Hannes Johnson dot Com

Here is a quick post because my readers demand it ;) But seriously, thanks for the “push” – always nice to know that people want more :)

Well… related to my previous post How To Create A Viral Video – I ran into this series called Viral Video Film School. It’s a bit silly and sarcastic at times but he still has a few good points.

Like in this one, he says you should “snap up some animal fights”:

He mentions Battle at Kruger which ranked #6 on my Top 10 Most Viral Videos Of 2007 list and has gotten over 36 million views.

I’ve only watched a couple of videos from the Viral Video Film School series so if you find a video there that you think is cool let me know – I would like to check it out.

And related to my previous post Motivating quotes here is a quote I found interesting:

Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

Well, take care – I’ll post more when I get back from my trip.

I just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.6 and it has a lot of cool new features like photo captions, live theme previews and post revisions (similar to what you might be familiar with in Google docs). While reading the release post on the WordPress development blog I noticed this at the bottom of the post:

Easter Egg

There have been rumors and allegations that there was a so-called “easter egg” added to 2.6 early in its development. These rumors and allegations are completely false!

That got me curious… :) So I went on Google to research this further.

Unlocking the easter egg

Apparently what you need to do is after saving a post you scroll down to “Post Revisions” and then click one of the revisions. At that point you should be able to compare a revision with itself (by selecting both left and right radio buttons at the same revision and click “Compare Revisions”). What happens next is pretty cool.

Here is a video that shows you what happens:

Easter Egg in WordPress 2.6 from Len Kutchma on Vimeo.

Easter eggs are always fun :) Have you upgraded your blog (if you’re using WordPress)? It’s always smart to upgrade as soon as possible, not just for the cool new features but also because of security risks.

Wondering how you can make the Top 10 Most Viral Videos list? Check out this video I found about how to create a popular viral video:

Mine’s doing great, got over a million hits and it just landed me a job at a hot new media firm.

Specific areas include:

• Filming yourself sitting at your desk
• Hurting yourself
• Hurting others
• Using animals to hurt people…

Very funny parody :) So cheesy… ;) But this parody is fairly viral – it has gotten over 47,000 views (although it’s been more than 1,5 years since it was posted on YouTube – it has probably been posted on a few other places where it’s gotten several thousand additional views).

That’s one way to make your video successfully viral – make it funny. Also, if your video is about something related to the internet and internet culture then it’s likely to be passed around…

Here are a couple more videos/ads from the Viral Learning Center:

Here is a quote I received earlier this week:

Aim at perfection in everything, though in most things it is unattainable. However, they who aim at it, and persevere, will come much nearer to it than those whose laziness and despondency make them give it up as unattainable.

I thought it was motivating, with an interesting perspective. You should reach for the sky, every time :) I got it because I’m subscribed to a list on Simpleology where I get these kind of quotes pretty much every day. I didn’t know at the time who the author of this quote was because Mark Joyner (the creator of Simpleology) only reveals the name of the “quoter” after sending a few quotes.

That is a pretty effective copywriting method (that Mark Joyner likes to use a lot) called the Zeigarnik effect. Basically it’s all about incompleteness and the fact that if you know that something is incomplete (like the end of a movie) you are almost forced to do whatever you have to do to find out the missing piece (like how the movie ends).

Well, today I got to know that the author of this quote is Lord Chesterfield,
a British statesman and diplomat. Here is another thought-provoking quote from him:

Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.

Do you have a favorite quote that is inspirational, motivating or thought-provoking?

I saw this video the other day called Design Coding by The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) – pretty cool, it’s educational and fun :)

(via iJustine)

This is an excellent example of how to create a viral video. It was posted March 20, 2008 and it already has 84,071 views. He also has some more internet marketing related rap videos on his YouTube channel.

If you’re trying to create a viral video you should consider how you can make it entertaining – if you analyze some of the most popular videos you’ll see that many of them have at least some entertainment value. Think about “What would make people watch this?”.

Oh, by the way – did you see the new Gmail feature that Google announced? It could come in handy to be able to make your mail appear to have been sent earlier – even mark it as people had read it ;)

I was checking my web tracker logs and saw a few hits from this page. It looks like I’m nominated on this German website in the category “Most Valuable Business Website”. Although I’ve never heard of this website createordie.de before it’s an honor to be nominated :) I’m there along with some very popular websites.

I’m not sure what the prize is – or if there is a prize… but if you want I would appreciate it if you could cast a vote my way :) Just click here and select the radio button where it says “My Most Valuable Site” below my site (www.hannesjohnson.com), scroll down and click the button that says “Jetzt abstimmen”. You have until April 24th to vote – but please vote right now while it’s fresh on your mind.

OK, I was checking the site again a little better and it looks like this is a site for a conference in Germany and according to this page the first prize in the business category is 5.000 € and an advertisement in “brand eins” (which I believe is a magazine). 5,000 Euros is about 7,700 USD so that’s quite a lot of money – what are you waiting for: go vote for me! ;)

If I win I will most definitely have a very impressive contest with lots of prizes here on this blog :)

By the way, do you want more contests on this blog? Because a couple of days ago I got a proposition from a guy that wanted to sponsor a contest on this blog. What do you say? More contests? – Let me know in the comments, also let me know if there are any specific contests you are interested in (like, subscribe to the RSS feed to get an entry, solve a puzzle, etc…) and if there are any prizes you prefer (gift certificates, PayPal payment, magazine subscriptions, iPod or something physical, etc…) – also let me know if you voted for me in this contest and I’ll give you featured link here in the sidebar for a month – but only the first 10 (maybe more) to comment [just let me know in the comment what anchor text and URL you want me to use].

Just came across an interesting article: Who clicks on ads? (Revisited with data) about the majority of people that click on online ads. Some interesting points like:

..heavy clickers are:

• More representative of lower income households than the average user.
• Less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).
• More likely to live outside of the major metro regions.
• More likely to be using SNSs to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).

This is also interesting:

Wealthier users are more likely to spend money online, but they are less likely to click on ads. Poorer users are more likely to click on ads, but not likely to spend money online except in a few verticals. Wouldn’t this then mean that Google is more likely to get the eyeballs of those likely to spend money, but statistically less likely to make money off of their clicks?

That means that businesses can actually benefit greatly from using e.g. Google AdWords to advertise their business by using it for branding and not trying to get more direct clicks to their website. If the data the article is referring to is correct then the people that can afford the products might glance over the AdSense banner and while they might not click they might notice the URL or the brand name (product name or company name) and visit the website later on (or Google the brand name) without it costing the advertiser anything. Something to think about for your AdWords strategy…

This is also something affiliate marketers that are you using AdWords have to think about – I’ve seen a lot of affiliates using the product’s URL as the display URL. This is probably not the best strategy if people see the URL but don’t click your ad (with your affiliate link) but just visit the URL directly later on. That’s why you should get a custom domain name for all the most important products you’re promoting as an affiliate.

I’ve been using this cool tool called Instapaper by Marco Arment for a few weeks now and it has helped me read articles that I probably wouldn’t have without this handy tool.

What does it do?

Well, according to the FAQ “Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.” It does this through a “Read Later” bookmarklet that you add to your browser. Then, next time you find an article online that you don’t have time to read you just click “Read Later” and it adds it to your Instapaper list. This is not a brand new idea per se… I’ve been using bookmarks for a similar purpose – created a specific folder for “Read later”, “Read ASAP” – I even started categorizing them – splitting them into sub-folders “January 2008″, “February 2008″ – but even those sub-folders just filled up and I only read a small percentage of the articles I bookmarked. I’ve also tried using del.icio.us and tagging articles with “toread” – it’s the same, I only check out a small part of the article I tag (although the tags “towatch” and “tolisten” have been more useful – perhaps because I don’t use them as frequently). I even tried out a Firefox add-on called Read it Later – but that doesn’t work any better than the bookmarking folder system.

Why is Instapaper so great?

The thing that makes Instapaper special is that I can easily access my “read later” list through my cellphone – which is excellent if I have to wait anywhere – waiting for a ride, waiting in line at the supermarket, etc… Or if I’m anywhere else away from a computer and nothing else to do ;)

Check out Instapaper here.

What do you think? Will Instapaper help you read more stuff? Do you often come across an article that you want to read but you don’t have time to read it right then?

I was so going to do that same research: Results: Most Popular CMS in Technorati’s Top 100. I had been planning for a pretty long time to make a post about what blog platform the Technorati Top 100 blogs use. But it looks like I don’t need to anymore, somebody did the work for me – and got the link love I might have gotten ;) It just shows you that it’s never enough to have a good idea – you have to execute it too. There is a good chance that whenever you get a brilliant idea somebody else has had the same idea (or will have soon) – so it’s important to act on your idea as soon as possible. Like Dr. Joe Vitale said: Money likes speed.

But it’s no surprise that WordPress is the most popular blog system – when I first thought of doing this kind of a list that was my guess.

Quick reader’s poll: Should I create a specific category for these micro posts?

I know, it’s a cliché… but I’ve been busy with other things ;) And it looks like my brilliant trick isn’t quite bullet-proof – although I have dozens of drafts in WordPress, another dozen of Notepad documents and also physical notepads with half-finished blog posts… But somehow I couldn’t find the time to finish these posts.

So I’m going to try a new trick – write really short blog posts. Inspired by the concept of microblogging I think I might be more willing to write short blog posts – rather than having to worry about writing insightful 1000+ words blog posts with research, graphs and the whole shabang ;)

Well, in microblogging a post can be anywhere from one sentence (with maybe a link or two) to a few paragraphs. So it’s pretty flexible. These short posts, or microposts, should take less than 30 minutes to write – well, they should probably take less than 5 minutes but you shouldn’t have to worry about time restraints. The idea is to just get the idea out there as quickly as possible – it doesn’t even have to be grammatically correct, you can just edit the typos later on – when your visitors point them out ;)

But sometimes when you start out writing a micropost you might get more and more ideas while writing and you’ll be inspired to write a full-length post – and that’s definitely a good thing :)

It might be appropriate to set up Asides to handle these microposts – to separate them from the “real” posts. I might also consider using any of the microblogging services out there to write short posts (and maybe import them into this blog).

The only problem with short posts like that is that it’s not so easy to add in-content AdSense ads when the content is only 2 sentences ;)

This post is kind of a micropost – I wrote it fairly quickly (although it took more than 5 minutes) and only read it over once. What do you think – is this a short post or a normal post? Maybe it’s just somewhere in the middle…

What do you think of the concept of microblogging? Do you think it could help you blog more frequently (which means more content on your blog = better chance of ranking in the search engines for cool keywords)? Are you going to try writing short posts every now and then? Oh, yeah, of course – even though I’m going to try writing more short posts it doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing full-length posts that I put a lot of work in :)

Also, in short posts I might not explain everything in detail – so that’s an excellent opportunity for the readers to post comments and ask questions.