When I asked my friend Ted Payne for an idea to blog about today, he immediately replied with this topic.

Ted shared with me the fact that when he first started in business he tried to play the part of an old man. Not just the way he dressed but in the way he interacted with other business people.

Once Ted realized that he didn’t need to play the role of anyone but himself, business got easier and more enjoyable for him.

If you find yourself dressing like someone you can’t stand to look at in the mirror, or playing the part of someone that isn’t congruent with your personality it’s time for a change.

Fear can be a good and bad motivator.

Sometimes when your back is to the wall, fear will kick you into action.

The problem is however many people today let fear guide their choices. I might suggest you try the opposite like George Costanza on Seinfeld. Instead of spending the day making choices to avoid pain, try making them to seek pleasure or maybe even to head right into the eye of your fear.

I remember the first time I wanted to film a blog video. I was SO scared. Scared of judgement. ridicule, criticism and more. Then I realized that you get way more kudos than criticism for putting yourself out there. The best part is the critics tend to be dealing with their own fears, and you recognize that if they do show up.

Don’t be so damn scared. You are safe, start making choices like someone who has choices.

How to fake 2 camera angles using video crop. Essentially you take a 1080P video and make 2 copies. 1 compressed to 720p and the other cropped to 720p.

You may laugh at how I illustrate width and height. People often mix these up.

This is a great way to place your scene cuts. When you see the camera angle change, you won’t notice a shift in my position or a break in my speech. I usually shoot in one take but when I am doing longer videos we do them in segments. Then we use these cool cuts to make the transitions seamless.

@DerekDwreckOHC (profile may not be safe for work) Asked me about how to get started and what to outsource. I think this is a tough question because everyone has a different set of resources to work with.

My best advice is to work on the stuff you are good at and outsource whatever you don’t know. The worst thing you can do as a startup is try to learn everything AND do everything. The learning will slow you down. It’s much easier to deal with professional designers and programmers than it is to try to become one.

As a for instance we do all our own video post production because:
1. We have the equipment
2. We have a trained Final Cut Professional in house
3. It’s faster to do the work than it is to explain what needs to be done


If those 3 things were not true I would hire someone to do my vid production pre and post.
If you have any advice for startups let’s get a dialog going here. I would love to hear your tips for people just trying to build their companies. Thanks in advance for sharing!

Internet merchants and affiliates are graduating into real businesses. Unfortunately there are still a group of people out there that make the rest of us look like douche bags. You know who you are.

What are your top signs of internet marketing douchebaggery? How does one stand out as the un-douche?

You’re probably asking yourself, how can Brad Gosse show me an upside to gonorrhea? If that’s what you were hoping for, sorry to disappoint. Unfortunately for you this is not a post about sexually transmitted diseases.

When I refer to the clap, I am actually referring to a trick we use to help video editors and sound editors sync up our multiple camera and audio tracks.

Essentially, I clap my hands before I begin speaking which gives the editor a singular point of reference with audio and video, allowing for faster syncing. It’s a little thing but it makes a big difference when you’re using two or more separate tracks. In our case even at bare minimum we are recording the audio separately from the video. Clapping my hands one time allows the two files to be merged easily.

Get organized with your traffic. Having your own in-house url shortener will help you to keep track of and update your affiliate and other links you place on other websites, PDF documents etc.

Once you install this free software you will never use a 3rd party shortener again. Here is the link to download it. http://floopis.com/short

Here I show you a fool proof way to get your blog posts indexed faster with Google. If you have a less popular blog this will get you indexed without you having to do anything beyond hitting the publish button in wordpress.

Simple instructions to show you how to use feedburner as a free email newsletter service that emails your subscribers whenever you update your blog. Once you set this up you can forget about it and it will grow your traffic base over time.

What you will need.

* A free feedburner account
* A site with an active RSS feed

I hope this helps you grow your traffic. I am planning more videos like this so let me know if you like it

Tag clouds are those little jumbles of keywords that you see on some blogs. They usually link to a keyword search within that website for all posts that contain that particular term. To the beginner SEO, this may look like a good way to stuff your pages with keywords that link to relevant sections on your website.

A better practice for getting pages indexed within your blog, is to put a list of the categories in your sidebar. Categories provide Google with a much better system of indexing your content.

The only time I would recommend using tag clouds, or when the user experience requires them. In the case where you might be running your own news website, trend blog or something else where the popularity of certain terms is important.