If you’re on my email list you will have already heard it, but as we know, Membership sites are a popular way of making money online, and the model was talked about extensively at the conference. Coincidentally, my online friend Yaro Starak has announced he is re-opening the doors to Membership Site Mastermind next week.

I don’t promote many training courses, and all I do I have personally been on myself and this is no exception (my WordPress Blog Training Videos is the result).

He’s released a couple of videos in the past which are well worth watching. The one below is The Blue Sky Video, and there is also The Slide Show Video.

As usual I offer no incentives (aka bribes) for signing up for this course through my affiliate link, I want you to sign up for it if you think it’s for you, will benefit you and help you achieve the lifestyle you want. Enjoy the videos though!

Oh, and if you notice something new about the comments, I’ve installed JS Kit Echo. They have to do a manual import of my old comments, but an enhanced service is now available, feel free to try it out! I’ll be writing a post on my experience with it another time.

Read the full post: Return Of Membership Site Mastermind

Ekin Ertac has produced a WordPress Template Tag Cheatsheet that lists the available template tags and what they do. You can download it in PDF from his site.

It also includes tips on a standard theme structure, what the loop is and a couple of example navigation menus for good measure.

[Via WeblogTools Collection]

Read the full post: WordPress Template Tags Cheat Sheet

It shows you, step-by-step, how to optimize your YouTube videos to help you drive an insane amount of traffic back to your website.

Gideon used these exact same strategies on one of his own YouTube channels, and received over 67,400 views in just 8 weeks! He actually shows the same channel inside the video.

So if you want to get more traffic from YouTube, you’ll like this stuff…

Read the full post: 7 Killer YouTube Traffic Tips

- You buy a domain.
- You buy (or already have) web hosting.
- Now how does the domain know to go to your web host? i.e. when someone types in your domain, how does it know to go to your web host and not elsewhere?

Simple answer – DNS. You tell your domain to be associated with your host’s domain name servers so it points to the right place – your site.

OK, so a more official definition (thanks Wikipedia), and with a slightly different meaning, is a nameserver “… consists of a program or computer server that implements a name-service protocol. It will normally map (i.e. connect) a human-recognizable identifier of a host (for example, the domain name ‘en.wikipedia.org’) to its computer-recognizable identifier (such as the Internet Protocol (IP) address 145.97.39.155), and vice versa”.

So there you go. It joins your domain name and hosting together. Magic.

Read the full post: What Are Nameservers?

Read the full post: How The World Has Shifted

Created by the makers of the paid-for Camstasia (TechSmith) Jing is a simple free application that lets you easily capture screenshots or videos on your desktop.

Its simplicity is brilliant, simply select the area you wish to capture, choose video or image and then go. If you select image you can then easily annotate the image with arrows and text. If video, you can choose whether to record audio or not. Once complete you simply hit the share button and it will upload the image or video to screencast.com and give you a URL to share with whoever you want to. It’s so easy and fast.

Of course, with simplicity come downsides. You cannot do everything you want when editing an image. You cannot edit a video at all, it’s a one take wonder. Videos are limited at 5 minutes, and your screencast account has an upload limit and monthly bandwidth limit, both of which can be increased by paying for a Pro account.

After failing to get the browser based Screentoaster working (damn you Flash!), Jing actually seems to be almost everything I was looking for. Now, when a client wants to know how to solve an issue I can send a quick video of how to do it without having to waste time editing it, producing it in the correct format, figuring out where to upload it to and host it. If you need to visually show people what you’ve done or how to do things, then take a look at Jing.

Read the full post: Free Screencast Tool – Jing!

There are a couple of great tools you can use to see what is happening with your site.

Down For Everyone Or Just Me? lets you know whether the problem is for everyone, or just you. If it is down for everyone then there’s a bigger problem.

Ding! It’s Up! will send you an email/SMS/Twitter when the site you specify is up, or for that matter, down.

You should also check the status of your server through your host’s tools if they have them. Also try to remember what the last thing you did was. If you were just writing a post and then it wasn’t working, well there’s a problem you haven’t caused (probably), but if you were changing plugin settings or a theme template file then perhaps undoing that last step may bring your site back to life.

Read the full post: Help! My Website Is Down!

I get asked which webhost I recommend a few times a week, and it is usually a choice based on personal recommendation and past experience. A recent rough count tells me that over 80% of my clients are using Host Gator (for at least one of their sites) and the number of problems I’ve had with them? Two. Both clients will not be using Host Gator again, for various reasons it didn’t work out well with them. However compared to the problems I’ve had (or more specifically, problems my clients have had) with other hosts, they’re a great choice.

If you have a lot of websites you may want to have more than one host. While most hosting accounts can handle multiple sites as add-on domains (this is a great inexpensive way to have multiple websites/blogs), some people like to have different hosts for their larger, more critical websites – if one host has server problems, then their other important site should still be fine. That’s why I recommend Hostgator.

The Host Gator Baby plan will be good enough for most people to start off. In fact for those on a really tight budget the Hatchling plan may work for them, but it only allows one domain.

A well known host will always have those who recommend it and those who don’t, it is all in the personal experience. I have had good experiences with the two above but there are people who have not, and the best advice is to go with what your friends, colleagues and people you trust recommend.

I could go into a long list of reasons why I recommend Host Gator, but this is a soft-sell blog, so essentially I think it is simply a great choice for beginner and intermediate blogs due to ease of setup and low cost. There are better hosts out there, ones with higher security, greater scalability and better support, but you can always move if you get to that level and feel you need to.

The links for Host Gator are affiliate links, meaning I make money if you sign up with them. However please feel free to go to their websites directly, almost all hosts have similarly priced affiliate plans and it has no bearing on my recommendations. Also the hosts will happily answer any questions you may ask, my recommendations might not be perfect for your individual situation so please contact them with any questions.

Oh, and Happy New Year! If I can help you make 2009 more successful than 2008, please contact me, I would love to help you.

Read the full post: Host Gator is My Recommended Host

Many people are testing Plurk to see how it compares to Twitter and with all of Twitter’s downtime recently then people are very intrigued. It’s not fair to directly compare then, but they do fulfill a similar need. If you try it, please let me know what you think.

Read the full post: I'm On Plurk

You can create unlimited 30 second videos for free (Animoto Shorts), or extended length (and downloadable) ones for $3 each or $30 for a year (or $25 with this code: tlobsvqg), and I almost guarantee you’ll sign up for one of the options when you see the results! Short video creation can take about 10 minutes, and if you’re not happy with the results you can just press Remix, and as no two videos are the same you’ll get something else. Give it a try for free.

If you’re interested in video, as a free gift to all my newsletter subscribers, you can now get the Ultimate Guide to Online Video for free! A 45 page report looking at 61 different video sharing and video editing sites, this is yours if you sign up to my newsletter.

[Via: Brendon over at Tailored Consulting]

Read the full post: Great New Video Tool