How to Outsmart Wiki Editors while SEOing

When it comes to SEO, there is a dark side to Wikipedia. Many of the supposed "do-good" editors on wiki sites are removing your links not because they honestly care if you're a reliable source or not, but because they are employed by SEO companies who are trying to protect their link juice (this is also why you may have trouble removing links from a wikia which obviously are spam. Some of the admins are the spammers!). They also do things like "wiki jacking" which ultimately benefit them while crushing competitors.

You might think it's despicable, but here's the thing: because this stuff goes on it becomes necessary for you to also engage in it. It's hard to compete with these sites who are receiving so much authority from wikis if you're not also being viewed as an authority site by wikis (so if you're gonna blame someone, blame the search engine companies for giving so much authority ranking to wikis, who are way too easy to manipulate).

The key to beating the rival editors;
wiki history pages!

It's pointless to engage in edit wars with them, because they control these websites and even if you manage to convince one person to not delete your link there will be others who will. So trying to protect your links on wiki sites is a gigantic waste of time.

Method #1 Link to older page versions

However, I have figured out a way to beat these guys. You see, Wiki sites allow anyone to view the prior versions of these pages and then directly link to them. All you need to do is go to the history page for that article and then find one of the edits before your site was removed from the page. Next socially bookmark that version of the page and even embed the link it into your articles and blog comments!

The even cooler thing about this technique is that your deleted link is now at the very top of the page in the part that shows what content was changed. This works well with services like Stumbleupon or Reddit, especially if there was any controversial statements made by the editors. Edit wars can spark the interest of Stumbleupon users, which can convince people to copy and paste your link into their browser just to see what the fuss was all about.

Unfortunately the older versions don't have quite as much authority as the normal pages do, but the domain names still carry a great deal of authority weight to them. As long as you help search engines find the pages by submitting the link all over, you can get authority ranking back to your site from these older page versions.

Lastly you can always add a bunch of links to your content on your profile page, and then submit that profile page all over the internet. And every time you post a signature on Wikipedia's talk pages, you'll be internally linking back to your profile page, too!

Haters gonna hate, but they can't stop this!

Method #2 Make a community blog post

The most latest Wikia version software allows any registered user to make a community blog. Moderators and rival SEO competitors pay very little attention to these blogs because they are so focused on controlling the articles. This means you can post your links on your blogs with a much lowered chance of having the links deleted.

Community blogs are a boon for back-links!

You may not be able to win the edit battles to ensure your links remain on the most recent version of  heavily trafficked articles (which the majority of users will see), but you can win the war to get authority ranking going back to your website from wiki domains related to your keywords!

Don't let rival editors stop you, just outsmart them!

How to add closed captions to increase Youtube video views

The single greatest tip I could give anyone on how to improve their rank in Youtube Search is to add a close captions script to their videos. This is because Youtube Search cannot detect what is in your audio files anymore; they used to generate a "machine" script using voice recognition technology, but now Youtube uses this technology to match a pre-written script to timecodes in your video.

What this means is that if you write a text file with everything you say in your video, Youtube will be able to pull that data to generate a closed caption script for you. This is such an easy thing to do that there is no reason to not do it. And better yet every word and phrase in your script is going to be considered a keyword, helping your video gain more visibility in Youtube Search results.

How to choose the best tags for Youtube videos

In this video tutorial I show you an easy way to find the best tags to place in your videos. You can also use the Youtube Keyword Tool and the AdWords Keyword Tools but the information isn't always up to date. Using the suggest box you'll get the latest trending keywords for whatever topic you are titling your video, and be able to rank higher in the results.

Realize, however, that this isn't a secret tactic. Pretty much everyone does this already, so I wouldn't expect to get too much crazy traffic by doing this. However properly tagging your videos is a simple step that won't take too much of your time to complete, and will bring you at least a few hundred more views than you would get if you didn't tag your videos at all.

Fair Use and Cover Songs on Youtube

As Youtube gets bigger, Google has been working out deals with major companies to make more money. Some of these deals involve how Google interprets "Fair Use" on Youtube.

The most important thing people need to understand about Youtube is that it is a privately held corporation and they are free to decide what content they will and won't monetize!

By contrast, "fair use" is a legal doctrine intended as a defense against a lawsuit.

If no one is suing you, "fair use" is simply not applicable!

And despite what you may have heard, inserting something like, "This video is a review and is protected by the fair-use policy and was made for educational purposes" provides you absolutely zero protection from your video being disabled! 

The reason is thus: because it is not cost effective to sue millions of people who upload copyrighted material, major corporations are working out agreements with Youtube to ensure they don't have to file lawsuits to have copyright infringement removed from Youtube. This means it becomes very important to comply with Youtube's policies concerning the use of material you don't own in your videos, which is described at http://www.youtube.com/t/copyright_permissions

If you are interested in making a cover song or song parody it would behoove you to obtain a license for the song to show Youtube when a Content ID claim is undoubtedly placed on your video, or your monetization request is declined by a member of Youtube's copyright team.

Obtaining a license is not always as expensive as you may think, because the entertainment industry is very complex. Although one corporation may own the rights to a song, many companies have licensing agreements to large libraries of songs and they are able to sell "sub-licenses" to others.

For example, https://www.songclearance.com/

This company tends to charge $15 to issue a license for making a cover song (which includes parody). You will also need to pay royalties of your song earnings, but this is better than the $0 you would be making without a license.

How to monetize royalty free music on Youtube videos

This official Youtube video demonstrates how to monetize a video that has royalty free music included in it and for which you have a license to use the music.

Bear in mind, Youtube's full policy for monetization can be found here. You must still comply with all Youtube's policies for monetization.

How to monetize Youtube gameplay videos

As a Youtube Partner who creates video game reviews on my channel The RPG Fanatic, I frequently get asked about whether making video game reviews are allowed to be monetized or not.

The above video explains Youtube's policy concerning video game footage and fair use. This is important information to know because unless you have permission from a developer to use gameplay footage in your videos, you must abide by Youtube's fair use policy for videogame footage.

Youtube's policy is very strict. They will not allow you to place ads on gameplay if there is no audio commentary tracks you have created yourself, and your commentary must provide educational or instructional value. This means you can't just upload video game trailers and expect to make money; Youtube won't allow you to do that.

Youtube also has an official video that demonstrates how to file a claim for videogame footage if you are invoking fair use,

For more information about fair use and DMCA on Youtube, please check the following links:

Using some copyrighted content in your video:
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=143457

Youtube Video Monetization checklist:
http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2490020

Partner Help Center: Video Game and Software Content
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138161

Center for Social Media: Fair Use for Documentary & Online Video Makers
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use

How to setup a Youtube Show page

A Youtube Show is more than just a playlist; it is a powerful tool for promoting your videos. Youtube Shows receive top billing in Youtube Search results. If you make a show title that is exactly the same as a keyword, you will always have your videos shown at the top of the search page for that keyword.

For example, I made a show called "Online Games" for my MMORPG related videos. Online Games receives several hundred thousand searches on Youtube per month. My videos now rank at the top of Youtube search results simply because they are connected to my show that has those keywords!

Youtube Shows are more than just a playlist!

Shows also appear on their own special search page, http://www.youtube.com/shows. They can also have the episodes made available for rental through Youtube.

Unfortunately a Youtube Show is an exclusive option for select Partners. Youtube does not give it to every channel. However networks tend to allow all channels associated with them to have a Show, so this tutorial can be useful to helping networked Partners learn how to use a Show page.

When naming a show, you should use the Youtube Keyword Suggestion tool to decide on the name. Try to pick something that is receiving lots of searches but doesn't already have a Show created for it. Youtube Search rarely displays more than one Show on the search page, unless that keyword is getting millions of searches every month. 

It's important to fill out everything correctly to have a show approved!

It is important that you fill out the Show page completely. As soon as you make it, the show enters an approval query for Youtube Partner support. You cannot just instantly be approved for a Show; it must be inspected first.

Several things can get your show rejected;

• Making a show that has the same name as an existing Show

• Adding videos which have "extra tags" in their description. All tag blocks should be in the "Tags field" of the video. If you want to use keywords in your description, put them in the form of a sentence.

• Not submitting high quality images for your Show.

• Not including any videos as episodes for your Show.

• Having video titles that are much too long or repeat words too much (for example, if your show is called "Bob's Game Reviews" then don't put "game review" in the title of your videos. Your show title will automatically be part of the title of all episodes attached to the Show page). 

If a show is rejected, the Youtube employee will have notes saying what needs to be done for the show to be approved. Unfortunately you won't get an email if your show is approved or rejected, so you will need to check back on your Show tab to see if it was approved. It may take up to a week for someone to review your submission.

Mod Abuse at Animeshinbun.com and other social sites

Originally written on August 26th, 2012

This is why I hate the internet and social media sites like reddit, n4g and Wikipedia. They are such a pain in the ass to submit to, even when you're following the guidelines. And it has nothing to do with whether the site is user friendly or not; it's because these companies give way too much power to a select few users called moderators.

I was doing my usual social bookmarking of recently published articles from my website. In particular a piece about a Masquerade Ball held at the San Japan anime convention.

Because the event is anime related (it took place at an anime convention and more than a few of the people in the video are dressed in cosplay) and was Legend of Zelda themed, I submitted it to Animeshinbun rather than n4g (which is owned by the same company as AnimeShinBun.com, HavaMEDIA), because, in my experience, n4g's crowd tends to be extremely anti-anime and even more anti-cosplay.

My belief is the article would do better on Anime Shin Bun than n4g, and anyone who knows anything about these websites would agree with that assessment.

However, as sometimes occurs with these sites, some mod named lavalamp 1138 flagged it for "not being anime related" and told me to go post it on n4g.

I protested the flagging and so did several other users using the "Disagree" option, but lavalamp1138 manually set the submission to "Fail" when it looked like his report was going to be automatically over-ruled by all the Disagreements against his report by the user base.

Not one to give up easily, I decided to resubmit the submission but lavalamp1138 instantly appeared to reject the submission again.

Because I am so freakin tired of this crap constantly occurring, I decided to fight back.

I messaged lavalamp1138 with a declaration that I was reporting him, as well as PMing every other mod I could find on the site about what he did. Then I sent a ticket in the admins of the website as well.

My brief conversation with mod lavalamp1138

I would show you a screenshot of the original submission and report filed by lavalamp1138 but in response to my threat, he used his mod powers to transform my failed submission back into Pending status in order to delete his original action against the submission (turning it to Pending deleted his original report and that he manually made it Failed), after I told him flat out I was filing reports against him.

The altered post. Notice his report has been deleted, but the last change before was Failed.
Rather than let the community decide, he manually blocked the submission until I raised hell.

I view this change of status to my article as only as an attempt to hide the evidence of what he was doing and most likely has been doing to many other user submissions. My belief is that he would manually set an article to Failed that belongs on the site so that his own submissions have less competition from high quality articles like mine which could be very popular with the users.

And that is why I've made this article; if he is doing it to others, it needs to be brought to light so his mod powers are revoked. Who knows how many other people he has been screwing over? Hell, who knows how many other mods are doing the same thing he is doing?

It would NOT be the first time volunteer mods at social book mark sites have abused their positions to get better exposure for their own promoted work. Such has been reported on by other news sources, and here are a few examples,

Why Reddit needs just enough anarchy (dailydot.com)

Reddit mod banned for selling his influence (dailydot.com)

Gaming sites game Reddit, get caught (cnet.com)

Realize I don't have any proof that Lavalamp1138 is a marketer, but it's the only answer that makes any degree of sense to me. His actions are completely out of character for what a mod at Anime Shin Bun should be doing with his powers if his goals are in line with those of the site he works for.

I mean, one look at Lavalamp1138's own submission feed shows he posts about many videogames which have nothing to do with anime. And as I pointed out in our conversation, The Legend of Zelda has way more manga books based on it than The World Ends With You does.

But it shouldn't even matter because the article I submitted took place at an anime convention and Anime Shin Bun is for anything about Japanese anime AND videogames. And Zelda is one of the most well known Japanese videogame franchises, right up there with Mario and Sonic.

Final Fantasy is so anime, right??

And for the record, I did try submitting the article to n4g, where it received no votes and one troll comment,

10 degree rating on n4g. As expected, n4g's crowd hated it cause it was cosplay.

By contrast, in the same amount of time the story has a 90 degree rating on Anime Shin Bun,

Now you might think this is nothing to get worked up over, but you'd be wrong. For an upstart website like Weekly Texas Jump which has no money for advertising, social bookmarking sites like Anime Shin Bun are vital for news to reach their intended audiences. Within a few hours of something hitting the front page of Anime Shin Bun, it can receive thousands of views.

This is a very big deal, because information sharing is now community driven. Users being barred from sharing information because it might be more popular than someone else's submission is a huge issue, and it's something I've been repeatedly experiencing from volunteer mods -- for example, a few months back I was banned from GiantBomb by a mod who deleted a several long threads where users were talking about one of my videos, and from GoNintendo's forums for daring to put a link in my signature that went to my Youtube channel.

And it's not like I submitted a beta key giveaway or something; this is a quality article and video which can demonstrate why Weekly Texas Jump is a good source of information related to anime and anime conventions in the Texas area.

Also unlike reddit, Anime Shin Bun encourages web masters to submit content from our websites,

"Submitting your stories to a newsboiler site can be a great way to promote your site and to gain new readers."

I'm really quite fed up with the lack-luster attitude many social bookmarking sites have when it comes to how much authority they give a select number of users who are chosen not for real-life credentials but because they are active on the website.

It's basically like saying, "Hey you there Mr. Marketer. Would you like to be able to block other people's submissions from our website so you can get to the top easier?"

The people who submit the most content to social book-marketing sites are marketers. Don't think it's not true, because it is. Every action anyone takes has a motive and the simplest motive for submitting hundreds of entries to a site like Anime Shin Bun is because you're trying to market something for someone.

And I believe too many of these social bookmarking websites allow people to become mods because they prefer volunteers to do most of the community management tasks (so they don't have to pay them salaries) without ever questioning why a regular user would want to become a mod.

For many mods, their "volunteering" allows them the opportunity to deny others the ability to promote on a website while ensuring they and their company are able to. This abuse of their positions has been reported on by many other websites.

So here is what I propose. If you've stumbled upon this article because you've also had trouble with moderators on sites owned by HavaMEDIA, here's the contact form on their website. Send some complaints about their moderators, along with a link to this article.

Maybe if enough people complain they will make some changes to get rid of the volunteer mods and hire real employees who've had background checks and can ensure they won't use their mod tools to block rival news companies from posting to the service.

UPDATE: As of September 1st, 2012 the article is now public, but not before it entered Failed status one more time. Because the article ended up at the very bottom of the Pending feed nobody saw it. Fortunately one of the mods manually approved it, archaic, who is apparently the site community manager.

And also the admin for Bulbapedia....

Though it finally went live, it is rather absurd it took over a week for this submission to to go live, all because of what lavalamp did. The silliness of the situation was even commented on by another user,

I'm not privy to what occurred between the mods but I hope lavalamp1138 was told to never do something like this again. But that's probably too hopeful.

What I do know is that the article has a 160 degree rating on Anime Shin Bun a day after going live,

...and on n4g it has a 20 degree rating even after 5 days on the site.

In the end I was correct to put it on Anime Shin Bun. This is where the submission belonged.

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Google Webinars provide some advice on how to SEO

Did you know that Google has been doing webinars to help educate people about how to use their products?

Some of these webinars offer generic information but a few of them are focused on very particular niches, such as how to be a better Youtube Partner. Some of these webinars are invite-only and sent to select Partners but some of them allow anyone to sign up. Google also does a lot of webinars to help people learn how they can get their websites to rank higher in search results or how to more effectively use AdWords or Analytics.

If you're interested in checking out upcoming Google webinars, just click on the link to their page. You can also access a modest list of pre-recorded webinars which you can watch any time.

5 Easy Steps to Become a Youtube Partner?

Today I'm sharing with you an infographic that has been floating around the web, created by http://www.comescaricaremusicadayoutube.it.  It uses data from the Youtube Creator Handbook which Google released several months ago and is supposed to summarize the necessary steps to become a successful Youtube Partner.

Personally speaking, I take issue with some of the facts in that book (for example, joining a network will boost your subscriber count by 90%? Not necessarily. Many networks just scheme to monetize as many channels as they possibly can and do absolutely no promotion for the overwhelming majority of channels they take in) but I thought the infographic at least summarizes the basic idea of what you're supposed to do with a Youtube channel. So I'm embedding it here for your viewing pleasure.

Before you read on I want to say the most important thing to understand is none of this stuff is special.

These are the basic things everyone should be doing, and because everyone is doing them they aren't necessarily going to bring you a ton of traffic. But they are required in order to for everything else you do to make any difference.

Nobody can find your videos if they don't have key-word rich titles, descriptions and tags; Youtube is a social network so communicating with your subscribers is vital; making videos that provide value to people's lives, rather than re-uploading someone else's music video, etc etc

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REVIEW : Youtube Subscriber Train Can Help you Get 150 New Subscribers a Month!

I'm always excited when I can tell people about a way to successfully market your channels and today is one of those moments!

There is a website called the Youtube Subscriber Train that integrates with your Youtube channel to automatically subscribe you to the last 5 accounts to use the service. Then the next 5 people to use the service will be automatically subscribed to you. In this way it is possible to get 5 subscriptions per day, and the software also penalizes users if they unsubscribe from people right away so the subscriptions tend to remain.

You can think of the service as a sophisticated "sub 4 sub" operation that ensures people don't cheat.

You can also purchase "tickets" to ride the train multiple times per day, allowing you to get subscribers faster. Another thing you can do is get a "V.I.P." pass for $7.99 which allows your channel to be in a banner rotation on every page, plus you will also appear on the page that someone sees after they ride the train. This allows thousands of people to see your channel every day!

I tested the V.I.P. service out and it actually is pretty effective at earning subscribers. The only downside is that only a handful of people can be a V.I.P. and you are bumped off the list after several other people sign up for the V.I.P. service. However you can remain on the list as long as nobody else signs up for the service, so by strategically signing up when the site is likely to get a lot of traffic (such as a weekend) you might earn a lot of subscribers if nobody bumps you off the list.

Personally I received 158 subscribers from the service during the period I was a V.I.P. and the majority of them signed up because they were genuinely interested in my channel (there are no perks for people to sign up to V.I.P.s).

The site also has a page where you can see a list of all the Youtube accounts that subscribed to you. This is useful for gauging whether people are staying subscribed to your channel or not. I like to check the lists to discover new channels and get an idea of what other kind of users are signing up for the service.

One of the things I've learned by looking at channels on the site is that many users have really poor quality videos, so it's not surprising they have difficulty getting subscribers and need to turn to a service like this. However that doesn't mean Youtube Subscriber Train can't be useful to people with high-quality videos; one of the most difficult things about building a Youtube channel is raising awareness of your videos, and my verdict is that this website does indeed build awareness of your channel.

Will the results be quick? No, because you generally only obtain 5 subscribers per day (unless using the V.I.P. service) but if you do it every day then you are getting 150 subscribers per month! That is one hundred and fifty more people who will see your status updates and latest videos, and who might share your videos with other people!

I hope you've found this review to be helpful to you!

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Using your Youtube RSS feed to increase views

Finding your channel's RSS feed is easy!

Did you know that your Youtube channel has an RSS feed? You absolutely do! By going to the Youtube API page you can quickly generate an RSS feed for all the latest videos on your channel.You just need to enter your username in the 'author' field and make sure the field is sorted by publish date, and you'll have a feed that continually updates with every new video you upload.

As an example, my RPG game reviews Youtube channel 's RSS feed can be found by clicking on the contextual link I just provided.

Amazingly these Youtube RSS feeds include dofollow links to each video, as well as any website URLs appearing in the video description section. This is a great SEO technique that can really save you a lot of time if you want to embed your videos into a blog feed without messing with plugins that may or may not work.

Additionally, I strongly encourage you to submit your Youtube channel's RSS feeds to RSS feed directory sites; as an example I routinely submit the feeds for all the featured contributors to my RPG Fanatics website.  This will give you a backlink from their domains to your channel and visitors to these sites might find your videos while they perform searches for blogs.

I also submit the RSS feeds for all the blogs I embed my videos into, including my Squidoo articles.

My favorite RSS Aggregation sites

The following is a list of sites I use to submit my RSS feeds. 

http://www.feedage.com

FeedAge is great because they have a feature called an RSS blend which allows you to combine several RSS feeds together as one RSS feeds. I use this to create a feed for all my featured contributors to have listed together. This allows the feed to update more often and have more varied content for pulling keywords.

As you can see in the accompanying screenshot, within five days of submitting my feeds I already received about 70 views to them. That may not seem like much but those are each new people being introduced to my videos. And it only takes a few minutes to submit these feeds to the website, which also provide some strong backlinks to my channel.






http://www.bumpzee.com/

Bumpzee is currently in a closed beta but you can submit a request to join the site.

http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp

Plazoo is a search engine that crawls RSS feeds to find information for its users. Each listing makes for a great dofollow backlink!

http://feedfury.com/faq
Feed Fury costs $5 per submission but it does provide a strong dofollow link back to your site. The choice is up to you whether you want to pay for a link or not.

http://www.rssmountain.com

 RSS Mountain allows free submissions and has a lot of different categories for you to submit your feeds under. It's one of the more popular directories.

http://www.rss-network.com/submitrss.php

RSS Network has an easy to use form that allows you to submit a feed to their expansive database.

Unfortunately they don't like the Youtube RSS feeds because the 'description' field is missing but you can definitely add feeds for the blogs you embed your videos into!




http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html

FeedSee has a painless submission process compared to many of the other directories I've listed here and their database is moderated by live people to prevent spam links from appearing in the database. Getting listed with them will provide a solid back-link.

http://www.rssmicro.com/feedsubmit.web

RSS Micro is another fantastic directory you should get listed on. It's even one of the top Google Search results for RSS directory, ensuring that you'll get some decent traffic from it for being listed there!


You can find more RSS directory sites to submit to by reading the article at this link. 

Lastly you can use Ping-o-Matic to manually tell search engines that your feed has updated.









Know of any other great directories or uses for Youtube channel RSS feeds? Let me know in the comments below!
Hey, have you heard about Youtube Money Storm? Click Here To Learn More!(Advertisement)
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How to record video game footage for Youtube

The RPG Fanatic Show on Youtube

I've been a Youtube Partner for several years now, focused primarily on videogame journalism with my show The RPG Fanatic. A lot of my content is video game reviews and many people have asked me how I capture video games footage for editing purposes.

This article will have all the advice I can give about the steps involved in video game review creation and how you too can make videos as good as The Angry Video Game Nerd.

How to record video game footage

For videogame console systems, I don't recommend using a video capture card for your PC unless you have a huge amount of Hard-drive space. For example, 10 Terabytes of space. And you need lots of RAM else there will be a huge delay between the gameplay and the commands you input using your controller.

I would instead recommend getting an HD capture box, like this one made by Hauppauge.

You can also be cheaper and buy a recordable DVD player. The honest truth is once you go through all the levels of compressing your gameplay footage during capture, editing and finally Youtube's flash compression, your "HD" footage is no longer truly "HD" and nobody can really tell the difference when they watch the videos on Youtube.

There are a lot of free software for ripping images off a DVD. I personally use Handbrake as it has produced the best results for me.

For PC games, fraps is the only way to go.

Editing your video

Do not use something stupid like Windows Media Maker if you can help it. The final output always looks like garbage and it offers very limited editing tools, especially when it comes to audio.

If you use a Windows based PC, I recommend the consumer (cheap) version of Sony Vegas. It's a great piece of software with some powerful audio functions.

However if you want to spend more money, get Premiere by purchasing the Adobe Creative Suite. One advantage to this is that you'll also get After Effects bundled with it, which can be used to make really great special effects for your live action segments.


I would recommend staying away from anything Avid. It's very pro software meant for high-end video editing, but the interface is so ridiculously non-intuitive you'd be better off not buying it unless you want to take film editing classes or have a friend show you how to use it.

Personally I use a Mac Pro for all my video editing, so I use Final Cut Pro. It's the only real choice. If you have a good Mac, get FCP or FCP X. Personally, I use an older version of FCP that I'm a lot more comfortable with but I've edited on FCP X too, and it's pretty user-friendly. If you've never done any video editing before it's very intuitive software.

If you are worried about how to edit a video and would like to learn some film theory, I recommend checking out any of these books about the topic.



What camera to use for recording live action segments

One thing I should point out is if you don't have a decent HD camera for recording live action segments, I recommend getting the Sony NEX-VG10 or the newer VG 20.

These cameras will give you a great picture and the built in audio mic is acceptable for product reviews (but not narratives! get a real mic and solid state audio recorder for that). Both cameras also come bundled with Sony Vegas, so you get both editing software and a great camera in one package.

However there are some cheaper cameras you can also get, though the picture quality won't be as amazing.

How to film your videos 

Film-making is the art of painting with light. Even with a great camera, in order to produce really great shots you need to either purchase a professional 3 point light kit or go down to Lowe's / Home Depot / Walmart and get three shop lights.

If you do choose to use shop lights then you'll need to tear off the metal grills (so they don't cast shadows over you). This will give you suitable lighting for making some product reviews (though the color temperature tends to be a'bit hot).

Regardless of which kind of lights you obtain, you should also buy some welding gloves because lights get insanely hot and you can easily scar yourself for life or burn your house down if you don't pay attention.

Recording good quality audio

Nothing ruins a great shot more than terrible sound quality.

You can record your audio voice over for the game footage segments by plugging a mic into your computer BUT if you do record the audio separate from the footage using something like Garageband, then you'll need to record the audio at the appropriate frequency so it will match the frame rate of your video capture.

Recording audio voice overs at the wrong frequency screws a lot of novices up. Always capture video at either 30 (29.9) or 60 frames per second and your audio at 48.0 khz.

This is the only non-frustrating way to get the video and audio to perfectly sync up....I mean, if you did record audio at a different frequency it is possible to get something somewhat synced up by doing a lot of compressing, but it's never going to be perfect. Recording your audio and video at the correct settings will make your life a lot easier.

Also realize that the least frustrating way to record audio that will match your live action footage is to do all the audio recording on the built-in mic of your camera. However, note that a consumer brand camera (such as the NEX-VG10 I mentioned earlier) will have a feature called auto-gain which will greatly degrade the quality of the audio. Basically, any time there is a lull in your voice it will crank the gain way up because the camera assumes it should be hearing something but the noise is just too low. Auto-gain on cameras results in the sound levels going up and down constantly, which creates a lot of staticy noise.

However, for a Youtube product review this shouldn't be a major problem. If you use software like FCP or Vegas you can even apply audio filters that help compensate for autogain and get rid of the static.

Which video streaming service to use?

You have a lot of options here, because Youtube has many competitors like blip.tv, dailymotion and vimeo.

However I would start out using Youtube. If you don't do any marketing of your video then you'll still be publishing content into the ethers, but far more people use Youtube to search for videos than any other service so you'll still get some traffic just from searches alone.

Now it is possible to drive traffic from Youtube to something else like blip.tv. This works by uploading a short 30-60 trailer for your episode onto Youtube and then including a link to your full episode on blip.tv in the video description of the Youtube trailer. However, you need a large fanbase on Youtube to make this tactic work. Only a small portion of your fans will take the extra time to travel from one video to yet another video to load. I'd focus on building a big fanbase before focusing on blip.tv. If you get a Partnership, Youtube ads pay much better anyway and all monetized videos automatically become promoted videos

You can also do things like plug your video as a Video Response to a more popular video. Just shop around different videos with similar subject matter, until you find someone who doesn't require approval for a video response to go public. Or you can ask the creator if they will approve your Video Response by sending them  a PM through Youtube. Video Responses helps getting your content seen.

How to compress your video for Youtube

Your video editing suite should allow you to export your finished video in H.264 with the dimensions set to 1280 x 720 (this size is often referred to as '720P' ). There is no reason to upload at any other settings, as these are the settings Youtube will convert the video file to if it isn't uploaded that way already. So unless you want Youtube to compress your video and reduce it's quality, always upload at H.264 with the dimensions at 720P.

How to determine keyword tags

For determining the keywords used in your video title, description and tag fields, use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool 

This form will determine how often keywords related to your video subject are being searched, which will make your video appear in more results.

I should point out that new users have some advantage now because Youtube changed their algorithms to heavily favor new videos.

Setting up annotations

For how to setup your annotations (very important for Youtube), check out this video tutorial I've made. This video is a combination of advice I've received from other Partners and from Youtube Partner staff in private webinars.

Conclusion

I hope this information answers your questions about how to record video game footage for Youtube and make product reviews of the games you play.
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Buying Facebook Ads

Advertising on Facebook is a tactic that has been suggested to me many times but I've had concerns. I've known for years that fake user profiles exist on Facebook as bots, and they are constantly loading and reloading pages as they send out spam. This is a problem for those who purchase Facebook Ads, because some of the fees Facebook collects are based on the number of impressions your ad generated. In fact, a recent BBC News article talks more about this problem. 

That said, I have had some friends who have used Facebook Ads to successfully generate a lot of sales, so I thought it was worth a small test of $20 to see how many clicks I might be able to acquire. I decided to test out the service using my recent project - Weekly Texas Jump, an online magazine for nerds. 

You can also narrow the audience the ad is displayed to down to geographical locations and interests. For example, my site Weekly Texas Jump is aimed at people in certain cities and wouldn't be of that much interest to people who don't live in the area. So this feature is very useful to me.

You can also target the Facebook ads to only display to users who have 'liked' a particular page or RSVPed for certain events. I ended up targeting users who 'liked' the pages of businesses associated with nerdom, like the San Japan anime convention and Ooples Anime Store.




I only ran the ad for two days because the outcome was less than desirable.

Fail

The ad was displayed a total of 49,125 times but I generated only 2 page 'likes' and a total of 26 people clicked on the ad. Maybe if I was selling a product that had a high conversion rate from the clicks, I'd have kept running the ads but all I was trying to do was build awareness of my new brand.

So my conclusion is that for purposes of building awareness of a brand, Facebook Ads are a poor marketing strategy. Most people ignore them.

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Using Fiverr for SEO and promoting Youtube channels

A few days ago I wrote an article discussing my $10 experiment with Fiverr and how the results were rather unsatisfactory. However I decided to try a few other gigs to see if I could obtain better outcomes. This time around things were much more positive.

I searched the site for the keyword "RPG" and discovered a gig where someone with a popular Facebook Fan Page about roleplaying videogames was offering to plug websites related to games on the page. So I seized the opportunity to get my RPG Fanatic.net Community Gaming website plugged.

The result? I'm happy to say that my website gained a spike in traffic! We also got about ten more users to sign up and make new accounts. That may not seem significant but these users quickly started adding new content to the website. My $5 was a worthwhile investment and I intend to keep purchasing this gig every few weeks to keep sending traffic to my site.

I also looked into seeing if there was any decent SEO gigs being offered, and stumbled on someone with a PageRank 7 blog. For a mere $5 he would make a promotional article on his blog with a keyword rich backlink, sending some vital link juice back to your website.

Once again, this is $5 well spent (If you don't understand why, then please check out this article that explains how Google Search works).

In this case I'm going after the keyword "gamer community", which receives 6,600 global searches per month and is considered low competition by the AdWords keyword tool. This phrase is one of the primary search terms I've been focusing on in my SEO strategy for the site. I feel I can get the webpage to the front page result without much difficulty, since few competitors are using it in their marketing strategies.

Now there are many gigs on Fiveer offering SEO, but the majority use bots to spam links all over Chinese and Korean wikis, as well as the comment section of various Chinese .gov sites. The effectiveness of this strategy is pretty low in my opinion given that the Google Penguin update slams these "poor quality" sites pretty hard. However I have tested it out with a few articles on some blogs I don't care too much about, just to see if the links will impact the rankings at all or even appear on Alexa (because it takes a few months for Alexa to update I'll have to revise this article in the future on how that went).

There are also people on fiverr who do the mass spam bot SEO stuff. For example one of the services I did, the bot created a blog profile at Tested.com and inserted gibberish about my Atlantica Online wiki article, which will likely be deleted by a mod later. At the very least I was able to get a list of good places to make accounts at for my manual backlinking, so I guess it wasn't a total waste of $5.


My advice for those interested in using Fiverr gigs to search engine optimize and build their site rank up is to focus on posting one link at a time on high PR blog sites, rather than turn to the mass spam indexers. It'll take a lot of articles but if you target low competition keywords you will undoubtedly make a lot of impact, especially if there isn't much competition to begin with.