It’s video Friday! Here’s an article I wrote that Danny Frank made a kickin’ video about:
If you’re involved in “biz opp” or “business opportunity” in any way… the Feds are looking into… you???
My husband has been working on a massive video project for almost two years now. Lots of trial and error with getting the processes right, and guess who’s in charge of the tech stuff? Moi. It’s taking so long partly because I just don’t have a lot of time. So, poor Pat (yes, he’s Pat, too) has to wait.
These last 12 days I’ve been on vacation. I haven’t done too much regarding my own work, but I have read a couple of books and did some posting, though not my regular routine, for that I’m sorry. I also did a few lessons for Spider Language. But I have had a chance to work on the video project.
I’m feeling pretty genius right now. LOL Perry Lawrence (AskMrVideo.com) would laugh because he IS a freakin’ genius when it comes to video (and a really nice guy), but well… it’s something I dabble in. I’m far from expert. BUT, I discovered something really key today, and I wanted to pass it along.
Chroma Key work has to do with using a green or blue backdrop when filming. The cost of doing this is minimal. There’s paint you can buy for it even, but we bought a frame with clips and a huge muslin screen. We want to add images to the video background while Pat’s speaking. So… He filmed a series of videos in front of the green screen this month, and it put the fear of God into me. I had no clue how to do something so intricate (Stop laughing Perry) to me.
I bought Sony Vegas a while back and I’ve been working with it regularly. It’s pretty powerful as video editing software goes, and I’ve learned a great deal about using it. But because it’s a tad complicated for non-video types like me, I bought a book to teach me more about it.
But my downfall is that I’m just the type that goes in and does things, you know? It’s how I’ve learned everything having to do with computers. I’m completely 100% self-taught on all of this stuff from blogging to video. I don’t read lots of directions, but when I do… I expect them to be easy to understand.
Not so with the Sony Vegas help. It’s rather obscure and confounds me most of the time… hence, the book. So, I looked up chroma key there, and it told me which FX (special effect) to use. No problem.
I got everything working, except I couldn’t get the image behind my husband. It kept showing up over his face. Argh…
Here’s where YouTube comes in. If you need to know how to do something, YouTube can often come to the rescue with videos from smart folks who know how to do just about everything.
So, I watched the first video and it showed me how to look at just the mask, to make the background (the green color) black and the foreground white (the subject, which in my case is Pat). Great… still didn’t help with getting the image in the background, rather than across his face.
So, I watched another video and picked up another tip and another video and saw something else, but, there’s ONE thing that nobody, not Sony, not the book, and not the three videos I watched don’t tell you.
Seems logical, but does it? When you’re dealing with a still image, well… it just didn’t occur to me to do that. It’s not a video, right? But then, I saw how one of the videos added an image below the video and the only way I know to do that is to add another video track! So, I thought, What the heck?
Sheesh.
Took me three hours to figure out that ONE little piece.
As videos go, this was the best one about using the chroma keyer in Vegas:
If you’re trying to do this stuff in Vegas… it makes it rather simple. But don’t forget! Add a new video track to apply your background, and then, you’ll be golden.
Danny is an awesome video creator… He teaches you stuff and it’s fun to watch!
Have you seen Microsoft’s new (revamped) search engine “Bing” yet?
Pretty cool.
Every day, there’s a different picture when you start out, and when you rest your mouse on different parts of the picture, you can see little tags of information. Today, it’s Denali National Park, home to Mt. McKinley. If you want to see where it is, there’s a link to the map. If you want to know about dog sledding (because it’s how rangers patrol the park in winter), there’s a link for that. Pretty interesting, I think. I can’t wait to see where we’ll be tomorrow. That’s totally non-Google, eh? Nice!
When you do an actual search, it’s simplified. I did a search for “eye glasses” just because it was on top of my mind. I need new ones, and I got the usual results. Eyeglasses.com came up first. But over to the left-hand side, I get “Women, Men, Babies, Kids…” This engine gives you categories to make searching easier.
The usual tabs are at the top… “Web, Video, Images, News, Maps, More…” And the suggested searches, rather than being at the bottom of the page, like they are at Google, are in a left-hand sidebar.
I’m not sure that Bing will overtake Google anytime soon, but that remains to be seen. It’s just fun to play around with because it’s not the same old thang… ya know?
Here’s a video I hope you enjoy. We posted it to YouTube a while back, but I’m telling you… if you’re marketing online and you’re NOT writing articles, you totally need to start, and here’s why…
Want more? Lots of stuff on our channel… Check it out: ListBuilding Club Videos
Remember a long time ago, I told you about a product that I created with Tellman, called Spider Language? Well, we’ve been working on it and tweaking it and making things all come together. It’s been a long five months as we went back and forth with the format and the set up and whatever…
We tried it a few weeks ago with a smaller list, and things have been going well, so we launched it to the whole list this weekend! I can’t tell you how excited I am that so many folks decided to take us up on the trial. (You can see what’s happening at http://SpiderLanguage.com)
I want to teach everyone that SEO isn’t as hard as they think. Oh sure, there are some very technical aspects that you can get into that are difficult to learn, but if you’re a webmaster and not a professional SEO that spends 24/7 on optimizing for the search engines, you really need the basics and you need them presented to you in a way that’s easy to grasp and retain. I think we’ve done that.
The course is presented in weekly installments with a video or two to back up the written learning. There are checklists that you can use to just fly through this stuff when you’re ready to pursue a task. And there’s homework. You need to learn this stuff with a hands-on mentality. I never learn something entirely until I do it myself, so I think that’s a very important component.
The other thing I want to teach folks is that SEO should permeate every single activity you do online–blogging, articles, press releases, videos, even Twitter… everything!
And so we’ll be talking about each of those areas, too, as the weeks roll on.
I’m really excited about this, and hope that everyone who signs up will be, too. SEO is something I totally love, and I don’t want folks to fear it because it’s too hard to learn. Come with me… I’ll make it easy for you, and you’ll be amazed at how you can really put this to work and get some of that free, targeted traffic that people are always talking about. Isn’t that what you really want? I’ll show you how it’s done.
If you have studied copywriting at any level, you’ll have heard the term “swipe file” often. That’s just a collection of headlines or really good sales copy that can be modeled. It can’t be used verbatim, of course, because that would be plagiarism, but you can rewrite what you find, and even the best copywriters do this all the time.
The constant pace of blogging can be demanding. When you’re first starting a blog, it’s important to write in that blog seven days a week. Then, once you have a following, you can cut back to five days and then three, and still maintain an audience. But the reality is, the more you post, the bigger your audience will grow, unless you’re a total moron and posting crap all the time. Hopefully, you have some cool stuff to mention about your niche to keep your audience engaged, but you must be consistent.
Sporadic blogging is very bad. It just shows that you’re lackadaisical, that you’re not really passionate about your topic, and it might indicate to the people you’re trying to impress that you’re a slacker. Not good.
However, potential bloggers are often aghast at the idea of writing every day!
You have to realize that blogging isn’t ALL about writing. It can be about video. You can make them yourself or just snatch them from YouTube. You can make audio recordings. You can add pictures with captions. There are lots of ways to be blogging.
You don’t have to be tied to your computer, either. WordPress allows you to write now and publish later. You only need click the “edit” link next to “Publish immediately” in the right-hand side of the “Add New Post” page and set your posting date and time. So, you can add 5 posts at the same time, and schedule them to go out 5 days in a row.
This is great for people who like to write Looooong posts. They shouldn’t be more than 500 words, so break them down over two or three days, if that’s the case. A good length is really about 350 words.
A good way to get ideas is by keeping a blogger’s “swipe file.” During the day, as I’m working on other projects, I see sites I may want to blog about later, so I just bookmark them and add them to my blogging ideas file. Then, later in the day, I can go back and write about what I found. These files can include Twitter remarks, websites, even emails that I get. All of them go into the hopper.
It sure makes writing a lot easier. Instead of sitting here at the keyboard trying to come up with something at the end of the day when I’m exhausted, I just go to my file, check around for something I can write about and then, I’m here pounding the keys or posting something to amaze and delight.
Well.. at least I hope so. 
Click Here to Learn More about Writing from a Professional Writer
We have a premium level of The ListBuilding Club called “ListBuilding 411,” where members can ask a question each day and one of the Overcome Everything team answers it on video within 24 hours. It’s an awesome service, and I wish it had been available when I was learning. It could have shaved years off my learning curve.
Anyway, today, one of our clients asked how he could get 4 spreadsheets with multiple pages online so that he could collaborate with others. I was amazed that he’d never heard of Google Docs! And then, I’m thinking… Wait. People know how to search with Google, but most folks don’t really get the power of Google!
Google Docs is a great way to store information online. It not only gives you the ability to get to it anytime you need to as long as you have an Internet connection, it gives you the ability to share with other folks and to keep it all private. Google Docs is great!
Of course, it’s not without limitations and irritations. Like sometimes, it won’t let you paste stuff in where you want it to go, or you can’t export or well… it’s just NOT as adaptable as MS Office applications, but it’s still worth the effort to get in there and try it. Why not? It’s free.
Google has given us a whole bunch of stuff that’s free and very helpful.
Google Calendar can help you plan your schedule.
Google Maps is more accurate than MapQuest, in my opinion, and with Google Earth, we can see our own street or what’s going on in London at 2 a..m. Why not?
Whatever would we do without GMail, and Picasa? Email and photos are all that some people do online, right?
Lest we forget, there’s Google Video and Shopping and blogs at Blogger. And now, they’re even putting books online for us! There’s Google Alerts, so we can see what people are saying about any topic, Google Translate, and Google for our mobile phones.
But did you know that you can also create 3-D images at Google Sketchup, create your own keyboard shortcuts, let you see You Tube videos or Picassa images right in your Gmail messages, and a whole lot more through Google Labs.
Google is getting to be a very powerful resource (as though it wasn’t powerful enough already). Try some of the “hidden” perks of Google, and you might find a whole new world of stuff to help you or waste your time and not have to pay a single dime. Amazing.
