Get Started with Web Video at My New Website VideoCameraUser.com

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Dec 30, 2009

It’s finally here! My new website at VideoCameraUser.com for those just getting started with web video launched last night. For the entire year of 2010 I’ve challenged myself to conceptalize, create, edit, produce and promote a web video every single day.

Quite a commitment there and I could only even expect myself (as unorganized and crazy busy as I am) to pull this off if I followed a simple, step-by-step process.

That process I will be following is available for free as a free whitepaper I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks called 51 Essential Essential Getting Started, Do-it-Yourself, Web Video tips for Business Owners, Speakers, and Authors.

Go check it out at VideoCameraUser.com and have a great New Year!

Keep Your WordPress Plugins Current

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Dec 12, 2009

Want to know what happens when you don’t keep your WordPress plugins current? I discovered what happens just a few minutes ago when I made a blog post and one of my team told me he saw the new post hit Twitter.

Of course, I have it setup so that my blog posts automatically turn into tweets and the first sentence is added as a Twitter post. But, when I didn’t have my Twitter plugin up-to-date, it just spewed a bunch of random HTML error code to my Twitter tweet.

So, this post is a test in one sense to see if I have the problem fixed. But, it’s also to inform you of the importance of keeping your plugins current and that you should go right now to see that they are current.

1ShoppingCart Review for 2010

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Dec 12, 2009

I got an email from a good friend in the business a few days ago asking if 1ShoppingCart is still my favorite cart to use and I thought I would feature my answer here:

1ShoppingCart is still the favorite when these five pieces are needed in a single 3rd party managed system:

1. cart
2. affiliate program
3. auto-responders
4. security pieces that make a cart secure, and
5. tele-phone shopping cart support, all for $100 a month or less

However…

Anyone should go into 1ShoppingCart knowing its limitations too:

1. “Some” FireFox browser users and some MAC users will have trouble making purchases through 1ShoppingCart. Their support knows about it and they continue to refuse to address the issue in their software. And, of course, if someone can’t order through the form, they probably won’t contact you to let you know.

2. 1ShoppingCart has, we’ll say, a “lower than optimum” delivery rate on the emails they send out through their auto-responder system. It’s probably because they’re just so big that recipient email server companies just ban them altogether figuring people are just all using 1ShoppingCart for spam.

So, you can expect to get emails from people saying they only got 3 of your 10 auto-responder messages and you will need to send them the rest manually.

3. There are many short-cuts and tricks to 1ShoppingCart that you only learn after you’ve picked and poked at the system for a few months. Why 1ShoppingCart doesn’t know how to use their own system better I don’t know. I’ve made a list of them and give them to people when they sign-up through my affiliate link. So, that would be my suggestion too when referring to others is to have them sign-up through 1ShoppingCartFree.com (which is free for 30 days) and have them send me an e-mail once they have registered, requesting the list.

Of course, 1ShoppingCart should by no means be thought of as purely “the best” cart system on the market today. NetSuite is probably the best in the category of under $20,000 but plan on paying $10,000-$15,000 every year for it.

Our “new” solution that we will be unveiling in 2010 will be a cart that is setup on our own secured server and supported directly by my own team at HereNextYear.

It will be a combination of our cart + our broadcast email system + integration with a 3rd party affiliate program.

What I don’t quite have for you yet is what we will be charging for all three pieces combined. It will be a payment made by the year though for best rate instead of by the month.

Hope that helps.