WordPress blog – Small Business Odyssey

April 1, 2012April 1, 2012

Easy Video Press: Video Player for WordPress Blogs

[evp type=youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln-Xbz3TgbM[/evp]

Easy Video Press is a WordPress Plugin that makes it very easy to play videos on your WordPress blogs. You can play videos uploaded from Amazon S3, YouTube or your computer.

You also have the option of customizing the video player – e.g. color of the background, buttons or outline. You can change the size of the displayed video and allow full screen playing. If you prefer, you can set the Easy Videos Player to play immediately someone visits your blog post (… and you can change this for each video).

Easy Video Press comes with four very short videos that explain each step in the process of setting up the Plugin and creating a video player for your blog post.

Monetizing videos with Easy Video Press WordPress Plugin

Easy Video Press enables you to add a hyperlinked logo to your video and build in a redirect to a website of your choice so that you can monetize the video. I have illustrated these features in the video player below:

[evp type=youtube logo=http://smallbusinessodyssey.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/meritsolutionsthumbnail1.jpg link=http://www.meritsolutions.com.au]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4StJfmKDus[/evp]

Easy Video Press: an easy WordPress Plugin for displaying a video player

This is a powerful WordPress Plugin that can open up the world of video marketing. It is easy to use and makes video playing on your WordPress blog so much easier.

All you have to do is install the WordPress plugin, customize the default settings (e.g. Amazon S3 URL’s, color scheme, video size) and then start using the video player within your blog posts.

When you want to display a video in your blog post, you provide a few details and the WordPress Plugin creates a “shortcode” which is automatically inserted in your blog post.

The following illustration shows the control panel that appears below your blog entry as you are developing your post. It enables you to:

specify the source of video – Amazon S3, YouTube or your computer
size of the video player
color scheme for the video player
cover image
logo image (if desired)
logo URL link (if desired).

If you want to use the advanced options available with Easy Video Press, you can do any of the following:

allow full screen
auto start video
hide controls/buttons or show them
redirect viewer at end of video

With either the basic or the advanced controls, Easy Video Press will generate a shortcode that is automatically inserted in your blog post when you hit the “Send Shortcode to Editor” button. You can then locate the video player wherever you choose within your post.

I was becoming increasingly frustrated with displaying videos on my WordPress blogs until I found this simple-to-use WordPress Plugin.

Easy Video Press is, as the name suggests, an easy-to-use WordPress Plugin that will take the stress out of your blogging and enable you to professionally display, and monetize, videos on your WordPress blogs.

February 21, 2012February 21, 2012

Force Field Analysis: A Strategic Approach to Goal Planning

Force Field Analysis is one of many goal planning techniques that you can use as a small business owner or online marketer.

Often you will find that your approach to goal planning and goal achievement proves to be inadequate or incomplete (the evidence lies in the fact that you may not achieve your goals). The beauty of Force Field Analysis for goal planning is that it offers a strategic way to approach your goals. It is easy to use, but incredibly powerful. It can give you new insights into what is getting in the road of your goals, including lack of awareness of your strengths and the inability to capitalise on them. It will also help you identify the things that you need to work on and strategies you need to employ to achieve your goals.

I’ve used this approach, as an organizational consultant, since the early 1980’s with small business owners, managers in organisations (public and private sectors), university faculties and doctoral/masters students. I have also used Force Field Analysis with colleagues in action learning groups as we planned our career transitions.

[Image credit: Goal by Sean MacEntee]

How to use Force Field Analysis for goal planning

Force Field Analysis was first used by Kurt Lewin in 1946 when he was working with minority social groups. What struck him was how people were becoming stuck in their disadvantaged position in society. He needed a way to help them move beyond where they were now – to achieve their life goals.

Lewin was acutely aware that many things conspired to maintain the status quo. He realized that what gave effect to the current situation for these people was a group of hindering and helping forces that created the current equilibrium represented by the status quo. He recognized that if you analyzed these forces and put in place strategies to address them, you could change the equilibrium and move towards your goal. Hence the name, Force Field Analysis – analysis of the helping and hindering forces within a particular arena (field). Lewin was able to create major social change by using this method with people who were suffering social disadvantage.

So it is with any goal you wish to pursue, whether expanding your small business, developing your small business marketing online or improving personal productivity. Once you identify what is helping you move towards your goal (helping forces) and what is hindering you (hindering forces), you can plan concrete strategies to address these forces.

Specifically, you can work out ways to strengthen the helping forces and weaken the hindering forces – thus changing the equilibrium of the current situation and enabling you to move towards your goal. It’s this two-way approach that creates the major shift. So it is not enough just to work on the hindering forces, you also need to strengthen the helping forces.

Force Field Analysis: An Example of Goal Planning

Let’s assume that you have set a goal, “To be effective in small business marketing online”. I have developed an example Force Field Analysis based on an imaginary set of forces (helping and hindering) that are impacting on your goal achievement. Ideally, you would do this analysis with at least one other person, but you can definitely do it by yourself.

So what you have here is the second rung of goal planning – you have a goal in mind and now you have to establish sub-goals and strategies to move forward. Force Field Analysis helps you to do this as illustrated in the example below:

FORCE FIELD ANALYSIS

GOAL: To be effective in small business marketing online

Hindering Forces	Helping Forces
1. lack of time	1. good brand recognition
2. lack of knowledge	2. motivated
3. don’t know where to start	3. have a good speaking voice
4. not a good writer	4. have friends who are good at small business marketing
5. have no presence on social networks	5. access to good online resources
6. don’t know how to create a WordPress blog	6. prepared to have a go

So now you have to decide which helping forces you will strengthen and which hindering forces you will work to reduce. So some options might be:

In relation to the helping forces, you might employ two or more of these strategies to strengthen the things that are working for you:

develop a podcast blog (to build on your speaking capability)
set clear, achievable milestones to maintain your motivation
use specialists in online branding to strengthen your brand online
talk to your friends about what works for them
study up on your online resources with a particular focus and goal in mind
join a small business online forum or group on one of the social networks.

To reduce the impact of hindering forces you might decide to do two or more of the following:

work on improving your productivity
use your online resources to build your knowledge (in a focused way)
purchase a resource that covers “small business marketing online”
outsource your writing
start with one social network that you are comfortable using, e.g. Squidoo or LinkedIn, and build from there
outsource the design of your WordPress blog to a web design service.

Force Field Analysis has many applications including evaluation of outcomes and processes. MindTools.com explains how to use Force Field Analysis for decision making and offers a free worksheet for using the tool.

Force Field Analysis offers a comprehensive approach to goal planning and has been proven over many years to help small business organisations and individuals achieve their goals.

November 11, 2011February 9, 2012

WordPress Plugin Guaranteed to Boost Search Engine Results for Your Blog

SEOPressor is a WordPress Plugin that enables you to achieve great search engine results for your blog posts and website pages. The Plugin is easy to install and it provides you with a means for ensuring that your blog posts are optimized for the search engines; that is, they will rank highly in the search engine results for their targeted keyword.

What the SEOPressor WordPress Plugin does

I’ve used SEOPressor to score first page results on Google for my blog posts. What this WordPress Plugin does is help you to improve the onsite SEO for your website – it identifies what aspects you can improve with minimum effort to gain better positioning in search engine results.

SEOPressor does all the work of analysis and research and reports an overall SEO score for the post/page being analyzed. It also identifies how you can improve your use and placement of keywords, font emphasis (bold, italics and underline), images and the key markers that tell Google what the post is about.

What you can do with the information from this WordPress Plugin

With this information you can improve the ranking of your blog post/page by implementing the minor changes recommended. SEOPressor will then recalculate your overall SEO score for the blog post. In this way, you are able to gain better results for your writing through higher placement in search engine results.

The Plugin also educates you so that you can consistently achieve improved traffic from search engines irrespective of what blog or website you are writing for. This is an easy way to maximize the return on your investment of your time and energy in writing.

The SEOPressor is a WordPress Plugin that improves your writing, boosts your search engine results and brings increased targeted traffic to your small business blog or website.