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Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

Video Seeding For Professionals

28 Jan 2008

I remember that whenever I had to do some ‘casual seeding’ for a promo video for an agency, I had a document with all the usernames and passwords of the sites I would dump the file to. It would take me up to a day to drill down that list, surf to the site and log in, upload the video, wait for the encoding and then bookmark the url of the clip to track the number of views afterwards. I know seeding promotonial clips has taken a downfall a bit, since not all communities are that keen on ‘being abused’ by ‘yet another agency that wants to score’ with a clip in the hopes it goes viral. So. Here is a solution that can make some people very pissed, but at the same time would come in very handy for an agency to start the seeding and save a lot of time.
In comes Hey!Spread

First thing to do the ‘undercover work’ is to have some sleeping accounts. Just go to the sites listed below and register for an account. You better start making those on beforehand, even when you don’t have a clip to seed. You can put some ‘general’ funny clips on the account and pretend to be a regular user. It’s good to have a history on a site. The longer the better. It’s good to have some activity on that account as well, it will add up to your credibility. Write down all the usernames and passwords and then head over to the Hey!Spread website.

With a simple login, you get access to their service, name your movie, tag it and start the uploading. Hey!Spread will upload your movie to:

All the links above go directly to the registration page of the sites, so in case you don’t have a username/password on that site yet, you don’t have to look for the signup page.

Hey!Spread also allows you to add a watermark to the video file, in case you want to brand it for an official release or something. As soon as you start uploading your file, all you have to do is sit back and relax. The only thing you have to wait for is the processing time of each individual video site. When everything is uploaded, you get the URL to the location of the uploaded clip. Just copy-paste that list, put it in an e-mail or a Word document, and go check the views if you need to harvest the results.

As a bonus, you can use the Hey!Spread API which allows you to propose Hey!Spread in white label as a innovative and addictive feature to your users or clients. Allow them to mass-distribute video content over the best video platforms at any time, but still be the solution provider that came up with this brilliant plan for your customer!

Have fun.

 

Ultimate How Much Are You Worth

26 Feb 2007

Yawn. Another tool to help you measure how much you’re worth. It’s a mix of the domain name analyzer, a domain traffic tool, a domain whois tool, a domain history, a domain popularity, domain appraisal (site value report), a link value appraisal (link value report), pagerank check, an inbound links count, an indexed pages check and more.

It basically pings a lot of services you already knew of, but now in one time. The only thing I find useful about it is that it gives you a sort of overview about the backlinks you have.

dnscoop logo

The tool is definitely made to make money, because the links to Google’s AdSense and TextLinkAds that are given after the analysis are referrer links. First they measure how much you’re worth, then they tell you how much you can make, and then they offer you to sign up. Clever.

Via: Seth Godin

Other tools previously featured on Marketing Thoughts:

 
 

R|Mail Inside

15 Oct 2006

Randy tuned R|Mail a bit and it’s becoming a popular web service with 27.272 users and 68.504 subs. R|Mail is crawling 34.065 feeds. That’s very cool. At this time, my blog is ranked 12th with 264 subscribers. The widget to subscribe to my feed is in the sidebar of the blog. You’ll get your blog-update notification shortly after I’ve set the new post live, if you subscribe, you’ll be amongst the first to know of new goodies, so if you haven’t done so already, enter your e-mail address and join the club!

I asked Randy to give me three good reasons why R|Mail is better than FeedBlitz and here’s what Randy had to say:

Many FeedBlitz users say it doesn’t work and they never get their emails

A FeedBlitz publisher gets your email address when you subscribe, you are giving up your email to both FeedBlitz and the publisher, he can unsubscribe you and he can subscribe you to other mailing lists without you wanting that

FeedBlitz is confusing. You can’t just go to http://www.feedblitz.com/ and subscribe to something

He also added: if you read the FeedBlitz blog, then you’ll find a few times every month where the end user asks why his stuff isn’t working – they don’t even bother responding

here * here

FeedBlitz is actually broken and many users are switching to Rmail. Recently I’m gaining about 100 subscriptions per day. Here’s some posts that I’ve found on the FeedBlitz problems.

* here * here

And if you read the FeedBlitz blog, you’ll find the last 2 weeks that it’s mostly entries about why their service is not working.

* here * here * here

Further, if you read the comments for the last two months on their blog, you’ll see people complaining that they are not getting their emails.

* here * here * here * here

So, that’s why I’m very happy with R|Mail, with the speed it delivers the news and the ease of use. If you need a trustworthy service for your readers, I’d put my money on R|Mail and give it a go. You’ll see.

R|Mail

R|Mail Subscription page
R|Mail Blog
R|Mail Stats

 
 

RSS 2 Gif

12 Oct 2006

Now here’s a cunning idea to promote your favorite RSS feed. RSS-2-Gif creates an image of your post titles and lets you decide how many you want to have on display. I suggest 5 topics is a normal average, because clicking on the image takes people to your site, not to the post itself. The image updates itself every time it is loaded and makes sure people see the latest items you’ve blogged. If you put this in the footer of your e-mails, you’ll be promoting your own blog (or the one from someone you like) and drive more traffic to your site.

It looks like this:



RSS2GIF

Get your own on RSS-2-Gif

Weird thing is: if you want to right-click and save the generated image, it says it’s a .png file. Hmm. That doesn’t match with the concept, but let’s not start nagging about that.

You can edit the generated HTML code and cut out the promotional image for RSS-2-Gif, but to be nice, I’ll add their button here anyway. What you see below is normally added in the middle under the light blue image that displays your feed items. I think they should work on a more sophisticated way to promote theirselves because the button isn’t really fitting in right with the rest of the project. If I’m going to use this in my e-mail footer, it’s going to be without the button. I mean, they already have the text in the generated image of my feed items, no?

 
 

Top 100 Belgian Blogs

24 Sep 2006

B.V.L.G made a top 100 of Belgian blogs, based on the tool provided by the Business Opportunity Weblog. Although one might question the accuracy of a tool like this, I’m quite happy with my 7th place. I’ll line up the first ten blogs, you can see the rest at the bvlg blog.

  1. www.photoblog.be : $875,601.54
  2. www.brusselsjournal.com : $810,679.44
  3. www.mess.be : $623,816.70
  4. veerle.duoh.com : $597,847.86
  5. www.el73.be/drunkey-love : $362,434.68
  6. www.tenderfeelings.be : $186,862.74
  7. blog.coolz0r.com : $160,329.36
  8. www.dopplerradio.net : $154,119.42
  9. www.zattevrienden.be : $139,441.38
  10. fantomaster.com/fantomNews : $132,102.36

For the record: I’m not selling yet, but it’s ok if you want to invest :)

 
No Comments

Posted in Blogs, Tools

 

Moo

20 Sep 2006

Okay this is pretty wicked. Moo is a printing service which is also connected to Flickr. They make small cards of the pictures you select from your sets, then you can add about 6 lines of text on the back of the card. So, what they do is offer you a nice and unique way to promote yourself, your blog of your Flickr account, by using the best images you personally picked and edited in the cropping zone. Awesome. Best part is: first 10.000 Flickr Pro users can have a go for free! Try it fast, before the rest of the world finds out about it!

Moo

Pro Flickr users can try out a set of 10 cards for free (if they’re part of the first 10.000), otherwise it’s going to cost you $ 19.99 for 100 cards.

Go to Moo! | via zog

 

Google Analytics White Paper

08 Sep 2006

MoreVisibility.com has a nice clarifying white paper about Google Analytics online, for free. It’s well worth reading if you’re into stats and numbers. The paper is titled ‘Google Analytics – A Practical Guide to Implementation’, it counts 27 pages and has the following content points after the introduction:

  • Pros and Cons
  • Tips for Google Analytics Installations
  • Reports
  • Conclusion
  • Appendix A – Google Analytics Install Guide for Lead Generation Web Sites
  • Appendix B – Google Analytics Install Guide for E-Commerce Web Sites
  • Appendix C – Google Analytics Help Center Links

The track-ability of Internet Marketing is one of its greatest assets. The first tracking tools for online marketing campaigns were focused around banner ads. Today they range from email marketing tools to ROI (return on investment) tools.

Download it here (.pdf, 226 Kb)

Also check out their SEO white paper library, in case there’s something else you want to know more about.

Thanks, Tom

 

More About Live Writer

14 Aug 2006

As announced yesterday, here’s some more thoughts about Live Writer. I’ve tested the publishing phase, for which I didn’t had time on Sunday and I’ve been walking around in the interface some more. My general opinion about this tool remains that it has a lot of potential, but that there’s still some work to be done.

First of all, there’s the images. I always center my images with a simple <div> tag, and align them so that they kind of fill up the space. With the Live Writer tool, I can’t seem to have the image centered. The ‘inline’ function lets me slide the image between words, but that’s not what I’m looking for. So I’m hoping the Live Writer team will provide some simple align tools in the next update, just like they do in Word (left, center, right – easy as that). I don’t really want to work with the custom margins either, although it’s really cool that you can customize the position manually. But for me: plain and simple, and automated, thank you.

Of course it’s great that you can have your images with some nice effects, but here too I have some desires. I normally upload everything to the subdomain slash images folder (blog.coolz0r.com/images), and it’s great that the Live Writer tool allows me to set up a custom FTP job. Awesome. But. Apparently, as I’ve experienced with the previous post, the source pad of the image is no longer /images. It’s been changed to /images/BerlitzBabel_E4DD/image.jpg.

As far as I can tell, a new folder is created with the title of the post. So instead of uploading it straight to the images folder and adding it to the existing images, I now get an entire new structure (tree) in the images folder. Hmm. I ran through the setup settings again, and I clearly pointed it to the right folder, and I can’t seem to find the settings where it says it will create a new archive for every individual image, so I can’t turn it ‘off’ either. 

Then there’s the cool ‘Insert Map’ tool. Superfine, no doubt, but I don’t seem to get it to work right. I can browse to my house, find it on the map, but when I insert a pin and add a picture from Flickr to it I get a link like this:

Then when I don’t attach a picture it looks like this:

Weird. Must be something I’m overlooking, I can’t figure it out. I always end up somewhere in the middle of Flanders, even though I pinpoint my exact location. I’ve removed the pushpin because that also got totally misplaced and the Flickr image I attached didn’t load, even though it’s a valid image URL. Some work needs to be done here, guys!

As far as the complaints from others about the tabbed interface: I like it the way it is now. In WordPress, I don’t have tabs either. You can write, save, publish. I’ve never been editing multiple posts at once, and I’m not planning to do so in the near future. So it’s fine when that a new post pops up when I’m finished with the old one. Maybe a small detail: When I click new, instead of discarding the post I just published the Writer tool opens a brand new window, but the old post needs to be closed manually. Perhaps it can be fixed to open a new post in the same window and discarding the old post at the same time?

Other things I came across that I like:

  • The extra editing options when inserting an image in the ‘effects’ tab when you click the ‘+’
  • The option to add a watermark to the picture
  • The fact that you can customize the image size, with constrained proportions
  • The built-in spelling checker (don’t know if it’s multi-language) and the ease of adding words to it

That’s about it for this review I guess. If anything shocking comes up, I’ll post it, but for now, all I can say is you’ve just got to try this for yourself and enjoy!

The only downside is the compressed source code, which makes editing afterwards in WordPress a real pain, because it’s so unstructured. There’s also quite a lot of &-nbsp stuff that I usually avoid, which I can’t stop from being used. But those are minor details.

Download it here