Worth Reposting…. Clay Shirky is our MP3 » FOLLOWERS OF THE APOCALYPSE. For those who don’t know, Clay Shirky talks and writes about the Interwebs. He’s faculty @ NYU . He likes to make predictions about the future. He’s now … Continue reading →

Relevance for your YouTube Video Note - this is part 5 of a series of resources about marketing courses on YouTube. To start at the beginning click here: Part 1 - Online course marketing with YouTube - Part 1 So far in this series we’ve covered the benefits of YouTube for marketing your online course, the overview of a teaser video structure, the basic process of how you actually drive sales from YouTube and we’ve seen that views are key to conversions from YouTube, and we get views by increasing two factors on our video: Relevance - which is driven primarily by the YouTube Video Title, Description, and other textual items including video tags. Popularity - driven by Views, Ratings, Comments I’ve put together a short summary / checklist as a reference for you. Get the Checklist here. Let’s start with the Relevance attributes: YouTube Video Relevance Relevance - tracks how relevant a video is to the search terms someone enters - so if you search for cats you’ll find videos on cats. And the videos with the most reference to cats will be more likely to appear at the top of the list. Our relevant attributes include: Title and Description and other textual items including video tags. Title - is exactly that. The title of your video. There are two goals for your title: First - to be relevant - and it means you want to include the search terms or keywords that you want to attract. It makes you more likely to be found Second - the next goal is to get people to click on your video and watch it. Once your video pops up in the search results the title of the video helps entice people to watch. It should be interesting, descriptive and accurate. Consider the following when picking your YouTube Video title: Most Powerful: The title is hands down the most important text associated with your YouTube video. It has a huge impact on driving your video to the top of relevant searches and a huge impact on whether someone clicks on it or not once they find it in a search. Descriptive: Be descriptive of the content in your video. Accuracy: Be accurate about what your video contains. Nothing turns viewers off faster than a video that does not deliver what your title promises. Also, the #1 reason for dislikes on a YouTube video (that thumbs down rating) is that it does not deliver what they title promises. Keywords: Consider the key search words you are trying to target with this video and include them in your title. Note that the words that appear near the beginning of the video title hold more weight for search. So ensure your primary keywords are close to the start of the title. So "Learn how to Sleep Train your child" is not as good as "Sleep train your child" You only get 100 characters for your title so choose wisely! YouTube Video Descriptions: Next up is the Description. This is the space for 5000 odd characters or 1000 words that you can put below the video to describe it. People do not see this until after they have clicked on your video. There are two key goals for your video description: First - is to be relevant or show up in searches. Similar to the title you’ll want to include relevant search terms in the description. The difference here is you have much more room to play with. You can even list keywords out at the bottom of your description. You should also describe accurately what’s included in this video. The second goal of the description is conversion. This is another place to give people a call to action. You can pitch a few key reasons to visit your site or check out your course. My video descriptions look something like this: Quick call to action e.g. "More lessons at mysite.com" (ensure the link works) and let them know what they should do when they go there. E.g. Sign up for a free trial, or check out the online course. Optionally here you can list some other resources available at the site including… info/resources/lessons/videos/download (list a few specific items or topics) A short description of what’s in this video. Pack this full of keywords. Follow this up with another call to action and a link. E.g. "And you can get even more of this at mysite.com" Optionally list out some other key search terms that relate to your topic. Many people leave their video description blank. Please don’t! It’s a big opportunity to increase the chance you’ll be found and increase your conversions. Subtitles / Close Captions / Transcript Another often overlooked item that affects how likely your video is to appear in a search is the subtitles or closed captions or transcript of the video. This is literally just a script of what you say in your video. Close Captions or subtitles are a great way to get tonnes of keyword exposure. If you mention leadership in your video often then it will appear often in your subtitles. Google and YouTube are constantly trying to increase the odds that someone searching finds what they want and transcripts really help with this. While you can put anything you want in your video title, even a dishonest title, the transcript is tied to your audio and forces you to be honest. Because of this, YouTube and Google can put more trust in the transcript or captions. They use speech recognition to confirm so you can’t cheat on search terms. A note about the transcript. If you don’t have one or can’t produce one, don’t worry about this one too much. It’s not as important as the title and description. Tags Finally the last item we’ll look at for relevance is video tags. YouTube allows you to add Tags to your videos. These are just keywords to let YouTube know what the video is about and what search terms it should pop up next to. This one is pretty simple to deal with. Your video Tags should describe the content of the video. Also consider including words that describe the problem you’re solving. Think of words that someone searching for your video might use. You have about 500 characters for the Tags section. I’d suggest using us as much of that space as you can. Next up…  Part 6: Increasing the Popularity of your YouTube videos.

We’ve expanded our line up of user experience features, and our latest release is Bulk Student Email. Read on for more info on how you can take advantage of this feature. What is a Bulk Student Email? A Bulk Student Email allows you to bulk email a message to a large quantity of users at once, directly from the Thinkific dashboard. Why would I want to send a Bulk Student Email? Drive traffic: Bulk Student Email is a quick way to stay in touch with a large number of students, as one message for you easily equates to a thousand for customers. In addition, when conversation is personalized for specific segments of users, it can lead to a greater number of responses and conversions - as in, more sales! Email Marketing: Creating an email marketing campaign is inexpensive and extremely effective. Regular emails helps construct a reliable brand image for customers, which helps to establish a two-way relationship, loyalty, and customer retention. Action-oriented: Bulk Student Email is a very powerful tool, especially when used in company with the Segmentation feature, as you can target groups of students based on those segments. For example, I can combine "Enrolled in: [course name]" with "Has not completed: [course name]." As a result, I’ve learned that three students have not completed a course they were enrolled in. At this point, I could choose to send them a reminder email to touch base with their progress. How can I take advantage of Bulk Student Email and Segmentation? Here are some examples of ways you might segment your users and reach out to them: Distribute coupons for your course to a specific audience, and then segment your new students to see who signed up using that coupon code and contact them with a targeted message. Segment users who signed up for a free trial, but didn’t purchase the full course following their trial. Contact students who didn’t complete a course, and haven’t logged in since a certain date. When you update a course with new content, let students who purchased a course before know that their course has been updated. Contact all users who signed up from the same company email domain. View all students who have made purchases - This group is the most likely to buy again in the future! Notify affiliates of changes to your program that will help them promote your courses. How does a Mass User Email work? Select a segment of students (Learn about segmentation here) Draft your message Hit send That’s it! For step-by-step instructions, visit our support page here. I want to send a Mass User Email! If you’re a member with one of our paid monthly plans, you already have access! Head to your dashboard to try it out. If you are not yet a Thinkific customer or if you’re on our Free plan, get Mass User Email (and all our other awesome premium plan features!) by upgrading to one of our paid plans from your Thinkific dashboard. The post New Feature: Bulk Student Email appeared first on Thinkific.

Sigh. Sandy Hook Shooting: Video Game Violence Isn’t to Blame | TIME.com. Dec. 20, 2012 Yesterday, Senator Jay Rockefeller introduced a bill calling on the National Academy of Sciences to "study" video game violence on children. Speaking of the recent … Continue reading →

YouTube Views and Subscribers - Maximized for Online Course Sale Conversion Note - this is part 4 of a series of resources about marketing courses on YouTube. To start at the beginning click here: Part 1 - Online course marketing with YouTube - Part 1 So far in this series we’ve covered the benefits of YouTube for marketing your online course, the overview of a teaser video structure, the basic process of how you actually drive sales from YouTube. I’ve put together a short summary / checklist as a reference for you. Get the Checklist here. Now we’re learning how to actually achieve success on YouTube. For some that may mean the adoration of millions of fans. For us success means driving learners and sales to your online course. With the added benefit of building your brand as an expert. In order to achieve this goal we want one key thing - VIEWS. More people viewing your videos means more leads, more conversions. More Sales. A few things we’ll be talking about: Views - the total number of times people have watched each video - Driving this up is our primary objective, which in turn will help drive conversions. Subscribers - this is your audience. They get notified when you release new videos and this translates into instant views. How to Maximize your views: As we’ve seen, YouTube is a search engine. A massive one. And part of being so big means that there is a vast amount of content or videos on YouTube. Hundreds of videos are uploaded every minute. You want your video to be found and you’re competing with other videos to see who tops the list when someone searches for topics related to your video. You want to be at the top of that list. If your video is about child sleep training and someone searches for sleep training, you want to be the first video that shows up. You do that by optimizing your video so it’s more likely to appear in a search in YouTube or even Google. The key things that determine how likely your video is to appear in a search are: Title, Description, Views, Ratings and Comments. A few others that can affect your ranking are your subscribers, and transcripts or closed captions. We’re going to take a look at each of these and how you can optimize them quickly in order to maximize your views and in turn conversions or sales. Let’s break these key items out into two groups: Relevance and Popularity Relevance - tracks how relevant a video is to the search terms someone enters - so if you search for cats you’ll find videos on cats. And the videos with the most reference to cats will be more likely to appear at the top of the list. Our relevant attributes include: Title and Description and other textual items including video tags. Popularity - tracks how popular a video is and uses this to push more popular videos to the top of the search list. So that cat video that got shared 10 million times is more likely to top your list of cat videos. Our popularity attributes include: Views, Ratings, Comments Next up… Part 5: Let’s start with the Relevance attributes

Summer is full of tough decisions. An ice cream cone or a popsicle? A day at the beach or in the cool air of the mountains? Relax in the comfort of the indoors, or wander the great outdoors? If you’re the literary type, you might think that staying indoors means you’ll get more reading, writing, and deep thinking done. But that’s not necessarily true - love of the written word and love of the wilderness need not be exclusive. Below are some great writers who spent as much time outdoors as possible. These renown wordsmiths show that just because you’re the bookish type doesn’t mean you’re the indoor type, and a breath of fresh air just might inspire you! 1. Jon Krakauer I now walk into the wild. If any one can prove that writing and wilderness survival can go hand-in-hand, it’s Jon Krakauer. Krakauer is a world-class mountaineer who has penned such gripping non-fiction works as Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. In fact, in the latter, Krakauer details his own harrowing experience with an ill-fated Mt. Everest expedition in 1996. Before tackling Mt. Everest, Krakauer had already established a new mountaineering route in Alaska and surmounted one of the most difficult peaks in the world in Patagonia. 2. Ernest Hemingway Hemingway was a Nobel prize-winning, prolific writer of novels and short stories, who still found time to live a life of adventure outdoors. He was an avid and accomplished deep sea fisherman, who not only won a slew of local fishing competitions in the Caribbean but had the added honor of catching the biggest marlin ever caught in 1935. Hemingway was just as comfortable on land, too. He embarked on African safaris to hunt large game, and was named an honorary game ranger in a local African district. 3. Barbara Kingsolver Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard. After a long day of typing, there’s nothing like getting your hands dirty. Barbara Kingsolver is recognized as a best-selling novelist, essayist, and poet with a focus on social justice in her writing. She’s published over a dozen books, but she’s no writer in an ivory tower - Kingsolver and her family work on their farm in Appalachia. In fact, in 2005, Kingsolver and her family endeavored to live solely off of food they grew themselves for a year. The result of their experiment was a non-fiction memoir about the locavore life, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver still lives on her farm today, growing vegetables, tending sheep, and, of course, writing. 4. Agatha Christie She’s listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling author of all time, with 66 detective novels to her name and over 2 billion copies sold. You’d think that would mean Christie spent her life at her typewriter, but far from it. Christie had a lifelong outdoor hobby that meant spending hours under the blazing sun - archaeology. She visited many an excavation site where she contributed by cleaning, conserving, and reconstructing recovered pieces, photographing sites and findings, and taking notes. 5. Flannery O’Connor Flannery O’Connor shaped much American Southern Gothic literature with her novels and numerous short stories. When not writing, however, she was devoted much of her time to raising peafowl and other birds on her family’s old dairy farm. Though O’Connor suffered from lupus, her condition did not stop her from penning award-winning literature while cultivating a flock of over 40 peafowl and being at their "beck and sqawk." 6. Vladimir Nabokov Like O’Connor, Nabokov is yet another author whose fascination with nature’s winged creatures frequently took him out of doors. The author of Lolita and Pale Fire, however, was not an avian enthusiast but an avid lepidopterist. Nabokov’s study of moths and butterflies was no mere hobby, but scientifically significant. He collected butterflies extensively, traveling around the world to remote places to discover collect new, undocumented species. 7. Henry David Thoreau I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Last but not least, let’s not forget the contributions of Henry David Thoreau. He’s probably the first person that most people think of when someone mentions a writerly life outdoors. He wasn’t a sportsman like Hemingway or Krakauer, nor did he farm or cultivate like O’Connor or Kingsolver. Thoreau just went to the woods to be. He spent two years, two months and two days living as simply as possible in a cabin in the woods. His time communing with nature inspired Walden; or, Life in the Woods and the well-known words, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Driving Sales from YouTube Note - this is part 3 of a series of resources about marketing courses on YouTube. To start at the beginning click here: Part 1 - Online course marketing with YouTube - Part 1 Now that we’ve covered the benefits of YouTube for marketing your online course, and the overview of a teaser video structure, let’s learn the basic process of how you actually drive sales from YouTube. I’ve put together a short summary / checklist as a reference for you. Get the Checklist here.The Search - Once you’ve got your teaser up, someone can find it through a YouTube or Google search. We’ll look at how to improve your chances of being found in searches a little later. So in our example: A parent searches for information on how to sleep train a toddler. At this point they may have no idea there’s even a course out there, they are just looking for some help or information. Your YouTube video pops up with an enticing title "How to prepare your child’s room for sleep training" looks helpful so they click to watch it. The Sale - once they’ve watched your teaser video, they’ve gotten some value from it and now they’re looking for more and you’ve told them where to get it with your call to action. Some of them will follow your advice and head over to your website to check things out. The conversion - I won’t get into too much detail about landing pages and conversion optimization here, but just a few quick pointers. Ideally have a dedicated landing page for YouTube visitors   Give them something more for free in exchange for their email - remember these people only found you on YouTube a few moments ago and they may not be ready to pull our their credit card just yet. So offer a free trial of your course or a free one page report to help them out.     Get their email - ensure that the key call to action on this page results in you getting their email and adding it to your list - you can then try to convert them to a full course now or at the end of the free trial and you can also follow up via an automated email campaign.     Automated email follow up campaign - this part is really key, make sure you don’t just stop here. Get back in touch with these people regularly with automated emails to increase your chances of a sale. * More than 70% of my sales come from follow up sales generated through my email campaign, and not on the first visit to my site.     Maximize your conversion - Free trials of your course are a great way to do this! What I mean by free trial is giving them access to the first lesson or two for free and then they must purchase before they can access the rest of the course. This gives them value for free and gets them more familiar with you and the course you are selling. Ensure that you get their email before you give them free trial access as you’ll want to market to them if they don’t buy yet. So that’s the overview of how to sell on YouTube. Now let’s dive into some specifics on getting this set up and in particular optimizing your videos to ensure you get more views and more sales. The goal here is to be successful on YouTube. For some that may mean the adoration of millions of fans. For us success means driving learners and sales to your online course. With the added benefit of building your brand as an expert. Next up.. Part 4: optimizing your videos to ensure you get more views and more sales

phd031305s.gif GIF Image, 600 × 260 pixels. Author lists SHOULD demonstrate scholarship and the advancement of knowledge. They should NOT be about politics. They ESPECIALLY should not be about paying ‘homage’ or stroking egos. Sadly, and, more and more, they are. I … Continue reading →

Increasing your exposure and online course sales with YouTube Note - this is part 2 of a series of resources about marketing courses on YouTube. To start at the beginning click here: Part 1 - Online course marketing with YouTube - Part 1 Here’s the Step by Step approach… Here’s how YouTube can lead to the sale of your online course. Let’s use an example of a course called "Sleep Training for Toddlers", or better yet, if you’re keeping up with my advice on choosing your online course topics and title: "How to Sleep Train you Toddler in less than 30 days". I’ve put together a short checklist / summary as a reference for you. Get the Checklist here. The Teaser - The first step is to create a few video teasers. You can start with just one but you’ll want to add more. A video teaser gives the viewer some help with the subject and ends with a call to action to check out your full course for more help. The key to the teaser is it MUST ADD VALUE. That means that on it’s own it should help the viewer out. It shouldn’t be just an advertisement. In fact I find my most successful teasers add tremendous value on their own. We’ll look at a detailed step by step setup guide to teaser videos later but here’s the key components to the video itself: There’s a few ways to do this.. the list below is one way I’ve found that works exceptionally well. If you’re enjoying this it would mean the world to me if you could share it. Thanks! A step by step guide to creating your YouTube Marketing funnelClick To Tweet Here’s the key components to the YouTube Teaser video itself: Tell them what they’ll learn in the video (make sure this matches the video title) Sleep training example "In this video I’m going to show you how to set up your child’s room to help with sleep training. I’ll show you the three things that parent’s often forget to remove from the room that can interfere with sleep training and the two things that will save you weeks of sleepless nights. Let’s get started…" As you’re telling them what they’ll learn, show a link to your site in the video (more on how to do this later) You can use YouTube’s Callouts for this with a link directly to your site. Something like ‘More info at sleeptrainingcourse.com" could appear on the video. No need to mention it in your script, just have it appear over top of the video. Get right into the lesson fast - save the sales pitch for the end of the video, they don’t know you yet and they’re not ready to buy. "Okay the first step in sleep training is…" Offer REAL VALUE in the meat of the lesson - this should make up 90% of the video or more. Depending on the size of your course you may have more or less material to give away, but I’ve found that the more value you give in the free videos the more it helps drive sales. Try to keep it between 3-7 minutes in length. Sleep training example - give them the essential items and items to remove from the room as you promised at the start of the video and in the video title. Ask for comments. During the meat of your video lesson, ask the viewers to leave comments below. Ideally give them specific things to leave comments on. It’s better to do this during your lesson than at the end. You can also ask for comments at the end of the lesson, just before your call to action - if you do this be quick about it as you don’t want them to leave before they hear the call to action. "So that’s the first item to remove from the room. I’d love to hear from you, how many of you have this item in your child’s room? Please let me know in the comments below."   …   "I hope you find these tips helpful! If there’s other things you’d like to learn about sleep training please let me know in the comments below.." Close with a call to action. Now that they’ve gotten to know you and your teaching style, and they’ve seen that you add value to their life, now is the time to ask for them to take action. You do this by letting them know you have more great help/resources/lessons in your full online course on the subject. And let them know where to get it. "This is only one small part of the sleep training process, for a full look at how to sleep train your child in less than 30 days, check out Sleep Training Course dot com where you’ll find everything you need to sleep train your child, including a step by step process and a look some key mistakes to avoid." Show a link to the site where your course lives. Again, similar to the beginning of the video but now you can be a bit more blatant and show the link for longer. Put it up and leave it up for a while. Remember, when a YouTube video ends, they suggest other videos for you to watch next. With short attention spans, web viewers often click on one and hop off to the next video. Avoid losing viewers by putting your link up and leaving it there for a while, 10-30 seconds. Advanced tip - Once you have a few videos up, you can include your own "Videos to watch next" by embedding them right into your video as you edit it. Here’s an example of how that works: http://youtu.be/XXCbffp7jLM?t=1m50s The video ends at 1 minute and 52 seconds, but continues for another 10 seconds showing videos to watch next on the same channel. It’s also part of a playlist which is another way to accomplish a similar result. Note that this has to be edited into the video before you upload it to YouTube and then you can add the calls to action over the embedded videos. That’s the overview of the structure of the video itself, we’ll get into more detail about how to set this all up later. Next up.. Part 3: learn the basic process of how you actually drive sales from YouTube. The post Marketing with YouTube - Increasing Exposure appeared first on Thinkific.

This is a well put together argument. Meat Eating and Human Evolution | Mark’s Daily Apple.