You are here: Home / Archives for Tips

Expand your content sharing with Print Friendly and PDF

October 21, 2011 By 8 Comments

As bloggers we’re always looking for ways to make our content more friendly, encourage conversation and encouraging distribution of the content to amplify our voice. I recall seeing the Print Friendly plugin for the first time over at Waxing Unlyrical. I thought it was interesting but didn’t connect the dots until yesterday that is.

Why some of your readers will love this plugin

Think for a moment about your less tech savvy readers, the ones who may not even have a Twitter account or won’t bother to click the LinkedIn share because they rarely log in. Or think about the friends and connections of your tech savvy readers that won’t want content delivered anywhere but the old tried and true – Email. This is where the true power of Print Friendly lies. In this video I demonstrate how the plugin works and describe in more detail why I think it is great for the web 1.0/Email crowd.

Video not showing up? Try this direct link.

Filed Under: Productivity, Technology, Video, Wordpress, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

7 Reasons you should still use Hyperalerts for Facebook Pages

February 14, 2011 By 9 Comments

Facebook recently added alerts and other changes to the Pages Interface in fact I have a video and post about it Facebook makes big changes to Pages Interface. This will be handy for people who don’t want to bother setting up a Hyperalert but there are 7 reasons you should still use Hyperalerts for Facebook Page notifications (5-7 were added on 2/13, read on to see why):

  1. You can use Hyper Alerts with ANY page (not just those you admin)
  2. You can sign up from ANY Email address (even one that forwards to multiple recipients)
  3. You can receive your own content (imagine if you have multiple admins)
  4. You can control WHEN you receive the updates.
  5. The quality of the hyper alert emails is excellent, complete with comments so you get the context.
  6. Hyper Alerts provides a dashboard to manage your alerts (and add more, etc)
  7. Hyper Alerts provides a record of all alerts in your Email folders (Mari Smith mentioned this in her post)

So don’t go and delete your Hyper Alerts just yet, it’s still the best tool for the job. If you want to learn more about Hyper Alerts check out my recent post Monitor any Facebook Page for Posts, Comments and Content.

Here is a sample of what the Facebook option looks like:

Facebook Email notification

Here are the superior Hyper Alerts options:

Hyper Alerts Add Alert User Interface

So what do you think, will you still use Hyperalerts for Facebook Pages or is Facebook alerts enough for you?

Update 2/11/2011: a Skype chat with Are Sundnes of Hyper Interaktive

I wrote the above post on 2/10/2011 and scheduled it for 2/14 before receiving an Email from Hyper Alerts detailing why they feel Hyper Alerts is still a better option. After receiving the Email I did a minor investigation to see if I could find someone at the company to chat with. I went to their site and it was in Norwegian, but I did recognize “Kontakt” so I clicked through and found an Email address. After sending an Email I got a Skype connection from Are (pronounced Ari) Sundnes. Within minutes (and being the wee hours of the morning his time) Are agreed to chat with me about Hyperalerts.

hyper interaktiv

More about Hyper Interaktiv developers of Hyper Alerts

Are Sundnes is a concept designer and programmer for Hyper Interaktiv. His company does creative advertising and development. They have 24 employees and as a small company many of them multi-task. Are is just one of those people, you see while being a digital artist by trade he actually programmed the Hyper Alerts system mostly by himself in response to needs they some of their clients had. It would be just our luck as I am very impressed with what they’ve done and I suspect there will be more to come in the future. Are would not give me any specifics but he did tell me they have lots of plans for Hyper Alerts and that they are in the process of prioritizing them. I also learned that the proliferation of their Hyper Alerts service has been completely organic. They have done zero marketing in fact due to the strong response they are working on a English language version of their website as you are reading this.

Filed Under: Facebook, Productivity, Social Media Strategy, Tools Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Thumbnail tips and tricks for posts with embedded video (Video)

January 12, 2011 By 19 Comments

I was writing a post about the importance of including images in posts with embedded video’s recently and discovered a great little “hack” to hide said images so that only the thumbnail would show up when shared. This post is the result of that discovery, it solved a long standing issue that I had with video only posts. If you also had come across this issue the video tutorial in particular will be very valuable. There is actually a hidden image immediately after this paragraph, view the page source if you want to see it or watch the video to see how it was done.Correct Thumbnail Rendering "Hidden" Image

The problem with embedded video posts

Posts with only embedded video and no pictures do not display as nicely when shared on Facebook, Linked In and other similar sites.  For example, when I share a post without an actual image included, these are my thumbnail choices:

Image Choices

None of these are appropriate in most cases as they do not represent what I am posting about. The thumbnail should represent what the post is about, here is a good example:

Shonali Burke 2 Yr Anniversary of Waxing UnlyricalIn the example above the image represents the 2 Year Anniversary of Waxing Unlyrical (Shonali – that’s 3 days in a row, inside joke sorry readers). With the two candles you really get the gist of what the post is about before reading it, the image ties in perfectly with the title and what the post is about. The example above is clean and professional.

The solution is simple – an appropriate but hidden image, this video will show you how you do it:

Filed Under: Blogging, Facebook, Images, LinkedIn Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How to use Tagxedo to embed a cool tag cloud on your Blog

January 3, 2011 By 4 Comments

Tagxedo Tag Cloud of Joe's Gone SocialHave you tried Tagxedo? It’s a pretty nifty little app I spotted on @liendi11′s  Amplog recently. While playing around with it I realized that it was more difficult to get the clouds to work in WordPress than one would think so when I found a way to get it to work I also created a video to explain it. The method that I demonstrate shows you how to create a tagxedo cloud that is usable in both pages, posts and even as a widget. The main thing that needs to be modified is the size of the iframe code that is provided in the tagxedo code snippet. Here is the video followed by a live example of the tag cloud.

In the live example of a Tagxedo Tag cloud below you’ll note that all of the links go to the default function in the setup – a Google search page. Ideally a blog specific search should be used. I’d imagine someone will get creative and port it to a WordPress plugin before too long but until now you can see the possibilities. (Note: If you click the tags it will take you off my site and to Google search, apologies I should have adapted it to my site search!)

Filed Under: Blogging, Images, Social Media Strategy, Video, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How to delete posts from your amplog on Amplify.com (Video)

December 13, 2010 By 4 Comments

This video is a direct response to the top two search terms that brought people to my blog this past week. First of all thank you for coming. This video answers two questions that a number of people are asking:

  1. How do you delete posts from MyAmpLog
  2. hide my amplogs on amplify

Here is the video:

Any questions about Amplify (or anything else) feel free to ask in the comment section or on my Youtube Channel

Filed Under: Amplify, Blogging, Technology, Video, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Uses of the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin for WordPress (Video)

September 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Whenever we post things on a website the search engines index the page based on the address of that content. What happens if you move it? People will no longer be able to access it using your old link and the search engines will start fresh with the new page once (if?) they find it. This video shows you how you can use the Quick Page/Post Redirect to prevent losing referring traffic when you rename a permalink in WordPress. This plugin also has a number of great other uses, in fact I demonstrate how it was used to redirect old links from my Joomla based website to a WordPress based revision of the site as well. Don’t lose your SEO juice when you make changes, let your content be found.

Filed Under: SEO, Tools, Video, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,

Helping friends and Building Influence with Paper.li

August 27, 2010 By 1 Comment

Recently I noticed I was featured in a paper.li daily by @morgaine. I went and checked it out, thought it was a pretty interesting site. Being the web 2.0/Social Media tinkerer that I am I could not help myself so I created an account and started playing around with my own dailies. I found some extremely beneficial aspects to the service but I am going to focus on 2 of them for now:

  1. Helping Friends
  2. Building Influence

Joe Hackman Daily on paper.li

Helping Friends

Since your paper.li papers can be about lists, people or hashtags – there is great opportunity to help people. How is that you ask? Well if I make a Joe Hackman daily, it will feature my tweets and the tweets of my followers to generate the article content, videos, etc for the feature. Being mentioned in a daily, or anything, is almost always good for a Twitter user (unless someone is complaining about you!). The other thing it does is build back-links to your sources articles and blogs. We all want to be found, being linked to will benefit your sources SEO. When you start to think through the list feature, hashtags, etc, you start to understand how there are many ways to help your friends achieve the mentions and back-links for better SEO.

Building Influence

This point is fairly simple, people like to be featured in your paper for the reasons above and for another important reason. It is great to have your content recognized and shared. In this case you will receive recognition for following others. How? By following anyone on Twitter they have a chance to be featured on your paper, if they are feature and they actually are paying attention they are likely to appreciate it. This means that if you produce a paper.li your sources on Twitter are more likely to be recognized and recognize you. That is influence. Of course you could also record a cool video and write about it in your blog then direct people to read about it. I think that might add a bit of influence as well.

Be sure to watch the video for additional tips and subscribe to my Youtube Channel if you enjoyed this post. I’d also love to hear your tips about how to utilize paper.li.

Filed Under: SEO, Social Media Strategy, Tools, Twitter, Video Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Nurph vs Chatroulette battle for top web handshake

April 9, 2010 By 1 Comment

Ok there is quite a bit of buzz over the infamous Chatroulette, a site where random people are placed in a video chat session together. I personally don’t have the stomach to even try it since I’ve heard “found mostly depressed looking guys and naked men (about 1 in 5 shuffles was a guy’s bits)” source: Chris Brogan. Not my idea of a fun or practical application. Nurph on the other hand is exceptionally cool for several reasons:

  • It’s easy to setup
  • It works with most websites
  • Easy authentication
  • Realtime text chat, no video or audio

Easy Setup
The setup is very simple, you go to Nurph’s website and type in the url you wish to add a chat to. You can then use that URL in the future to access chat at that site or you can even create a link on the website to that url. For example if you click this link, you should be connected to the chat on this blog. If you see me online be sure to say hello.

Compatibility
I tested Nurph with Chrome, Mozilla and Internet Explorer. The only issue I had was a flash component (my cumulus tag cloud) overlaid the chat window. I was able to resolve that by enlarging the browser window. There may even be a setting to change the “always on top” aspect of Flash components. Please comment on this post if you are familiar with a way to do that. Websites that require authentication such as Facebook do not currently work with Nurph. No doubt that will improve with time as the product matures.

Authentication
In the battle for authentication dominance, I always find Twitter to be the most comfortable. Fortunately while Nurph is in beta you can only use Twitter to access it unless you are part of the beta program. Just use the connect with Twitter button, but make sure you are logged in to Twitter first.

Text Chat
My comments about Chatroulette were largely in jest, but plain old text chat is a good handshake medium. Rather than investing in voice or video chat via the anonymous web you have a simple medium by which to say hello and assess your new contacts before taking that step. For that reason Nurph is a great way to “shake hands” without committing too much. Since it is multiple user you can also see how the participants behave with groups.

Video
I am a screen-cast addict, if I need to explain how to do something a lot of times I just record a quick screen-cast and send that. Here is a Youtube video I created where I talk about Nurph and demonstrate how simple it is to use.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Filed Under: Technology, Tools, Video Tagged With: , , , ,

On not waiting for others to make things happen (podcast)

January 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Here is a podcast I recorded this morning over at Cinchcast.

Filed Under: Inspiration, Podcasts Tagged With: , , , ,

With an Abundance of tools my Internet use evolves (podcast)

January 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Today while exchanging some tweets with @simbeckhampson I recognized that my social media and web footprint has evolved over time and in the process different tools have been useful for different things:

  1. Facebook is where most of my real life friends are. I also find it more personal interaction wise.
  2. I get news from Twitter, share news and interesting info. More informal interaction wise.
  3. Blogtalkradio has opened up a nice niche for conversations with interesting people.
  4. Cinchcast – I love to call in and get ideas out while driving then I share it later.
  5. Youtube – I am big on screencasts and moving towards more personal messages (videos of me mixed in)
  6. Amplify – I am making new friends, sharing more what I am reading more and selectively share to FB, Twitter, etc.

These aren’t all the tools I use, for me the key is really the data that comes in via Email. I need to re-evaluate my use of Google Reader and RSS also for incoming information. Here is the podcast that was inspired by my conversations with Paul:

Filed Under: Amplify, Blogging, Facebook, Podcasts, Social Media Strategy, Tools, Twitter, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , ,
« Older Posts