The Open Source Marketer

Tonight I’m in San Antonio Texas for a few days of fun and sun with the family at Sea World. It’s about a five hour trip from where I live so I had some time on the road to listen to audio books and think. I took in about four chapters of The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss and I can tell you it’s worth the read, or download and listen in my case.

Tim often refers to people in his book as the New Rich. These are the people who have learned to maximize their time while minimizing their work hours to get the most benefit from their efforts. The point is to live your life without engaging in “soul crushing activities” for the sake of “being a hard worker”.

This got me to thinking about ways to reduce some of the less value added takes I perform. For example, when I upload videos to sharing sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, Blip.Tv, or Vimeo I usually upload them one at a time. But a better way would be to upload a video once and have it upload to multiple video sharing sites without any extra effort on my part. In fact, I could probably get an assistant to do the task for me.

The site I have my eye on for automating video upload processes is Hey!Spread.com. They offer an inexpensive service for uploading videos to multiple sharing sites and they have an application programming interface (API) that I can use to hook mulitple sites and software to the service. That means I could automate some of my video distribution tasks and possible create tools and services that others would be willing to pay for.

If you haven’t heard of them or haven’t been to their updated site recently, then give them a visit and see what they have to offer. They really have an impressive list of supported video sharing sites and they are adding services regularly.

Now, off to bed for me. Sea World awaits!

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Here’s a Microtween about putting thought bubbles in your videos to add interest, generate visitor traffic, and help people remember your videos better. The standard wisdom is to put your website address at the beginning and end of your videos when you post them to a video sharing service like YouTube so that people will see the address and visit your website. That’s a great piece of advice, but what if you could add a little bit of video spice to your promotional mix and get attention for it?

That’s where BubblePly.com comes in to help you out. You can you add thought bubbles to your videos and then share them anywhere. This is a very cool tool and it’s extremely simple to use. I’m not going to try and give you ideas for how to use it. Just take a look and I’m sure you’ll come up with you own promotional ideas.

Bubbling,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Here are two extremely useful tools that I am using in 2008 to help manage the information and media content I am producing and consuming.

Anarchy Media Player - for adding video to your WordPress blog posts. This WordPress plug-in is extremely easy to install and use. I just uploaded the player folder to my WordPress plug-in folder and activated it. Now when I link to a video the player is automatically inserted for me when the blog post is viewed. I can control the styling and placement and I don’t have to hassle with the code

“Anarchy Media Player 2.0 for WordPress, WordPressMu and Standalone Javascript will play any simple href link to mp3, flv, Quicktime mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp as well as Windows wmv, avi and asf files, in the appropriate player on your web page. The WordPress versions also add buttons to the Rich Text Editor for embedding Flash swf and Director dcr movies as well as YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, DailyMotion, Revver, Metacafe, MySpace, Apple iTunes iMix, and GoEar players.”

SendMeRSS.com - for keeping up with your most important sources of information. I use this RSS to Email service to put important blog feeds in my email.

I know there are other ways of doing this same thing with feedblitz, feedburner, etc, but SendMeRSS works on any feed so you can pull all your feeds into something like Google Reader and then only get email updates when there are new items added to that feed. Or, you can use it to watch affiliate program notices, spy on competitors, you name it.

To keep things focused I am only using it on feeds I really want to hear from and not just the ones I am “following” in my feed reader. It helps me stay on top of new information without the information overload.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com