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!

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 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.

Enjoy this article? Follow Carey on Google+ to stay up to date!

How to get Pinterest traffic to your videos

Carey Martell's Pinterest Profile

At first it doesn't seem obvious how Pinterest can be used to generate traffic for Youtube videos. If you simply pin your videos to the service and do nothing more, you end up with the same problem we have on Youtube; our pins get lost in the sea of other submissions and it is difficult to stand out from the crowds.

However the problem is many people use Pinterest in an ineffective way, pinning all day long without doing any actual marketing of their pins. Youtubers are no exception, and in fact many users just pump out video after video to their channel without even considering that they should embed the videos on other websites.

It's easy to get the tunnel vision because many Partners focus exclusively on thinking their only product is their video content. So they don't have a website, they don't market any products and they attempt to make money solely off the ad overlays on their videos.

This is the wrong approach.

Instead you should be trying to use your videos as part of a larger offering of content and products. Youtube views shouldn't just be about how much ad revenue you make-- the views are more valuable for their ability to drive traffic to websites.  Anyone who wants to use Youtube for business purposes should be taking full advantage of this fact.

While I have a network of websites I control, my main focus of late has been on RPG Fanatics, a wiki database of games that also has powerful community engagement systems. One of the unique things about us is the way we display game box art and Pinterest gives us an excellent way to take advantage of this to market our site.

So I'll take you through the process I use to create my Pinterest boards in order to capture search engine traffic (which is how the site should be used!)

For deciding what keywords to tag our boards with, we once again turn to Google's AdWords Keyword Tool.

The keywords I decide upon are,

• "game cover" - 135,000 searches
• "boxart" - 60,500 searches
• "game covers" - 60,500 searches
• "games covers" - 49,500 searches
• "video game box" - 14,800 searches
• "game box art" - 6,600 searches
• "video game covers" - 6,600 searches
• "vg box art" - 4,400 searches
• "video game box art" - 2,900 searches
• "video game boxart" - 1,900 searches

Based on the number of searches for these keywords and the lack of boards using them, I decide to create my board with the title, "Video Game Covers and Boxart".

Using these keywords means that if I can get my board to the front page of Google Search then it has the potential to reach around 67k people every month.

To make things easier on myself I install the Pinterest button add-on for Chrome. I've got hundreds of box art images on my site so I need to quickly be able to index them all.






I then created a copy macro for pasting the keywords "Video Game Cover / Boxart" after the name of each game.

After an hour of this I end up with 416 pins to my video game box art Pinterest board. I can now plug this board as a link, just as I would with any other article.

You see, I already have a modest network of game related blog articles built up on various websites, so I can add this board as a back-link to any of those articles with the anchor text using the keywords I listed above. This will send signals to search engines that they should be ranking my board for searches involving game cover art. Additionally, users on Pinterest who like the images will re-pin them to their own boards BUT the URL for my website will remain. The re-pinning is really great because it allows you to tap into audiences other users have been building with their boards.

One thing you might do is create a board for you and many other Youtubers to have your videos pinned to. For example, I've got this board titled, Videogame Videos on Youtube which my friends and I pin our videos to. I do the same back-linking with it to help it rank highly in search engine results.


The important thing to realize about Pinterest is that the boards are just an article of images with backlinks to whatever website the images are hosted on. So you could make images of cooking recipes or schematics for hacking iphones-- whatever it is your Youtube channel is about, you could make a Pinterest board to help advertise it -- but only if you have a website for your Youtube channel that is hosting the images.

So if you haven't made a website yet, go make one!

Update: I've made another article pertaining to Pinterest, this time about an app called Pinvolve that integrates with your Facebook Pages. If you plan to use Pinterest you NEED to be using this app!

Follow Carey on Google+

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

Follow Carey on Google+

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.
Follow Carey on Google+

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.

Follow Carey on Google+

Creating Subreddits for Fun and View Traffic

Despite what reddit pitches to its user base, it's no secret that reddit is frequently used by social media marketers. This write up from The Daily Dot talks about the case of Ian Miles Chiang (a moderator for many communities such as r/WTF,  r/Politics and r/AskReddit) who was was hired by the GlobalPost to promote their articles in the reddits he administrated.

One of the comments left on the Daily Dot article

What I find interesting is that some users claim Ian often used his mod status to delete and ban other users who competed for views with him.


Sadly this kind of admin abuse is not uncommon and has been reported by other sites as well. Even I have written prior articles about how subreddit mods have blasted my submissions even though the content submitted was appropriate for the topic of the community.

The only way to not deal with moderators who want to compete with their subscribers for views is to create and grow your own subreddit communities. This is the tactic I'm now taking. The thing is, it can be difficult to stand out from the legions of other subreddit communities that already exist for every conceivable topic under the sun.

So what I've done is try an experiment; I created a subreddit for users of my website to share news, videos and other kinds of links relevant to all things RPG. I also made it clear the community was associated to my site, so there can be no accusations of "spamming" or misleading users.



Another thing I did to differentiate my community from other subreddits about RPGs is let people know they won't be banned for self-promotion. Nearly all subreddits have mods looking for any excuse to use their mod powers, so my belief is that by allowing people to self-promote we can find a niche.

I also encourage my users to submit links, because I will be using the community to find news about games to promote on my RPG Fanatic Facebook Fan page. So if they submit one of their own high-quality articles it might receive a personal plug from me.

The benefits to creating my own subreddits are simple to understand:

• Nobody will be deleting my links anymore.

• Because my links aren't getting deleted, I'll be able to gain more link karma as people upvote my comments and links.

• I can include links to the sidebar of the community to things I want to promote, including other communities.

I'm planning to start more subreddits but at the moment I haven't quite nailed down how best to promote a new subreddit. I shall have to write about that in a future article.

Update: I've taken over moderation of an existing the sub reddit,

http://www.reddit.com/r/YouTubeGamers/

We'll see how this experiment goes.

Send a mass friend invite on Facebook for Pages and Events

Many people wonder how they can send a mass invite on Facebook Fan and Event Pages. There is a method you can use involving manipulating the URL code of a page using javascript, but I have honestly never gotten the thing to work.

The method I use is MUCH EASIER and only requires using the Google Chrome browser to install the following plugin from the Chrome Web Store - Facebook Inviter. 

After installing the plugin you can use the Build Audience drop down menu on your Page / Event to locate the Invite Friends function, 

Next you need to set your display parameters for all of your Facebook friends. By default Facebook will only show your recent interactions, so you need to manually switch it to all of your friends. 

Lastly you need to SCROLL TO THE VERY BOTTOM of your friend list BEFORE you hit "toggle all". If you don't scroll to the bottom the tool may not select all of your friends. Additionally if you have over 500 friends it may not select all, because Facebook limits how many invites you can send at once. You may need to run the invite friend function several times, repeating the steps in this guide until all of your friends have been sent invites. 

I hope this guide has helped you. It is a major pain to manually send out friend invites to Pages and Events, and this little plugin makes it so much simpler!

Follow Carey on Google+

How to effectively choose a Youtube channel name

A lot of people choose usernames for personal reasons and that is fine, but if you want to build a business with your Youtube channel you need to choose a name that is going to help you in search engine results.

My original Partner channel was 'jfreedan'. I eventually realized this is not a great keyword, so I moved my gaming content over to an account named TheRPGFanatic, because the name of my show on jfreedan was 'The RPG Fanatic'.

Today I am making a new Youtube channel for a series of cosplay tutorials I am producing so I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain the process I use to choose channel user names.

By using the AdWords keyword tool I can see that "cosplay" receives 4 million global searches, with 1 million of these searches performed by users who are local to my geographical area.

I can also see related keywords, such as "costume". That keyword receives 37 million global searches, with 16 million of them from users local to me.

Additionally, "What is cosplay" and "how to cosplay" receive 4 million global searches. These are all keywords I should be incorporating into my Youtube video descriptions and channel description area.

Unfortunately the username that would be most ideal for my show, "HowtoCosplay" already exists; http://www.youtube.com/howtocosplay

It is also under-utilized, but it does have a video on it that has 25k views.

My first instinct is to reach out to the owner of the channel and ask to purchase the channel. This would actually save me some trouble because the channel already has some presence and lots of activity. But is the channel even for sale and if so, at a price I can afford? Probably not.

The channel http://www.youtube.com/user/cosplaytutorials also exists, but has been abandoned for over a year. The chances of being able to purchase this channel are rather low because the owner has not logged into the account since August 2011.

On the other hand, http://www.youtube.com/user/whatiscosplay does not exist so the channel name is available.

So I will create a Youtube channel with that username. This is because even though it isn't the most ideal channel name, the keyword "what is cosplay" receives 4 million global searches per month on Google.

The next step is to optimize the channel for appearing in search engine results related to the keyword "cosplay". For this we edit the channel info,

I will post the text here so you can see what I wrote and why,

"On this channel you can learn how to cosplay and receive costume ideas. We will teach you how to make lots of amazing anime costumes! You will also be able to purchase items from our costume shop! Happy cosplaying!"

Every underlined phrase is a keyword that was recommended by the Google AdWords keyword tool. 

The tags for the channel are also selected from the recommendations of the tool.

This is the process I use to create channel names for Youtube. I hope this article has helped you. 

Follow Carey on Google+

Content ID Under Fire

For years many Youtube Partners have had trouble with companies using Content ID to claim their content but the issue is finally starting to receive some media attention. This Ars Technica Article by Timothy B. Lee shines a spotlight on one instance where Content ID was used to claim a video of President Obama.

Personally speaking, I have a channel I created to upload public domain videos called the Classic Movies Network.  I've uploaded videos with expired copyrights or those commissioned by the federal government (videos that exist in the public domain and who no one can claim copyright ownership of) and received copyright strikes from companies who have claimed ownership of these videos using Content ID.  I end up keeping the videos private while I appeal the decisions, which can take weeks or a full month.

To date I have always been able to appeal the decision and get the strikes overturned (they would need to file a lawsuit over it which they know they cannot win) , but Youtube then prevents me from monetizing the videos unless I show proof of copyright ownership. This is terribly unfair because no one can provide proof of ownership for these videos, yet they allow companies to claim them using Content ID.



Worst of all, Content ID is not given freely to all Partners; only a select few companies are allowed to have it. I have been rejected many times even though I have millions of views to my videos and several Partner channels. So Content ID is basically monopolized by the few who have it, and they use it to claim content they do not exclusively own in order to run ads on public domain videos that other users have uploaded.

I'll admit, the strategy is smart from a business point of view. They probably make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month by using Content ID like this. However it is not morally correct and Google should do something about it rather than waive their hands in the air as they collect ad revenue.

Why RPGFanatic.net and other community blog sites are great for Youtube Video SEO

This is going to sound a little like tooting my own horn but the strategy behind RPGFanatic.net is insanely great for Youtube Partners who make gaming content, and I really want to tell you why.

As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, Google made a lot of changes to the Google Search algorithms that have altered the landscape. The "freshness" of a website is now heavily factored into what web pages are displayed on the front page of the search results; that is, the more often a website makes new pages, the more likely that site is going to be having articles be displayed on the front page of the search results.

This is why community oriented sites where users have the ability to add content are fantastic for SEOing. On RPGFanatic.net you can have tons of people writing blogs every day and editing the wiki database. Once the site really kicks off with a few hundred daily users it is going to have a very high Page Rank and search engines will favor content related to it. I've already managed to get one of my articles on the front page of a Google Search listing for a game, so I know it is possible to make this work.

Another thing is that you can plug your personal blogs, Youtube channels and Facebook Fan Pages inside your blog posts, creating a backlink from Rpgfanatic.net to your own content. This has the effect of increasing your site's visibility in search engines!

If you want to get your content seen, all you need to do is embed your roleplaying videogame videos into our database and then plug those articles on other websites, such as forums, Squidoo articles and your own personal blogs. Share them on Facebook, reddit and Twitter! This has the effect of not just driving traffic to your videos but it improves the ranking of your content in search engines.

You will also be introducing more people to RPGFanatic.net who might start adding content of their own, which increases the "freshness" value of the website in Google, boosting the Google Search rank of ALL content that exists on the website!

And note that while there are other websites which allow you to submit your content to them, most of them have mods who discourage you from submitting monetized videos and will ban you for "spamming" if you embed your entire library of gaming videos. RPGFanatic.net will never ban users for adding legitimate content to our servers; we want you to be able to earn revenue from your game reviews, let's plays and walkthroughs!

We realize the more successful our users are, the more successful we will be.


Follow Carey on Google+

Getting your video on the front page of Google Search

It can be difficult to get your videos seen if you don't have them embedded into blogs and then get those blog articles on the front page search results for a search engine like Google.

All of the listings in green are pages that I made!

Fortunately there is a tactic that can work quite well. The key is to target keywords that get a lot of searches but don't necessarily have much competition from other web pages.

For example the search term "Ragnarok Online Leveling Guide" receives a few thousand searches per month. By making pages on high PageRank domains that pointed to my article titled, "Ragnarok Online Renewal Leveling Guide" I was able to get my page on the front page search results for those keywords.

Backlinks on forum posts related to the subject of the article can also count toward the SEOing of your page; for example, I made a post on the Warpportal forums (used by the Ragnarok Online game developer ) linking back to my guide. 

I also made a Squidoo page for Ragnarok Online Leveling Guide which exists primarily to get a link back to my site from Squidoo. However I made sure that the link went to my Ragnarok Online Leveling Guide.

Currently my article is receiving around 1,000 hits per month from Google Search. That might not sound impressive on its own but when you do this kind of tactic for every article on your website the views start racking up into hundreds of thousands of hits a month -- and that translates into views to your embedded videos.

And it only took a little bit of effort to make the forum posts and the Squidoo page. A few hours of work is translating into thousands of views.
Follow Carey on Google+

Want more tips on how to be successful with Youtube? Click Here!