Here are the steps on How to put a video on your website:

1. Login to your account on www.youtube.com
2. Upload your video
3. When viewing your video on youtube, on the right hand side, copy the embeded code. You can first click on the small gear icon next to it to change some of the formatting such as size, colors, etc
4. In your wordpress (or website editor of your choice) post, click on the HTML tab and paste the embeded code there.
5. When you switch back to the vidual tab in wordpress it will just show a box with an f (for flash) in the middle. This is correct.
6. Click preview or publish to see the results

Additional Tip: If you want the video to play automatically rather than having someone click on it to view it, then add this syntax at the end of your hyperlink: &autoplay=1

To shut off the autoplay use a zer0 or this code: &autoplay=0

Hopefully that helps you learn how to put a video on your website or blog.  Feel free to contact me via comments here if you have any questions.

This affiliate tracking software is very advanced with awesome tracking mechanisms so you can feel confident that your affiliates are getting credit and being paid for what they promote for you.  IDevDirect offers multiple packages for you and incredible marketing tools for your affiliates.  With this software, you can expand your sales force with your own online marketing army.

I would like to help you get going by defining the steps to setup a blog. My friends asked me to help them setup a website. Since I was going through the steps for how to setup a blog with them, I decided to create this write-up so I can help you and others as well. My first question for them was what do you want a website for? Their answer was to help get customers for her Gift Basket business that she runs part-time. That is a great place to start, knowing what you want to do with your website and one of the best and easiest ways to create and design a website is to make it a blog, using free software from WordPress.  I’ve also simplified it for you by providing various links to the tools you will need to make progress on your blog.

1.    Define your market niche
There are many ways to do research for finding a market niche, however, this is a topic for another discussion. For the purposes of our example, we will use the “Gift Basket” niche.

2.    Research keywords
Keywords are the most important factor in the creation of your blog. This is how people looking for the product or service you provide will be able to find your website. You should first take a look at the obvious keywords. In our example the obvious would be “gift baskets”.

Click Here for an easy free tool to see what keywords get the most traffic

Click Here to use the free keyword search tool that Google provides

Click Here for another good free tool for keyword lookup

3.    Research Competition
It is always a good thing to know what your competition is doing, so to take a look at the competition do a search on Google for the primary keyword of your niche. In our case this is “gift baskets”. We can then find this site: www.giftbaskets.com  comes to the top so let’s look at them.  I look at them with this great free tool from SEObook for examining your competitor’s website.   I like to see what the competition has done to ‘beef up’ their site and this tool can show me what sites they are on that link back to theirs as well as many other things.

Side Note: While doing this research and coming across this website, I see that they have an affiliate program and that my wife’s blog www.JoansCraftWorld.com is in a relevant market so I will add a banner to her site and see what it brings us.

Furthermore, once you found some keywords that pertain to your niche, go to Google search and enter them one by one. Look to see what sites come up on the left side. Examine a few and then use the Google keyword tool to find what keywords Google sees when they look at that site. Click Here to use the free keyword search tool that Google provides. This time select the option to look at keywords by ‘website content’ and Google will list the keywords for the site you enter. This is powerful stuff because Google will actually tell you what keywords that site uses to rank so highly with them. You then want to incorporate many of these keywords in your blog.

4.    Get domain name
You may already have a company or business name but keep in mind that the name of your domain does not need to be the same as that. You want to select a name that pertains to one of your top keywords because Google search likes this aspect of relevancy. Use the top keyword in your domain name, such as affordable gift baskets dot com.  Using Godaddy you can typically find your domain name for about 10 bucks a year. You do not need to purchase the additional security features because Google likes it when you are open and they can see who you are. CLICK HERE to search for your domain name and reserve it.

5.    Get hosting service
It is best to hire a service to host your website.  This way you have control over what goes there and how you back it up. I use HostGator and they provide great features that I have not had any problems with.  You can get a really good deal starting at prices like $4.95 per month. CLICK HERE to get your HostGator website hosting service.

6.    Get email auto-responder service
You may have heard it said that “The money is in the list”. This is a true statement so every website you establish should have a subscription form on it so that people can signup to receive correspondence from you. The best service I have found to accomplish this is Aweber (about $19 per month).  When you are ready to get that setup you can CLICK HERE to go to Aweber.

7.    Install wordpress
Fantastico is an easy one button tool to use to install your wordpress on your website, thus turing it into a blog. You will find this in your cPanel from Hostgator (or hopefully in whatever other hosting program you chose)

8.    Select theme design
You should select a theme that relates to the niche you are creating the blog for. There are thousands of Free wordpress themes available for download and you can search for them based on the way you would like it to look.  You can either do a Google search for “free wordpress themes” or start with these sites where I found some of my own themes:  Click Here for Free WP Themes or you can also Click Here for Wordpress Extended Themes.

You can also go into your wordpress site manager for your blog and click on add new themes and do a search there.

9.    Implement plug-ins
Wordpress provides for including plug-ins that control a variety of things you want for your blog, such as SEO updates, analytics, pinging, and much more. In order to simplify this for you I found some free seo software (created by an associate, Jeff Johnson) that provides a great tool to use. The software guides you through setting all the plug-ins up for maximum traffic getting exposure. You can CLICK HERE to get the Free SEO wordpress Plug-in.

10.    Install form code
Go back into your Aweber account and follow instructions about how to create a form.  Then get the html code and put it into your blog, typically by updating the sidebar.php file. This will allow your visitors to subscribe to your mailings via email.
Note: Before activating the form, you should first create some emails that will automatically be sent to your subscribers. These emails will basically welcome them and then pertain to what your niche is about.

11.    Drive Traffic
Congrats on getting to this point! You are now ready create a structure that will bring traffic to your site so you can increase your visitors and subsequently make money with it. The primary thing I can suggest is to improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings.  Have you ever seen when you do a search on Google the results you get have a list of websites on the left plus another list on the right side. The right side are paid advertisements via the Google adwords PPC (Pay Per Click) program. To be listed here costs you money. You want to be listed on the left side which is free and the way to do this is to put out relevant content on your blog that pertains to the keywords people are using to search on for your niche.
That being said, I came across a software package called SEnuke that dramatically helps this principle by propagating your content to well established sites that will link back to yours and thus increase the likelihood that Google and others will list your site on the left side for specific keywords. You can do this manually or to automate it, you can CLICK HERE to get a Free Trial of SEnuke Software.

12.    Wordpress Support
You can get an answer to just about any question you have regarding Worpress and your blog by posting in the wordpress forums. Click Here to access the Wordpress Forums.

Related info: See my other post to Learn how to put a video on your website (or blog)

All the Best and Happy Blogging!

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