Need more actionable advice? Get your free weekly marketing "to-do" list, straight to your inbox every Wednesday:

Buffer

Need more actionable advice? Get your free weekly marketing "to-do" list, straight to your inbox every Wednesday:

Buffer

Hi! I’m Laura Roeder and I want to tell you who can see your Twitter messages. Are they totally public? Can just the people that you follow see them? Can just the people that followed you see them?

The answer is that unless you have your account set to a private account, which means you have that little lock icon on your account, which I don’t recommend that you do, unless you have that set up, all your tweets are totally public and they are searched and indexed by Google. So when somebody searches for a topic or something that you said, your tweet could come up. So I don’t want to scare you off from tweeting, but it is important to know that everything you’re writing is totally public and searchable by Google.

The only exception is direct messages or D-messages in Twitter. A direct message is Twitter’s version of an email and it is private. So when you send a direct message, it won’t show up on Google, it won’t show up publicly and will only be sent to the person that you are sending that message to, and the same goes for the direct messages that you receive that others sent to you.

If you liked that video and you would like to get 20 more, just like it for free. All you have to do is go to TwitterWebinar.com/video. Again, that’s TwitterWebinar.com/video for instant access to 20 more free videos just like this one. I’ll see you there.

Need more actionable advice? Get your free weekly marketing "to-do" list, straight to your inbox every Wednesday:

Buffer

Need more actionable advice? Get your free weekly marketing "to-do" list, straight to your inbox every Wednesday:

Buffer

Hey, I’m Laura Roeder of getthedash.com, and I want to propose an idea to you today for your small business and that is he who is the most consistent wins. I think consistency is incredibly important in building a successful small business especially over time and here is what I mean.

I see a lot of businesses that publicly kind of fall off the map. They have been blogging for a while and then you look at their blog and they haven’t updated it for two months. They’ve stopped sending out emails. You haven’t heard from them in six months.

Sometimes these businesses actually have a lot going on behind the scenes, but from the customer’s perspective, that relationship really decays. All the time that you’re not communicating with your customers, you’re losing that relationship with them, right? It’s just like a friend that you used to talk to every day and all of a sudden you haven’t heard from them for six months and you’re not as close to them as people that you stay in touch with all the time.

I think sometimes people think, “Oh, it’s just a blog. It’s just sending out emails. There’s no big deal.” But then it builds up and builds up, and then before you know it, three months have gone by and no one has heard from you.

The businesses that I see winning are businesses that make a very serious commitment to their consistency. This is something that I’ve done in my business and I think it’s a huge factor in my success.

But you don’t have to do it all at once. So what I did is I started with a newsletter. I decided to make a commitment that I would publish a newsletter every week, and if you’re on my list, you know that we publish that newsletter every week, week in and week out for the last three years. It’s a non-negotiable no matter what, the newsletter goes out. Of course we have systems that help us do that like writing the newsletter in advance. Amazing idea, right? This really can help you get it up every week instead of scrambling to do it that morning.

So first, we started with a newsletter and then we added on a blog. When I launched this business, I actually didn’t even have a blog for it because you have to be realistic about you and what you can achieve, right? So we started with a newsletter. We got the newsletter happen, we got it down, and then we added a blog. So we started blogging I don’t know how often it was. Let’s say we even just started blogging monthly and then we moved that weekly, and now we have a twice a week blog schedule. We blog pretty much every week, twice a week, at least once a week.

And then after that we added on webinars. Now, we usually do a webinar every two weeks, sometimes once a month. We have a regular schedule. So all those things add up, first the newsletter and then the blog and then the webinars.

But we don’t do things one off. We look at how can we make this consistent so that we’re communicating and adding value and making promotional offers to customers over and over again. And of course the more you can communicate with your customers, the more you can make offers to your customers, the more your business is going to grow, the better the relationship with your customers and the more chances you have for new people to come in the funnel. If you’re releasing a newsletter and a blog post and a webinar regularly, you’re giving people a lot of opportunities to hear about your business. So as you’re doing your planning, I would just ask you to really at not what can you do one off but how can you make a serious commitment to be consistent in your marketing activities.

Need more actionable advice? Get your free weekly marketing "to-do" list, straight to your inbox every Wednesday:

Buffer

Hey, I’m Laura Roeder, and today I want to do a book review for you. So this is actually not quite the book that I’m reviewing but it’s very similar.

So I’m holding up today “Beyond Book Solid” by Michael Port because I don’t own a copy of “Book Yourself Solid”. This is the follow-up book to “Book Yourself Solid”, but what I want to talk about today is the book that comes before this one, which is called “Book Yourself Solid” by Michael Port. As you can see, the follow-up is good as well because I got that one too.

“Book Yourself Solid” was an essential book to me when I was starting my business, and “Book Yourself Solid” is really a marketing plan for how to book yourself solid in the service business. Get your practice full so you can make money and be successful in your business.

I would highly recommend “Book Yourself Solid” to anyone especially when you’re first starting out because it’s the first book that really gave me a concrete understanding of how to market my business and how to get clients. Everything that I had read before was either very theoretical marketing or maybe was one specific marketing tactic, but before that book I never had the whole plan laid out in front of me, and Michael Port does a great job of giving you a very clear, very step-by-step plan for how to get clients and it works. I promise you that if you do what he lays out in the book, you will get clients.

One idea that I learned from him in “Book Yourself Solid”, which really changed how I looked at my business, was the idea of the “red velvet rope.” So Michael talks about how you really want to set up a red velvet rope for who you’re going to work with, and you’re not going to work with just anyone; you’re going to work with your ideal clients.

Now, I don’t know about you but when I was starting my business, I was so desperate to work with anyone. I would take on all sorts of projects. I would really, really try to get any sort of business that was remotely thrown my way. So this was a very new idea for me to only work with the best people who I could best serve; but I found that once I embraced that, it really helped me take off my business, it really helped me book myself solid because I was only working with people that were the highest use of my talents and where the engagements can go really, really well.

Because I’ve found that with people who weren’t red velvet rope clients, it usually didn’t work out right anyway, like I wasn’t happy with them or they weren’t happy with me. The project just didn’t go well or didn’t go as well as it could in some way. So only working with people where you really enjoy what you’re doing, it gets you the most referrals. Also, it puts out that good energy of that like you are really looking for people who you can really help instead of you are just looking for anyone that will help you.

So it was a game-changing book for me. If you’re just starting out, you have to read it. Even if you’re not just starting out, well one, maybe you want to readthis follow-up book, Beyond Book Solid. Or even if you’re a little farther in your business, I think it’s just a great reminder of what those basics are for getting yourself booked solid.

So again, this is “Beyond Book Solid” by Michael Port. I highly, highly recommend this book and “Book Yourself Solid”.

Hey, I’m Laura Roeder, and in early 2011, I was lucky enough to go on a trip to South Africa with Sir Richard Branson with Virgin Unite. Virgin Unite is the Virgin Group’s nonprofit arm. It’s personally funded by Richard and they have a strong focus on entrepreneurship as a way of social change.

When I was in South Africa, I actually got to visit the Branson Center for Entrepreneurship in Johannesburg. I got to meet a ton of innovative entrepreneurs in South Africa that have built their business through the help of the Branson Center. And then that’s why I’m so excited to tell you about Richard Branson’s newest book. It’s called Screw Business as Usual, and Screw Business as Usual is all about what he calls “Capitalism 24902″ and Capitalism 24902 refers to the circumference of the earth and it’s the idea that capitalism should not just involve money but involve the earth itself and all the people in the earth in making your decisions in what you do to grow your business. That’s what Virgin has done and that’s what this book is all about.

This tells the story of Virgin Unite. It tells the story of tons of different nonprofit and forprofit business, how they have made change, how they have collaborated. I loved that he talks about small businesses, small as in a tiny village in Africa, one woman running a business, all the way up to huge corporations like Shell, how they can work together, what they can do to change the planet. It’s a very, very inspiring book and very practical and very useful as well.

The book challenges us to talk about how we as small businesses are screwing business as usual. So this is something that I’m really excited about. It’s some of the ways that I’m screwing business as usual. One of the biggest ways is that I have an online business in many different senses. So I actually don’t have an office. I’m recording this video here for my house, here from my home office; and everyone who works for me all over the country and all over the globe, they work from their own homes as well. So we save a lot of natural resources, a lot of commuting time by not having an office.

Another way that we screw business as usual is that everybody has a flexible schedule. There’s a lot of people that work for my company that have small children that they want to spend a lot of time with, and a normal job that requires you to go into an office from 9 to 5 or 9 to 8 doesn’t allow you to spend time with your kids. I think people should spend time with their kids so we’ve set up a workplace that allows people to do that or whatever it is that they like to do or that they feel passionate about.

Another way that we screw business as usual is by delivering all of our programs online. We could ship out physical DVDs but we save a lot of carbon, a lot of natural resources by having everything delivered online, and it’s really cool because people can access our materials from all over the world. We also provide a lot of free training materials that allow entrepreneurs that are just starting out, entrepreneurs all over the globe to do whatever their version is of screwing business as usual to grow their small business as well using our free training and free tools, and I think that that’s really cool.

So if this is stuff that excites you as much as it excites me, or if it doesn’t, I hope that you read the book anyway so that maybe you can be converted. So definitely check this out. Please buy a copy because the proceeds directly benefit Virgin Unite.

Need more actionable advice? Get your free weekly marketing "to-do" list, straight to your inbox every Wednesday:

Buffer

Need more actionable advice? Get your free weekly marketing "to-do" list, straight to your inbox every Wednesday:

Buffer

Hey there. I’m Laura Roeder and today, I want to show you how to use the Flowplayer plugin to get videos to show up on your WordPress website. This is a topic request that I got from a Dash reader, and I’m happy to make a video for you about it today.

So let’s start by explaining what Flowplayer is. Flowplayer is something that you use to put a video player on your website. So you would use Flowplayer if maybe you have a video that you don’t want to be on a public site like YouTube for whatever reason. Maybe because it’s private, maybe because it’s password-protected, maybe it’s too long for YouTube and you need to host it somewhere else, that’s what you would you use something like Flowplayer for.

Now, what you have to understand about Flowplayer is they don’t host your video. It’s simply a way to play a video on a website. So you’re going to need another service. In this example, I’m going to show you how to do it with Amazon S3 which is a really popular service for hosting a video. I recommend S3. I love it because it’s a really lowcost way to host files like videos for your website. So let’s get started.

So the first step is to install the WordPress plugin. The one I recommend is called FV WordPress Flowplayer. Again, that’s the letters FV WordPress Flowplayer. So you’re going to go into your WordPress website; you’re going to go in the plugins section and search for this plugin. And here it is. I already have it installed on my site so it’s showing up as installed, but you’ll see right here FV WordPress Flowplayer and then you’ll click “Install Now” as you see in this example to install it.

Okay. So you’ve got it installed; you’ve got it activated. The next step is to find the video or to upload your video. So you can see here I’m logged in to my interface for Amazon S3. They finally got a web interface where you can see all your different video files. So you can go to their web interface. You can upload it here. It’s really important to make the video public. So let’s see. Which was the one I was using as the example? Yeah, Early Bird.

You’re going to right-click on it and click on “Make Public.” So whenever you want to embed a video on your website, you have to make that a public video. Otherwise, it won’t work. So this is a really common place for people to get error messages. So again, in this S3 you’re going to right-click it and click on “Make Public.” It will ask you if you’re sure and you’re going to hit OK.

Okay. So we’ve got our video uploaded to S3. We’ve got our plugin installed. Now let’s make a post to show the video.

So if you go over to FV WordPress Flowplayer in your settings, so that’s over here, you’ll probably have it on the bottom left side of your WordPress interface that lists all your plugins. So you click on it down there and it will show you this page where you get to choose how to play the video. I have an example right here.

So you can choose if you want AutoPlay, if you want a popup box, if you want to enable full screen mode. They’ll let you choose your default video size, different colors, all different options there so you can look through that.

Also on this page they have the short code for embedding your video. So you can do it really simple with just the filename or you can add the width and the height and they have some other and they explain it all here a lot of different options for customizing your video. It’s really cool because this is free. Flowplayer is free and it’s totally customizable.

So let’s just go with the most simple example. So I’m just going to copy and paste these little short codes so I can remember it, but basically, it just says Flowplayer src= and then you put in your filename. Now, a lot of people think that these have to be Flash videos, FLV, but they actually don’t. In the example today, I’m going to show you an MOV file. So any type of video file will work with Flowplayer.

So again, I copy and pasted this little short code. Now I’m going to go to add a new post and I’ll just paste in my short code right here. Now I need to grab my filename where it says example.flv. That’s where I put in the video file.

So, now that I’ve made my video public in S3, I’m going to go on to properties and now I have the link to link to this video. So I’m just going to copy and paste this link, copy the link, go back to my post. So where it says example.flv, I’m going to post in my video URL; and then of course, if you want to put “Here’s My Video” or any other text above or below the video, you can do that using your normal WordPress interface.

So now I hit preview to make sure that it worked, and so I’m just going to test the play button. Of course, it didn’t work because I’m doing a training video and God forbid something works.

So I’ll show you how I would troubleshoot this. So the first thing I would do is I want to make sure that I made my video public, and then the next step I want to do is to make sure that I got the URL correct. So I’m going to go here, I’m going to copy this URL again. I have this zoomed in so it’s showing a little funky.

So okay, I think I know why this didn’t work. I think it didn’t work because this is showing up as a link. So I need to not make that a link I think for the code to work properly. I’m actually glad it didn’t work because now you can see the troubleshooting process which is an important part of making your website work.

So I’m going to go to save draft again and then I’ll hit preview again so that reloads, and I’ll play my video. Hopefully, it worked this time. We’ll give it a second to load here. I think it’s going to work.

Alright! So it worked! So there is my post. I have my video embedded.

Let me move this to trash.

Again, I am Laura Roeder. That’s how you use the Flowplayer WordPress Plugin to embed any type of video onto your WordPress blog.

Need more actionable advice? Get your free weekly marketing "to-do" list, straight to your inbox every Wednesday:

Buffer

Hi! I’m Laura Roeder, and today I wanted to hit you with a little book review of this wonderful book. It’s called “The Art of Non-Conformity” by Chris Guillebeau. His name is hard to say but I think I said it right. Here’s my copy from the library. Why does it say 56? I don’t know, library. I always wonder about that. I think it’s because this is the 56th greatest book in the universe.

So if you haven’t checked out Chris’s blog, The Art of Non-Conformity, it’s a great free blog he writes on a lot. This book to me is like the new Your Money or Your Life. If you haven’t read Your Money or Your Life, that’s another great book. That’s what it’s called. I don’t remember the author’s name but you can look it up. It was written in the 70s I think and that book is all about looking at money in a new way and looking at your life in a new way and examining do I really need everything that I think I need, or is there really a much lower amount of money I need every month to achieve my dreams and do what I want?

The Art of Non-Conformity is really about crafting your life in the way that you want to and about how it’s much easier than you think it can be. I recently went to South Africa somewhere that Chris has also spent a lot of time and it just emphasized to me how many ways we have to spend our life. It’s very easy to get stuck in whatever we grew up with or the options we see around us, but you can have 10 different lifetimes in your life. You can travel if you want to. You can have a bunch of different careers. You’re not stuck in one thing forever and that’s really what Chris emphasizes. You know what it says? Set your own rules, live the life you want, and change the world.

I love this book because it’s very inspiring but it’s very practical at the same time. He makes you see that this isn’t a crazy far-off dream, but crafting the life that you want, a life of nonconformity perhaps, is actually really easy to do and takes much less money than you think.

Just to hit you with one idea that I really liked from the book, he talks about looking at retirement in a new way. So our classic idea of retirement is that we say let’s say we have saved a bunch of money and at some point we retire, and then we start living off that money. But of course, the problem perhaps with that model is that you have to save literally now millions of dollars to be able to retire on, to have any semblance of the lifestyle you’ve had before, and as inflation rises, it will probably be millions of dollars just to be able to retire at all.

But most of us in this little world, most of us, if you’re watching this video, don’t have the type of life set up where we’re just like waiting till the day when we can finally stop working, till we can get rid of this awful job. So a new way to think about this is to build income streams that will continue to support you throughout your life.

The other problem with retirement is you’re not really gaining anything, right? You’re just putting in money to be able to take it back out. Yeah, you’re earning a little in investments but you’re losing just as much from inflation. So to me, it makes much more sense to build income streams that will continue to go for you instead of just basically putting aside money just to take it right back out later. You’re not really gaining anything in that scenario. You know what I mean?

So there’s lots of great practical ideas like that. As you can see, it’s a short book, and it’s really just a must-read for changing your life.

So again, I’m Laura Roeder. I have to highly, highly recommend The Art of Non-Conformity.

Need more actionable advice? Get your free weekly marketing "to-do" list, straight to your inbox every Wednesday:

Buffer

Need more actionable advice? Get your free weekly marketing "to-do" list, straight to your inbox every Wednesday:

Buffer