. So if you want the player to be around 300 pixels wide, you’ll need to set the height to be around 240 pixels, based on the chart below.

Final Steps
Now that you have the desired width and height, change those values in the Embed Code then add the entire code to your blog. If it doesn’t fit correctly, revisit the table above and find a combination that works for you.

You just learned how to create and resize a custom YouTube Player!