Introducing Author Badges

We have once again added a new green button to the Author Dashboard (soon we are going to need a bigger dashboard), and you know what a new green button means? It means a new MindBites Author toy for you to play with - YAY! This time, we have added the highly anticipated and requested “Author Badges.” Author Badges are great-looking promotional badges that you can easily place on your blog or website to link to your author profile and lessons on MindBites. So, let’s take a quick look at how to put these badges to work.

Author Badges

Here at MindBites we are all about making our Authors’ lives easier (check out our newest features Series Creation and Bulk Upload & Editor, as well as all of our Author Resources), and that includes helping you promote your MindBites lessons outside of MindBites.com.  That is where our new Author Badges come in.  You can access these mini billboards by (you guessed it) clicking the green “Get Badges” button on your Author Dashboard. We have provided you with 6 different, yet equally amazing, badges to choose from!

Simply choose the badge you would like to showcase and then use the corresponding HTML code when placing the badge on your site.  It is as easy as that. Visitors to your site will click on one of these beautiful badges and be sent directly to your MindBites Author Profile Page. From there, they will be able to view and purchase all of the amazing lessons you have created.

These badges are a fantastic way to remind your visitors that you have lessons for sale in the MindBites marketplace. Not to mention, we have already done all of the hard work of creating the nifty graphics so you don’t have to.

Have questions about the Author Badges or ideas for other author features you’d like to see?  Let us know by speaking out in the new and improved Author Forums. Thanks…and I am excited to see the Author Badges on your site!

New Bulk Lesson Uploader & Editor

If you’ve logged into your Author Dashboard over the last week or so, you may have noticed a couple of new big green buttons labeled “Bulk Upload” and “Bulk Edit.” As you may have already found (or guessed from the not so mysterious names), these buttons lead to our new Bulk Lesson Uploaders and Bulk Lesson Edit tool! These are fun new features we’ve been looking forward to that have been repeatedly requested by our authors. So, we’re pretty excited about them. Let’s take a quick look at how to use these cool new tools.

1. Bulk Uploaders

Trust us, we know as well as anyone how painful it used to be to upload lots of lessons to the site, so we decided it was high time we made this easier - enter standard bulk lesson uploader. You can access this bulk uploader using the ‘Bulk Upload’ button on your author dashboard or by accessing www.mindbites.com/uploader (which will only work when you’re logged into the site as an author).

It’s pretty simple to use - you’ll just simply drag and drop all of the video files you want to upload as lessons to the site.  Then, it will upload them all sequentially.  As always, you’ll be notified via email when your uploaded lessons are finished processing.

There are actually two bulk uploaders on the MindBites site. The main one, accessible through your dashboard, is for standard video files.  The other is specifically designed for screencasted tutorials.  There is a link to the bulk screencast uploader on the standard bulk uploader page (see image above), or, when you’re logged in, you can access it at the following URL: www.mindbites.com/uploader/?SC=1.

2. Bulk Lesson Editor

Once your bulk lessons are uploaded, you will automatically be directed to your bulk lesson editor.  You can also access this page using the ‘Bulk Edit’ button on your author dashboard (see picture at top of this post).  With your bulk lesson editor, you can easily adjust titles, descriptions, pricing and categorizations of all of your lessons in one convenient place.

More bells and whistles to come!  And, if you have some you’d like to see us add (or changes you’d like to see made to some of the ones we already have), please let us know.  Turns out that you folks (our authors) are much better at coming up with ideas for much-needed site enhancements; we’re pretty lucky to have all of you helping us out with suggestions and feedback.  Thanks… and enjoy - go upload some stuff en masse to see how it all works!

Announcing the Screencast4Cash Winners!

Well folks, it is finally time to stick a fork in the Screencast 4 Cash contest and announce our winners! Before we spill the beans on the big news, though, the MindBites crew wants to extend a big ‘Thanks!’ and ‘Way-to-go!’ to all of the contestants for their great videos. We had a great total field of entries, including tutorials on Google Sketchup, Facebook privacy settings, Microsoft Excel, Gimp, Artisteer, Photoshop, Hulu, LinkedIn, and much more.

And, we definitely couldn’t have done it without our partners in this - TechSmith and its Jing Pro team (which makes and markets a fantastically affordable and capable screencasting tool), the good folks at DownLoad Squad (especially Grant & Christina), and our friends at the Youth for Technology Foundation. It’s been such a pleasure to get to know all of these organizations and the people behind the scenes that make them great. Finally, a huge thanks to Michael Pick, pro screencaster from WordPress.tv, who graciously joined our esteemed panel of judges. We couldn’t have asked for better folks to work on this with!

Now for the big news…(drum roll)

Read the rest of this entry »

Taking Great Pictures with a Digital Camera

Two years ago, my dad gave me his old Canon digital SLR camera. At the time I knew nothing about photography. (The only thing I ever owned was a disposable camera!) Most of everything I have learned has been through trial and error and reading and watching lessons online. I don’t have the patience to take the time to read manuals, so video lessons and blog posts have been really helpful to me. Here are five great resources and tips I have learned about the art of photography:

1. Expensive Cameras Are Not Necessary

The camera my dad gave me is over 10 years old. That’s about 100 years old when you are talking digital time. Yet with the right lenses and techniques, I am still able to take great pictures. No one would ever guess that I am taking pictures with an obsolete camera. Many point-and-shoot cameras are affordable and can take great pictures as well. Here is a great lesson on taking pictures with any digital camera:

2. Importance of Depth of Field

When you see amazing portraits of people where their face is in focus but the background is very soft, the photographer took a picture with a shallow depth of field. This is the number one way to make a subject pop out in the scene.

Learn how to use a shallow depth of field here:

3. Understanding Composition

When you see an interesting photograph, 9 out of 10 times the subject is placed off-center in the photograph. Many amateur photographers see a person and shoot them  perfectly in the middle of the frame. This is boring to the eye; the eye likes variety. Always think about shooting from above and below as well as straight on.

4. Edit and Store Photographs

After you take the picture, your job is not over. You have to get the images off the camera, store them, and make them look beautiful for print or for the web. This can be tedious and time consuming but will be worth it in the end. Make sure you purchase an external hard drive and backup all of your photographs. Make sure you label each photograph so you will be able to find it 6 months from now. Sometimes your photographs just need a little tweaking in post production to make them look 100% better. There are many photo editing programs that are free. Here is a guide for editing and storing photographs:

5.  Always Be Prepared

You never know when you will witness something great so always carry your camera on you, especially if you are traveling or going to an event. Almost all of my favorite photographs were unplanned. You can see the spontaneity in the photograph as well.

Learn how to take better travel and action shots here:

Cast 4 Cash Update: Daily Voting Begins!

34 Rockin’ Entries

We had some great entries that got uploaded and entered into the Cast 4 Cash contest just under the wire (and unfortunately some sad folks that just found out about the contest hours before the deadline).  It looks like our final tally is 34 entries made by a whole slew of talented folks that cover a range of handy tips and helpful instruction.  Judging this bad boy is not going to be easy.  It’ll *definitely* be fun, though.

Daily Voting for People’s Choice until June 8th. Get out the Vote!

As you probably remember, there will be two winners in the contest: the Grand Prize winner, who will be picked by our esteemed panel of judges and will walk away with $1000 and a TechSmith product bundle of both Snagit and Camtasia Studio; the People’s Choice Winner will be determined by popular vote and will take home $500 and a copy of Snagit, courtesy of TechSmith.

As of this morning, daily voting has begun for the People’s Choice Award. So if you’re entered, go get out the vote to your followers, friends and families. The voting is still anybody’s to win at this point. And remember that every vote cast will translate into $0.10 donated to the Youth for Technology Foundation. There just isn’t a more worthy cause out there.

Winners Announced June 9th

On the other side, our panel of judges have their work cut out for them trying to pick one Grand Prize winner out of these 34 entries. Winners for both the People’s Choice Award and the Grand Prize will be announced on Tuesday, June 9th.

Soooooo, go vote for your favorite… and do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day and so on through next Monday. :) And if you’re entered, go get out the vote. We are in the home stretch now, and its still anybody’s race!

Cast 4 Cash Contest: The Final Countdown

T-5 days and counting…  get your Screencast 4 Cash entries in by 11:59PM CST on Monday, June 1!

We’ve gotten 29 great entries already, and I happen to know about a couple more in drafts that haven’t yet been published by their respective authors.  We’re getting excited around MBWHQ about daily voting, which starts on Tuesday of next week (the day after the submission deadline).  We’re not, however, looking forward to judging.  There are already some pretty amazing entries, and we’re expecting more to come.

Still on the fence about trying out screencasting?  We promise it’s fun, and Jing Pro makes it *really* simple.  Even I can handle Jing Pro!  The program is only $14.95 per year, and it’s a great cross-platform tool to use to try out this whole screencasting thing - learn more about Jing Pro here.

Not sure what you can teach?  It doesn’t have to be rocket science, and it doesn’t have to be something that no one other than yourself knows how to do.  Think about teaching others tips and tricks to get more out of software or online apps you use every day or maybe sneaky tricks for games you play every day or code you spend your nights writing… If you do it on a computer, it’s pretty much fair game (and I can pretty much guarantee that someone out there would appreciate you taking the time to walk them through it in a screencasted tutorial.

If you’re still not sold on the idea of making a screencast for our lovely contest (probably because you just have no use for $1000, eh?  Who does when the economy is doing so well?), there’s no acceptable excuse for opting not to vote.  For every vote you cast, $0.10 will be donated to the Youth for Technology Foundation.  YTF obviously can’t buy too much technology for a dime, so we need everyone to mobilize to make sure they walk away with enough money to really make a difference for some deserving kids in some underserved communities.  So, go cast your own vote, and then get busy hassling your friends and followers to make sure they get out to vote, too.

Marketing your Video Lesson Part I - On MindBites

In this article we offer 13 tips on how you can improve your lesson by: Describing it to Attract Traffic, Packaging it to Convert Traffic to Sales and Pricing it to Sell.

DESCRIBE IT - So “They” can find it:

Your first step in marketing anything is to make it easy for people who are looking for your product to find it. This is especially critical online, where millions of webpages are competing for your potential customers’ attentions. Moreover, web video is at a disadvantage to web text since search engines can only see the text associated with the video (and not any of the actual video). Thus, your first step in marketing your video tutorial should be to describe it as extensively as you can so that users can find it.  On the web, this is typically known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Findability, and MindBites has built its platform to give you some easy ways to improve the findability of your content:

1. Lesson Titles

Titles get extra credit in the determination of search result order.  Your title should be specific and should include words that people search for (keywords).  I use the SEO Tools Website and Google’s keyword tool to research search terms.  Type in words/phrases to see which are searched most.  Google’s tool also recommends related keywords.  Usually, highly-searched keywords are hotly contested, so you’ll be competing for traffic.  Thus, include both specific niche terms and bigger-ticket ones.

2. Lesson Descriptions

While your title has the most impact per word, your lesson description really has the broadest impact for improving the findability of your lesson.  Your lesson page has two audiences: customers *and* search engines. Unfortunately, search engines don’t know ‘exercise your butt’ means ‘workout your rear.’  Thus, make sure to include keyword variations and synonyms in your lesson description.  Try to include as many phrases that users may search for as you can.  It’s also wise to think through and include specific questions answered in your lesson (that users also might search for).  Last, bigger is better for descriptions - we suggest 150-200+ words. We can’t stress it enough - Write a detailed 2 paragraph description!

3. Lesson Transcripts or Outlines

By including a transcript, you essentially make all of the specific text, key phrases and content of your lesson crawlable by search engines and thus findable by your potential customers.  Transcripts also enable users to find out exactly what is and isn’t covered.  Oftentimes, an author may not realize that people are looking for portions of the information he/she is presenting and may be happy to purchase the full lesson just for these parts (e.g. not just how to make your own baby food but also what foods can be introduced to your baby in what order).  A transcript will ensure that they know these parts exist.  A transcript is better, but if you’re short on time or wary of giving too much information away, a detailed outline can suffice.

PACKAGE IT TO CONVERT - so “They” decide to buy it:

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”  - unknown

“But it looks so professional and good, I want it!” – your subconscious

Packaging matters.  And by packaging, we don’t mean cardboard and plastic wrap.  We are talking about everything that surrounds your content when it’s presented.  If you go in the bookstore and a stack of papers stapled together is sitting next to the same content in nicely produced hardback book, which would you prefer?  You need to make sure your product has its best foot forward.  In marketing, this is known as packaging, and your goal is “conversion.”   Here are some easy things built into the MindBites platform to allow you to package your video instructional content to optimize conversion (the % of visitors who purchase):

Your lesson’s thumbnail is its book cover; users shouldn’t judge based upon it, but they do. MindBites captures one automatically, but, as with any auto-generated video snapshot, it may be ill-timed, fuzzy, or just plain ugly.  Consider uploading a different image. You don’t want blurry, dark, cluttered or indecipherable images (even when they’re in their smallest form - 110X83 pixels - or roughly 1-by-0.75 inches).  Descriptive images are best (not just a picture of the title screen) given that the lesson title shows up with the thumbnail.

2. Lesson Previews

Just like most book buyers would first pick up a book and flip through it, most potetial buyers for your video tutorial will watch your video preview first.  The MindBites platform automatically creates a preview of the first 60 seconds of your video, so this is where you want to include a solid and intriguing overview of your lesson.

3. Supplementary Materials

Supplementary materials can make the purchase of your lessons more compelling for users.  Think through whether there are audio or text files that might be helpful.  Make sure to mention and describe included files in your lesson description (as they will only be available to users who buy the lesson).

4. Author Profile

Another thing people want to know is who you are.  Just like you would flip to the back of a book to see who the author is, your users will want to know who they are learning from.  So, upload a picture or logo and tell them who you are and how you learned what you’re going to show them.  Edit your author profile under your My MindBites tab.  Your author bio and picture shows up on your profile page and the bottom of your lesson and series pages.

5. Ratings & Reviews

People want to be assured that others have bought and enjoyed your lesson.  This is why we have ratings and reviews.  You can get friends to buy/watch and then rate/review your lessons to make sure there is an external assurance that your lesson is worth the price.  You may even want to price low initially to build up credibility through ratings and reviews. You can always raise prices later.  Pay attention to feedback in reviews.  Consider answering questions or addressing concerns expressed in reviews by revising your lesson, adding supplementary files or editing your description.

PRICE IT TO SELL: So “They” will buy it

The rubber hits the road when a consumer is deciding whether to fork over their cold hard cash for your lesson.  Once you get to this step, both pricing and how you bundle and package your lessons become very important.  These two attributes drive people to purchase and determine how much they purchase.  In the world of retail, their average purchase amount is known as your “average ring” (think cash register).

1. Pricing

MindBites allows you to price lessons from $0.99 to $99.  Obviously many considerations factor in to pricing: length, quality, price of alternatives, etc.  While it’s hard to generalize about price, we would say, in general, to start low and raise the price over time as warranted.  Starting with a lower price lets more users access your lesson, and (hopefully) this will help drive favorable reviews and good word of mouth promotion.  Over time, as you get a following, you can consider moving your price up.

2. Reference (& link to) related Lessons

Mentioning and linking to related lessons in your description will help potential buyers locate and navigate among your lessons. Especially in instances where instruction is broken up over multiple lessons, help users to understand what is covered in each and where other lessons can be found.

3. Creating Series of Lessons

If lessons are related, create a series (like a bundle or an iTunes album).  Discounts vary, but we usually suggest a 15-20% discount for a series relative to the purchase of each included lesson individually (to entice users to buy all lessons up front versus one at a time).

4. Giving a Portion of your Proceeds to Charity

Give and you shall receive, right?  Yep.  One of the things we have always felt strongly about is that teaching and learning go hand in hand with helping others.  Thus, we made it easy for MindBites authors to designate a portion of their lesson proceeds to a related (or otherwise deserving) charity.  Even a 10-20% designation will go to help a good cause and show potential buyers that you care about your community.  And, yes, if you do opt to designate some portion of your proceeds to go to charity, it will be noted on your lesson page.

5. Promoting with Freebies
Consider creating and linking to a free video introduction of yourself or a free video tutorial that teaches something relevant and introductory.  These freebies can show users that you know your stuff and can teach it, which will whet their appetite for more.

NEXT STEPS
Now that your lesson page is set up optimally, it is time to drive traffic to your lesson and optimize for search external to MindBites.  If you have your own website or blog, start there.  If you don’t have your own site, you can still have an online presence through Facebook, forums, answer sites, Twitter, etc.

Cast4Cash Contest Update - May 19-er 2009

An update on the contest - yippeeee!

Just under two weeks to go to get your entry into the Screencast 4 Cash contest as the deadline was extended to Monday, June 1, 2009.  Once you’ve entered, be sure to encourage your friends and fellows and fans and family and followers to vote for your entry.  Right now, individuals can vote once per week, but starting June 2, folks will be able to vote daily.  Now, if you’re questioning the advisability of hassling your friends about spending one minute to vote for your entry, consider reminding them that, for every vote they cast, $0.10 will be donated to the Youth for Technology Foundation.  The good people at YTF work with underprivileged communities to offer technology resources and training.  Who can argue with a cause like that?

What better way to spend your Memorial Day weekend than pulling together a scintillating screencast…and making plans for how you’ll spend your cool $1000 once you win!

Know lots of stuff but not anything about screencasting?  Screencasting is a way to record all of the activity that happens on your computer screen (and even your voice over to explain what’s going on).  This makes it the perfect medium for teach folks about SW apps, development, gaming, etc.  The good news is that it’s pretty easy – the bigger hurdle is finding something you can teach about.  If you’ve got something you can teach, give Jing Pro for screencasting a try – it’s only $14.95/year and is a fantastic screencasting application from the good folks at TechSmith (who also make Camtasia Studio and Snagit, which are fantastic products once you get really serious about this screencasting and business – and are conveniently awesome contest prizes that’ll be handed out to our winner).

So, no excuses – get to casting!  We want to learn what you know, and you’re the only one that can teach us that.  Once you’ve got your lesson created and uploaded, next step is to promote your entry to get out the vote.  There are contest entrant badges, contest twitter and other interfaces, and embed codes on each entry player to help you with this part.  Check out the contest landing page and your lesson page for all of that and more!

The final push is officially upon us, so this weekend is really a great opportunity to carve out some time to get a lesson created and uploaded and promoted.  It’s a great cause, and quite frankly, there aren’t so many entries that winning is a pipedream.  :)  For those of you that just can’t find the time to invest in a screencast between now and June 1st, even getting out there to vote on the entries (and encouraging others to do the same) will mean more money raised for the Youth for Technology Foundation, who incidentally, can now be found on Twitter (@youthfortech).

Screencast 4 Cash Update - Awesome Entries, Deadline Extended & T-Shirts 4 Current Entrants

23 Awesome Entries and Counting!

The Screencast for Cash contest is in full force!  As of this afternoon, there are 23 really cool entries vying for your affections votes.  But, for as many cool entries as have had come in, we’ve received as many inquiries from people who might benefit from a little more time.  Since the goal of the contest is two-fold - get the best set of entries and generate as many votes as we can (remember $.10 for every vote goes to benefit Youth for Technology Foundation) - we decided to extend the entry deadline two weeks to June 1st. (We would have only extended one week but that would have collided with the Memorial Day weekend).  To show our appreciation, we’d like to send all of the hard-working entrants who have already gotten their entries in one of our almost famous MindBites t-shirts! For the rest of you…you have no excuses now.  Get to casting!

More Cowbell! - Entry Deadline Extended to June 1st

• Revised Deadline for Entries- Mon 6/1
• Revised Daily Voting & Judging Period- Tues 6/2-Mon 6/8
• Winners announced – Tues 6/9

For those of you who are still trying to get started, check out Jing Pro as a great and inexpensive screencasting tool from our friends at TechSmith.

MindBites T’s For All Current Entrants

For our on-the-ball entrants who have already gotten their entries created and submitted, we would like to say thanks by sending you one of our soon-to-be famous MindBites T-shirts. We have sizes of S/M/L/XL/2XL in three stylish shirt options: The original “Smart Ass” in black, the “Mental Beefcake” gray workout T, and the staid but popular black logo T. So for all of you current entrants, look for an email for us, or just send us your address, size and shirt preferences to support [at] mindbites [dot] com.

Get out the Vote!

And remember, in addition to helping your favorite submitter to take home some cash and prizes, casting your vote will also translate into a $0.10 donation to our friends at the Youth for Technology Foundation (and now on twitter at @youthfortech).  So, get out the vote!  We’ve added a ‘Tweet out the Vote’ button and link to help make it easier, and embeddable badges are available for entrants as well.  And, of course, like all MindBites videos, you can embed your favorites on your site or blog.  Everyone can vote once per week now and then daily starting after the June 1st entry deadline.  So, as they say in Chicago, “vote early and often!”   Ongoing contest news and updates will be available via periodic coverage here and on DownloadSquad; you can also search for #cast4cash on twitter (or follow us - @mindbites) for regular updates.

Our Apologies for the Pillowcase Dress Incident

We here at MindBites are big fans of the Pillowcase Dress… but not to the extent that you may think based upon our recent URL redirect debacle.  We rolled some new features to live yesterday and apparently missed a big bug in the testing.  It was browser-specific and URL-specific, but we should have caught it before we foisted the problem on all of you.  Color us embarrassed (that’s a pinkish-red color - much like anger but with eyebrows less slanty - see right).  

Anyhow, for those afflicted, you may have experienced some bizarre redirect behaviors between yesterday evening and this morning.  If you were impacted, you almost certainly would have noticed as you would have been redirected to Annie’s lovely how to make a pillowcase dress tutorial regardless of where you tried to navigate on the site.  Oh my!  

This has since been corrected, but we apologize for any damage it may have done to our authors and any consternation it may have caused for our users.  Even if you received the offending cookie last night or this morning, you should be good to go.  If you continue to have problems (related to this or something else), however, please let us know by emailing us at support [a t] mindbites [dot] com…

Again, we’re terribly sorry for this inconvenience and are grateful for the folks who brought it to our attention this morning.