Also on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wuy3Z8Cihg

Hi there 30 Day Challengers, Caro here, and my video today is going to be about one of my favorite topics: the 30 Day Challenge forum. For those of you that have been around for a few years, you may have observed that I’m quite prolific in the forum. I’m very passionate about helping people and also leveraging the forum because I know for me in my first year that the forum was instrumental as well as my team and my group. The forum was very much instrumental for me in my success in the 30 Day Challenge, so it was thanks to the community of the forum and also maybe I’d offer some things I did right with how I posted, how I approached the forum and posting that really made my 30 Day Challenge experience something that I’ll talk about for the rest of my days because it certainly gave me my start in internet marketing. So, come this way and I look forward to taking you through forum, forum protocol, and what each section is for and so forth. So, come on.

So here we are at the forum itself. I’ve just typed in www.thirtydaychallenge.com/forums/ so that’s how I get to the forum. And here you can see that I’m already logged in. Now, it’s important to write down and remember your username and password so that you can access it very easily. And you can also of course login with Facebook connect. So this is the memory of my login has been saved on my browser as well. So you’ll see here that we have quite a few different sections.

Now, the main ones for 2009 are the General Chat, now I know that some of the terminology here may not seem as specific as you may like it, and we accept that, at the same time this is a terminology that has been around for a while, so just to help you understand, General Chat is for everything to do with the 30 Day Challenge, the experience, the strategy, the techniques, any questions you have about it, and so forth. So general chat is about general chat to do with the 30 Day Challenge.

Getting Ready for the Challenge is about pre-season training chat for 2009, so this is a new section that has been created specifically for 2009. So in many ways you can ignore this section here [Pre-season ‘08].

Team Talk, and I’ll go into it, is where you can set up, look for a team. So that’s sort of the section, and as I mentioned the other day, I will be doing a separate video on teams themselves because again as well as the forum, my team was instrumental, or I believe they were, to my 30 Day Challenge experience.

Extra Tips, for those that want to offer some tips that are more related to general internet marketing, possibly with 30 Day Challenge but they’re really, when you go and have a look you’ll see some of the quality of the tips in that.

30 Day Challenge Experiences, these are experiences you’ve actually had, some wins, maybe some hurdles that you’ve overcome. It really is about sharing your experiences here.

General Internet Marketing chat is for things, anything outside of the 30 Day Challenge, so the 30 Day Challenge is in this section [General Chat] and this is to talk about non-related 30 Day Challenge topics. And even though this sections says that, the same rules apply with regards to the, I suppose the culture and environment we have in the 30 Day Challenge and I’ll go into that a little bit more as well.

Meetups is where you can set up for meetups in your particular area. And here really this is about, you know people are expected to post on a particular thread rather than to where they’re meeting up, and it’s really up to individuals here to set them up. We certainly encourage people to connect face-to-face because that can be, you know, just add that extra element as well. Because so much of this is behind a computer screen and keyboard.

30 Day Challenge Plus is for something outside of the 30 day challenge, so I’m not going to speak too much on this because it’s not that relevant for the 30 Day Challenge.

Then we have forum questions, comments, suggestions, this is more where you may be struggling with some difficulties to do with navigating around the forum or something like that.

And then this is just a test board. And you can also see that you can tell who’s online at any one time. And some other bits and pieces here.

So let’s have a look. I’m going to take you through to I think the rules and procedures, because I really believe this will set you up well for your forum experience because every forum is different and I think the 30 Day Challenge forum is really quite a unique one. We have the most incredible culture here, it’s a real support each other culture, it’s positive culture, and we do have a few rules, I believe we don’t have that many, but a few that Ed and Dan have requested and we certainly as moderators we will advocate those rules. So here, signatures are to have one link in them, and they can be a friend feed or a twitter link. So it’s one, not two. Some people are trying to get away with two. You can also have the 30 Day Challenge history and one quote of choice, and be in normal size font. I’ve got there how they’ll be moderated.

No links in the body copy of your post that lead to a website or blog related to your name or business which has a lead capture, adsense, or affiliate product of yours, or something you’re affiliated to. Self-promotion is really not what we’re about here. So there are to be no affiliate links of the body copy of your post.

And then there’s also to be no links to your niche blog that you’re testing for the 30 Day Challenge. That’s actually more for you to protect yourself because unfortunately there’s just a really small minority that don’t always have the best intentions, so we really do ask that you keep that to yourself. Certainly you can share your niche and everything with your team members and again I’ll be speaking about that in another video.

No flaming, no directing anger at another 30 Day Challenger, name calling, defamation of character, sharing your frustration or so forth. Now we’ve all learned different ways of operating and it’s really, sometimes we can get really really frustrated and it seems perfectly reasonable to us to say, well you’re the fault, you’re the reason I feel this way, might be a particular entity, it could be Ed, could be me, could be Market Samurai or WordPressDirect, and you’re feeling that in some way they’ve let you down or the support has. It’s really not appropriate in this environment to, we consider that to be flaming if you go well, you’re a this that the other, if you’re feeling frustrated, own it. I recommend writing if you’re really feeling the need to , is something along the lines of “Hey, I’m feeling really frustrated here, I’m not sure what to do next.” So really think about something before you type a post. And I know that this has stood me in very very good stead when I started my 30 Day Challenge because I found that people wanted to help me more because I was very much demonstrating that I wanted to help myself. So, and again, please know that when you are moderated it’s not something that’s a personal attack. We sometimes get people that feel that, how dare we moderate them? There are these rules here and we will follow these moderation rules.

No spamming, and no duplicate posting by the same author.

And then again, procedures, this is another thing that’s really important and will be moderated. Please use the search function before posting. This particular forum has been going since 2007, 2008, 2009. There’s an awful lot of information already there. The search function is an excellent search function. I know I taught myself to use it and it was trial and error. And really, I would say same goes for you, just learn how to get the most out of this search function. But generally most questions have already been asked, so I would recommend that you use the search function. Again, it shows that you are trying to help yourself.

No need to PM any of us. Our commitment is to help the community at large, so we will not be answering one-on-one PMs, unless we specifically give permission for someone to PM us about something because our commitment is to help the group at large, and one post, out of responding to one post has a capacity to help many.

Make the headline relevant. For the support go to these particular areas. Encouraging you to use tags. And really there’s a lot of knowledge in the 30 Day Challenge out there in the community. When it comes to the 30 Day Challenge itself, the key people to listen to are Ed, Dan, and GuruBob. They are the creators of the 30 Day Challenge. I also do have a role where I am their mouthpiece on the forum. So I really do not offer anything unless it has come directly from them. So there’s safety there or so to read what I write. But key thing is really to listen to Ed, Dan, and GuruBob.

So I’ve gone through what each area means. So let’s just go in and have a look about how to post. So let’s say I wanted to create a new post. I would go to new thread here. So that’s post a new thread. So I would just start here, I would put my title in. Now as I’ve said before you want to be really helpful. “This is a Dummy Post For Demonstration Purposes” So that’s telling you exactly what it is.

Notice I’m not doing it all in caps. If I did, I would expect that to be moderated because that’s essentially shouting at somebody. And again, writing it, again you don’t write it all in caps. You might want to emphasize a few words here and there in bold or italics. “Hi there everyone, I have been watching…” So I can type something like this about how I’ve been watching the videos, I notice that GuruBob said xyz, I’m not quite that clear on what that means, or something like that, so I’m actually in my post I would always demonstrate the action that I have taken and how I’ve tried to help myself already because I find that when you’re polite and you show that you’re looking to help yourself, people are more willing to help you. I’m sure that’s the same for you, you’re more willing to help people that are looking to help themselves.

And you can put tags here, or if you want you can put a little smiley face and then you can preview and submit. So that’s just if we’re doing that.

So really, I think that’s pretty much it with the forum, I am such a big advocate of this forum, it was instrumental for me. I was a prolific poster, I still am a prolific poster, the difference is that now I’m answering people’s questions, but in my first year, so in this section we had, I was asking questions, it was probably daily. The key thing was that I was taking action and I was watching the videos piece by piece, and because I was an absolute newbie, sometimes it felt like they were speaking Japanese to me. So I was really really careful. I thought about each post before I made it, and about how I could best elicit the assistance that I needed. So really what I’d say to you is take responsibility for yourself. Certainly we don’t expect you to know everything. We do understand that you may not get a concept right away. I mean, I certainly didn’t when I did the 30 Day Challenge. To post and sort of suggest that somehow someone else is lacking is really not going to get our attention, or anybody’s attention because you’re not demonstrating that you’re a keen eager student. And I know from personal experience and I know from other people’s experiences that really when you write something on forum with respect, and you’re on your best behavior, you tend to get inundated with this most amazing community and people that will assist you. So really, do come to the forum. We are a friendly bunch ere. The moderating team is brilliant. I just have so much respect for my team and they’re doing a great job. And really, if you do go against any of these rules and procedures you will be moderated so please expect that and don’t take it personally. And I would say that those that are, are a minute small minority, so I just get blown away every year by the amazing new people that turn up and get themselves known by us. And it’s just an absolute joy and delight to assist you through your 30 Day Challenge.

Now just quickly up here we’ve got the other sections, so the training section and the blog section here, so if I click on this you can see, there I am. There or training, again, I love these icons. Just absolutely brilliant.

So, I think that will do. I’ll go to the final slide for make sure. And then I look forward to making my next video for you which will be on teams.

So there you go. A video on the forum, navigating the forum. I did focus mostly on the General chat area because that is what we would be expecting you to use with regards to questions on your 30 Day Challenge experience. I’ll talk more about the team area in the forum when I will do the team video for you very very soon. So thank you again for watching this, I hope it has been informative for you, and I look forward to talking to you again. Take care, bye!

Also on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuhJ4mdrsrU

Hi 30 day challengers Caro here and welcome to another one of my videos.

Today’s topic is going to be on how to set up a Google group for yourself and your teammates.  Now you can use Google groups for many different reasons in this context this is what we’re recommend you use it for.  I’ve already done a video on Skype and setting up Skype, and I’ve mentioned there that it’s just a wonderful wonderful tool or vehicle to communicate with your team.  So too with Google groups.  It’s like you can invite the members so you can invite your team members and I’ll take you all through that.  And you invite them and you use that as basically your central hub to send out any correspondence, so it could be when the next meeting’s on, it could involve questions, it’s really just a very effective and efficient way to communicate with particular people that you’re desiring to.

Anyway all that said, follow me and I’ll show you how it’s all done.  It’s very very simple, I promise.

Okay, so here we are at the Google page and all I did was type in Google groups and I get this here [groups.google.com].  Now I’m going to sign in, and for the purposes of this video, I’m actually going to use the 30 day challenge gmail address, because we don’t actually have a Google group set up in that, so I’ll show you how it’s done.  So I’ve signed in, now, just to backtrack, I really do recommend that you get yourself a gmail account.  If you don’t have one already, you can certainly post on the forum asking for gmail invitations.  But generally what you do is you first of all set up your gmail account.

So I’m signing in there.  It thinks I’m Ed.  I can be Ed.  For nickname, I’m going to call it Ted Legend.  Now I have a feeling that a photo of me might come up that’s not ed, but please don’t get too panicky about that.  So that’s what I’m going to be called here, my nickname.

Okay, so I want to create a group.

Name of the group is 30DCTest.  So it’s as simple as that.  And [in the description], “This is a group for demonstration purposes only :-)”  Now here are the various options that you have.  Now, I recommend that you do restricted.  For this purpose you want it to keep private, so it’s going to be restricted and create my group.  That hard.  Wait, no it’s a bit trickier because it’s got one of these, that sometimes aren’t always clear.  Okay, so, it took me two goes, trying to work out what those letters were to get in.

So what you can do is then you can add members.  So, all you do is you add their email addresses.  So I might type in, you know, one of my own addresses.  You list people one under the other, and then it’s “Hi there, Caro here, I’d love me to join my group :-)”, so you provide whatever you want [ for the invitation message ].  So invite members that way.

So that’s the group there, that’s what it’s called, group email, and invitation to one member.  So [click] visit our group.  And this is where you can set it up.  Now you see here group owner Ed Dale, there.  Now you can invite members here, discussions, a discussion topic here, and you simply do new post.

And I could do subject “This is a test email for demonstration purposes”, [ with a message of ] “Hi Caro, welcome to your group.  Cheers, Caro :-)”  Yes I’m completely and utterly crazy here, and then you just send her that.

Now it’s important to know that when you send out a message the best way to respond is to come back into the hub of the Google group so I just post that message.  And then I click here, and then it tells me that from Ed, that there’s a test email here and so I can go read them, so you build up your list here so discussions here, you can load up files, there’s pages you can create, you can invite more members, so really just enjoy yourself, have a look around this group.  It’s that simple.

And really one of the main messages again is to use it, and it’s just such an excellent communication tool, so I really do recommend that you go about setting it up, I also recommend, something I’ve been taught, is everybody uses gmail email addresses, it’s not absolutely mandatory because we have people in some of our 30 day challenge behind the scenes groups that have not used gmail, it’s just very easy and preferable.  If you don’t have a gmail address at this stage, by all means just post on the forum, maybe we start a thread for that, and it’s very easy to send invites out to people.  It’s not a biggie.  I think actually for a lot of people it’s also called Google mail, so it’s either gmail or Google mail.  So that’s pretty much it.

So I’ll flash through to the final slide.  Very simple Google groups, go to it, set it up with your team, just so you know, I am also going to be creating a video on teams, how to go about setting it up, the importance and everything like that.  What you know for now is that Skype is a great tool to speak to your team and so are Google groups.

So that’s it for me, I hope you’re having a great day with whatever part of the world that you’re in right now.  Take care, bye!

Or the YouTube version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEBQw-5bxCg

Hi there 30 day challengers, Caro here, and welcome to my video today, which is going to be on how to download files.

Now, this is really a video for those who are very new to the Internet and online marketing. I know what it was like for me in 2005 when I first started. Everything was pretty new to me. Even though I used a computer every day for my working life, a lot of the online things I found kind of overwhelming and confusing. So what we want to do is break everything down for you and just make it as easy as possible. This should be a short and sweet video so follow me.

Okay then so here we are at the 30 day challenge training page, which you would see when you go to the 30 day challenge.  You’ve got home, training, blog, and forums.  We’re in the training section, and I’ve just taken one of the latest videos on Google docs. Now we have these options here: HD which is high-definition, standard definition, and the iPhone version. Now at each of them all we need to do is right-click.  And you’ll see it actually says right click and download now for me. I’ll go “save as”, because I’m on a Mac. For a PC for most of you it’s likely to be “save target as”, say, simply go. Now if you want to, go download the HD version. That’s the highest definition possible, and that’s if you want to know keep it on your computer. If you are looking at the SD version we really do recommend that you subscribe here to the Apple TV version and you can see it all through your iTunes so it comes in automatically to you. The difference between the HD and the SD is the HD is really about two to three times larger in file size than the SD. So it’s your call, which you prefer, but let’s have a look if we were to do the HD. I’ll go “save link as” and it comes up to a nicely created a 30 DC 2009 file so I would just save this here as simple as that. And that saves it. So that I can go back to my 30 DC file here and I can call it up. So again, that’s for those of you who want to have a record, which is highly recommended particularly if you are new, because it’s nice to be able to go back to the videos.

With 30 day challenge this year, we’ve got many many alternatives such as YouTube, so you can watch it here on the screen or on YouTube, or you can download a high-definition version for your computer. The standard definition which if you do make that choice, and I love iTunes subscription thing, you need to subscribe here or for those of us with I phones you can also get an iPhone listen. So there you go. It’s as simple as that so hopefully you found that video self-explanatory.

I hope you found that self-explanatory, and I look forward to the next time that I see you in the video. Take care. Bye.

Or the YouTube version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_iVr_ZVYwI

Hey gang Michelle McPherson here for the 30 day challenge.  Thank you so much for watching this video, but more importantly, congratulations to you for taking part in this event.  You’re going to learn a lot.  And today it’s all about social bookmarking.

Now, social bookmarking is important simply because it is part of a broader concept called search engine optimization or SEO for short.  And I know that that can be a big scary term if your new to this stuff so let me tell you what it is right now and clear all that up: search engine optimization simply means taking a few steps to help the search engines rank your site higher.  Now you want your site ranked highly, because if somebody enters in a key phrase related to your site, let’s say you’re doing vintage electric guitars and you want your site to be at the very top of those listings in Google, not all the way down on page say 200.  You’re going to get a lot more traffic if you’re ranked higher and more traffic to your site means more people looking at your ads and more potential that they’re going to click those ads and purchase the products or services that you have available.  So, search engine optimization is very important because it brings us that traffic and that traffic is what makes us money.  And one of the biggest concepts within search engine optimization, one of the most important ways that we use search engine optimization is via building links for our sites and sometimes we call it getting link love and all that that is, is going out to other sites on the Internet and getting them to link to our site.

Now, the more sites out there that are linking to our site, in general, the higher our site will rank.  So we if do some of this link building, getting some link love to our site our site will rank higher in the search engines and there we’ll get more traffic.  So, one of the easiest ways we can get this link love is with social bookmarking and that’s why you’re here today.  Now, social bookmarking allows you to go out and get some links from other sites on the Internet to your site.  If you don’t have a website yet, that’s okay.  I want you to watch what we’re going to do in just a moment on the computer and learn these concepts.  Plus it’s really really easy and it’s stuff we’ll be using later on in the 30 day challenge so let’s go on over to the computer and i’ll show you how it’s done.  It’s going to be quick, I promise.

Figure 1: Icons for social bookmarking sites

You’ve probably seen links to or icons for social bookmarking sites as you browse the web and here’s an example right here on our own 30 day challenge.com website [Figure 1].  These links up here allow people to bookmark this page on the 30 challenge website into any of these social bookmarking sites and one of those right here is delicious.  So let’s go ahead and find out exactly how we would bookmark our site on delicious.

Figure 2: Delicious homepage

You’ll of course need an account at delicious.  And here’s what the homepage looks like once you’ve logged in [Figure 2], and it’s just like any other website where you fill out your basic name and e-mail address and they’ll give you an account.  Once you’re logged in it looks like this.  You can see the links to other pages that people have put onto delicious and you can add your own links so let’s go ahead and save a new bookmark.

Figure 3: Copying link location for the blog post

Figure 4: Pasting link into Delicious

And we’ll go over to our example site, the vintage electric guitar blog.  And we want to save one of these blog posts on delicious to help it get a little more link juice.  So I’m going to copy the link location [Figure 3] for the most recent post on the vintage electric guitar blog and that means I’ll be bookmarking this post on the vintage electric guitar blog into delicious and then I’ll head back over to delicious and hit paste [Figure 4] and there it is, I hit next it’s going to think a little bit and then it’ll give me the title of that blog post from the blog itself.  So it pulls that in automatically for you.

Figure 5: After we've added comments and tags

Then you have a chance to put in a couple of notes if you want for the page that you’re bookmarking, and go ahead and do that.  So that you can jog your memory as to what it was about and also give anybody who comes across this bookmark some information as to what this page is about.  I’ve said that the Gabriel V18 amp info from vintage electric guitar blog it looks like a fantastic amp.  So I’ve just filled in some information in the notes and now we’re going to go on to the tags and the tags are very important because those are what create links on the social bookmarking site.  So in the case of this particular site, they’re talking about vintage electric guitars and they’re talking about the Gabriel V18 amplifier.  Those are the tags that I will use when I am tagging this post and you of course would use the tags that are relevant to your own blog and your own individual posts.

Then you have the chance to share or do not share you absolutely want to share this post and then click save [Figure 5], and we’ll find now here is the post on delicious [Figure 6].  It’s in our bookmarks it has our tags it has our description.  So this has now created a link from delicious to the vintage electric guitar blog, and that individual post on that site to help increase its link juice.

Figure 6: After the bookmark has been entered

Figure 7: New bookmarks with the tag guitar shows our entry

Now if i go into bookmarks and find the recent bookmarks, I’ll be able to find the one that I just put in by the tag guitar.  There it is [Figure 7] that’s the bookmark that I just put in, so it’s available for everybody on the site to see and more importantly, it’s available for the search engines to see.  And that means that they’ll be able to find this link to this blog post and go visit it.  Now understand that this is a vote in the search engine’s eyes for this particular blog post as being important and interesting, and that’s exactly what you want to do for your sites.

Now there are a lot of social bookmarking sites out there and I’m going to show you a much faster way to get through bookmarking your information on more social bookmarking sites at once.

Figure 8: Social Marker

This is social marker [Figure 8], and it’s at socialmarker.com and it actually allows you to submit to multiple social bookmarking services while filling in the details just once.

Figure 9: Social bookmarking sites to be submitted to

Now if we scroll down [Figure 9] you can see a list of all of the different social bookmarking sites that social marker will submit to.  And of course you will need an account at each of these social bookmarking sites.  To create all of those accounts you can use a tool like lastpass.com LastPass is a form filler tool.  It’s a Firefox plug-in so you use it with your Firefox browser, and it will help you fill out forms with your name and e-mail address so you don’t have to type in the information over and over again as you create accounts at all the social bookmarking sites.

So you’ll fill out the bookmark details with the title of your blog post, the URL to your blog post, and a description just like we did over at delicious.  And then in our tags, they want these to be separated by commas, and I’ll show you exactly what that means.  Our tags that we used at deicious were vintage electric guitar and Gabirel V18 amplifier, because that’s what the post was about.

Figure 10: Entering bookmark details into Social Marker

So let’s enter in vintage electric guitar, and then we’re going to enter in a comma, and then Gabriel V18 amplifier.  Now those tags are now separated by commas, we’ve given one tag vintage electric guitar, a comma, and then our second tag.  So now you’re going to enter your tags separated by any commas and then you’ll hit the submit button [Figure 10] and at that point social marker will walk you through the process and automatically fill out the submission forms on all of these social bookmarking sites that it supports.

Now keep in mind, number one you do need an account at these sites and number two you have to be logged into them so you may come across a site that you not logged into you’ll the simply log into it and then social marker will help you fill out that information and submit your URL to those sites automatically.

Now you know what social bookmarking is and how to do it and you also know why it’s important: it’s so that you can get that all-important link love from other sites linking to your site.

You’ll learn more during the 30 day challenge about social bookmarking and other ways that you can build up that all-important link love to your site.  This has been Michelle McPherson.  Thank you so much and look for the next preseason video at thirtydaychallenge.com.

And on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNcqKsVfWUA

Hi everybody, it’s guru bob, and welcome to this preseason video on Google analytics.

Google analytics is a free tracking service provided by Google that we can use to track the type and nature of traffic coming to our websites.

In addition it can give you some very useful insight in the types of keywords that people are searching in the search engines which bring them to your site.  And if you’re tracking these sorts of things and making changes over time, then those changes will be impacted in the type and nature and quantum of the traffic you’re receiving, and it will make your ability to judge the quality of your improvements much easier if you’re actually tracking using a service like Google analytics.

By introducing it here in pre-season, we’ve got a chance to sort of overview the Google analytics interface and show you how easy it is to install the code.  We will be using Google analytics in this year’s 30 day challenge as we did last year.  But we’re introducing it here in pre-season to sort of briefly overview the interface and make it a bit more efficient during the challenge itself.  So without further ado, let’s go to the screen.

The web address to access Google analytics is http://www.google.com/analytics/

It will bring you to this page here.  If you haven’t already signed up for a Google account, or have signed up for a Google account you can click sign up now, either way there’s a link here to sign up for an account or you can enter your account details here.

Another way, if you already have a Google account, is just click access analytics button and enter your account details.

And you will get access to Google analytics.  This account here, this 30 day challenge account was set up last year to track the traffic going to the vintage electric guitar blog, which was our example site for last year’s 30 day challenge.  I’m going to use this as an example to go through Google analytics today.

If you haven’t already set up a site inside Google analytics, it’s fairly straightforward, you just need to click add a website profile.  You can add as many website profiles in a Google analytics account as you wish, and each one of those could be for a different site sitting on the same domain as another site, or different domains.

So if we click on add a website profiles here just to show you how to do this, we either add a profile for a new domain or an existing domain.  I’m going to come up with a dummy domain here, we’ll call it domain.com.  Pick a time zone and a country and click Finish.  Google analytics will then setup the profile, and give you some code that you can use to paste into your site.  Every profile has a unique Google analytics ID, which separates that profile from any other site that you might be tracking.

Now the basic principle behind Google Analytics is it will track traffic for any page that has this code sitting on it.  In the 30 day challenge we’re going to be using blogs as the main thing, and the blogs that we’re having have a default plugin which means that we only really need to use the UID here.  But if you’re wishing to track traffic to a static website, something you may have coded or had somebody else code for you, not a blog, the way you set up Google analytics is to copy this code here and paste it into every page on your site that you want tracked, and you would paste it into the position on the page immediately above the closing body tag of your web page.  So you would paste this into every site that you want tracked.  Very straightforward.

Having pasted the code onto those pages, we need to make sure that Google analytics has recognized that code exists, and the way I do that is to go to the profile that I’ve just set up, click on the edit button, and up here in the top right corner there’s a “check status” which will cause Google analytics to check whether it can find any pages on your site which have that code pasted in.

There’s no good me clicking that here, because I don’t have a domain domain.com, but that’s how we would do it to check that everything’s ok.

Now when Google analytics recognizes the code, you will see a check box here next to your site, under the status column.  All right, I’m just going to delete that profile that I’ve set up because it’s not going to be any use to me in this account.  And let’s go and have a look at Google analytics for the vintage electric guitar blog.

Two ways of accessing that, either click on the view report link, or you can select the dropdown box here if you’ve got multiple websites installed in your Google analytics account.

The first page you’ll come to is a dashboard, which is a brief summary of some of the useful tracking information that Google analytics is tracking for your account.  Now, the first time you log in, it is going to give you information for the past 30 days.  See may 22 to June 21, you can click on the down arrow there to change the time period, for which Google analytics displays data.

At the very top of the dashboard display you’ll see the number of visits by day to your site, you can see the blog is getting somewhere between 30 and 80 searches a day over the last 30 days.  Then a summary of visits per 30 days, page views, number of pages that people view per visit, the bounce rate, average time on the site, and the percentage of traffic that represents new visits, as distinct from returning visitors.

The bounce rate, for those that don’t know is the percentage of people that come to your site and then leave immediately going either by clicking the back button, closing the window, or clicking to a link and leaving the site going to another website.

Obviously bounce rate should be somewhat indicative of the nature of the site you have.  If you’ve got an affiliate review site, then you’d expect the bounce rate to be high, because you want to get the traffic off your site as quickly as possible, and off to another site where the visitor can either buy or find out more information about the affiliate product you’re promoting.

But if you’ve got a community site or some sort of information site, where you hope to retain that visitor for the longest period of time, you want those bounce rates to be lower, and preferably as low as possible.  So you’re going to be monitoring your bounce rate as an indication of how well the site is performing relative to the site’s purpose.

This is the overview here, which is somewhat the same as the information displayed at the top.  A map overlay showing the principal areas where the traffic is coming from.  Summary of where that traffic is coming from, either it’s being referring site, other website, search engines, or direct traffic.  And then an indication here of the top four or five pages on that domain that people are visiting.

So that’s just a brief summary page.

Now, to get more specific information about all these things, we’d click on the links on the left hand side, and you can see there are four main links, visitors, traffic sources, content and goals.

We’re not going to be going much into goals today, let it be said though that you can set up tracking goals for your website which Google analytics then monitors relative to the actual traffic you’re receiving.

There’s also some quite expensive custom reporting functionality, if there’s some very arcane thing you want to find out about your site, then you can set up custom reports to deliver that.

But let’s have a look at the first three links here.

First we’ll click on the visitors link.  And the goal of this part of Google analytics is to sort of get a sense of the type and the nature of visitors that are coming to your site.  Both in terms of numbers and their demographic breakdown.  You can see a little bit more information about the quantity of visitors and so forth and how long they spend on the site.  Down at the bottom here we can see the type of browsers that the visitors are tending to use.  We’ve got a high proportion of FireFox users.  If I click on the view full report, it would show more the detailed list of the breakdown of different browsers.  Similarly we can get a sense of the nature of their connection speeds of the users.

We can also get a breakdown of the proportion of new vs. returning visitors, what languages, which is first of all what country are they coming from.  There’s of course much more detailed map overlay here, where we can get a breakdown of traffic per country, in terms of the number of visitors, pages per visit and so forth.  Very detailed, and if I showed more rows here I would get a breakdown all the way down to the finest and smallest number of clicks.  So that’s visitors.

If we go on to traffic sources, we can get a more specific breakdown of exactly where traffic is coming from, which search engines, which websites, and so forth.  And more importantly here, we can get a full report of which key words people are entering into the search engines from which they find a link to our site and click through to the site.

Naturally the blog is about vintage electric guitars, so indeed we’re having some success here, because the bulk of our traffic is coming, at least as far as the search engine is concerned, from people searching on the key phrase vintage electric guitar.  But there are other semantic key phrases that people are searching on, where they’re also finding a link to our site.  Like antique guitars, guitar blog, Gibson falcon, and so forth.

Now, the value in actually monitoring the keywords that people are using to find their way to your site via the search engines is that if the search engines are already sending you traffic for a particular key word but you don’t have any optimized content on your site for that keyword, then if you were to go publish some optimized content for a key word then Google and yahoo and so forth are probably going to give you a better ranking for that key word, and if they’re already sending you traffic now, with the better ranking they will send you more traffic.  So monitoring your keyword term list in Google analytics is a way of giving you suggestions for things you might want to publish content on to get more traffic.

So that’s traffic sources.

If we go into the content area of the site, we can get a sense of what are the most popular pages on the site that are receiving traffic, but we can also get an indication of how people are navigating the site, through the navigation analysis, where people are entering the site, and where they’re leaving the site and so forth.  So this here is a way of optimizing the success of your site navigation and traffic management once people come to your site.

So I hope you can see that Google analytics offers a tremendous amount of information that helps you not only manage the development of your site and the evolution of the site, but also allows you to help you optimize new content for the site, but also assess how efficient you’ve been in getting ranking and traffic for content that is already on the site.

You track the site to learn about what’s happening so that you can then manage your site more effectively to get better rankings and more traffic as time goes by.  That’s the purpose.

Well that’s a brief overview of Google analytics.  We will be using Google analytics in the 30 day challenge in relation to the blog we’ll be asking you to set up.  But we’ll be doing that via a plugin that will be a little easier to set it up.  If you don’t have a website, or if you have a static website and you’re not tracking, then I highly suggest you consider using Google analytics, it’s very easy to do, and it offers tremendous insight in the type and nature of the traffic that your websites are receiving.

Also on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c6GpHk1yr8

K, and we’re back.  And we’ve currently got your Facebook all set up, but the trouble is, your page is probably looking a little bit blank at the moment.  We need to get you some friends.

Now, the important thing about friends, particularly on Facebook, is that they’re people you know, and that you’ve met personally.  I don’t put in, and please don’t take offense at this, but particularly with Facebook with my private profile like you’re looking at here, I don’t accept any friend invitations unless I really really know the person personally, like in real life.  I just wouldn’t do that.  And I really highly recommend that you don’t either, because it really does ruin the Facebook experience.

There is another way, if you’re interested in following me, and what I’m up to, and I’d love to see you there, and it’s specifically designed by Facebook for that purpose and that’s a fan page.  But I’ll show you that a bit later on.

Right at this stage I want to focus on you and find you some friends.  So if you go and click on the friends tab here, and funnily enough we go to invite friends.  Now, you can see here you’ve got the ability for Facebook to go and check out your mail and see if that matches up with anybody who is in your mail in Facebook.  I personally wouldn’t do that.  I don’t like the idea of it at all.  I really don’t.  So what I would do as a different way instead of doing invite friends, I would find friends.  Because at the moment we’re just testing the waters, I really don’t want you to stress about Facebook at all.  We’re going to show you some amazing things to do.  But I really really want you to just take it very very slowly.

So, the best thing, and we don’t want to use this find people by email, ok.  We don’t want to use that.  There’s sometimes some suggestions but they’re not going to be that particularly useful for you I don’t think if you’re just starting out.  And I wouldn’t use your IM list at this point.  We just don’t want to do that.  Now, you can see here, and this is cool, because I’ve filled out my profile, it asks to see if there are any classmates from the University of Melbourne from 1998.  Which is not when I was there, I was there in ‘88.  I must have typed that in wrong, oops.  Or, I could find former high school classmates.  And this is what I want you to do.  I want you to go and find, now unfortunately because I went to the tiniest school in human history, I don’t think it comes up.  But I bet you your school does.  Yeah, see unfortunately my school doesn’t.  But you, like if we went to Beech High School here in Tennessee, and we were there in the class of ’87, and we search for classmates, we’d see if there was anybody there who was on Facebook.  And I think you’d be pretty amazed, you can search by name, you can do all these different things, but I reckon the coolest way to see how Facebook really works is to find an old friend that you haven’t kept in touch with for a long time.  And look at all these people who are Beech High 1987 graduates.  Which is very very cool.  So I would really recommend you do that, because I think it’s a really really cool way to get introduced to Facebook, because the cool thing that Facebook does I think, and let’s go back to my home page to see it.  All of my friends, all of these people that I’d like to keep track of because I know them personally.  Like Eugene there, Eugene and I went buying iPhone 3GSs this morning.  Facebook keeps you in touch with people who you may not have seen for months or years or not in regular phone contact.  But you keep in touch which is really really fascinating, and it really works.  And that’s why, particularly at the moment I want t encourage you guys to really use Facebook for friends purposes.  Experience Facebook like a real person, not like an internet marketer.  And you‘ll really start to get the flavor of why Facebook is so cool.  Because imagine if you’re keeping track of all your high school buddies, and it’s fantastic any time they do an update, bang, it’s popped up here, and it’s Michelle Trent.  So there you have it.

That, I think is a great feature.

Now, if you want to see what I’m up to, basically what we need to do is, and I’ll just type in this the easiest way, if you type in www.tubbynerd.com/facebook, this is my fan page.  Now, this is fantastic, if you come to this fan page, click on become a fan, and you can see, particularly if you’re a much more a Facebook person and you tend to stick a lot of time in Facebook, then this is a great way to follow along.

Remember, this year in the 30dc, it’s not released yet but it will be soon, we have the 30dc completely run in Facebook with a special new Facebook application.  It’s very exiting, it’s a first for internet marketing.  and we’re really really really excited about it.

So here, if you come to this page you can literally click ‘become a fan’, now fan pages are a fantastic way to keep track of people that you’re interested in as a fan, or sometimes people find the word fan a bit funny because they’re not necessarily a fan, they’re interested or whatever, but anyway that’s the term Facebook uses.  And for example I am a fan of John Mayer, and I’m a fan of MasterChef, and a couple of other bits and pieces as well.  Signet Mae for example, the band.  Fans of them as well.  And what’s cool about fan pages is you can send and update to your fans, and we’ll be talking about fan pages when we start talking about marketing your online business.  But for now, you might want to check out a couple of fan pages to follow.  Which is the perfect thing for this sort of stuff.  So check that out as well.

Okay, so we’ve got friends, and we’ve got some fan pages, which is fantastic.  Next I’m going to show you how to put all this into Seesmic, so that we can track everything from one spot, which is super duper cool.  It makes things so much better and easier.  All right folks, speak to you soon.

Also on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5kNj61dxs

Hey everybody, Ed here, welcome back to preseason and we’re going to talk to you a little bit today about Facebook.  Now, like Twitter, we’re going to take it nice and easy. Facebook has extraordinary opportunities and possibilities with the 30 Day Challenge, but it’s much better done if you take it a little bit at a time.  We don’t want to overwhelm you at this point.

So what we’re going to do today is show you how to get yourself an account, which is very very simple. And then I’m going to show you using mine, which has got a few people on it, the major functions of Facebook.  And then at the end I just want to show you how you can search for a friend and we’re going to talk about that.  But again, keep it nice and easy.  Now remember one of the benefits for signing up and having a Facebook account is you can use that same account to log in to the 30 Day Challenge, leave comments at the blog, and of course you can also leave comments in the forum using your Facebook profile, and which is very exciting, and we’ll show you this later on, you’ll be able to use the 30 Day Challenge completely inside of Facebook.  Yes, that’s right folks, this year for the first time ever, there will be a complete Facebook version of the 30 Day Challenge.  So you don’t even have to leave Facebook if you don’t want to.

So, first up, lets sign up.  And you can see here it’s really hard, because you literally type in your name, your email, a password, put in your sex, month day and year, and hit sign up.  Pretty simple.

Now, I’m not going to show you an example of this, and after you put in this information it also asks you to add some more profile information.  I’m not going to do that because Facebook are very strict about making sure that you only have one Facebook profile.  Their terms of service are very clear that you can’t have multiple identities.  Unlike twitter where it makes a lot of sense to have your own personal twitter account and maybe one for your niche.  On Facebook, at this point, and we’ll show you where to do things for your marketing in your niche later, but at this point, Facebook is all about you.  It’s just your personal self, regardless of your market.

Okay.  So let’s jump in, I’m just going to log in now onto my account and show you some of the key features.

Okay, now I don’t have many, like on twitter, I have a very very significant policy which is only, and this even more important I think in Facebook than in Twitter, please please please only follow people that you really really truly know, or like me, for example, I am a fan of the MasterChef page, but I’ll explain what that is in a minute.

So let’s navigate you around this screen.  First of all, you’ve got your Facebook link, and if you ever need to go to Facebook home, that’s how you click it, you’ve got your home link which will take you here, your profile, which is all about you, your friends, where you control your friends and add friends, and your inbox which is just like a mail box.

Actually let’s go through this, this is obviously you, it’s Ed Dale, here is the settings where you can change all your account settings, privacy settings, and application settings.  I encourage you to go through and look at each one of these and add details where necessary.  And in particular pay attention to the privacy settings in Facebook, and make sure you set those to where you’re comfortable with them.  Okay?  So make sure you go in there and have a look.  Facebook is really really protective.  One of the reasons it’s gone so massive is it’s really really protective of your privacy.  You only publish information to people you have specifically given permission to.  So it’s important that you look at your privacy settings and make sure you’re absolutely comfortable.  Because just recently Facebook have changed their policy where as before they used to turn all the privacy settings completely on, now what they do is that they have all privacy off so all of your information is public until you suggest that it is private.  So please, make sure you check your privacy settings.  Okay?

And we’re not going to talk about these now, but when you start adding applications, like the 30 Day Challenge application, you can play with your application settings there.

Of course if you’re sharing a computer you can also log out.

Now, down the right hand side, I’m not going to dwell too much on this bit, you can see there are friend requests, Facebook throw up suggestions, there are ads, there are highlights there, which are based on your friends, and you have the ability to invite friends to join Facebook.

Now on the left hand side, you have the news feed, which is the major feed here.  It’s what you can see here.  Now this is really the heart of the news feed, and I just refreshed mine there.  Okay, now this is all of, if I’ve just got this news feed highlighted, it’s everybody I’m friends with, regardless of the relationship I have with them.  So pro blogger here Darren Rowse, and Harlan Kilstein, Master Chef who I’m a fan, it’s my favorite TV show, good old Jonathan Gunson, and so on and so forth.  So this is a feed with what all my friends on Facebook are doing, and it has their comments, what they’re up to.  If I like the article I can show, I can click ‘like’, and it’s very important in Facebook that if you do like something that somebody said, make sure you do hit the ‘like’ button.  Just like I did then.  Because that’s the whole interactivity of Facebook is about that.  If you want to make a comment, then feel free to make a comment.  So you can write a comment there and hit ‘comment’ for example.  This happens in real time, this news feed, but it doesn’t refresh automatically.  You have to click on the ‘show new posts’ to do that.  So, and there’s good old Dr. Mani.

Now what I’ve done here, which is very interesting, is you can divide up your friends in… there’s my god-daughter.  It’s a lovely photo, it’s a nice haircut actually.  You can see all my family, and you can also see I’ve also got all my marketing homies, so I’ve divided up.. this is really really cool because you can quickly see the family stuff and, say work colleagues, or however you want, high school friends, you can divide this up any way you like.

You can also for example choose just photos that people have put up for example.  And so here’s a whole bunch of photos of my friends, which is fantastic.  And we can see status updates, which are a bit like twitter updates, but you’ve of course got the ability to comment and like them.

So this is really the engine around which Facebook is built.  It’ where you come, this is the information you get.  Now, what’s super super duper cool is that we can actually get all of this information into Seesmic Desktop.  That’s right, our twitter client.  So we can have all our Facebook and our twitter stuff all in the one spot.  But folks as we say, all in good time.

So that’s a basic description of what happens with Facebook.  In the next video we’re going to come back and I’m going to give you a little exercise to try and to try to give you a good excuse to show you how cool Facebook is.  All right.  We’ll speak to you soon.

And on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4plsHMQOKw

Hey, that wasn’t too bad was it.  What a cool tool.  And if you set it up so it’s just sitting there in the corner, you’ll be able to check in, and of course as soon as we give you an update in terms of the 30 day challenge, and remember, the fastest way to get any information about the 30 day challenge will be through our twitter feed, then it makes it simple, and you don’t have to go off and check somewhere else.  And we’re going to come back, and we’ll do a separate setup on Facebook after we’ve shown you how to do and use Facebook in preseason.

Now the next thing we’re going to do in this video is show you some of the more advanced features of Seesmic.  Not tricky, but just advanced features.  In particular, search, we’re going to show you how to set up a search.  We’re going to show you some cool hashtag action, and you’re going “what’s a hashtag? that sounds vaguely rude” don’t worry, it’s not, we’re going to show you exactly what that means and how you can really use it very well for the 30 day challenge.  And a couple of other cool features.

I should point out, in the pre-season videos, we’re not going to teach you the marketing strategies of these tools, because that’s what the 30 day challenge is for.  We’re going to teach you how to use them and get you nice and comfortable with them, so when we get to the marketing stuff inside the 30 day challenge, then that’s what you need to know.

I should also say at this point, with Twitter, is that I don’t view twitter as a platform to make money with.  I view it as a platform to communicate with the market that you’re trying to communicate with.  And it’s a very very important distinction.  I won’t go into it now, but I just want to put that out there.  I think if you went on and you tried to sell stuff on Twitter, you would have a very limited future in Twitter.  You wouldn’t have many followers for very long.  So, we’re going to teach you about the marketing stuff inside the 30 day challenge, because Twitter I believe is a key tool in being able to understand your market and ultimately become a leader in your market as well.

So with that, let’s check out some of the advanced functions of Seesmic and Twitter.

Oh and of course, don’t forget, I almost did, all the support materials, resources, links, transcripts, everything is available at www.thirtydaychallenge.com.  And you can get all the support material, there’s awesome forums there, there’s everything.  So make sure you go and check that out.  So we’ll speak soon.  Have fun.

Welcome back and in our final video for now — we’ll definitely be coming back to Seesmic Desktop and of course Twitter in the 30 day challenge — but just to get you going and keep you learning, I wanted to show you a couple of the more slightly advance features.  Basically the way you can communicate with people.  So were back here in our eddalesstrat account, which is very cool.  And you can see, for example, there are some messages, there’s another one from me that I’ve put up.  And you can see here’s the one with the URL in it, and for example this is the twitpic we’ve put in before.  if I click on that, a browser will open up.  There we are.  Charming.  14 people have already viewed that.  Very impressive.

And you can also see, and I’m going to show you how to do this a bit later on, there’s some other links that I’ve done to other cool stuff for example, so you can just click on that and up it will plop, and your browser will fire up, which is very very cool.

Okay, so say we’ve got a tweet in here from me.  Okay, this is a very cool tweet actually.  This was the thing I wanted to point out about this is not necessarily the photography, although the photographer Joe McNally is amazing, but far more importantly is that he’s a guy who knows how to lead a market.  We’ll be hearing a lot more about Joe soon, but I love the way he describes in this article how he takes these photos, and what I wanted to show you is something you might recognize from my playbook, is his fantastic diagrams of how this all worked.  Which is just absolutely fantastico.  And we’ll see much more of this, but it’s just brilliant.  If you’re a photographer you should check out this Joe McNally blog.

Anywho, if I think wow, that’s something that I’m interested in communicating about, I have a few options.  Let’s hover over Ed Dale’s head and have a look.  The first one is, if I want Ed to know how appreciative I am about getting that, I can click the @, up pops Ed_Dale, which is very very cool.  And we’ve got that there, and I can type a message.  Very good.  And I can click send, and off that message goes to Ed_Dale, and Ed_Dale hopefully will get it.  And he might even respond.

Now if I wanted to send a private message to Ed, you have to click the direct button.  Now a thing about the private messages is that the person you are sending to has to follow you in order for you to be able to receive them, if that makes sense.  Which means that unfortunately sending a direct message to me is usually not an option because I am probably out of most odds not following you.  But an @message will do just fine, and if there’s something you want to speak privately about, just @ me and I’ll send you an email that you can send that to.  But I find the direct feature very good amongst working with teams.  And I use it for my teams because it also sends me an email as well, so I absolutely make sure I cover everybody from every which way, which is just brilliant.  So I do like the good old direct message for teamwork, and you might want to implement it for teams.

Another really cool thing, let me just delete this out, is if I’m hovering over this and I hit this little double-triangle here, that is the retweet button, in other words, so it puts the RT in front, retweet, you might have seen this, and you can see @Ed_Dale: Learning effective twittering from Ed Dale’s splendid YouTube videos .  Ed when you’re in Vermont, come have a.. and there’s the rest of the link.  And you can see here, see this gray section?  Unfortunately the post is too long.  Now if I was retweeting, it’s usually very important to credit where you retweet from, so we need to leave Ed_Dale in, but usually just doing a little bit of editing is fine.  So for example remember I talked about the shrinking text.  Let’s see how this will work, that’s worked  a little bit, not a lot though, you can see it’s turned the “you’re” to “U’re” in the tweeting texting perspective, but we can edit that out and just make sure it’s less than 140 characters which is very cool.  And so you can retweet.  That’s often a really interesting thing to do when you’re in your market.  Again, we’ll explain the functions of this when we get to the appropriate point in the challenge.

Now, finally, there’s a bunch of admin functions.  You can Favor the item, you can report it as spam, if you see somebody that’s sending, heaven forbid, Nigerian loan scams or something.  Again, I don’t have a problem with spam at all, because I only follow people I know.  It’s that simple.  If I don’t know them, I won’t follow them, and so I never have a spam issue because nobody I know and who I want to follow would bother spamming, so it makes sense.  People only ever have spam problems in twitter when they follow every Tom, Dick, and Harry when they don’t even know who they are.  Very cool to speed up creating groups is adding to userlists, again probably not something you have to worry about now, but down the track it might be useful.

Now Follow and Unfollow, and you’re going “well, follow, that seems strange,” I’ll show you where that’s really useful in a tick.  And then there’s unfollow, which is, if I’m annoying you, you click that, and you’re unfollowed.  That’s definitely what you want to do.  If somebody is being totally offensive to you, and again this is not going to happen if you follow only people who you know.  But if you need to, maybe one of your friends goes feral, who knows, you can block these and you’ll never ever hear or see anything of them ever again.

So the thing I like about Twitter is it puts all the power in your hand. You choose what messaging you want to receive, when you want to receive it, and so on, and using Seesmic Desktop makes that really useful.

Now, there’s one final thing I want to show you here which is the search function which is really really fantastic.  And it’s something you can play around with right now, and I think, again, if people showed people how to search properly, that would be so cool.  So for example here I just typed in kickboxing just for kicks.  But this is to show you how important twitter is, kickboxing, you’d hardly think that’s mainstream, right?  Check this out, 3 minutes ago, 33 minutes ago, 36 minutes ago,

For the piece de resistance, the final part of this twitter section for now, I want to show you hashtags.  And in particular I want to show you the 30 day challenge hashtag.  So what I’m going to do is just do a search, now the hash, some people call it the pound key, depending on where you are from, and what part of the world you’re from, but that hash (#), which is under the 9 key on most telephones around the globe.  It’s a little hash or pound, depending where you’re from, and the official hash tag for the 30 day challenge is #30dc.  So any time I do a post that’s related to the 30 day challenge, I put this little #30dc at the end.  So I’m going to switch back to my own account.  here we’ll go back to Ed_Dale here, and then I am going to do a tweet, which I’m going to set back to my Ed_Dale account here, and going to tweet there.  And I’m going to say, so I’ve typed that out, and you can see I’ve added the little #30dc at the end of my tweet.  And I’m going to hit send.

Now, if I switch back to good old, my eddalesstrat, and this is what you would see.  Now it hasn’t refreshed out as yet, and that will in a second.  In fact, I didn’t show you these, you can hit the refresh button to refresh the timeline, and look, there we are, or we can delete or clear the timeline, in other words delete all these posts, because Seesmic acts a little bit as a database for you and it stores these tweets.  You can also detach the column so that you can have multiple columns.  I haven’t shown you that feature yet because I want you to be very careful about it initially because it can get so overwhelming.  That’s what it is.  First of all, you can see any time you’ve got #30dc, you can click on this, check this out.  There is a twitter search of everybody who’s talking about the thirty day challenge.  And they’ve got the #30dc as a hash tag.  So it goes through and searches, so it makes it really easy to search for anybody who is talking about the 30 day challenge.

So you can have this running permanently on your desktop and every time you open up Seesmic you can have it working beautifully, and you can do searches, and you can have these searches going permanently on anything, and that is a really really super powerful part of the whole business, which I think is fabulous.  So you really want to check that out.  I love it.  I think it’s great.  And we’re going to show you how to use that to devastating effect within the 30 day challenge when we’re seeking to understand a market.

I should also emphasize that remember, you don’t need to do any other setup inside of Seesmic because all of your usernames are already set up, so everyone that you’re following from the first couple of tutorials is already here inside of Seesmic which is very cool, and if you see someone who is interesting, you can for example the amazing 30 day challenge is here, signetmae, you can click on that link and click follow, and you’ll be able to follow.

But again, please try not to follow too many people at the moment, otherwise you will get overwhelmed.  Alright, that’s it for Seesmic Desktop for now.  We’ll be visiting our little friend often in pre-season and in the 30 day challenge itself.  It’s a wonderful  tool and I think it’s really cool.

So there you have it.  There’s Twitter 101.  Speak soon.

And on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-N5ULNEsoo

See that wasn’t too bad, was it?  Keeping it nice and simple.  But if you had to go and check twitter out on this web page it would mean that it’s just another web page that you have to go to, to check things out in the morning, to check the email, to check the reader, and you check all these different things, and gosh here’s another thing I have to check?  Which is a big reason why people don’t stick with Twitter.  Which, as I said in the past videos is an absolute tragedy.  So, I want to introduce you to the tool that we’re going to recommend to people doing the 30 day challenge use.  It’s an interesting selection because power-users of twitter would use a tool called TweetDeck indeed in 30 day challenge plus, will teach people how to use TweetDeck.  But I’ve got to say, for you starting out now, it’s not the right tool.  It’s too complex.  So the tool we’re going to show you, and it’s a superb one, is called Seesmic Desktop.  And there are two reasons we’ve chosen Seesmic.

One, is in terms of screen real estate.  It just uses one column, which is fantastic, okay?  So it just uses one column, you can have it sitting off on the side of the screen, or minimized and you can just pop it up, so it can just be sitting off there.

The second huge reason, is it integrates beautifully with Facebook.  So it kills two birds, pardon the pun, with one stone.  you’re going to be able to do your Twitter stuff, plus, and if you’re not on Facebook yet, but we’re going to show you on preseason all about that, you’ll also be able to get comment and like on your Facebook stuff, which is so important as well, and the cool thing about that of course is it’s one tool , so you don’t have to go to Facebook, you don’t have to go to Twitter.  You can do it just all in this one desktop, and there’s a lot of powerful stuff in there too, but we’ll save that.

let’s go over the basics, let’s download Seesmic, it’s completely cross-platform, which is awesome, it’s build on the Adobe Air platform, the same platform Market Samurai is built on, so it means Linux, Max, PC, whatever, it does not matter, which is very cool.

So, go and check it out, and as always, remember, high definition down there, you can watch this video in high definition, and don’t forget all the support materials, training, transcripts, and everything else are available at www.thirtydaychallenge.com.  Let’s go check out Seesmic Desktop.

Hi everybody and welcome back to this next video in the Twitter series.  Now guys I’ve been telling you that the most important part of making sure you’re not one of the 50 to 60 percent of people who drop off twitter inside a month, is to show you the right tools to use during the 30 day challenge, and of course beyond.

Now, we have been doing an extraordinary amount of testing of all sorts of different tools, and for the 30 day challenge purposes, and particularly if you’re new to twitter, we feel that Seesmic Desktop here is the best option.  And I’m going to show you why, but of course before I can show you why, I have to show you how to install it.  And the good news is that it’s super sweet to install because it’s an Adobe Air app.

So all we have to do first of all, I should point out that the URL is http://desktop.seesmic.com/, so there we are, that is the URL that you need to go to.  And once you’re here you’ll see this page, you may want to enter your name and email address to get any information.  I have, and they’re very good about it, and it’s nice to be kept in touch.  And all you have to do.. you can see it’s available for Mac and PC, all you have to do is click Install Now.  Check this out.  There we are.  Now, would you like to open or save this file? I’ll open it, because we’re going to go straight away.

Okay, so you’ll see an install box here, and what we want to do is click install.  I always put it in the default area, which happens to be /Applications on this machine.  Click Continue.  And you’ll get some sort of warning on the Macintosh, we get this one, very clever.  So we click open.  All we have to do is add our Twitter account.  And so, all we need to do, if you remember, eddalesstrat, and click add.  Now I have to put in the password, want to save that password, retweet RT is a good idea.  Enable notifications we definitely want to do.  I would leave all of this below, we can leave all of this stuff later, don’t worry about this now, it’s fine for you.  It’s only when you become a power user does that become an issue.  On the eddalesstrat, and you can see here’s my updates, remember we added myself, and you can see somebody here has added @eddalesstrat, so I’ve got that @eddalesstrat message, here’s a message from GuruBob.  And there’s a couple of tweets from people.  And there you have it, we’re set up and we’re ready to go.  So what I want to do is show you how to operate Seesmic in this basic window, so this small window, because the idea is to just keep it nice and out of the way.

You can manage multiple accounts with Seesmic, which is great.  I’m not going to show you how to do that now, because I want to keep this super simple.  Twitter is absolutely vital to your marketing efforts, and if we don’t keep it super simple for you, you’re going to be one of the 50 to 60 percent who drop out, and that will be a crying shame.  That will go a long way to ruining your chances for success in the marketplace.  Yes, I think Twitter is that serious.  So let’s try to keep it nice and simple to start off.

Okay, so let’s have a look at what we see when we come up with our desktop.  First of all you can see a whole bunch of tweets in here, and we’ll go and explain those tweets.  First I want to show you here, the various sections, you can see there’s home, and that is all of the accounts.  That will show you all of the accounts.  So when you’ve got multiple accounts, you’ll see here I’ve got Facebook, again we’ll show you Facebook later, one of the key features we choose Seesmic is because you integrate Twitter and Facebook into the one client, which I just love.  So if we click Home, that will show you all of these columns. At the moment, if you click home and you’ve just got the one account, which is what you should have, then you’ll just see whatever it is, in my case eddalesstrat, you’ll be able to see @replies, private messages, when people send you direct messages, again I’ll explain all that shortly, and sent messages.  And as I say, it does have the capability of multiple accounts.  It also has a function called userlists.  This can be handy when you’re following a few people and you want to, say, divide it up into work, colleagues, and all that sort of thing.  Again, not something I‘m going to show you today, because again we want to start small.  But for those of you who are following a lot of people and you want to create groups, that’s how you’ll do it.

Now when we’re posting, it’s literally as simple as just adding a text, and pressing the Send button.  And that’s all we have to do.  And for example if we go to eddalesstrat, there we are, we can se we have just added the post, which is very cool.

We can add a link, by adding “add URL” so if we want to attach, we can copy that in, you can also shorten that by using all these different shortening url services.  So rather than having a big huge long URL, you can have a nice, short one.  So use whatever you like there, you can also add an image to your post, which is really cool.  You can drag and drop there, we can open up the web cam for example.  There we are.  And there’s a whole bunch of services there, some may use different ones, twitpic works just fine, we can click OK.  And we can type, now “this is me recording live!” Click send, and up it pops.  You can see, there we are.  Which is very very cool indeed.  You can also shrink the text, to help you shorten the words, and it uses like texting language if you’ve seen that.  You know, BTW – by the way, 4U, rather than “for you” etc.  You can do that.  Of course, one of the key things I should point out with Twitter of course is you have 140 characters, so it really does work like a text message.  Again, you can post to your various accounts by selecting one of these.  At the moment you’ll probably have only one.  Later on we’ll add your Facebook, and you may indeed go multiple accounts when you have a niche, but again we’ll cover that at a later date.  So you can choose where to post, which is very cool as well.

So, that’s the basic operations.  When we come back in the next video, I want to show you some of the cool extra stuff that you can do with all of this.  All right.  We’ll speak soon.

Also on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_r0GrIinZw

Welcome back to this part 2 of our Twitter series, and straight into it, I’m going to show you how the Twitter home page works.  I’ve got to admit, I’m going to be pretty quick here, because I don’t think this is the best way to follow your tweets.  Okay?  I think this is sort of an emergency version if you happen to be somewhere but it’s the most think most people see so I did want to explain what was going on here.

Okay, first of all, in our profile section, and we’ll click on the profile section up here, we can see there’s my eddalestrat and you can click that you can add a photo.  You really should add a photo.  Very, very important I believe to add a picture, and I think a real photo is much much better than an icon or something along those lines.  So certainly do upload one of those. Now account, and this is important because this is a good one for you to see.  You can see you can enter your real name, the username, which is eddalestrat, which gives you your URL which is very important, because you can refer people to that, and in fact you can use this url in your signature for the 30 day challenge forums, as a way for people to find you.  Obviously your email, and you should set your time zone to wherever you happen to be.  And we’ll fix that to Melbourne.  And if you’ve got a url or a blog then I’d definitely suggest that.  We’ll put in thirtydaychallenge.  And then a one line bio.  Wow, one line bio, so feel free to fill that out too.  And you can put location.  Some of the cool apps let you set your location automatically, which is pretty spiffy as well.  Choose your language of course.

Now, protect my updates is interesting, I don’t do it for my public sort of things.  “Only let people whom I approve follow my updates.  If this is checked, you will not be on the public timeline.  Updates posted previously may still be publicly visible in some places.”

This is if you don’t want anybody to see what you’re doing except people you have approved to follow.  And for some people that might be quite useful.  From a marketing perspective, for a marketing version, you certainly wouldn’t want to do that, however for private stuff you may well want to do that as well.  So we hit Save.

Okay, so we’ve got all of that saved, obviously password section.  Devices, you can set up your mobile phone, and again, I would leave this alone for now.  It’s very cool once you’re up and running, but for starters let’s leave that alone.  Now, you can get notices, you can get Twitter to send you an email if you haven’t been updated in 24 hours, email when someone starts following, not a bad idea, email when I receive new direct message, which is quite useful, and yeah, email me when newsletters are there, which is fantastic, and again you can see your picture.  And you can choose a theme for your particular profile, or indeed you can upload your own, but hey, let’s leave that for the moment.  Well, why don’t we?  This looks lovely.  Oh, that’s  bit bright for my liking.  There we are.  Very good.  Okay, so that’s the profile, thank you very much Twitter, lovely.

All right, and we’re done.  So let’s head out you can see you find people, find on Twitter and you just type in a search to find other people.  On other networks, and that’s like your gmail, AOL and Yahoo, again I’d stay away from that personally.  You can invite someone you know via email, which is not a bad idea, and of course there are other suggested users but I would honestly stay right away from that unless there’s someone who specifically you’re interested in.  If there’s a celebrity, you know, that you really really like, like I follow John Mayer for example, is one example, so there’s that.

Okay, our settings, which we’ve already seen, there’s a help function of course, and sign out, but let’s go back Home.

Okay, you can see that here we are, where following we’ve got three following, and we also have three followers.  Fascinating.  I’ve done this, nobody knows about this account whatsoever, and this is just to prove a point.  So there we go.  And what else have we got here?  Let’s have a look.  Please don’t get hung up about how many people are following you, it’s so schoolyard.  It doesn’t matter how many people are following you.  Particularly at this point.  We just want to use it.

Now, this is an important one.  This is what we call @messages.  Now on Twitter, the @message, if you put @ and for example if you were to type, and I’ll show you this in the window, “@Ed_Dale”, and submit, that is going to go directly to me.  And only people who are following.. the only people who will see that is myself, and if someone was following both me and eddalestrat if that makes sense would see that.  So it’s a great way of seeing somebody and one of the best things about Twitter, then you can send them a message and you know at least they’ll see it.  Because for example if somebody had sent eddalestrat a message, in fact I might just go do that now.  There we go, and we’ve got a message, so somebody sends us a message, and this is great, one of the real strengths of Twitter, is it’s really democratizing, if there is such a word, because just being able to have a look and know for a fact that somebody, anybody who’s on Twitter will at least see your message is a very powerful thing.  I love that.

Now, we can do some cool things here with search, and we’ll be coming back to this in a big big way when we go through the marketing stage of the 30 day challenge.

But you can see here, as I do this, the big trending messages are Kobe, I think the Lakers might have wrapped up the NBA championship.  obviously the Iran election is very popular at the moment.  This is really interesting.  This is sort of like a way of getting flashing news, it’s really really cool.  But what I’d encourage you to do with this search box just for a bit of fun, is type something in that you’re really really interested in, like a hobby or something.  For example I might choose, Leica camera.  And if we click search, check this out. 12 minutes ago, somebody wrote something about Leica, 32 minutes ago, 41 minutes ago, an hour ago, about an hour, about two hours…  Leica is not exactly a big huge deal, anywhere.  It’s a very niche camera, but look at all these people on Twitter talking about Leica.  So check it out, and we’re going to use this function a lot when we come to our marketing, but for now, you can just follow it.  And it’s very interesting when there’s a news event, or something like that, just to be able to search and see what people are saying in real time.  It’s one of the really powerful things about Twitter.  Okay.

So we’re going back to our home screen. There is an RSS feed, and don’t worry if you know nothing about what that is, but that is very important.  And in pre-season we’re going to teach you how to use an RSS feed, and it’s going to change the way you use the internet.  We’re going to do that with the amazing Google reader.  But for now, don’t worry about it, we’ll check back with you.

So that’s the home page, and that’s the Twitter page if you will.  Don’t fret too much about it, it’s a bit of a backstop, because we’re going to show you some cool tools you should be using which do the job and make Twittering really really powerful and really really pleasurable and most importantly I think, really really controllable.  So, come back, and join us.  All right, speak soon.