Blog Category: internet

How to use royalty free music in your web videos

20 April 2012

For designing and marketing a successful website, nothing beats an entertaining video. Properly formatted, well edited and enjoyable, a video is the perfect method of conveyance. Any message you want to get across, a video can do it. On the upside, great videos keep watchers interested and wanting to come back, so an enthralled base and repeat visitation is what you have to look forward to if you produce high-quality videos.

One of the best ways to make a video really sing, pun intended, is to add a music track to the video. However, whether you’re posting these vids on YouTube or Facebook to create a buzz, or whether you’re posting them directly on your website, there is always a chance of violating copyright laws.

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What should you write on an About Us page?

23 November 2011

Whether your website is a large online retailer or a special interest blog, you will invariably have an “About” page. This is the page that everyone feels they need, and yet people seldom put the right kind of information on it. If your website is a personal blog, there is a good chance that nobody will need to look at your About Us page to find this out. For most other kinds of websites, this page presents an opportunity to connect with a very important type of visitor - the visitor who is interested in knowing more about your site, or your business.

When Not to Market Yourself

Although the About Us page presents an easy opportunity to market to your visitors (clicking on the “About Us” link can be equated to saying “I want you to try and sell yourself to me”), that doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the place where you should put yet more sales copy.

Once a visitor is on your site, they are probably already interested in the products you sell or the services you provide. They don’t necessarily want to read more of the same thing that you have on your home page and in your product descriptions.

Why Someone Clicks on “About Us”

Most of the time, when someone visits your About Us page, they are interested in some of the following things:

• What exactly does this company do/who owns it/what is their business objective?

• Is this a legitimate business, and if I want to talk to someone is there a real person behind it?

• Where is the business based, and how did it start? (less likely)
These aren’t all the questions they could ask, but they’re good ones to begin with. You have to remember that most of the people who come to your site are probably not as interested in these things as you are.

Internet users have short attention spans, especially when it comes to big pages of text. Here’s how to give out the most information, make yourself look good, and not lose your reader’s interest.

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How to Find sites that are stealing your content

09 November 2011

Content stealing is rife on the internet, and there is every chance that if you have written something useful, interesting or insightful that someone will steal it and put it up on their own blog within a few weeks. Fortunately, there are easy ways to find this out.

Unfortunately, there is not a lot you can do about it if you do find that someone has stolen your content.

Most fortunately of all, though, is that thanks to changes made in 2010 - 2011 to Google’s search ranking algorithms, people who steal content seldom gain very much advantage from it, reducing the need for you to lose sleep over your stolen content and traffic.

Content Stealing vs Pingbacks

When I made my first website, I saw to my great distress that someone had used some kind of script to take excerpts from my content and place it on their blog (with little or no context). I didn’t see the point, but I was annoyed - until I realized that they had posted the link to my article there. While I didn’t get much traffic from referrals from the site, the incoming links did help my own articles to gain search results positions.

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