The next videos should including references to finding us in iTunes considering that’s a huge way to promote your content and get updates each week without having to subscribe or surf to them on random video sites.

Enter, tubemogul.com, a website that houses your videos and launches them across many video podcast sites. This will become the savior of may video podcasters who are trying to promote their videos with time saving techniques. First, tubemogul allows you to store your credentials for tons of video sharing sites like imeem.com, metacafe.com, blip.tv, howcast, youtube, sclipo, 5min, break, dailymotion.com and so many other sites that have large user bases. If you’re not sure which sites are hot and popular here is your chance to go sign up and register to the sites tubemogul will publish to!

Once you’ve signed up for all of them, yes this is a bit of a hassle, you can use them as launching platforms for all your videos. It takes awhile to register at all the ones that are great targets for your videos but this is a one time experience, once you’ve registered (and validated) your accounts you’ll be able to post to many sites with the click of a single button.

Get Popular

You won’t be famous overnight, but you will not get anywhere if you don’t start publishing your video podcast content now. You’ll probably find a few of these sites don’t bring in as many hits as you’d like to become popular but posting your content to them is free and it requires very little of your time with tubemogul so what’s the harm in posting to them?

Revenue?

Once you’ve registered on all the video sharing websites you can upload your videos to tubemogul one at a time and begin your launching and promotion. Many sharing sites have revenue models where you can make money if you have a paypal account. If you don’t have an account with paypal you can get one so that you can make potential money on the ads they provide. You may not make money, but who cares, it costs you nothing.

The beauty of video podcasting is the lack of quality content. Although there are many folks making videos only a select few are doing their video content with quality and consistency. It will be much easier to become popular if you start video casting today rather than waiting until everyone is doing it.

If you’re an average guy trying to get ahead in the video casting you’ll have to understand and accept the fact that attractive female video podcasters are going to have an advantage from the very beginning. Don’t get upset because a no-talent hot female is beating you in views, remember why you’re doing it and why your content is better. Just head to tubemogul, publish your videos to as many sites as you can and be consistent and passionate about what you’re doing.

As you find new tools to make publishing podcasts faster and affordable, take advantage of all of them. At least give them a try and see what is out there.

It makes our lives easier because traditional media is going to have to start thinking about marketing towards their demographic instead of blasting their advetisements to boat loads of uncaring consumers. Given 2% of TV viewers may actually buy into an ad campaign, that leaves 98% of the consumers unused. Return on Investment for a large commercial to gain impressions simply makes no sense.

Don’t believe me? Gary Vaynerchuck backs up this train of thought with his awesome energized campaign to show media how they must change.

The first three shows are key to get ourselves into places like iTunes and other directories so we can be taken seriously. We’ve decided to station our video home at Blip.TV. Although it doesn’t allow for a lot of customization it does allow us to host the shows for free if we don’t want to upgrade to a pro account (which we’ll eventually do). It has a flash and our original show in the RSS so you can subscribe to the RSS!

The mixed drink show will also be taking on a new name: Common Man Cocktails. It summarizes what we are, what we do and how we will present our drinks. Here is the third show.

Everyday Drinkers: Chocolate Vodka Martini from Derrick Schommer on Vimeo.

Now this was done with a 3-point lighting kit from Lowel for around USD $980 and a Sony HVR-A1U purchased on ebay for USD $1800. For a mic we used a Shure SM11 lavalier mic attached to the Alesis Multimix 12 Firewire wired into a Mac Book Pro and recorded with Garageband.

The reason for the mixer and the Mac Book Pro rather than directly into the Sony HVR-A1U was because we were getting hissing sounds out of the camera even before recording. This hiss would go down on the tape and become a permanent fixture in the video (our first video, also on Vimeo reflects this, I used background music to distract from it)

You can certainly record directly into the sound module on the camera, we wired the MultiMix 12 to record into the camera and the laptop so we had a backup of the audio track and something to sync up the “good” audio on when trying to align the audio with the video in Final Cut Express 4.

If you’ve got a PC or Mac handy (preferably with little noise coming from the case), you can pickup a MultiMix 12 or equivalent (such as the 8 track one instead). We use the MultiMix 12 for recording other audio podcasts so it came in handy for this project.

The entire video was shot in under 10 minutes, with another 10 minutes assigned to set design. Setting up the camera with the right 3-point light configuration took a few hours, but it was worth it. Now, we leave the set configuration for future shows!

Video cast, audio cast, so many ways to define audios presence on the Internet but it’s hard to wrap you mind around its simplicity. Recently a met with a guy looking to define himself on the Internet and was afraid I was going to bombard them with more search engine optimization tips (SEO). Imagine his surprise when he found our methods of marketing were not exactly SEO By The Book, but utilized other sensory systems.

As far as I’m concerned, the basic mechanics of SEO have been bundled up in great blog software like Wordpress. You can get the All In One SEO plugin and you’ve completed the basic SEO best practices. Forget page rank, link backs and vying for impossible keywords for a minute, think podcasting.

Not everyone is going to be fit for podcasting, but those looking to expand their business with audio tidbits, training, keynote speaking, book publishing and other ventures can benefit from a podcast. The major barrier being those that are savvy as writers or public speakers aren’t always “in the know” about how to take their audio online. It sounds like a very tough task to tackle, but it’s easier than they think.

During my meeting I was asked “how do I compete for words like ’stress’ when their are so many competitive sites selling stress relief products and google returns millions of hits?” One way is to attach yourself to the new broadcast medium of audio on the internet (aka podcasting) because you can bring in an enthusiastic audience and compete in podcast directories instead of google search results.

So, again, what is podcasting?

It’s broadcasting yourself in audio (or video) form using digital media on the Internet. For now, think audio podcasting because its easier, more cost effective and allows for faster editing. Using websites and syndicated feeds (known as RSS) you can promote your show and publish it reliably each week. You take an audio “show” of any length, five minutes, one hour, whatever and compress it into an MP3 format using almost any audio tools. Once you’ve compressed it into a .mp3 file you can upload it to a content delivery network for very little money. I use liberated syndication (libsyn.com) and pay them $10.00 a month for 250MB of storage (which holds roughly four one-hour podcasts) and they will publish an RSS feed for me.

With libsyn I can generate an RSS feed in a few minutes to cater to most major podcast directories like iTunes. You can submit the feed to iTunes and within a few weeks you’ll be accepted into their directory (unless your content violates their terms of service of course). Now you’re syndicated and can start building listeners and marketing yourself.

If that sounds simple, that’s because it’s really not hard; it’s just ‘new’ and different so it can be intimidating to understand at first. Here are some basic steps:

1. Record quality audio (buy a good microphone that works with your computer).
2. Build a structured show with your great content and keep it shorter if possible (this is dependent on genre of content of course)
3. Save your audio file as .mp3 with 96kbps quality and in mono to keep the size down.
4. Upload it with FTP over using libsyns web uploader
5. Fill in your iTunes details in the settings on libsyn to explain what your show is about, give it a great title (something you want to compete for in google for keywords isn’t a bad idea)
6. Publish the new file
7. Take the RSS feed which libsyn will expose for you and submit it into iTunes, podcastpickle and all the “podcast directories” you can find on the Internet using google.
8. Monitor some of your metrics on your show via libsyn (as they give you graphs and such)
9. Become a podcast superstar (or at least garner a listenership)

Publish weekly shows on the same day each week and devote some time to coming up with topics and ideas for each show. Consider yourself a radio broadcast show, what would you expect to see out of them? Reliability, excitment, enthusiasm for the topic, structure and energy.

Audio is a passive experience, your listeners may put your new podcast on their mobile devices (i.e. ipod) or listen to it on their computers while working. Set the stage by building a website which you can talk about on your podcast (i.e. “checkout our blog on weekly updates and more thoughts on the topic”) to keep people coming back and building a community.

As Internet speeds, in the US anyway, speed up we’re seeing more people bringing their own user generated content in the form of video. Sites like Vimeo, GameVee and other YouTube like sites have developed to house some of our importent, albiet huge, data files. Other companies have gotten people to fund their adventures, much like Revision 3 has managed to do, they’re expanding their show list seemly each month.

The common computer user can pickup a camera with a built-in microphone for under USD $50.00 at any big retail outlet and start video casting in an hour. Creative content is king in our new found industry and each month it accelerates to new heights, levels and fans. Right now, a show may max out at 100,000 to 500,000 fans, a small amount compared to a broadcast TV show, but broadcast TV started small too.

The next few years are going to be amazing and I’m looking to get involved. My wife and I are working towards are first video casting adventure and, over the next few months, hope to have a fresh new video podcast for iphones, ipods and for online watching. Our goal is to test the waters, experiment and learn from our findings.

The world of video casting is still small and learning all the great techniques is still a challenge, so we’re planning to learn from our mistakes and get any informatoin from the great “user generated content” pouring onto the Net each day.

As we learn stuff I’m going to work to keep you informed. Wish us luck!

After being de-indexed and asking to be re-submitted my wife and I have had a chance to watch the response time of google answering our plea and putting us into their search engine again. We were de-indexed on a Saturday and by Tuesday we were back in the google search results–very efficient
for such a large search engine company. Three days response time was beyond my expectations of efficiency, especially considering they say it could take up to thirty days!

What we witness next was latency from google which was very unexpected but not too surprising. The day casualgamerchick.com was re-indexed by google traffic almost reached normal conditions (600+ hits a day, off by roughly 200). It seems our organic results were simply “filtered” out while de-indexed but left in the same search position the day of the re-index. However, three days later, we could have been considered de-indexed again considering the drop in organic search hits.

Why?

Three days after being re-indexed all our key pages, which were on the first page of results in google, dropped to page 70 and deeper! At this point, we saw organic search results drop as if we were not in google at all; it was another sad day. It seems google decided to drop our pages “rank” from the important search results, presumably because of the hacks in the pages. It took google three days to “catch up” and drop us down in the results probably as a result of being demoted from google days before.

In this graph from 103bees.com, you’ll see the yellow bars represent search traffic (referrals were mainly from images.google.com, RSS readers and in-bound links). April 26th was the day after being told we’re losing our indexing and the 29th was the first day we realized our site was indexed again:

After our three days grace period (or “lag”), four more days went by with 50 to 75 organic search results, most of which were our “normal” traffic from MSN and Yahoo organic search, google wasn’t directing any users to our site! Then, yesterday, everything changed again; our first page google search results were back in force and once again google was sending traffic towards the site. I validated this by doing routine queries each day for keywords we initially ranked search result one to ten to validate we were not there. Oddly, sites that linked to us with those key words were still ranking at the top but our site was not.

Why?

My guess is google has a delay of roughly three to five days for any potential shake up to occur. Although the act of being deindexed was fairly quick, we were out of the results one day after being told it was occurring and arrived back in the results fairly quickly, the organic search results themselves take time. You do not receive a “welcome back” message when you’re re-indexed so it’s hard to measure the response time from the re-index, but it’s obvious that the impact waves through the organic results for about a week before maintaining some amount of stability.

If you find yourself de-indexed and have put in a request to be included again you can probably look forward to:

• Short delay between re-indexing if your site is accepted again.
• A short burst of google traffic upon re-indexing (you get happy)
• A short burst of being thrown down in results due to the prior de-index (you get said again)
• Back in action within two weeks of the initial de-indexing (yay!)

Although the site isn’t completely back 100% it was obvious when google mixed things up with their results in the matter of hours. A day of 50 search results with a next day of 600 is a drastic difference and will be detected by most metrics overnight.

This goes to show just how big google is in the organic search market, perhaps too big. A blog is at the mercy of google and must comply to all of google’s terms of service or find their site wiped from the map–Yahoo and MSN just don’t hold up against the results you’ll get from google.

You can find yourself out of favor with Google. We found this out at casualgamerchick.com when we received an e-mail from google stating the site was being removed from google because it violated the terms of services….

What?

Yeah, a day or two ago we got hacked and the site theme was modified to include hidden links to sites that broke the terms of service (and most moral values). A day after our notification our organic searches went from 800+ a day to 0.

Google has no warning messages, just a standard message that even considers what occurred as a problem, “This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.”

They are very efficient about bring your traffic to a screaming halt and losing any ad revenue you make. We’re still waiting to see how long it ‘really’ takes to be re-included into their index. They send you a link where you can plead your case and ask to be re-included–they say it can take up to 30 days but sites on the Net seem to have folks getting back in within three days. We’re hoping it’s closer to three than to thirty.

Lesson learned. A few other sites I help run also were hacked but I fixed them before they were found by google, but a site that gets constantly scanned by google because of it’s great content is the site that will be de-listed first (go figure).

Although I don’t agree, I believe you should get at least a 3-day advanced warning to fix the issue, there isn’t much you can do against the mega-giant Google; you need google rank.

Here are some lessons you’ll want to keep in handy if you’re a blogger with a site that has mild to great traffic:

• Monitor Security Advisories: Take them seriously, don’t wait until later to do the updates because later can be too late.
• Perform Weekly Site Audits: You might be small but you should practice the work of the big boys, try to go through error logs, access logs or at least view your sites source in a browser once a week to check for hidden links.
• Perform Weekly Backups: Run a backup and put the backup off-site each week (or more). Try to keep a site with up-to-date content staged on a secondary hidden site that you can quickly ‘diff’ and repair the changes. If you’re hacked this can save you hours of hunting for the problems.
• Minimal Plugins: Only take the needed plugins for your CMS. If you don’t utilize them, disable them. Every plugin is an exploit waiting to happen and increases the chances of SQL injections and other badness.

Hopefully it won’t happen to you, however, the more popular your site is the more likely you’re going to be subject to an attack. Hackers don’t care if they only get links to their site from your hacked blog for a few days before your site is destroyed. It’s unfortunate people exist that have this type of attitude and lack of caring for others but it’s not going to change anytime soon so be prepared.

If you’ve been de-listed, read up on google’s help center.

After consulting firms told me “how” and “what” I need to do to get my site “ranked” I had all the knowledge I needed to start working the magic, right? Lots of blogging, lots of keyword use and formulating my messages so google would absorb and make my data available to everyone who organically searched… why spend money on advertisement when you can get it for free with google?

Because life’s too short and a ton of people are playing the same game of SEO. If you’re in a niche market with little competition you can utilize google and other search engines to rank #1 for many things, but video games is not one of them. Mainly because their are so many game review sites and fan blogs that you’ll have a hard time generating enough specific content to rank first. Think on this, if I want to rank for “Saints Row” for the “Xbox 360″ I need to chat about the keywords a lot but I really just want to sell a game.

When people search for those keywords they’re probably also including “tips and tricks” or “howto” or other things to get ahead in the game; people aren’t really searching for buying the title. On top of this challenge, journalists and bloggers have talked about the game for months (or years) before the title was released so they’ve already ranked on the first page, leaving you to clean up on page two or three (or fifty or sixty).

How, then, does one make money on E-Commerce sites? Unfortunately, you have to spend money to make money. You’re going to want to look at shopping sites like shopping.com or pricegrabber.com. These sites are “pay per click” systems where you’ll pay them anywhere from 10 cents to 45 cents (or more) when a customer of theirs clicks on your product and is sent to your page. Believe it or not, it’s worthwhile because you’ll have a tough time ranking organically based on obscure and unknown match criteria but these product search systems are pretty basic: you got a low price? You rank first.

Over the course of a year or more sales on video games from our site weren’t so great using standard organic searching. The competition was high and we spent more money housing products that didn’t sell (as drop shipping video games is cost prohibitive) and products were being reduced in prices while ours didn’t move…making it nearly impossible. Around the holiday season we’d make some money from Google’s product search, Froogle, but not enough to justify a business. It was time to either close the doors as a loss or try something new.

Shopping.com was our next step but their customer service was lacking, their product integration was a bear and extremely tedious to do product matching so we ended up on pricegrabber.com. They gave us a single point of contact person for all our needs and have been available whenever we had an issue. With .35 cents a click, it was still risky (minimum deposit is USD $250.00) but it was all worthwhile because product sales jumped from 0 sales per month to about one a day… still way off from a “success” but a hell of a lot better than nothing!

Over time our rating has increased (it’s only been a month!) so we’ll slowly get more customers taking a look at our products. In the end, we can call it a lesson learned, sometimes SEO isn’t the right idea, sometime you have to swallow your pride and spend money to make money by marketing it on a site which as done this for years and has departments that spend time and money getting your products to customers easily.

If you’re planning on selling products, take some time to invest some research in a site that assists users with finding products for their customers and see how hard it is to get on their list of search results. You may also need to get a developer to write in hooks to get your products on their site easily or use excel to upload your products on a daily/weekly basis so customers get the most recent prices from your site.