Here’s an informative video by internet marketer Melissa Erlandson to help you find out how video marketing can boost your campaign into the stratosphere. Learn tips on keyword research, production and distribution. 

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It also offers a further personal touch to the already social Twitter experience – giving your followers a look into who the person behind the bio. Allowing your personality to truly come to life and shine.

It also has a lot of potential for both personal and corporate branding. Imagine being able to tell followers your latest news or information, but instead of tweeting it you can say it? It’s a great way to make yourself stand out in a large group of followers.

BubbleTweet uses a unique URL to host your video message on. The best way to use it is as a link from your blog, website or email signature. Once your visitors have seen the video and the bubble window closes, it then reverts to your normal Twitter URL so you control its use. I personally wish this was optionally always on however today it is not an option.

I’ve seen similar applications used on blogs before, but not Twitter. It is pretty ironic because Twitter was designed as a Micro Blog supporting only 140 characters by design. Regardless, this is a great widget to add to any Twitter page and is one of my twitter “must have” widgets for the hardcore user. This is a great little tool and I recommend you check it out.

About the author: Follow Michael D. Howard on Twitter

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photo courtesy BubbleTweet.com

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Church Website Design: A Step by Step Approach

The church website video introduction is designed to inform people who visit your website what type of faith and commitment you offer the community. Video can add an extra dimension to your church website design. YouTube is a great generator of embedded videos that allow your video to be embedded within your site while at the same time retaining the tools of YouTube for viewing such as fast-forward and full screen.

Video files tend to be very large in terms of memory and size but YouTube compresses the files making them much smaller and quicker to download and watch. Your video should be composed with members of your congregation. It should be informative without being Evangelical. Once the video is completed, you are ready to upload it to the internet.

There are a few steps to uploading videos to YouTube:

• You will need a free YouTube account. This is easily obtained by going to YouTube.com and registering for an account.
• Make sure you fill in all the information the registration requests that is required. Name, organization and location are very important for people searching by locations.
• Once you have signed up with YouTube, you will receive an email with a link that takes you back to YouTube to complete the process of registering. Allow extra time for the email and check your spam folder to make sure it was not sent there.
• After your registration is complete, you will be ready to upload your video to YouTube. There are two ways to upload videos: You can upload a video you have already created or you can upload straight from a web camera. You will select the required option and then select upload or record. In the privacy settings, make sure you check the box that allows you to share your video.
• After uploading/recording your video, you can view it by going to “My Videos” on YouTube under your “Account” tab. Click the video you wish to place on your church website design and you will see the YouTube video player. To the right of the video, you will see two boxes. One is called URL and the other is EMBED. Embedding is the option that you will need to place the video on your church website.
• Highlight the code in the EMBED box, right click on it and click “copy.” Now open your church website design and paste it in the location you desire on your church website.

Your video is now ready for viewing through your website. This will greatly increase the viewing of your website and possibly increase the attendance at you Sunday sermons. Get some parishioners involved in the making of the video and allow them to speak for the church instead of one person making the video and sounding as though they are being paid to say these things.

About the author: How easy is it to get your church web design on YouTube, and is it a good marketing tool? Visit www.thechurchwebsitedesigners.com

Courtesy: EzineArticles

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Wishes aren’t horses, so we can’t ride. What we can do is take a good, hard look at our businesses and see just how we can set ourselves apart from the competition. Whether it’s just freshening up the website or doing a major overhaul, making changes in your business site is a great place to start, especially if that’s the main way your clients find you and find out about your services. Sites that haven’t been updated in three to six months are considered nearly obsolete, so if yours falls into that category, think about some steps you can take, inexpensively, to help clients have a better experience and spend more time on your site.

Have a Graphic Designer Look at it for Cleanliness of Design, Clarity of Message and Ease of Use

Have a web developer look at it for functionality, and also for whether you’re making the best use of your web presence. Does the page sequence flow? Is the shopping cart easy and accurate? Is the part that needs to be secure really secure? Ask if you’re making use of the technology that may have been developed since your site went live: do you have a way to harvest site visitors’ email addresses in order to grow your potential client database? Do you have content that’s easy to change and update to keep the site fresh once you get it spiffed up?

Use Audio and/or Video

If you’re not already using multimedia, now is the time to consider doing that.

The Consumer Electronics Association reports that almost 75% of US households have broadband access, and for the heavy internet user (someone who spends more than 10 hours a week at home online) broadband penetration is nearly 90%. What this means is that the old rules for websites don’t apply anymore; you can be content-rich and interactive with video and audio on the site. You can offer free audio downloads or video downloads, and many business owners are doing that in exchange for a visitor’s email address.

Have a Warm, Friendly Human Voice Help Visitors Navigate Your Site

This will allow visitors to see the things you want them to see, hear the things you want them to hear, and greet them any time of day or night, even while you’re sleeping!

Offer Audio E-Courses

Add a podcast, one of the hottest marketing tools going right now. You can offer an e-book/audiobook download, something the top internet marketers are using to make more money than even they thought possible.

All of this makes you more visible, more credible and more profitable. Because all of these things enhance the stickiness of your site – the likelihood that visitors will stay for more than 5 or ten seconds.

Good design, good navigation and good interactivity equals a website that will set your business apart from your competitor’s. Now is the time to be sure your site is truly doing business in your best interest.

About the author: Sandy Weaver Carman is a 30 year major market radio professional and is the CEO of Voicework On Demand, Inc.

http://www.voiceworkondemand.com
http://www.billysbuildingfund.org

Courtesy: EzineArticles

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Podcast promotion should be approached with the same tactics as website promotion. Identifying and informing your audience will increase communication and dialogue.

1. Educate the Public

It is important to remember that podcasting is a relatively new technology and not everyone understands or knows what podcasting is. It is particularly important to educate users if your audience is not technical. Not only is it important to explain what a podcast is, but it is equally important to explain how your podcast will help listeners. Instruction on how users can listen to podcasts should also be included.

Understanding Podcasting: http://www.podcasting-tools.com/podcasting-articles.htm

2.  Add Graphics

Add a graphic to your website to let website visitors know that a podcast is available for your content. Colorful graphics have become the signature to alert listeners that podcasts and RSS feeds are available. The podcast flags were initially bright orange rectangles but as the popularity has grown, webmasters have bent the rules a bit.

A free online RSS graphic tool is available that allows users to quickly customize buttons by selecting the text and the color scheme of the button enabling webmasters to coordinate their podcast flag to match their website color scheme. Graphics experience is not required. Simply select alternative colors and insert text to personalize the feed graphics.

Online Graphics Tools: http://www.feedforall.com/public/rss-graphic-tool.htm or choose ready made graphics fom: http://www.feedforall.com/podcasting-graphics.htm.

3. Descriptive Content

Be sure the podcast RSS feed contains enough information related to the contents of the podcasts to grab the interest of listeners. The description should be keyword rich. A link to the audio file should be included in the description field. The audio file link is a great way for listeners to sample a podcast.

4. Press Release

Send a press release about the podcast. In addition to distributing the press release to editors, be sure to submit the release to free online press release directories.

Submit Press Release: http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/pressreleases.html (scroll to submit release)

5. Podcast Directories

Submit podcasts to the podcast directories. Podcast directories contain podcasts that cover a wide variety of topics. Inclusion in the podcast search engines and directories will tap a whole new audience.

Submit to Podcasting Directories – http://www.podcasting-tools.com/submit-podcasts.htm

6. Consistent Theme / Interesting Content

The last thing you want to do is to turn off listeners who have subscribed. Provide consistently formatted and consistently themed audio files. Interesting content that is consistently presented will gradually increase your listening base.

7. Create a Community

Encourage feedback and dialogue with listeners. Listen to the feedback of listeners and test their suggestions. Remember the podcast is for them not you.

About the author:  Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition, Sharon manages marketing for NotePage a wireless text messaging software company.

Courtesy: ArticlesOn

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This is a great time to stay competitive and set up podcasts of your own so that you too can capture some fans of your own. To start things off, you will need a podcasting software or service that can let you create podcasts quickly and transfer them easily to the server. There are different kinds of podcasting software that vary in features.

Although choosing the software that you are most comfortable in using could be the best choice, it is important to know how each podcasting software weighs in with their pros and cons.

FeedForAll

FeedForAll is a decent program that supports one of the crucial elements in creating podcasts – RSS feeds. RSS is now being supported in all the latest Internet browsers and mobile devices. The sole purpose of RSS support is to allow regular Internet users to have syndicated content of the sites of their choosing and give them the quickest access when updates are made. If your podcasts are created with RSS support, you can easily distribute your podcast RSS link and have them add it to their browser for easier distribution and updating.

However, FeedForAll has no built-in audio recorder and editor requiring you to purchase 3rd party software for podcast production.

Podcast Studio

Podcast Studio is a strong contender because it has it all complete with the RSS feed support, an audio recorder with support for audio signal mixing, an audio editor which can be used to make some quick fixes and enhancements to new recordings, and even a built-in FTP client for uploading the podcasts to your designated server. The interface is well done and even has a trial version available for people having second thoughts in buying. The price is a bit much compared to other podcasting software, but all the programs included make it worth the purchase.

Magix Podcast MAKER

Magix podcast MAKER emphasizes on turning your computer into a radio station. This is the perfect choice for people who want to record their voice and have some music playing in the background. It has plenty of advanced audio options allowing users to tweak things such as the audio speed and even adding some cool audio effects too. It is fairly cheap and should be a perfect companion for making radio-style podcasts. However, it lacks an FTP client, but has a great submission tool for putting the new podcast link in a number of podcast directories.

The best way to choose which podcasting software is best for you is by downloading multiple programs and trying each one directly. Weigh them all in and see what podcasting solution is worth your money. If you find all of them too difficult to use, try to join some forums and ask around on what their favorite podcasting software is. Once you get the hang of things, you should be able to produce podcasts on a routine basis.

About the author: Andrew Green is part of the team behind A-Z Proxies, an attempt to list from A to Z every active web proxy. Andy has been actively working in the web proxy field since 2005 and has built up a wealth of knowledge on the subject.

Courtesy: EzineArticles
photo credit: Dale Gillard

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I have compiled this helpful guide to help you wade through it all. This is the third in a multi part series that explains all the technical mumbo-jumbo you need to know in order to enjoy producing, sharing and watching Internet video files.

The H26L Series of Codecs

In this article, we’re going to talk about the H.26L series of codecs developed jointly in a partnership of the Video Coding Experts Group, (VCEG) and MPEG, the Motion Picture Experts Group. Those two groups based the H.26L series on earlier developmental work from the International Telecommunications Union based in Geneva, Switzerland.

The current version of the series, H.264, is an important element of many software applications. It is not a file format unto itself.

H.261 was the first version designed for transmission of video over Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) lines on which data rates are multiples of 64 kbit/s.

H.261 was considered a break-through technology. The basic processing unit of the design is called a macroblock, and H.261 was the first standard in which the macroblock concept appeared.

One advantage of H.261 was an effective post-processing technique that became a key element called the de-blocking filtering. This reduced the appearance of annoying block-shaped artifacts caused when motion is compressed. Such block-like pixilations are probably familiar to almost everyone who has watched digital video.

Deblocking filtering has since become an integral part of the most recent standard, H.264 (although even when using H.264, additional post-processing is still allowed and can enhance visual quality if performed well).

H.261 has become essentially obsolete, although it is still used as a backward-compatibility mode in some video conferencing systems and for some types of internet video.

H.263 is the second in this series designed by the ITU-T. H.263 came in 1996 as a low-bitrate compressed format for video conferencing and internet transmission.

The next enhanced codec developed by this consortium is the H.264 standard, also known as AVC and MPEG-4 part 10. It was completed in May 2003. This version is the most up-to-date and H.264 provides a significant improvement beyond H.263. Most new videoconferencing products now include H.264 but remain compatible with H.263 and H.261.

This is the end of part 3 of this guide to digital video file formats.

About the author: Lorraine Grula has been a well-respected award winning video professional for over twenty-five years. (Yeah, that makes her kind of old.) Lorraine has done virtually every kind of video production imaginable and now shares her expertise on the web. Her blog, Video Production Tips.com is full of free information and video tutorials.

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I have compiled this helpful guide to help you wade through it all. This is the second in a multi-part series that explains all the technical mumbo-jumbo you need to know in order to enjoy producing, sharing and watching Internet video files.

IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ELSE….

FLASH VIDEO

Flash video, which is given the file extension .flv is perhaps the most common format on the web today. You’ll see the .FLV file extension on videos encoded by Adobe Flash software to play on Adobe Flash Player. Virtually everyone has these since they’re free downloads. Flash delivers more video over the Internet than any other file format.

Flash was originally a Macromedia product but is now Adobe.

Notable users of the Flash Video format include YouTube, Google Video, Reuters.com, Yahoo! Video, and MySpace. Many television news operations are also using Flash Video on their websites.

FLV is probably the single most common format on the internet. .FLV gives one of the smallest file sizes after compression.

Flash Video is viewable on most operating systems, via the widely available Adobe Flash Player and web browser plug-in. Flash video also plays on several third-party programs such as MPlayer, VLC media player, Quicktime, or any player which uses DirectShow filters such as Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player, and Windows Media Center. Did we leave anybody out?

You can trust the fact that Flash is virtually universal.

GOOGLE RULES

.GVI is the file extension for Google Video File, a video format developed by Google and used as their proprietary video format.

Developed to solve compatibility issues, Google Video Player was another way to view Google videos and it runs smoothly on both Windows and Mac OS X. The Google Video Player rendered files in Google’s own Google Video File (.gvi) media format and supported playlists in “Google Video Pointer” (.gvp) format. (More on that confusing duo in a second)

Why two Google video formats? Size. When users downloaded to their computers, the resulting file used to be a small .gvp pointer file rather than the full sized .gvi video file. Much like a link, the pointer file, when run, would point to and then download the actually video file to the user’s default directory. Seems like the long way around, but what do I know?

As of August 17, 2007, Google Video Player has been discontinued and is no longer available for download from Google Video website. I don’t miss it. The option to download videos in GVI format has also been removed, the only download option remaining for iPod/PSP (MP4 format). Guess it all just got too confusing for words.

FROM THE NEW BACK TO THE OLD

Graphics Interchange Format with the file extension .GIF is one of the original digital still formats. It dates back to the pre-historic days of CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the web due to wide support and portability.

The biggest drawback if GIF was poor color reproduction. Many people thought it wasn’t adequate for reproducing photographs when brilliant and accurate color was important. It’s better suited for more simple images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

GIF is for still images only and can not handle moving video files.

Tagged Image File Format (abbreviated TIFF) is a container format for storing images, including photographs and line art. It is now under the ownership of Adobe. Originally created by the company Aldus for use with what was then called “desktop publishing,” TIFF is a popular format for color and black and white images. The TIFF format is widely supported by image-manipulation applications, by publishing and page layout applications, by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition and other applications.

Adobe Systems, which acquired Aldus, now holds the copyright to the TIFF specification. TIFF has not had a major update since 1992, though several Aldus/Adobe technical notes have been published with minor extensions to the format.

This is the end of part 2 in this multi-part series on digital file formats.

About the author: Lorraine Grula has been a well-respected award winning video professional for over twenty-five years. (Yeah, that makes her kind of old.) Lorraine has done virtually every kind of video production imaginable and now shares her expertise on the web. Her blog, Video Production Tips.com is full of free information and video tutorials.

Source: EzineArticles.com

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To help you master the world of Internet and digital video, I have compiled a series of articles giving you a comprehensive, yet easy to understand list of all the different digital video file formats. This special series of user-friendly guides includes definitions of all the technical jargon you need to understand digital and Internet video.

WHY SO MANY?

If you want to know why there are so many confusing formats, blame the fact that everybody feels the need to have their own. Each development or manufacturing company, each standardizing organization, and every combination hereof, all have to come up with their own proprietary software codes and methods.

On one hand, that gives you lots of choices. On the other hand, it makes things confusing and sometimes prevents stuff from just WORKING!

Fortunately, much of this stuff actually works together. There are lots of friendly alliances and most folks work with a goal of compatibility and universal platforms in mind. The geeks really are trying to make it easy on us folks!

Another thing that helps it all work without you needing to become a geek yourself is the fact that most computers today are loaded with multiple media player software, so just about any format will play if you click somewhere.

You often don’t really NEED to know exactly what you’re doing…trial and error gets you to the right place relatively quickly. But if you’re like me, I want to know what’s going on so I don’t waste any time.

Another word of caution about freaking out over file formats….although the technicians love to argue about specifics, most of these file formats, especially real video, quick time and windows media files are all similar in size and quality when they are looked at by humans. Some people swear one or the other is better, but their eye sight must be better than mine. The differences are small.

Also keep in mind that not all formats are suitable for Internet Video, where file sizes need to be small. New HD formats are great for home entertainment, but are way too big for the web.

To make the article series complete, we have including digital still image formats as well as video formats.

Let’s start with the letter A:

AVCHD: Stands for Advanced Video Codec High Definition. This is a high end consumer home electronics format developed by Sony and Panasonic for HD home theater systems. It’s not a web format.

AVCHD is in its infancy as a format and will someday be much more common. Since it’s new, compatibility is still an issue. Video editing software applications are slowly adding this format to their repertoire.

AVCHD uses MPEG-4 H.264 encoding which is standard for many video formats. Blu-ray players will eventually play this format too and it will become a standard in home theater systems.

.AVI This is a format for motion picture files developed by Microsoft that conforms to standards set by Microsoft Windows Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF). .AVI stands for Audio Video Interleaved and works with applications that capture, edit and playback audio and video, like Windows Movie Maker. Because it is windows-based, .avi format is virtually universal. AVI contains multiple streams of different type data, including a control track and separate video and audio streams.

As with all Microsoft products, this format is extremely common. .AVI is known for good video quality and commonality. AVI creates relatively large compressed files that retain high quality.

DivX: A popular video compression software known for being able to squeeze an entire movie onto one CD. DivX has the reputation of being powerful and stable, providing excellent quality and high compression. This software has been developed jointly by the DivX Networks and the open source community, which many people feel is the best method of software development. Lots of brains with one goal. The hot new thing in DVD players is that some now play DivX files in addition to MPEG-2 files.

You can download a free trial of the DivX compression software at http://www.divx.com/ The site claims its been downloaded over 220 million times. According to their mission, DivX is more than compression software. It’s a global community informed by creativity and passion for all that is possible with digital media, and that community is growing in strength and number every day.

Some say DivX become the Internet’s de facto distribution standard, and it has the advantage of allowing viewers to skip around while watching. Some buffering is to be expected, but it works just like a video on your hard drive – you can forward, rewind and pause whenever you want to instead of being restricted to watching it from start-to-finish as it downloads.

Another popular feature about DivX is the open platform. Anyone can design plug-ins for DivX Connected using its open source SDK. It uses the Gecko rendering engine; the framework behind Firefox.

That’s it for Part 1 of this guide to Digital Video File Formats. Continue reading for more in-depth yet easy-to understand information about digital video file formats.

About the author: Lorraine Grula has been a well-respected award winning video professional for over twenty-five years. (Yeah, that makes her kind of old.) Lorraine has done virtually every kind of video production imaginable and now shares her expertise on the web. Her blog, Video Production Tips.com is full of free information and video tutorials.

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What is Video Compression and why bother?

Without video compression, Internet video would simply not be possible. It’s that important. Video files are HUGE. Download times for raw, uncompressed video would be so high that no one would bother, even at broadband speeds.

Compression is the process of taking the huge file and knocking the file size down while preserving a decent picture. Compression works by first analyzing the complex and detailed video signal. Portions of the signal not noticeable to the human eye are dropped. Detail and resolution are lost, but hopefully not too much. Different compression methods select differing data to lose and this causes variable results.

Often, a video signal is compressed, then when opened and played, it is decompressed and some of the lost information is restored.

Codec, what is it?

Codec is a term that combines the root words compression and decompression. What is compressed must be decompressed. To do so properly requires the machine reading the file be able to reverse the process used for compression. Hence the two go together like a lock and key and form the word codec.

Compatibility issues come up with editing software or playing devices if the compression and decompression methods are incompatible. This happens frequently and produces the joy known as the video makers headache. I don’t know any serious video maker who hasn’t struggled at one point with compression incompatibility.

Different software platforms and the file formats they produce differ, in part, by their codecs. So if incompatibility arises, it almost always can be traced back to codecs.

Rarely do you need to concern yourself with the specifics of which codec is being used when, but being aware of compatibility issues can help you slog through the video production process whenever the inevitable problems arise.

On my blog, www.videoProductionTips.com you will find more digital video glossary terms and file format definitions.

Happy video compressing!

About the author: Lorraine Grula has been a well-respected award winning video professional for over twenty-five years. Lorraine has done virtually every kind of video production imaginable and now shares her expertise on the web. Her blog, http://www.VideoProductionTips.com is full of free information and video tutorials.

Source: EzineArticles.com

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