Continuing with our guest blogging series, today we are going to talk about two WordPress plugins that can enhance your site for showcasing your videos, graphics and media.

WordPress plugins not only enhance your site’s functionality, they can also enhance your ability to build relationships online. There are thousands upon thousands of plugins to choose from in the WordPress directory. Take care as you don’t want to use too many plugins as they can slow down your site and in some cases even interfere with your blog being displayed properly.

EmbedIt Plugin

If you have ever tried to pop audio or video code into the html section of your video post, only to find that your video either doesn’t show up or that it disappears after one viewing, you will want to know about the EmbedIt plugin for WordPress.

This is a simple plugin that allows you to embed any audio or video code into a post or a page. What you do is paste the code into the “custom field” section, down the page below your post. In the "Custom" field, assign (type in)any key from HTML1 through HTML9 to your audio or video code.

Then scroll back up to your post and type in the corresponding key (example – , into your post in the location where you want your video to be displayed. You can post up to nine audios and/or videos per page or post. Just take care to assign each audio or video its own code, placing each code snippet into a different custom field.

If you want your video to be centered, simply enter “<center>” (without the quotes) before the audio or video code and “</center>” (without the quotes) at the end of the video code. Have fun with this plugin and enjoy the ease with which you can now add audio and video to your blog.

To download the plugin – visit the following site. Scroll down and provide them with an email address where you’d like them to send the download link to the plugin. They will not add you to a list and they don’t send out any email aside from this. Enjoy!

http://www.matteoionescu.com/wordpress/embed-html/

J Query Colorbox

One way to strengthen relationships and keep people on your site longer is to set up a light box for your images that share more about who you are, what your interests are and what services you are offering to others.

I’ve been researching light box plugins for close to a year, this one is "my new best friend" and is "stupid simple". Simply install and activate the plugin. When uploading images, leave the url to the image intact. Then, when someone clicks on any of your images, they will pop out in a gorgeous light box.

What Colorbox Offers:

• A beautiful light box experience for individual photos
• A slideshow of any images displayed on a specific post or page

· 10 themes to chose from

· Works out-of-the-box with WordPress galleries

· Images are grouped as galleries when linked in the same post or page. Groups can be displayed in an automatic slideshow.

For a live example, visit this post and click on the image:
http://powerfulplugins.com/jquery-colorbox-lightbox-plugin

Powerful Plugins

I am a raving fan of WordPress and of WordPress plugins and love discovering new and amazing powerful plugins. Do you have a favorite WordPress plugin that you use and highly recommend? Are you looking for a WordPress plugin to accomplish a specific task? Share your comments below and let’s learn from one another.

Please note that as part of the Blog Tour, there is a Commenting and Tweeting contest. You get points for each comment and each tweet about this post – using the hashtag – #blogworldtour . Visit the Blog Tour site (link below) for full contest details.

Thanks again Lon for having me as a Guest Blogger on your site!

All the best,
Dvorah

D’vorah Lansky
Relationship Marketing Wizard | Author | Speaker | Educator
www.BlogWorldTour.com/blog

Tags are keywords that describe videos. For example, a surfing video might be tagged with “surfing,” “water,” and “waves.” Users who enjoy watching surfing videos can then search for any of those terms and that video will show up in their search results. Tags help you label videos you upload so that other people can find them more easily but the problem is that YouTube only allows single tag words and NOT keyword “phrases”.

Here are some Top Tagging Tips:

1. Research other videos in your niche that have lots of views.

What tags are they using? Checking these can give you some ideas…but more importantly:

“What combinations of tags do they use that users may be entering in to get specific results?”

Think of these combinations as keyword phrases used in Adwords and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So for a surfing promotion, if you went surfing in Waikiki in your video, you could include “surfing” and “Waikiki” in your tags. Users who search for “surfing Waikiki” find your video more easily than users who search for “surfing” or “Waikiki.”

2. Use your Tags in your Description text.

Including them in the text likely makes your video appear more “relevant” and more desirable for YouTube to return as a search result.

3. Do Keyword Research to find good tags.

Another great tactic is to do good ‘ole keyword research for what your market is searching for. AdWords ads can provide valuable info in this area. Why? Because, if someone is spending money to advertise for specific keywords & phrases then you can bet it’s because those words are getting searched…and are profitable.

People search YouTube the same way they search Google.

Here are my favorite tools for keyword research:
PPC Web Spy
This new tool from keyword legend Brad Callen integrates with Firefox and provides outstanding data with the click of a button. I totally LOVE this tool! Oh…and it’s yours – FREE!

Get it here: PPC Web Spy

SEO for Firefox

Another Must Have tool I use is called SEO for Firefox from SEO Tools. Their motto is: “Learn. Rank. Dominate”

Soooo appropriate! This thing has a laundry list of features as long as your arm and I use it on a daily basis to see check trends, PR rankings, backlinks, find potential partners…tons of stuff!

Enjoy and don’t forget to do your homework!

The really cool thing about this is that the new HQ features of YouTube take advantage of these settings.

Here’s a sample video using the HD 16:9 aspect ration that YouTube now likes:

[youtube]http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lsbA8RhiI[/youtube]

This was created and rendered in Camtasia version 6 but the result is the same.

Capture your video in Jing and shoot it directly up to YouTube, Vimeo, or FaceBook. If you want to put the YouTube video on your web page, don’t forget to add “&fmt=18″ (without the quotes) to the end of the URL to display it in HQ.

With the Pro version, the Jing branding at the beginning and end of the videos? Gone!

And if you want…edit your capture in Camtasia Studio. There is also a Mac version.

So now there is no excuse (like the 300 bones for Camtasia Studio!) NOT to start making killer screencasts.

Of course, to learn how to do THAT, head over to Screencastprofits.com

Image via CrunchBase

Google announced on Wednesday that it would begin selling space on YouTube search-results pages to advertisers.

This new feature will allow anyone who has a video on YouTube to promote it on a search results page. Sound familiar? Advertises will be able to bid on keywords and the promoted videos will show up on the right hand side of the YouTube search results page along with a thumbnail image of the video.

Sound familiar?

And just like Adwords, you get charged when a viewer clicks the link, you can set a max. amount per day, and the results are based on highest bidder and relevance.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTffb8OF8_U[/youtube]

We’ve been waiting for this kind of monetization model and Google has been going down the road of figuring out how to profit from the incredible asset that is YouTube. Last month, it added “click to buy” icons to ads that took viewers from YouTube videos to iTunes or Amazon.com

Apparently, they are still figuring it all out since CEO Eric Schmidt said in a conference call in July:

I personally do not believe that the perfect ad product for YouTube has been invented yet…

And Tracy Chan, a Google product manager, at the press conference introducing the feature pointed out that:

There’s the assumption that on YouTube, it’s 17-year-old boys watching dogs’ skateboarding videos…

Well, that might be the “perception” among big companies looking at this model but it doesn’t bother me! I’ll take a few of the eyeballs searching for…let’s see…how about: “17 year old boys racking their nuts on skateboards”

To keep up to date with the Camtasia strategies I’ll be using to cash in on this and all the latest video marketing methods be sure to join ScreencastProfits!

This guy (fungun1970) has pulled this off by basically tricking people into watching at least some of his video by taking a brilliant Title:

“full version tina fey as sara palin saturday night live”

And using Tags:
“tina fey sara palin saturday night live hillary clinton amy poller”

Certainly, a VERY popular bit of content, right? WRONG!

I will only waste 29 seconds of your time for you to find out why…I would risk the copyright infringement but I’d be curious to see what kind of clicks he’s getting to his MySpace page!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV4r7SDab4I&feature=related[/youtube]

For a more honest approach to better videos, check out ScreencastProfits.com

According to analysts Piper Jaffray Research, the site could generate $200 million in sales in 2009.

But for all of us, it means that this is the first step towards throwing other products into the mix. Like products and services that we offer! Screencast marketers may soon be able to use video promotions (which Camtasia videos are perfect for) that include the ability for a viewer to click a Buy-Now kind of function.

According the the Official Google Blog:

This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries — from music, to film, to print, to TV — offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos.

Lots of open questions on the User Interface and how all this will work, look, and be received but certainly a step that we can all be interested in!

NOTE TO OLD-SCHOOL VIACOM: Hey! Instead of suing to the tune of making only the lawyers rich, how about, oh I don’t know…profiting by advertising?? Duh…