Yourls Not Working

by admin

I know, kind of a weird way to start off by saying something doesn’t work.

Yourls works great for shortening your urls and tracking your clicks and providing details about those clicks.

For some servers, there seems to be a problem when you try to add a url – Yours can’t add urls :(

You seem to get the “spinning wheel” that never stops and tells you that the url has been added.

The installation is straightforward (if you understand installing scripts, setting up MySQL datatbases, chmod directories … you know, that kind of stuff).

There Is A Problem

On some servers, certainly not all, Yourls doesn’t seem to work.  It won’t allow you to add a url – sure, it looks like it is working, but it never completes and tells you that the url has been added.

So what’s a person to do?

If you don’t mind hacking around a little bit, then open up your favorite file editor or login to your websites control panel and find the insert.js file that was installed in your Yourl’s js/insert.js file and add a couple of lines of code.

One line 39 add the following code:  newurl = newurl.replace(“http://”, “”);

It should look like this:

You need to do the same thing later in the js (javascript) file, on line 111 add the exact same line of code.

Your Yourls url shortener should now be able to add and delete urls.

I don’t know if you noticed or not …

These “hacks” unfortunately don’t allow you to do one thing that Yourls was designed to do.

And that is, track secure urls, https.

That’s the price you will have to pay with this hack if you are having problems adding urls to yourls.  If you are not using secure urls, then no big deal.

If you are interested in an easier solution, let me know

I was considered knocking out a script that autoinstalls Yourls, however I would like to know if there is even a hint of interest before I go down the rabbit hole.

Use the comment section below to let me know if you are interested.

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Moving to Aweber

by admin

The time has come to retire my old AutoResponsePlus email autoresponder (sigh).

And move over to Aweber.

For those of you who move over to Aweber with me, the confirmation page will have a report on how to pre-populate your WordPress blog with your Aweber subscriber’s name – kind of like what you are seeing now .

This is useful information for those of us who segment mailing lists like Andre mentions in ARM 2.0.

Use the form below and don’t wait as this will be a paid product or a bonus for another product soon.

Name:

Email:

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The Real Truth About Mobile Monopoly

by admin

If you don’t want to read much – here’s the summary.

Mobile Monopoly exaggerates the possibilities without providing enough details.  On the plus side, the mobile squeeze page generator BeastMobi is pretty good.

In a nutshell

The author’s favorite and most lucrative method of mobile marketing is using the Admob platform with a mobile optimized squeeze page targeting IPhone / Droid users (51M phones – not 5 billion) and selling Clickbank products to those people.

For example.

Mobile Monopoly Clickbank

Where I have a problem with this is the math.

If you listen to audio associated with the Clickbank module, the author says:

Let’s say you spend $50 to get those email addresses with the campaign you ran and you made $100 that means you just made a $50 profit.  Now you do that over and over and over that starts to add up.  You see what I am trying to say here?  This is huge.

OK, yes I see what you are trying to say here.

I just don’t believe it.

My experience to date shows that getting those 51M Iphone / Droid (yes, I was just targeting the 35+ Iphone woman) isn’t that easy.

If you don’t mind watching paint dry, then sure, you can get Iphone users to click on your ads.

paint dry

(2 clicks in 16 days doesn’t cut it for me).

Let’s Do Some Math

I have 35 Aweber subscribers from the Admob campaigns I have run to date for one product.  The number of clicks was 1834 at a cost of $105 using a mobile optimized squeeze page.

mobiles queeze

Caveat: Yes, I know.  I am NOT targeting just Iphone/Droid users.  Maybe my results would be better if I just targeted those users (2 clicks, no subscribers in 16 days – I don’t think so).

Each subscriber cost me $3.  So far, the revenue is $0 from one email to each subscriber.

Keep in mind, I am using the author’s favorite and most lucrative method of mobile marketing.

My Suggestion

Adam, why don’t you show a campaign start to finish, A-Z, spare no details.

When you talk about spending 50 bucks and making 100 bucks, ramping it up and this is big … I just don’t get it.  Setup a “sacrifical” campaign for your customers showing the good / the bad / the ugly.

Beastmobi

Like I said, this is good.

I’m a fan of automation that makes sense.  And this does.

This script takes your Aweber code, Youtube embed code, optional tracking code (or you can use the tracking code provided), mashes it up and creates a basic mobile optimized squeeze page.

beastmobi

Is it worth $67 / month.

If you are making bank with Mobile Monopoly, hell yes.

If not, no.

The End

I consider Mobile Monopoly and introduction to mobile marketing.  If you don’t know about Aweber and Clickbank and want to know how to signup and use those, the videos are useful.

The introductions to the mobile advertising networks are beneficial if you don’t already know about them.

The key to the whole thing is spelling out in the first Update – split test.

I think I have said enough.

P.S. – I’ll have my own mobile squeeze page generator available soon.  UPDATE: Mobile Video Squeeze page generator available, CLICK HERE

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The Ongoing Truth About Mobile Monopoly

by admin

Here’s another “truth” I learned.

There’s NOT a lot of Iphones out there. At least not women in the 35+ age group.

admob details

See that group at the top?  Compare the number of impressions with the number of impressions from the next two groups.

The first group is targeting women, 35+ using a Iphone.  The next two groups are women 35+ regardless of the phone.  The first and second campaigns ran at exactly the same time.  Huge difference in the number of impressions.

If I really wanted to test this out, I should not target anything besides Iphone – no age, no sex, etc.

Some more truth

There’s a bunch of different screen sizes out there.

screen resolution

For the visitors I received, there are 72 different screen resolutions.

And the kicker.  12.7% have a screen resolution of 640×400.  What’s up with that?

That’s like twice the size of an Iphone (320×480 if I remember correctly).  Doesn’t make sense to me that I would be receiving visitors with a screen resolution that size.

For those who purchase Mobile Monopoly, there is an upsell offer to a mobile squeeze page generator that combines an Aweber signup form with Youtube.  Based on the resolution of the visitors I have received, that generator doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Now to get a little techy …

The HTTP user agent.

Aw hell, I’m not going to even trying to explain it.  But if I am figuring things out correctly, it looks like the people’s mobile devices are a Samsung phone based (sam-r), followed by Cricket (Cricket-A), then Motorola (MOT-A).

HTTP user agent

I guess what I am getting at with this information is I’m surprised.  I *thought* there would be more Iphone users (guess not).  The screen size resolution has me scratching my head.  The next step is to open things up – no restrictions on sex, age, device – anything.  See what is out there.  Figure out where visitors are coming from (I have that info for these campaigns).

Why Did I Buy Mobile Monopoly?

Remember the second image I mentioned previously?  The one “from the sales page tells me my results are NOT in line with expectations”.  That second image that got me to buy Mobile Monopoly.

Here it is.

mobile monopoly

$0.01 clicks.

Penny clicks.

So far, I haven’t been able to get those elusive penny clicks.  Wouldn’t that be nice though.

Notice I included the text and image above.  The one that says $51.6k in 6 months … able to do that with clicks that cost just a penny or two.

How come I haven’t made any money after spending $105?

What you should do before purchasing an information product online

Google.

Serious.  Google is your friend here.

Do a search for the author’s name in Google and see what you come up with.

http://www.google.com/search?q=adam+horwitz

Make sure you use the custom date range search.  Set the “To:” date to sometime before the product in question is released.

adam horwitz search

What we are trying to do is cut through the crap – the bogus reviews.

You’ll find out some interesting information.

Next post will have me ripping into the Mobile Monopoly content.  Don’t worry, I won’t give away any of the “secrets”.  I might point out some of the “weaknesses” and what I would like to see.

Until then …

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The Truth About Mobile Monopoly

by admin

The truth, nothing but MY truth, so help me.

I admit it, I bought Mobile Monopoly.

Two images on the sales page seduced me.

Just two.

That’s all I needed to click on the “Add to Cart” button.

The first image is 22,312 subscribers at Aweber.

Mobile Monopoly

Very cool.

I noticed that the “today” column showed over 2000 subscribers added for today.

Does that get you excited?  It did for me.

Who doesn’t want 2000+ subscribers a day.

If you look closely at the image and use a little common sense you might not be as impressed.

Why?

22,312 subscribers includes almost 5,000 unsubscribes.

Really you are talking about 17,327 real subscribers.

Sure, 17,327 subscribers is nothing to sneeze at.

But, kind of stops and makes you wonder about the “facts” being presented.

I started by saying this is MY truth about Mobile Monopoly.

Let me share some results to date with you.

Using the Mobile Optimized Squeeze Page module , I have generated:

- 1,053,075 mobile impressions

- 1,814 clicks

- 35 subscribers to my Aweber email list (was 44, 9 have unsubscribed)

- emailed that list once, and 0 sales

admob

Ad spend is $105.00

What I do have is (1) subscribers and (2) data telling me what does NOT work.

That is valuable.

Is it worth $105?  Not sure – yet.

In the next part of this story, we will dig into the data and see what nuggets of gold we can come up.

I’ll also show you a couple of Google searches you should do before purchasing an online information product.

P.S. – Given the data I have now, the second image from the sales page tells me my results are NOT in line with expectations.

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Download Your ClickBank Sales Stats With Salestator

by admin

In this video, I will show you how to save time by being able to download your Clickbank stats instantly for ALL of your Clickbank accounts.

The Salestator script that you install on your site allows you to grab sales stats with the click of the button. You provide your credentials, in this case your Clickbank API info (don’t worry – it won’t hurt) and Salestator goes off and grabs all of your sales stats in csv format for easy analysis in your favorite spreadsheet program.

Salestator

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Upload Video To Amazon S3 and Creating A Video Sitemap

by admin

Here’s a 10 minute video on how to upload a video to AmazonS3 using the Firefox S3 Organizer plugin and creating a video sitemap.

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How To Create A Video Sitemap For Camtasia Videos

by admin

If you are a Camtasia user, creating a video sitemap is all about finding the video content location.

For Google’s video sitemap, there are a few required items. Most are easy to provide – location, title, description, thumbnail location and then there is … the video content location.

I’m a little bit leery of saying that there is exactly one way to find the video content location. The truth is different versions of Camtasia have different options for the video content location.

What Doesn’t Work

At least not consistently is – viewing the source and looking for the video content location (a file with a .sfw, .mp4, .mov extension).

Here’s the HTML source code for web page containing a Camtasia video made from version 4.0. There is no video content location shown in there.

And here’s the HTML source code for a web page containing a Camtasia video made from version 7.0.

For the version 7.0 page, you can actually get the location of the video content, for 4.0, you can not.

What Should You Do

Do what I do – login to your cPanel account, go to the filemanager, descend into the directory that contains the Camtasia video and look for the largest file. That is more than likely your video content location.

Yes, I know, kind of a screwy way to do it.

Take the url of the file and enter that into your Content Location and off you go.

Extra YouTube

I should probably mention this in a different post, but figured since you are already here …

You can also use the video sitemap generator with YouTube videos that you embed on your site.

Once again, the most challenging part of the whole operation is finding the video content location.

With YouTube, it’s a snap.

Simply visit the video on YouTube (not your site), find the “Embed” button, then copy/paste the code into the Video Content Location box and continue on.

There you have it, how to include your Camtasia videos and YouTube videos hosted on your site in a video sitemap.

Related:

Video Sitemap Generator

EasyVideoPlayer Google Video Sitemap Generator

How To Make A Google Video Sitemap

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EasyVideoPlayer Google Video Sitemap Generator

by admin

For those that use EasyVideoPlayer, here is a Google video sitemap generator specific to EVP.

Note: Remember, the first thing you do when you visit the Tool page is login using the email you signed up with. What email am I referring to? The email you used to signup to this mailing list. If you aren’t signed up – what are you waiting for – use the signup on the right hand side of this page to get access. No need to login, just click on the link for the Easy Video Player video sitemap generator

You provide the details about your video – location, thumbnail location, title, description and content location. What is specific about this sitemap generator is that is takes the EasyVideoPlayer code and returns the appropriate information.

Now instead of me telling you about this, let me show you how this works.

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How To Make A Google Video Sitemap

by admin

If you are using video on your websites, it is in your best interest to create Google video sitemaps.

There is no reason to waste the potential link love and search engine traffic that a video can provide.

And Google has been kind enough to let us know exactly what it wants to see in a sitemap for videos.

What Does Google Want To See?

Going straight to the source, Google has a few basic requirements in a sitemap for videos, some recommended by not required suggestions and optional information.

Starting with the required.  You need to provide this information.

Location – this is the page, the url that the video resides at, the page that has the video embedded.  It is NOT the url for the actual video content.  For instance, in a video sitemap for this site, the Fast Landing Page post on this site is the location for the video.

Content Location- the url of the actual video.  Your videos need to be a certain type.  Google can crawl mp4, mov, wmv, mpg, mpeg, flv, swf, avi, asf, ra, ram, and rm file types.  There are pros and cons to each type of file type.  Often there is a trade off between the quality of the video and the video file size – you decide what your audience wants.  Either this information or the player location is required.

Player Location – the url for the video player.  Again, this is not the url for the actual video content.  Either this information or the content location is required.  Google is specific about the player type, it needs to be a Flash player for a specific video.  Within this tag you can specify if the video is allowed to be embedded and optionally is there an autoplay option, i.e. autoplay=”ap-1″.   My preference is to provide the Content Location and not provide a Player Location.

Thumbnail Location – the url for a image of your video.  Google accepts most every image type and size but recommends images that are at least 120px wide by 90px high in .gif, .png. or .jpg formats.

Video Title – hopefully this is self explanatory and makes sense why you would want to include this.  You are limited to 100 characters so use them wisely.

Video Description - up to 2048 characters (anyone know what is special about 2048 … anyone?  2048 is 2 to the 11 power … this has to do with binary number, bits, bytes, words, etc. … excuse me while I went off on that techy trail …).  This is the description for your video.

The rest of the possible tags allowed by Google are optional.

Expiration date – This is recommend where applicable per Google.  Seems obvious enough that you wouldn’t include it if you have no intentions of removing it at a particular date in the future.

Video Duration – In Google’s words “Strongly recommended”.  And I agree.  When searching a seeing results that includes video, I want to have an idea how much time I will be involved with watching a video versus being able to visit a web page that includes good old fashion text that I can scan.  Somebody tell me how to scan a video  as quickly as I can scan text please!

Tag – This is optional, but I highly recommend it.  You can provide multiple tags – up to 32 – that describe your video.  A tag does not need to be just one word, it can be something like “video” or “funny video”.  Make good use of this optional feature.

Category – Up to 256 characters.  Think of a category as a broad grouping, like Automotibles or Health Or Finance.

Publication date – When the video is published.  Date needs to be in a particular format – W3C format to be specific.

Rating – On a scale of 0.0 to 5.0.  While Google doesn’t say, I am assuming that a rating of 5.0 is the best.  Whoever heard of zero as a hero?

View Count – This one I don’t really understand unless your video sitemap is updated every time it is viewed and has a way to update the number of times a video is viewed.  I typically leave this out (and leave out the rating unless I am feeling lucky and give myself a perfect 5.0 :)

Family Friendly – Or not.  Set this tag to “no” if you have a naughty video.

Restriction – A list of countries that can either be allowed or denied using the relationship=allowed or relationship=denied tag.

Now that Google has told you what it wants, you need to give it what it asks for.

Google Video Sitemap Creator

You didn’t think I was going to leaving you hanging after all of that, did you?

I have automated the creation of the single video site map.

For people who are on my mailing list, you simply need to visit the Tools page and login.

May I suggest you login first before you go clicking on any of the links. It just makes it easier. Sure it will work if you first click on the video site map link. But you will need to refresh the page and click on the video site map link again. And you don’t want to have to do that. I know, I know, way too complicated.

So go over there, Tools, login, and provide the information requested. I suggest you also provide tags, category and duration. Click the “Submit” button and presto, instant site map content.

Take that fancy looking code, create a file in the root directory or your web server, call it “video.xml” and paste that code in there. Create a link from a web page to your video blog and if you are feeling adventuresome, head over to pingomatic and drop your newly created sitemap in there (in the rss/xml portion).

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