Alex Schultz

Author: Alex Schultz

  • embedding videos on your website with revver

    I like embedding videos on my paper airplanes site. I have from time to time used revver and used you tube for these videos and both have their pros and cons. Here is the step by step guide to revver embedding which I personally prefer.

    The first thing you do is visit Revver.com and sign up to their service including payment details for having money sent to your paypal account. Once you have done this click on the UPLOAD video link on the left hand navigation panel. That will take you to the page below.

    The great thing here that beats YouTube is that you can upload multiple videos at once (in this example I am uploading four planes). The uploader will then scroll through them in it’s own time uploading them to Revver. This is great, since you can leave the computer, go to a different browser session and not have to keep going back in order to start the next upload as you do with YouTube. Once you have uploaded all the videos your “my video’s section” will have a link at the bottom asking you to add meta data. This is great since you can go away and then reaccess your revver account from another computer (eg. at starbucks on wifi) to add your meta data.

    Once this meta data is in place the Revver team will review the meta data and the video and approve it if they consider it ok. You receive messages in your my video hub page to let you know it has been approved.

    If you then click on one of the videos revver then opens up the video you wish to view within the my videos section. If you click on the green grab this video icon you come to the page below where you get the code to insert into your HTML.

    I find this process really easy, really intuitive and actually in a lot of ways a great deal better than YouTube where I have also hosted my videos (170k video views in a little over a month). The bonus of getting paid for the video views too is amazing and I only hope this site gets the support it needs to be huge. Stephen Colbert’s show on the YouTube rip off is my favourite, I do believe my content is valuable and I should be paid for creating it. I like, no I love, the way Revver doesn’t treat me as free fuel.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Ideas for future blogs

    So this is more a post for me to remind myself what I have to talk about and what I should be posting about, I get a few hundred visitors through here a week so if you would like to comment on what you want to hear about that would be cool, if not I will try to get to writing some interesting blog posts on these over the next few months.

    Self publishing – I have written a book, 150k copies were sold at 10GBP a pop… 1,500,000GBP of revenue for marks and spencers and I made 3000GBP. I can write about this, how to avoid falling in the trap yourself and about potentially taking a foray into self publishing.

    User generated content – have been running a website built on user generated content for 4 yrs. What are the pitfalls what are the benefits, what have I learnt… I should share that here.

    Recording videos for the web – I run my paper airplanes site now on videos (huge numbers of my users watch them) and have gained some experience about this. Posts on it may well be a good thing to put online

    The trends in online advertising – having been making money off the web in largish amounts now since 2000 (before that was tiny) some of those learnings may be really interesting for visitors… posts in this area would be cool

    Cocktail making seasonality – what are the most popular ingredients searched for by month, what are the most popular months of the year, what cocktails are most popular by month of year/day of week/week of year. I run a cocktail site I have this data from 100ks visitors… might be fun to share. This could make a great PR article to drive traffic to the site.

    Bubble 2.0 – I made a little money off bubble 1.0 and am now making more off bubble 2.0 this is definitely a potential story….

    Database structure – I have made sooooooooooooooooo many mistakes in building databases that are just not queryable in a scalable way to do what I want. Perhaps I could share that… stories about summarizing data, caching data, structuring data, creating sensible time columns… etc…

    Ah well those are all ideas. If only I could find time to post them. The life of a small webmaster eh! 😉

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Dennis rocks

    and so does his blog… if you aren’t reading it yet you definitely should start too. Dennis Goedegebuure

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • How to use the Typepad Widget API with PHP

    The Typepad Widget API is awesome. The concept is that you have a great widget you want users to add to their sidebar. Typepad want this to be a small self contained piece of DHTML code and want to be able to do all the verification of the user on their side without giving the widget owner any access to the user’s account.

    Browser based authentication used at both the eBay and Yahoo! developer programs (and explained beautifully in diagram form on the Yahoo! site) simply won’t work for this since it gives the programmer access to your eBay/Yahoo/Typepad account (were they to use it). So Typepad found a solution to the problem that is really simple and elegant.

    All data is sent to the API in a POST command along with redirecting the user themselves (rather than just a server to server POST call). Typepad’s Widget API requires fields identifying you as a developer, your application, what it is called, verifying you are who you say you are (with a token) and finally containing the FULL HTML you want inserted in the user’s sidebar to be sent to them through the POST command.

    The user then lands at a Typepad log in page and all the data is carried through with them to a page where they can effectively suggest whether or not to keep the Typepad widget. GREAT!

    I love this method, it’s secure, clever, simple and behaves exactly as you would expect… Having worked with Google AdWords/Base/Adsense APIs, Yahoo! APIs, eBay APIs and a fair few others I have to say this Typepad Widget API has been the simplest yet. Well done Typepad!

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Linkbait for Typepad

    I have been playing with the joy that are widgets for some time now. You can see a lot of my attempts at www.randomdomainname.co.uk. Widgets are simple and fun to program but they are also a great potential source of linkbait.

    The concept of linkbait is really simple indeed. You create an awesome article which other people on the web want to link to or a great tool/widget which other users want to place on their site and contains a link. Distribute said article or widget through any promotion you have available to you and suddenly you have hundreds of high value links across the net.

    My latest experiment in this field is my cocktail of the day widget on typepad. Using Yahoo! site explorer I have followed the progress of the back links tracked to my cocktails site since I launched the widget. On launching the widget I had 186 tracked backlinks, within 2 weeks of certification I am now at 494 links and growing at c. 20links a day still. Many of these links are from high page rank pages and blogs.

    The Blog owners get a cool tool that let’s them show a cocktail of the day on their blog and I get a really awesome set of backlinks to my website. Everyone’s a winner and I hope this will help me to continue to build traffic to my cocktails site.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Using Revver For Videos Instead of YouTube

    A while back I wrote a post about paying for user generated content. As someone who generates a lot of content on the web and knows the value it can bring I believe very passionately in this topic.

    For almost two months now I have been recording videos of folding paper airplanes and posting them to my YouTube account but also linking them from my paper airplane website. The videos have been seen 150 000 times in under two months… pretty good going in my mind. Every time the video is shown YouTube gets free advertising and free promotion on my site. I help increase awareness and consideration of YouTube outside the usual web2.0 style audiences who already know about their product.

    In return the pay a lot of money for bandwidth which I couldn’t afford and that is cool. I still however feel they are earning more from me than I am from them. This is where revver comes in. Revver pays me to show people videos on my site in a revenue share stylee. When someone views a video on my site to the very end they see an advert. If they click on that advert I get a 50% revenue share.

    I am already earning $6 a day with less than 1/5 of the potential exposure I could give these videos and only 1/2 of the exposure YouTube is currently getting on my site. I will continue to add videos to revver and see what money I can make from improving my user experience.

    I am even on the verge of finally giving up the crack that is pop unders.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • 3 Quotes that made me happy today

    “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” – Oscar Wilde

    “Americans can be trusted to do the right thing… after having first explored all other alternatives” – Winston Churchill

    “trust is good, control is better” – Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov

    Gave me a big grin with thanks to my dad, to facebook and to a random site called wheels.org

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Great quote from Tony Blair

    Tony made a great comment in his leaving speech at about 45min (which is worth listening to). “The British people will forgive making a wrong decision, they will not forgive not making a decision”

    I love that comment and agree with it wholeheartedly. Make a decision, put your shoulder against it and move. You may win, you may lose but if you don’t make any decision you will lose.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Adsense Google referrer test – the results

    In my earlier post about using php setcookie() for an adsense test, I set up a test to see whether traffic sent to my site from Google behaves different to traffic sent to my site from non Google domains. The results confirm my thoughts that Google users are more likely to click on Google Ads.

    The Google user’s CTR is significantly higher than non Google users. However the CPC for non Google traffic tends to be equally or more valuable. So essentially clicks from traffic sent to my site by other search engines are equally or more valuable than those from Google, however Google-referred traffic is far more likely to click on Google ads.

    Above all this test has taught me one thing. I am massively frustrated with only 200 channels in Google Adsense for Content. This is far too low to do the testing I want to do.

    Come on Google, you guys know data, you guys are excited by the interplay of variables, why not let me get access to that data and really play with it?

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • It’s like a pinata

    Jon Stewart is incredible I loved his statement earlier this week on the daily show “It’s like a pinata: Beat them hard enough with a stick and… sweet candy inside”.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here