Video is a great way to add more content to your website. This doesn’t mean you need to spend lots of money on professional videos. You can incorporate other videos that you see around the internet and add your reaction to them.

YouTube is the largest video site in the world. There is already so much content there. If you haven’t done it before, watch the video below to learn how to take videos from YouTube and add the player directly on to a page of your website or your blog. These instructions are specifically for YouTube but other sites like Vimeo have embed options as well, so these instructions should help with other video players as well.

If you can’t see the video, click here

How to Add a YouTube Video to Your Website

1. Find a video you want to add to your website
2. Click on the Embed button
3. Personalize the video to the correct size and specifications you need
4. Copy the HTML code
5. Go over to the HTML side of your blog or website
6. Paste the copied embed code
7. Publish
8. Voila – you have embedded a video to your website

What information we hold as private versus that which we make public is blurring. With widely adopted social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn we are connecting with our family, friends, business associates and more all in the same place. Many have had to learn the hard way that over-sharing with your network has personal and professional repercussions.

This has become a popular topic when I talk to customers, conference attendees and even with my personal network – which I think is good. Everyone should have this conversation with themselves before something bad happens. Every time we get a new employee at Hall who is going to be participating in Social Media as a part of their job, we sit down and have that very conversation. We determine for them what they want to make public, what is better private, what is good for one community may not be good for another and our company policy on sharing on social media sites.

Facebook is the network catch all

Facebook is the most popular social network in the world. This seems to also be the biggest offender of mixing those lines between personal and professional. It is that way because that is who we add to it. All of your friends and former classmates are on Facebook but so are businesses and people from your professional network.

One thing you can do to organize your contacts on Facebook is to create lists of your connections and tag them for how you know them. Then you can share certain things with one list and not publish them on another list. It takes a little work on your part but it could make a huge difference in how you share content and with whom.

For a quick demo on the process check out this video:

View video here

If video isn’t your thing here are instructions on how to create a Facebook list:

1. Login to Facebook
2. Go to Friends (left side under your photo)
3. Go to Edit Friends (top)
4. Then Create List (top)
5. Name your list and choose friends to include in that list
6. Save by hitting Create List

Go into your privacy settings and under Custom Settings choose who you want to see which pieces of content. You can also select Customize and exclude certain lists. You can also exclude lists when updating your Facebook status.

Hope this was helpful.

In this blog tutorial video, Fred from Hall shows you how to comment on blogs that you like, quote other bloggers in your WordPress blog, and contact bloggers for guest blogging opportunities.

In our latest blog training video, I show you how to search the blogosphere with Google Blog Search, and how to subscribe to blogs you like using your favorite reader (such as iGoogle or Google Reader).

While the technique is very straightforward, using Blog Alerts and Blog Search is an extremely effective way to keep in tune with what’s going on in your industry without losing tons of time each week.  These simple tools allow you to easily sift through all of the content on the internet and find only what’s most relevant to you, your business, and your blogging ambitions.

Clients are always asking us how to subscribe to a blog, which leads to the real question – what is an RSS reader and how do I use one?  This video tutorial answers the question by showing you how to subscribe to a blog using the popular feed readers Google Reader and iGoogle, and the open source application Thunderbird.  We also touch on some options for getting RSS feeds into your Microsoft Outlook mail.

View the rest of our blog training videos in the archives.

Ready to ‘see’ what we’ve been working on lately? We are excited to introduce a new series of video blogs to the SEO Vision blog. Each month we will aim to bring you something funny, something informational and everything related to search engine optimization, internet marketing and social media via a 2-3 minute video blog hosted by Fred and Chrystie.

Our first blog introduces Fred, who (bless his heart) still hasn’t embraced video, to the endless opportunities which exist with online videos. Enjoy!

For the last hours of the Sage Software Insights 2008 tradeshow we of course talked to some more business partners, as well as some of other Preferred Vendors at the show. See some of our final observations before we wrap up for a very successful week!

We’ve spoken to lots, and lots of people at the tradeshow here at Insights, but one of the greatest pleasures of the show is being able to touch base with our customers and see how their sites are working out for them. And people are very happy!

Thanks to Mike Renner of Computer Accounting Systems for taking the time to chat with us — Mike provides accounting software including Sage MAS 90 and 200 in Washington State.

Thanks also to our many other wonderful customers and other Sage Software business partners who’ve talked to us about the web. It’s been a great show, and we look forward to another great day during exclusive tradeshow hours this morning and the reception/wrap-up this evening.