Wednesday, January 06, 2016

YouTube Custom Channel URLs

Get a custom URL for your channel

Subscribe to the YouTube Help channel for video tips, tricks, and how-to's. 
You can give fans an easy-to-remember web address to get to your YouTube channel using a custom URL (likeyoutube.com/creatoracademy). Choose from URL options based on things like your display name, your YouTube username, any current vanity URLs that you have, or the name of your linked website.
Important: You can't change your custom URL after you create it.
To get a custom URL for your channel, your account needs to meet these requirements:
  • Be in good standing
  • Have 100 or more subscribers
  • Be at least 30 days old
  • Have an uploaded photo as channel icon
  • Have uploaded channel art
You can also qualify for a custom URL that aligns with your web domain by linking and verifying your official webpage with your connected Google+ page
If you're qualified for a custom URL, you'll see a notice in your advanced account settings, receive an email notification, and may see a notification in your Creator Studio dashboard.
To get your custom URL, follow these steps:
  1. Sign in to YouTube and go to your advanced account settings.
  2. Under "Channel settings," select the link to claim your custom URL.
  3. In the "Get a custom URL" box, you'll see the custom URL(s) you've been approved for. You can't change these, but you may need to add a few letters or numbers to make the URL unique to you.
  4. Select the box next to "I agree to the Terms of Service," then click Change URL.
  5. Keep in mind that the custom URL will be linked to both your YouTube channel and your Google+ identity. Once your URL has been approved, you can't request to change it. When you're sure this is the URL you want, clickConfirm choice.
Once selected, your audience can reach your channel by going to to either youtube.com/c/creatoracademy oryoutube.com/creatoracademy (note that we are using the Creator Academy channel as an example here, your URL will be unique to your channel). Both URLs will redirect to your channel homepage.

Tuesday, January 05, 2016

Is Google Authorship in web-search officially dead?

Is Google Authorship officially dead? 

For now.. Yes.

However for those of us working on clients.. Google Publisher Tags (GPT) are very much still alive.
Which means Schema is still important.
https://schema.org/publisher
And if Schema is still important than Authorship just got moved into Knowledge Graph and KBO (Knowledge Base Optimization), based on Schema. It would dictate.. "that the "Entity" related to "Author" is a "Person within an Organization" .

Example: Who is Peyton Manning?


Monday, January 04, 2016

Six Social Media Rules for 2016


Six Simple Laws of Social Media

1. Be yourself… period.. Be Genuine — BE YOU.. not a copy of someone else.
2. DO: Be Professional — if F bombs are ok in your professsion so be it.. however you remove yourself from safe search when you drop them.
3. DONT: Feed the trolls.. Trolls starve without food and your energy and move on to some other mischief.  "Have a nice day" Can sound just like the “basic new york echo” — Robin Williams.. Google it.. better yet. click here (new window)

4. DO Spellcheck.. nothing better than saying somthing extremly smart with typos.. makes you look stoopid, doesnt it?

5. DONT: Run schedulers without lots of tweaking.. and learn how to connect accounts on different social media platforms and networks.. “I posted a Photo to Facebook” really makes me want to look.. also.. if you posted it to twitter.. people would actually see the picture without going to facebook.. which on a mobile device, for me isnt going to happen..

6. DO: Listen, Stop, Listen again, Think.. spellcheck.. check links.. then tweet..
PRO Tip Bonus: after :30 all tweets are archived in library of congress due to downstream twitter feeds and aggregators.. delete any tweets within 8 seconds to insure proper deletion.