From the technical aspects of uploading and displaying optimized and compatible videos online, creating professional-level screencast videos or live videos to effective video marketing and traffic-generating techniques, Dave’s the man to talk to.

Here are some of the things we talk about:

• How Dave got started and how he built up his brand to the level of prominence it has today.
• How Dave uses videos for his own businesses.
• One simple thing you can do to make sure you keep your viewer’s attention and not have them click away and get distracted before your video has finished playing.
• Why he created a video-player platform and how it’s different from competing products.

Listen to the interview here or use the link below to download it (mp3 format):

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Download the audio file

Links:

• Video Rebel
• Web Video University Membership
• Dave Kaminski’s Blog

I hope you enjoyed this interview! If you have any questions or would like to add something, please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Easy Video Player 2 boasts a few features that are actually very useful for marketers and others that aren’t so much. In this review, I’ll show you exactly what the software does and you’ll learn how it compares to other video players (some of which are available for free). As usual, this review is a bit “late”, since the big, hyped-up lauch of EVP2 is already over. For those who haven’t yet decided whether EVP2 is the right thing for them: Here’s perhaps the first and only actual review, made by someone who’s both used the software as well as many other competing products.

Read on to get the scoop on Easy Video Player 2.

Easy Video Player 2 Overview

At it’s most basic, EVP2 embeds video files that you’ve uploaded into nice-looking players and gives you a code that you can stick on your website, where you want that video to display. This may seem very simple and if you haven’t done much work with video, you might be asking yourself why one would need an expensive piece of software to do this. If you have worked with video a lot, then you probably know how complicated things like this can be.

Before I go into a few more details on Easy Video Player 2 features, let’s address one common question:

Why Not Just Use YouTube?

If the answer to this is clear to you, skip on down to the video.

It is, of course, possible to upload video files to YouTube, vimeo, DailyMotion or any number of other video streaming sites, then grab the code from there and embed the video on your site. This costs absolutely nothing and is very easy to do. So why buy something like EVP2?

Mostly, it’s a question of branding and control. A video embedded from YouTube is branded as a YouTube video, will display related YouTube videos (unless this is explicitly turned off) and may not visually fit in with the rest of your web-page.

More importantly, a video like this is not 100% in your control. There are rules regarding the content (videos that are too commercial might be removed), there are limitations on how long your video can be and there’s always the risk that your account might get blocked or a video removed, at any time, for various reasons.

Finally, you also need to consider that it can make you look unprofessional, if you have a sales-page or product-page and your videos are embedded from YouTube.

On top of all that, Easy Video Player 2 offers a whole bunch of features that are not available through video streaming sites. On the other hand, many of those features are overrated…

Overrated Features

The marketing for EVP2 put a lot of focus on the sharing options you can activate for your videos and how these could make your videos go viral and help you make money and/or grow your list.

Those features are:

• Adding buttons below your video for sharing on facebook, twitter and digg.
• Adding embed code to your video, so that your viewers can publish the video on their sites as well.
• Placing a clickable button (e.g. an “Add to Cart” button) right inside your video.
• Placing an opt-in form right inside your video.
• Creating a nicely styled page for your video, including the sharing options and facebook comments.

So, the idea is that you make a video and add an opt-in form or a clickable button and then, thanks to the sharing options, it will go viral and be spread all over the Internet, getting you new signups and generating sales on autopilot.

This concept has some serious flaws, unfortunately. To name just two, videos with commercial intent are a lot less likely to be shared and go viral than non-commercial videos (simply think of all the viral videos you know of and ask yourself if they had worked if there’d been a pitch at the end) and your viewers are unlikely to perform two actions with your video (sharing, embedding, opting in or making a purchase all move the user away from the video page – they are unlikely to come back and perform a second action, once they’ve completed one process).

I don’t mean to be discouraging. If you own Easy Video Player 2, I recommend you give the viral thing a shot. It might just work. But these features are not, in themselves, compelling reasons to purchase this product.

The Upsell that Shouldn’t Be

I feel like anyone thinking of purchasing EVP2 needs to be warned of the upsell. Once you’ve made the initial purchase, there will be an upsell for what is called the “commercial” version of EVP2. What this upgrade (for $77) does is remove the Easy Video Player 2 branding from your videos. The “normal” version will display the Easy Video Player logo in the bottom left hand corner of your videos for the first few seconds of playtime and there will be a “Powered by Easy Video Player 2″ links above your sharing buttons, if you choose to display them.

In my opinion, the creators of EVP2 made a terrible choice in positioning this as an upsell. What happens is that you make a purchase and are then informed that what you got was acutally a branded version (which makes it seem like what you just bought is somehow limited or less valuable) and you need to hand over more cash to get rid of that branding.

On closer investigation, you’ll find that the non-commercial and commercial options are actually a very good deal and they should have been positioned as a choice between “Easy Video Player 2″ for 200 bucks and “Easy Video Player 2 – Branded” for those with a smaller budget. It’s a great deal either way because you can have the branded player use your affiliate link (when people click on the “powered by” link and buy the product, you get a commission) and getting an unbranded version of Flowplayer (the player that EVP2 is based on) happens to cost a fortune.

This is just an example of bad marketing, if you ask me.

What EVP2 Gets Right

I’ve been quite negative about Easy Video Player 2, so far, so it’s time to talk about what this product gets right and what it’s really useful for. The best thing about EVP2 is in it’s name: It makes things Easy.

The most complicated part about it is the installation (EVP2 is installed your server), which comes with very well made and detailed instructions. Once that’s done, you’ve got a very nice, easy-to-use dashboard for managing all your marketing videos. They are very easy to set up and customize and some of the features are really very, very useful. For example:

• You can add a download button to your video in one click.
• You can add “events” to your video, which will make any HTML elements appear above or below the video, triggered when the video reaches a certain point. What’s more, you can add several such events.
• The page creation feature can be very convenient if you want to send a link to your video, but don’t want to embed it on any of your existing websites.
• You can have your video play in a lightbox at the click of one button (great for showing higher-resolution videos that often don’t fit into a website’s layout).
• You can set up automatic redirects that take the viewer to a specific page after the video has finished.

For your video marketing needs, Easy Video Player 2 really is an excellent choice. What’s perhaps the most important thing about it: If you link up EVP2 with an Amazon S3 account, you’ve got yourself the cheapest, most reliable and fastest video streaming device I know of. Since most other commercial video streaming solutions come with running costs and EVP2 is available for just one payment, it can save you quite  a lot of money in the long run. Of course, that’s only if you actually do a lot of video marketing. Which brings me to the final point.

EVP2 Video Demonstration

Here’s a video demonstrating some of the features in EVP2. The video itself is created with Easy Video Player 2 and is showing some of the sharing features.

Should You Buy Easy Video Player 2?

It’s very simple:

If you are not doing any video marketing yet, then there’s no need to get EVP2. It will not be the missing link that finally makes you lots of money. The possible exception here would be that you absolutely know that you’re starting with video marketing and you have several projects lined up that require a player such as EVP2.

If you are a video marketer, i.e. you already work with videos for your sales-pages, squeeze pages and products, then you should get EVP2. You’ll love it.

Click Here to Get Easy Video Player 2

Check out the video below to see my take on the clever marketing tactics used in this launch.

Kajabi Guru Popcorn Video

What I failed to mention in the video, even though I meant to, was how incredibly good Andy Jenkins is with narration. He’s a guy who can practically speak on two tracks at the same time: He can say one thing with his words and use tone and rythm to say something else. Reminds me that I want to work on my own speech skills.

Also: Sorry for saying “clever” about 200 times in my video…

Leave a comment below and let me know what your thoughts about this launch are! Do you agree with my views of Kajabi? Or do you think I was too much “under the influence” of the marketing message, because I’m actually interested in this product?

Cheers,

Case in point: The new Product Launch Formula videos by Jeff Walker.

Okay, I guess I know where this is coming from. It’s the same with the launches in general. Why does every marketer use the same kind of pre-launch process, the same kind of build-up, the same kind of hype generation? Because it works…

And I guess that type of video also works. But does that really mean that every marketer has to go and make a carbon copy of the Video Boss videos? Same style, same background music, same fonts, same colors and even the same text-animations? Seriously, you can’t select a different animation effect?

Apart from anything else, I bet that almost no one has actually tested the Video Boss type video against a different type of video. Video is a b***h to split-test, after all. Let me just say that I’ve been running a few tests with different video types and I’ve found some pretty surprising results.

I think that Internet marketers who market to the Internet marketing crowd have to start thinking on their feet a bit more and start innovating more quickly. You see, outside of the IM market, you can go ahead and use all of those tactics and techniques you know inside out. Use free ebooks as sign-up incentives, do the product launch formula, use Video Boss videos, use fake time-constraints, have one-time-offers that aren’t really one-time-offers and claim that the price is about to go up “any minute now”. Outside of the IM market, people haven’t all seen this stuff a million times before.

But if you’re marketing to online marketers, start thinking outside the box and be the guy who comes up with the next formula rather than always relying on methods that everyone got fed up with last week.

And seriously, consider using a different text-animation, if nothing else.

By the way: While Product Launch Formula is certainly going to be big and spectacular and cool and everything, one of my readers recently pointed me towards a product about launching products that looks way more interesting. Check out the Interactive Offer and see for yourself. It’s a really cool way to market (one that I like to use myself) and I learnt some very cool stuff just from the pre-launch videos. Coincidentally, I had already been doing almost exactly what the videos talk about, before I saw them.

Too bad that the Interactive Offer also suffers from Video Boss-itis…

Let me know what you think. Is this rant justified? Are you also fed up with the same old formulas? Do you use them yourself?

Cheers,

What is Web2Mayhem? That’s actually not an easy question to answer, because Web2Mayhem includes so many different things. One possible answer is to say that W2M is an all-in-one website promotion system. It includes automatic submission tools, a link-network and a syndication network, keyword research tools a link cloaking and tracking service and a complete step-by-step system for promoting websites.

Does this product deliver or is it spreading itself too thin? Read on to get the full details.

Overview

W2M is a system that has many aspects. Actually, saying that is still an understatement. Below, you find a complete feature list with a brief comment for each item. If you’d like to see some further explanations and more details, check out my Web2Mayhem videos.

Web2Mayhem Software

• Account Creator
  The Account Creator does what it’s name implies: You enter all of your account info (desired username, password, e-mail, profile-picture etc.) and this tool goes out to 97 different websites and creates accounts for you there.
  A great feature of the Account Creator is that it also uploads a profile-picture and a short bio to all the accounts where this is possible, giving them a human touch.
  –
• RSS Announcer
  The RSS Announcer will take any feed you specify and distribute it to 37 different RSS aggregators online.
  –
• Social Bookmarker
  This program can automatically bookmark any webpages you load into it on a total of 37 different social bookmarking sites like Diigo, Blinklist, Mixx and others.
  –
• Video Sharer
  This tool will upload your video files to a maximum of 17 different video sharing sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Flyxia and others. Note that for many videos, it won’t make sense to submit to all 17 sites, since some of them are niche-specific and don’t accept videos on every subject.
  –
• Article Distributor
  This program submits your articles to 29 article directories online. Among the directories listed are Ezine Articles, GoArticles, Articlesbase, articledashboard and many more.
  –
• Blog Poster
  The Blog Poster is quite an interesting feature. The Account Creator will create profiles for you on 10 free blogging platforms like Blog.com, Blogger, tumblr and so on. The Blog Poster is the tool you use to submit content to all of those free blogs.
  You can use this to just submit the same articles you’re already distributing to article directories, but you can also make use of the free blogs in additional ways. After all, most of these free blogs allow you to insert links in the body texts, add pictures and videos and generally let you do a lot more with your content than what you can do on an article directory.
  –
• PAD Submitter
  This tool submits PAD files to shareware and freeware directories. Even if you don’t have any actual programs of your own, you can take an ebook and convert that into a PAD file for submission. In this case, you probably won’t get much attention in the form of people actually downloading the files, but you’ll still get backlinks from the websites where your files are listed.
  –
• Podcast Broadcaster
  This program submits your podcast audio files to 14 different podcasting sites. Again, this is something that can get you a lot of exposure and some nice backlinks as well.
  –
• Content Spinner
  The Content Spinner is a relatively simple text-spinning application. It lets you simply mark text you want to create variations for and then manually enter those variations into predefined fields. The program will then insert the correct spinning syntax for you (and you can even choose among four different types of spin code).
  –
• Keyword Corral
  This tool lets you import data from the Google keyword tool and filter and sort it according to what you are looking for. It’s a pretty solid tool and a good addition to the Web2Mayhem system, but it does require quite a bit of manual labour, compared to high-end solutions like Keyword Elite 2 or Market Samurai.
  –
• Web Page Analyzer
  The Web Page Analyzer will check some on-page stats on your site and compare them to the top listed pages for a keyword you specify. You’ll get a rundown of keyword densities, occurrence of the keyword in title, header and META tags etc. The tool can also be used to analyze competitor’s pages before you even enter into the race for ranking for particular keyword.
  –
• Note that for all the submissions that have captcha protection, you can integrate Decaptcher into W2M, if you have an account there (Decaptcher is a paid service).

–

Web2Mayhem Online Applications

• Syndicate Kahuna
  The Syndicate Kahuna is a network of blogs that you can submit content to. Similar to article directories and the free blogs, this is one more source of backlinks and traffic for your website.
  The only drawback is that you have to spin your text in order to get a good number of submissions (a non-spun article will not be submitted and the more you spin, the more submissions you are eligible for). After I plugged one of my blogs into the Kahuna and started receiving submissions from other members, I came to the conclusion that this is a big flaw in the system: Most of the articles I received were the kind of unreadable rubbish that auto-spinning software produces.
  –
• PAD Software Submitter
  In the W2M members area, you’ll find another PAD submitter which is separate from the desktop software one. It does the same basic thing, but submits to different directories.
  –
• Link Exchange System
  Also part of W2M is a very neat link exchange network. All you need to do is plug a script (or WordPress plugin) into a page on your website (this will be your links-page) and specify your niche. The script will then automatically create a list of links out to other sites relevant to your niche and in return, you get links back from other websites. The system makes sure that all the links are one-way and you get to pick the anchor-texts of the links pointing to your site.
  While links from link-pages may not be terribly valuable, the W2M link-exchange is the easiest and fastest way to get a couple of custom anchor-text backlinks that I’ve ever seen.
  –
• Collaborative Blogs
  As a Web2Mayhem member, you get the option to create mini-blogs on two collaborative blog sites. You can get your own category or subdomain on these blogs and have the advantage of your articles and links appearing on a frequently updated, aged, high-PR and frequently crawled web-property.
  –
• Web 2.0 Co-op
  This is a system that organizes the mutual promotion of social media content among the members. Here’s how it works: You can post “jobs” and see other members’ “jobs”. A “job” could be giving someone’s site a digg or a thumbs-up, rating and commenting on someone’s Squidoo lens or bookmarking a webpage for someone. For each completed job, you get credits which allow you to post your own jobs and thus get your own Web 2.0 content promoted.
  While you will never get thousands of diggs or stumbles just from the Web 2.0 Co-op, the system can give your content a great, initial boost that can make a big difference.
  –
• Redirect Kahuna
  This application is a link cloaking/redirection service that includes detailed tracking.
  –
• Keyword Research Tools
  Additionally to the offline tool (Keyword Corral), there are several online tools you can use for keyword research.

–

The System

If you look at that feature list and think that it all might be a little too much, you’re not alone. When I first saw how extensive W2M is, I expected the whole thing to be pretty chaotic and thought it would take me days just to learn my way around all the tools.

However, Web2Mayhem also comes with a step-by-step system and instructions on how to use it. The system simply runs you through several phases for promoting your website going from finding a niche and keyword to the initial promotion phase and all the way to the “maintenance” phase, which is when your site is ranking #1 in the search results and all you have to do is make sure it stays there.

If you just follow this system, you will be introduced to every one of the features of W2M one by one and there is a document and a video tutorial for each one.

Even though there is a ton of training material to go through, it is very well structured. The only thing I can complain about is that the video presentations could be better, but that’s really nit-picking.

As for the system itself: I found it to be very solid and fairly easy to implement. There’s no doubt that following this system will get your pages ranked. The system is nothing revolutionary in itself, it’s just that the W2M software lets you do a lot more promotion and link-building than you would ever be able to do manually.

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So, What’s Bad About It?

I’ve been saying an awful lot of good things about Web2Mayhem so far and I’m starting to feel uncomfortable. I hate it when something I write starts looking like a pre-sale.

So, let me put my critic-hat on and tell you some things that could be improved in W2M:

• Flexible Account Management
  W2M has only one set of user-data per account profile. This means that if you already have an account on GoArticles that you would like to submit to and you have another account on articledashboard, but with a different username, W2M can’t submit to both those accounts from the same profile. You’ll have to create separate profiles or create new accounts with identical username/PW combinations.
  It would be nice if there was an “I already have an account here” option.
  –
• All Browser Submissions
  All of the submissions are done in an automated browser window. The only problem with this is that it’s a bit slow, at times. The system works quite well, though, so there’s me nit-picking again.
  –
• Automatic E-Mail Confirmation
  Currently, you have to manually go through all of your mails and confirm the account creations. No fun.
  There are tools that can automatically go through your mails and confirm them. From what I read in the W2M forums, they might already be working on such a solution.

–

Ratings

Fluff-o-Meter

Again, I’m always careful about being too enthusiastic about the products I test, but I really have to say that Web2Mayhem is one hell of a fluff-free zone. The training material gets straight to the point and the entire system is focused on getting results. There’s none of the “I made $X in only X days and you can too!” bullshit that you so often find with make-money-online stuff. It’s all abaut learning how to do things and then doing them. No filler.

Web2Mayhem: Fluff-Free Zone.

–

Spam-Factor

My inbox has not suffered much from signing up to W2M. I do get occasional mails and most of them are at least somewhat promotional in nature but, and this is a big BUT, they usually contain some really good value like webinar and interview invites (and those webinars and interviews are well worth listening to).

Promotion + value = list I don’t mind being on.

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Scam-Scale

We can go straight to the synopsis-box with this one.

Nothing scammy detected.

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Overall Rating

The core of Web2Mayhem consists of a very good collection of auto-submission tools and a solid, well laid-out system to follow for promoting your website(s). Just to be clear: You will still have to do work. To make full use of Web2Mayhem, you should ideally have at least one (better several) monetizable sites in place and be willing to write articles and make videos and maybe audio content on a regular basis.

What Web2Mayhem does, is take that content that you create and make the absolute most of it by spreading it far and wide across the interwebs. And if you’ve ever wondered how to best coordinate all of the different properties to which you submit content, you’ll find a very good answer to that in the W2M training manual and videos.

This is for you, if:

• You have money-making websites already and want to get more out of them.
• You know how to build and monetize a website, but lack the tools and/or knowledge to get them ranked in search results.
• You already create content like articles, videos or podcasts and want to ramp up the results you see from them.

This is not for you, if:

• You are completely new to online marketing.
• You have never created a website before.

To sum it all up, Web2Mayhem is a powerful system with powerful tools. Work with it and you will be rewarded.

To learn even more about Web2Mayhem, check out my videos and to see the product itself, click the banner below.

Anyway, here we go with today’s collection:

• Find Good WordPress Themes on ThemeGrade
  If you’ve ever been looking for WordPress themes, I’m sure you quickly noticed that there are more of them available than you could look at in a lifetime. Many of them look very fancy, but how can you know which themes are also good “under the hood”? Ideally, a theme should have good SEO presets (proper tagging and such), be compatible with all browsers (with the possible exception of IE6) and load quickly. ThemeGrade is a great little resource since they rate (free and paid) themes in many different aspects. Makes picking a good one that much easier.
  –
• Link Acceleration Explained – SEOmoz
  Very nice, short-and-to-the-point video explaining the concept of link acceleration (sometimes also called link velocity). A must see for everyone who does link-building for their sites.
  –
• Link Building Basics – Terry Godier
  In this article, titled “7 Habits of Highly Effective Link Builders”, Terry Godier explains the basics of proper link-building. Together with the link above, this should give your link-building and ranking a kick-start.
  –
• Huge Collection of Video Marketing Resources – reelSEO
  As the title suggests, this post on reelSEO contains perhaps everything you will ever need to know about video marketing. It’s a collection of links to lots and lots of resources. If you’re into video-marketing, you can’t miss this.

Right, that’s it for this week’s Link Love Friday.
I hope you enjoy the linked content and benefit from these online marketing gems.

Cheers,