As I promised you guys, that I will be posting my notes from Izeafest 2008. Well here is one of them that I think was very interesting. This is from the Crazy Jewish Bastard, Loren Feldman. Don’t take me wrong, I have nothing against Jews, you will understand why I made the statement as you read the whole post.

Loren had a one hour session, and it was pretty straight forward. He told us about his experience and gave us the tips on personal and corporate videos. So here are the key points from him with my explanations:

Personal Video

• Know Your Audience – because what you say really matters. If your audience is conservative religious people, then don’t curse. Pretty simple eh.
• Don’t act like an actor – Be yourself. Have you seen people who think they are an actor when they are on a video. It doesn’t quiet work because you can act that way for one minute, but not any longer because you won’t be comfortable.
• Be Sincere, Be Honest, Be open.
• Connect with your Audience – Connect with them as they are your friend. Try to relate to them.
• Its not about the equipment, its about the athlete – People think that the video didn’t turn out good because the crappy camera. Well sometimes that maybe the case, but most of the time it is the athlete which is you.
• Practice to be Better – Look into the camera and not into your screen.
• Talk SLOWLY – Don’t worry everyone have that problem. I had that one as well when I am nervous. Try to be comfortable. RELAX
• Good Background – Find a plain background like a white wall. Otherwise it distracts the audience. But by all means have a different background if it drives the story.
• Imagine that the lens of the camera is your best friend. Look at it as it is a set of eyes.
• Don’t make BS Videos – Don’t make BS Videos. Do what you like and what you are passionate about. If you make BS Videos, it presents you as a BS Person.
• Don’t fall in love with what you do because you are not as good as you think you are.
• Edit, Cut, Cut….. and more cut, and cut, and then cut more.
• Keep the videos between 2 – 3 minutes – Honestly no one have time to watch a video that is all talk unless it is a TV Show.
• Four minutes should be the max, even with Naked Girls.
• Tag all your videos – Title, and Description are very important.
• Build your Video Audience – Don’t make response videos, or seeking out others for flash fame.
• Don’t get discouraged – If you don’t get a lot of views, don’t worry about it. Try again and do it better.
• Being Tall, Dark, and Handsome Helps – Not everyone is that. So don’t feel discouraged. Too bad Loren, I am tall, Dark, and Handsome… I knew I was special
• Always Play Big, and Play like a Winner

Wasn’t that interesting. Certainly I found it interesting. But that is just personal videos. He gave us advice on Corporate videos as well, so check those out.

Corporate Videos

• The money is in corporate video.
• Video connects with audience – If a company thinks they don’t need a video. You are dead wrong because Videos connect and relate better than words.
• Making videos bring personalization to your employees – Would you rather watch a boring director from your company tell you that you are getting a salary cut, or a rather personalized video that tells you that. I wouldn’t like either, but the second one would be better out of the two.
• Use videos as a commercial marketing tool – You can get away with alot. Loren got a company that advertised on his video. They said just go crazy. So at the end of his videos, he say something like, Check out these Crazy Jew Bastard, A credit card company.. Creative, funny, so people remember it.
• Establish Business Relations – Network, Network, Network. That is exactly why you should’ve been at that conference. I hope you will be next year
• Videos rank higher in Search Engines – It is good to have videos because you can notice that google is giving youtube videos authority by ranking them high.
• Ignore Criticism – Do what you feel like. Loren’s word not mine. I say read the comments, then if you like what they say then do it. Otherwise Ignore.
• View Counts – You can have a 1 million views with not a single important one, and have 10 views where 5 were CEO of major companies. Having that said, speak to the higher up. Get important people, because results are important, not numbers.
• If someone steals your video, take it as a compliment and move on. You can watermark your videos, but people who want to steal, will steal.
• Audio is super important.
• Tutorial Videos Rock – How to videos are a big hit.

Recommendations from Loren

Loren gave us some technical recommendations that I shall give you guys.

• Use Casio Camera – He use this one $149 camera from Casio.. Don’t exactly remember the Model Number. Maybe Loren can drop by and tell us.
• 640 x 480 Dimensions. 30 frames per second.
• PC Sucks, Use mac for video editing. iMovie and Final cut.
• I talked to him afterward for PC users, he recommended Adobe Premiere.
• Use Tubemogul.com – you can submit to a lot of the video uploading places rather than just one. Get more exposure

I really liked this session because it was dead honest. The guy came out, and said look here I can’t teach you what to do. But I can tell you how I do it. Because really it is true. Just like I can’t teach you how to make money online, but I can tell you how I make it. And maybe you can learn from it. I hope you do. Hint Hint, why this blog is not a make money online blog…

Anyways that was Loren Feldman from 1938media.com. Lets give him a big round of applause. He make alot of crazy videos. Thanks Loren for the awesome tips. I did learn a lot from your session. If you see this post, I would really appreciate if you can tell the audience that camera type again.

Did you ever think about your users before putting an ad on your website? Okay while I know almost all of you will say yes in public.. I want you to think about it again in your heart did you really? Most people don’t otherwise sites with extreme ads won’t exist.

Most bloggers entering the industry think it is pretty darn easy to make money online. Well, so what do they do. Put Ads for sale on all forums. People see the post, specially poker, adult sites, warez. They take the offer up. Pay the blogger and their ads are up.

While I understand that money is a motivation that keeps a lot of bloggers going, you need to understand that these people are only paying you because you have high traffic and decent ranking. That is only because you have your loyal readers. So when you are selling ads on your website, you are not selling PR, or Traffic, but you are putting your readers’ trust on the cliff. Make one wrong move, and you are dead from both ends. If you put the wrong ad, your users will abandon your blogs, and once your traffic goes down. You should already know what happens, Your advertiser will pull out as well.

What if I tell you that you can avoid all this? Would you believe me? Well let me tell you. You need to learn how to evaluate your ads.

How to evaluate ads?

• Ads must be Family Friendly – Well I think it should be a rule of thumb that all blogger should follow unless you blog about adult content. I would certainly not appreciate if a webmaster blog is showing a naked lady asking to chat. Even if the advertiser is willing to pay me 1500 per month for that ad, I will still turn it down. Because I don’t want my readers which includes, parents, teenagers, teachers, students to see this type of content. What if your user is a parent, and their kids walk by. You don’t want that to happen. I want my readers to share my site and content with their friends, colleagues, and family. Mouth to Mouth advertising.
• Ads must be related to content – You should know this by now that your ads won’t convert if it is not related to your content. If you are trying to do some affiliate marketing using Market Leverage on your webmaster blog. I would not recommend you to put healthy samples ad on your website. Because it is not related to the content that you write about. Even though the offer converts well for others who run this separately, it won’t work well for you. Same thing with Casino, or Warez links. Usually these owners are willing to pay higher price than normal. Say if they over you $1500/month for a peel away ad on your website. Will you take it? I know, I certainly wouldn’t. But alot of people will jump on to take that offer. You want to know what happens if you do. Your stats before you take the offer, UV = 50,000 per month. After the ad, 5,000 per month. Most of your genuine readers will leave. So don’t make that mistake.

What can you do to fix the ads?

Usually you can’t really do anything about the private ads. Because the users only have one banner for their site, so you don’t have a whole heck of options. But if you are trying to do affiliate marketing, then look through your options. So if you want to run an offer for Bluehost, then look through all the blue host banners that they have to offer. Sometimes, default affiliate banners are too ugly. Ask your affiliate manager and see if you can get a better version of the banner. I sometimes create my own banner with my Affiliate Manager’s approval. The reason is simple. I don’t want to display ugly looking ads on my websites. So look of the ad also matters. Heck that is what determines whether the ad is quality or not. Because a crappy banner can have a really good site behind it, but your user don’t see the site. They see the banner. So fix the look of your ads.

If you are displaying ads from Shopping ads, like I used to. These ads are generated by their server. So one time, I noticed it was an advertisement of online TV packages, but next to the TV there was an almost nude girl laying. Now I couldn’t change those ads, so I ended up removing their entire ads from my website. You need to look for long term loss rather than short term profit. Because a new user won’t tolerate those sort of ads, so you might make some money from these ads in the beginning, but the growth of your site will suffer.

Same thing goes for Contextual links as well. Bloggers started doing it because sites like John Chow were doing it. But you need to understand that John is at the point, that his blog is too big for him to care. But smaller blogs, specially the blogs that just have like 100 readers, shouldn’t use this sort of ads. Because these ads are very annoying to begin with. Then some just slow down your site. These double negatives can seriously hurt you. So the few cents that you make right now. Avoiding those won’t hurt you but will help you in the long run.

Bottom line is remove the services that ruins the image of your site. Don’t go for short term profit, but look for long term loss.

Turning Down Ads

While I understand, it is very tough to see the money go from your hands. But you have to think about your readers as well. So Turning down ads are sometimes beneficial for your blog. But you need to turn them down in a polite manner.

How do you turn it down Politely?

1. First be in a very passive tone. Nothing agressive. Be friendly.
2. Explain to them Why their site was turned down.
3. Support your statement with the TOS of your website.
4. Give them an option/suggestion. Such as telling them what they can improve to be accepted.

Because your private advertiser is more likely to come back to you if you respond clearly and explain everything rather than just saying your ad is not approved. Or a rude statement like fix your ad, it is not family friendly. When answering the email, put yourself in the shoes of an advertiser and do as you would like to be done to yourself.

Keep Looking

Last advice I would give is keep your eyes open. That is the #1 rule for driving, and the #1 rule for online business. The web world is vast, so there are always new opportunities to find advertisers that are related to your website. Look for PPC / Affiliate programs who offer the most related ads toward your website, and try them. Trial and error is the only way you will find out what works best for you.

As I have mentioned that Google Chrome is the fastest browser on the web right now. I am using this browser as my major browser right now. Somethings I use Firefox for, but for surfing the web or visit new blogs around the blogosphere, I use Google Chrome. (Read my review).

Well shortcuts make a lot of things faster. And if you have the fastest browser, plus shortcuts.. You will surf the web even faster. Therefore, I collected all the ones that I discovered, and more from around the web to give you guys a huge list of shortcuts.

Must Know

• Ctrl + N Opens a new window
• Ctrl + Shift + N Opens a new window in incognito mode (Privacy Mode)
• Press Ctrl, and click a link Open link in a new tab
• Press Shift, and click a link Open link in a new window
• Ctrl + T Open a new tab
• Ctrl + Shift + T Reopen last tab closed (It only recalls up to 10)
• Ctrl + 1 through Ctrl + 8 Switch to the tab at the specified position number. The number you press represents a position on the tab strip in ascending order.
• Ctrl + 9 Switch to the last tab
• Ctrl + Tab Switch to the next tab
• Ctrl+ Shift + Tab Switch to the previous tab
• Ctrl + F4 Close current tab or pop-up
• Alt+Home Open your homepage

Address bar Tricks

• Fill in www. and .com by simply typing the name and pressing Ctrl + Enter
• F6 or Alt + D Highlight content in the web address area
• Type a web address, then press Alt + Enter Open your web address in a new tab

Google Chrome features

• Ctrl + B Toggle bookmarks bar on and off
• Ctrl + H View the History page
• Ctrl + J View the Downloads page
• Shift + Escape View the Task manager

Page

• Ctrl + P Print your current page
• F5 Reload current page
• Esc Stop page loading
• Ctrl + F5 Reload current page, ignoring cached content
• Ctrl + F Open find-in-page box
• Ctrl + U View source
• Ctrl + D Bookmark your current webpage
• Ctrl + + Make text larger
• Ctrl + - Make text smaller
• Ctrl + 0 Return to normal text size

For those of you, who haven’t started using Chrome. I suggest that you at least give it a try. I know a lot of Firefox lovers who are against Chrome. But being open minded and giving it a try won’t hurt. Then you can criticize it even more

Read my review on Google Chrome.

A week ago I wrote about Essential Shortcuts for Wordpress. Which recieved a few comments and one of the comments wanted me to share my photoshop shortcuts. Well I have a good list of photoshop shortcuts memorized and some on the table attached. So I will share the ones that I know. If you know more feel free to add in the comments, and as I see them I will add it in the post. The good part about these shortcuts are that they really speeds up the designing. So if you are a designer, like me.. Or you own a Web Design Firm like me than you should really look into these. I will stop my rambling and begin the shortcuts.

Main Toolbar

Before you know any other shortcuts, you need to know about the Main toolbar because these will be one of the most used ones.

Marque Tool – m
Lasso Tool – l
Eraser – e
Paint Bucket – k
Move – v
Magic Wand – w
Paint Brush – b
History Brush – y
Blur – r
Pen tool – p
Type tool – t
Linear Gradient – g
Eye Dropper – i
Zoom Tool – z

Another important thing to know is to switch between the background and foreground colors use “x”

If you wish to restore the default colors then simply hit “d”

If you are looking for more space on the screen simply hit “Tab” to hide other tools.

Use “f” to switch the screen modes.

General Menu Shortcuts

These are general ones that will help you do alot of things much faster.

New – Ctrl + N
Open – Ctrl + O
Save – Ctrl + S
Save as – Ctrl + Shift + S
Close – Ctrl + W
Undo – Ctrl + Z
Copy – Ctrl + C
Cut – Ctrl + X
Paste – Ctrl + V
Free Transform – Ctrl + T
Show Ruler – Ctrl + R
Hide Ruler – Ctrl + ;
Show Grid – Ctrl + ”
Snap Grid – Ctrl + Shift + ”
Zoom In – Ctrl + +
Zoom Out – Ctrl + -
Hue / Saturation – Ctrl + U

Layers Shortcut

I call this category layer shortcuts because these are related to layers that you create when designing.

New Layer – Ctrl + Shift + N
Duplicate a Layer (Copy Layer) – Ctrl + J
Cut a Layer – Ctrl + Shift + J
Bring Layer Front – Ctrl + Shift + ]
Bring Forward – Ctrl + ]
Send Backward – Ctrl + [
Send Layer Back – Ctrl + Shift + [
Group Layers – Ctrl + G
Ungroup – Ctrl + Shift + G
Merge Layers – Ctrl + E
Select All – Ctrl + A
Deselect All – Ctrl + D
Reselect All – Ctrl + Shift + D
Feather – Ctrl + Alt + D
Inverse – Ctrl + Shift + I

Well thats the 50 photoshop shortcuts that I use very often and that were on my list. These shortcuts would speed up your designing because you will just be using your keyboards to deal with things rather than moving your mouse around all over the screen. Like I said, if you know more feel free to put them in the comment box and I will add them in the list. Feel free to digg and stumble and do all the social media love with this post Have fun Designing.

Well I see that some people like to complain that they spend too much time on a blog and not get enough results therefore they think blogging is a waste of time. I also see some advising others on the forum that don’t rely entirely on blogging which is fine. But what I don’t understand is how long does it take you to write a post? An hour or two? thats it if you write quality posts. If you are Bs’ing a post then you can do that in 25 minutes. There are ways you can speed up your post writing process and those are shortcuts.

Here is a post that will save you some time on writing a post in wordpress. Yup some wordpress shortcuts that you should write down if you don’t already know about them. I have a list on my table that have all these shortcuts and more for photoshop. In time you will memorize them, but the way to start is writing it down on a paper and stick it on your table, so you can use them daily. Now I have all of these memorized.

Make the text Bold

Alt + Shift + b

Make the text Italics

Alt + Shift + i

Insert a Link

Alt + Shift + a

Insert a Blockquote

Alt + Shift + q

Insert a Code

Alt + Shift + c

Insert Read More

Alt + Shift + t

Insert an Unordered List (ul) – Bullets

Alt + Shift + u

Insert an Ordered List (ol) – Numbers

Alt + Shift+ o

List Tags (li)

Alt + Shift + L

Insert an Image

Alt + Shift + m

Insert Del Date time – Basically Cross a Word Comments Restricted

Alt + Shift + d

Insert timing – Basically Underlines the world Spread the Words

Alt + Shift + s

Publish a Post

Alt + Shift + p

More from Suggestions on Social Media:

Undo an action

Alt + Shift + u

Redo an action

Alt + Shift + y

Edit HTML

Alt + Shift + e

Align Left

Alt + Shift + f

Align Center

Alt + Shift + c

Align Right

Alt + Shift + r

Ctrl + Number Get you the header size on highlighted text

Edit: Ian Blackford of Blogging Rocket has confirmed that if you are using Firefox and MAC you should use CTRL + Alt and the letters above. Its in the comment so I thought I should put it here so everyone can read it.

Now when I wrote 13 ways I promote my blog post, I got questions like how much time do you spend on your blog. On email as well as comments on the forums. Now I don’t spend alot of time because I have web design firm as well. But I do take a good 1 – 2 hours a day to search for post and write a good post. Sometimes less, and sometimes more. But I can tell you one thing, if you use these shortcuts you will decrease the time you spend on writing a blog post.