Tag Archives: ben armstrong

Social Media Tips

Schedule Social Media Posts with Buffer

Schedule Social Media Posts with Buffer

schedule social media posts with bufferIf you have ever ran a social media account for a business, then you are going to want to know how to schedule social media posts with Buffer. Running social media accounts sounds very easy on the surface. Pull up an app on your phone, type in a few words, & you are done. However, anyone who thinks the process is actually that easy doesn’t know what they are talking about. Anyone can type in a few words for a status, but unless you are a celebrity, no one really cares that you are taking your dog for a walk.

People who engage with business social media accounts want value. They want the accounts they follow to provide them with content that adds to their lives. When business accounts spam social media platforms with offers, sales, promo videos, & more, people will simply unfollow them. As a business owner yourself, you must find a way to give your followers a regularly scheduled dose of valuable content. This takes a lot of research. You will want to find relevant images, memes, articles, & other content that your readers want to see.

Due to the intense level of workload it takes for a business social media account to be successful, it is absolutely pivotal that business owners either hire a full time social media expert or find an online social media posts scheduler. While the former option can get quite expensive, finding a scheduling program is much more cost effective. A good scheduler will run you between $9.99 to $79.99 per month. Unless you are managing hundreds of accounts, you should never pay anything outside of that range. One social media scheduler we found is Buffer. Our video shows you how to schedule social media posts with Buffer.

Buffer Social Media Scheduler

I discovered Buffer a few weeks ago, and I have really enjoyed using it. For 3 or less social media accounts, Buffer is totally free. One cool thing about Buffer is that it offers a free 14 day trial of one of its upgraded packages. With this package you can manage anywhere from 4-10 social media accounts from a combination of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, & Pinterest.

schedule social media posts with buffer

With Buffer, it is so easy to add social media posts. I have been exclusively using Buffer for Twitter & Facebook. With this program, the control of your schedule is in your hands. You can create a custom schedule to post any number of posts per day. You will want to research how many posts you want to do each day per platform. For instance, on Twitter it’s really ideal to post between 10 to 15 times per day. While on Facebook, 3 per day will be a good amount.

One of the problems I found with Buffer, however, is in regards to Instagram. Buffer does not currently have direct posting to Instagram. Buffer has a phone app that will send you reminders for you to post to Instagram according to your schedule. There is a feature where you can share images directly from your camera roll to Instagram to speed up the process. However, if you want to add text/hashtags then you are still going to have to type or copy them into Instagram manually. There is a note on Buffer that says that hopefully direct Instagram posting is coming down the pipeline.

We hope this post has been helpful. Thanks for reading!

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Website Building

Setting Up Your WordPress Theme

Setting Up Your WordPress Theme

setting up your wordpress themeToday we are continuing our series, Web Wednesdays. In today’s video we are going to be focusing on setting up your WordPress Theme. So this begs the question, what is a WordPress theme?

If this is your first time setting up WordPress, then it is important to understand what a theme is and what it does. The best way to think about it is an anatomical reference. Your blog is the “skin” to your website. It’s what people are going to see the moment they visit your page. Your functionality and content could be incredible, but without the right theme, people will quickly be turned off by your website… and most likely they will leave before they ever get the chance to look under the hood.

While your visitors will see your theme, the theme does also affect the functionality. Each theme comes with settings and/or customization options for things such as your header, sliders, menus, footer, widgets, & more. It is absolutely pivotal that you get to know all of the settings within your header. When I add a new theme to a website I’m working on, the first thing I do is go look at the settings. If the theme does not have settings I like then I will change the theme. There is nothing worse than working with a theme that does not have a lot of customization.

For instance, some themes only allow you to have a text based logo. Just imagine how frustrating it would be to make a beautiful website only to find that it won’t allow you to put your beautifully designed logo at the top of your page. Sure, you could add it within the content… but that is not the best way to brand your business.

Choosing Your WordPress Theme

There are so many different ways to find a WordPress theme. The first question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you would like to spend money on a theme. If you are comfortable paying for a theme, then I suggest strolling over to the Envato Market and searching their Themeforest themes. Most of the themes there run anywhere from $29 to $59. They are fairly priced and these are full themes that will also come with support. Personally, I love Themeforest themes.

If you are looking for a free theme, then you will be able to search within the WordPress platform. It’s easy to search within WordPress for a great theme. The issue with the free themes, is that most likely the themes you find are going to be “Lite” versions of premium themes. The goal of the Lite themes is to give you an idea of what the full version or premium version can offer you above and beyond what you get with the Lite theme. It’s basically a way for these themes to advertise their full version… which of course will come with a cost. Some of the free WordPress themes will offer everything you need, but more times than not you will end up frustrated.

setting up your wordpress th

Thanks for reading & don’t forget to check out our tutorial video, “Setting Up Your WordPress Theme.”

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Extra Crypto Fridays

How to Use Coinbase – Full Tutorial

How to Use Coinbase

how to use coinbaseWe have shown you how to buy several different cryptocurrencies in our videos, tutorials, & posts. However, we have yet to show you a full tutorial video on how to use Coinbase. Without an understanding of how Coinbase works, it will be difficult to understand any of our other videos. For that reason, we wanted to make this blog post to show you how to use Coinbase.

Coinbase is a simple website to use. However, for many people just the idea of making the jump from researching Bitcoin to buying Bitcoin can be a massive leap of faith. If you read our last post, then you know why we are big believers in Bitcoin & cryptocurrency. Try Coinbase out for yourself! It is a great site and cryptocurrency is a fun hobby.

Coinbase has four cryptocurrencies currently listed on the site. They are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, & Bitcoin Cash. These four cryptocurrencies make up four out of the top five cryptocurrencies in terms of market cap. Market cap is the total amount of money invested into one specific coin (or also the total market cap which is the total invested into cryptocurrency as a whole). To give you an idea of where the market cap for cryptocurrency currently stands, the market is about half as big as the company Apple. Apple is worth about $900B. Cryptocurrency is currently around $460B. However, that number changes quite a bit on a daily basis.

What Can You Buy Next on Coinbase

To see exactly how to use Coinbase, please watch our step by step tutorial video. It will give you the ins and outs of the cryptocurrency purchasing platform. While we understand what we can currently buy on Coinbase, it is rather fun to speculate about what other coins can possibly be coming to Coinbase soon. Coinbase has shown a propensity to place coins on their site that are on the top tier of crypto market caps. I mentioned four out of the top five coins are currently on Coinbase. So why is Ripple (XRP) not listed since it is number three in market cap?

how to use coinbase

That’s a good question and has led to quite a bit of speculation. At the beginning of January in 2018, the crypto world was ablaze. This was partly due to the fact that almost everyone in the crypto world believe Ripple was going to debut on Coinbase by the end of January. However, Coinbase announced it would not list Ripple. This was a huge blow to Ripple and led to a huge downturn for the currency.

Many people believe that Ripple, a centralized coin, does not qualify as a coin that Coinbase would list (due to its centralization in nature – all other coins on Coinbase are decentralized). This leads many to believe that Ripple’s decentralized cousin, Stellar Lumens (XLM), could be next on Coinbase. Some other frontrunners for the honor could be NEO, ADA, DASH, & XMR. We hope this information has been helpful!

Thanks for reading!

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Crypto Thursdays

How to Buy A Bitcoin with Coinbase

How to Buy A Bitcoin with Coinbase

how to buy bitcoin on coinbaseOur Crypto Thursday videos have been immensely popular with our audience. However, we have yet to do a video on How to buy a Bitcoin with Coinbase. Well, you are in luck because today we are going to show you how to do just that. Coinbase is a super easy website to use… which is probably why it is the premier destination to buy Bitcoins on the internet. The first thing you need to do to buy Bitcoins is to create an account on Coinbase. You can do that by going HERE.

Once you get into your Coinbase account, you will see that there are 4 different coins listed there. The default coin will be Bitcoin. You can see the Bitcoin current price, percentage increase or decrease, and the chart. You can see the chart for several different time increments including 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, and all time. This is very useful to be able to see the trend that Bitcoin is currently on.

If Bitcoin is on a spike then it may not be the best time to buy it. You want to wait until what is called a “dip”. This is when a coin has been on an increase and then takes a small decrease. Unless there is some type of bad news surrounding a coin, dips typically go back up pretty quickly. I’m not a financial advisor, but that is my personal opinion on the best way to buy crypto in general according to a chart.

Buying Bitcoin inside of Coinbase is very easy. All you have to do is go to the Buy/Sell tab. From there select Bitcoin and type in the amount you would like to buy. You can use your bank account or debit card.

Why Buy Bitcoin on Coinbase

I’m going to give you my own personal story to show you why I like cryptocurrency so much and why I think it is a good idea to learn how to buy Bitcoin on Coinbase. Several years ago, I began using a software online for one of my businesses. Some point during my use of the software, the creator chose to accept recurring payments in only Bitcoin. The cost to use the software was about $150 every 3 months. It was very confusing to learn how to use Bitcoin around 2012. However, I figured it out and was able to make my purchase. Instead of putting $150 in, I put $165 in my account. After making my payment, I let the extra 120 Bitcoins I had left over sit in my account and I forgot about them.

how to buy bitcoin with coinbaseThe next time I had to make my payment, I used a different platform. Several months later, I went back to my account with the $15 worth of Bitcoin left in it. The 120 Bitcoins I had there ballooned from being worth $15 to being worth $2,000. I had made almost two grand by doing nothing. I was terrified that the price would drop again so immediately pulled them out and sold them. At the time, I was extremely happy about my sudden comeuppance. However, fast forward to December of 2017 and those same 120 Bitcoins would have been worth $2.5 million dollars. I still kick myself to this very day, but there is nothing I can do other than learn from my mistakes. As you may be aware of, many people have become millionaires and billionaires from Bitcoin over the last few years. There is no reason to think that trend will not continue.

 

 

 

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Tech Tuesdays

How to Save YouTube Videos with ClipGrab

How to Save YouTube Videos with ClipGrab

how to save youtube videos with clipgrabIf you have ever wanted to be able to grab a video off of YouTube for you own purposes, then you are in luck because I’m going to show you how to save YouTube Videos with ClipGrab. It’s a common problem for a lot of video editors. You are working on an incredible project, but you are missing a sound effect. All that your project needs is a clear and crisp sound effect of a rainstorm. However, you don’t have a library to go to to find the sound effect. So to try to find a sound effect that will work, you head on over to Google and start searching for “Rain Storm Sound Effect”.

You start scrolling down the page and find several sites with the sound effect. You go to each of them only to find out that they will be glad to give you any sound effect you want; for a monthly fee. Or maybe they offer you the clip at a fixed cost per clip. Either way, you don’t want to pay for a 20 second clip so you decide to keep searching. This time, you search for “Free Rain Storm Sound Effect Clip.” This search leads you to more websites that supposedly have the clip. You click on one of the sites listed only to discover that it is a danger site full of spyware. Sites like this will allow you to download the clip… if you also download a spyware toolbar for your browser!

Then like a beacon of light, you realize that at the very top of the Google search results were two videos of perfect rain storm clips. The issue is, how do you take a YouTube video off of YouTube and on to your desktop?

ClipGrab Makes Saving YouTube Videos Easy

This is where ClipGrab comes in. It is a super easy and simple software that allows you to pull videos directly from YouTube with ease. Head on over to ClipGrab.org in order to download the program. A great feature of this program is that it allows you to use it whether you use a PC or a Mac. Many programs are made specifically for one or the other, but fortunately ClipGrab works for both. When you navigate to the website, ClipGrab will automatically select the version you need for your computer. Download the program and then go through the installation steps.

how to save youtube videos with clipgrab

With this program, learning how to save YouTube videos with ClipGrab is a breeze. In order to grab the rain storm sound effect, all you need to do is navigate to the video you are trying to get in your web browser. Once you are there, copy the URL address for the video. Head on over to your ClipGrab software and paste the URL address in the empty field space in the program. Click “Grab this clip!” It will take a short period of time to process the video. Then just choose the file name and location of where you want the file saved to. Once you have done that, then your video will be saved and you can insert it into your video editing program. You are good to go at this point!

Thanks for reading and good luck!

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Website Building

Getting Started With WordPress Dashboard

Getting Started With WordPress Dashboard

getting started with wordpress dashboardThis week, we are continuing with our web series about how to build a website from start to finish. We have already purchased a domain name, set up our hosting, installed WordPress, and now we are getting started with WordPress Dashboard. The first thing you must do before investigating the dashboard, is to login to your site. To do this, type /wp-admin after your domain name. It would look like this: http://www.YourDomainName.com/wp-admin. One quirky aspect of the WordPress admin URL is that the “wp-admin” must be typed in lower case letter only. If you were to type “WP-Admin” then you will not be able to get to your admin. To my knowledge, this is literally the only URL address I have ever encountered where the case of the letter matters.

Once you have pulled up your admin login screen, type in your username and password. My email address never seems to work for any sites I have created with WordPress (between 75-100). You will need to use your username here. If you forget your username or password, click Lost Password. You will be prompted to type in the email address associated with your username and WordPress will email you a reset link. Be careful about this though, because my Password Reset link usually gets sent to my spam instead of my main email inbox. Once you have logged into your account, you can now explore the dashboard.

Making Sense of WordPress

If you have never created a website before, WordPress can be quite intimidating at first. However, the platform is very easy to use with a little practice. One of the most frustrating things that WordPress does in my opinion, is allowing spam on their dashboard. Let me explain. If you go through any hosting service to install your WordPress, the hosting company has agreements in place with companies that integrate themes, widgets, & plugins. These agreements allow them to automatically install plugins & widgets onto your WordPress page.

To an experienced designer, this is not a huge problem because a good designer knows that these plugins are unnecessary. To the novice website builder, these extra plugins make the dashboard confusing. Two of the most common companies I’ve seen are JetPack and MojoMarketplace. To me personally, I have never found any use for either of these.

Plugins can create problems for your website. Certain plugins may cause certain parts of your theme to malfunction. Above all, having several plugins on your website will kill the speed of it. My philosophy is the less plugins, the better. Now of course, plugins are not the devil (even though Bobby Boucher’s mom may disagree!). Plugins are a necessary part of website building. They offer functionality that you will find solve a lot of problems. However, you only need to add plugins that you actually need. For this reason, my preference is to deactivate and deleteĀ every single pluginĀ that comes preloaded within my WordPress site. When you delete all of those plugins, you will be amazed at just how much that simple action cleans up and simplifies your WordPress Dashboard.

Our tutorial video “Getting Started with WordPress Dashboard” shows you much more about the WordPress Dashboard.

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Social Media Tips

How to Build Reddit Karma Quickly

How to Build Reddit Karma Quickly

how to build reddit karma quicklyIf you are over 30, there is a chance you don’t even know what Reddit is. If you are under 30, then there is a good chance you have used it extensively. Either way, it is a great idea to get to know it better and learn how to build Reddit Karma quickly. Reddit is an awesome platform to be able to get the word out about your business, product, service, channel, or any other cause you would like to advertise. Reddit is build in such a way that it protects its users from spam. If you are looking to spam your way to the top, then Reddit is not the place for you. If you are looking to promote your business with quality content, then Reddit is one of the best places to do so.

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Crypto Thursdays

How to Buy NEOGAS

How to Buy NEOGAS

how to buy neogasIf you have been paying attention during the latest bear run on the cryptocurrency market, then you have seen a few coins that seemed to be able to take the blows better than other. Three coins that seemed to stand tough during the dip were Waltonchain, NEO, & GAS. Don’t be confused by the title of this article, How to Buy NEOGAS. NEO & GAS are two different tokens, but they are on the same platform. They are attached at the hip. When NEO drops in price, GAS is usually follows the same trend. If NEO goes on a bull run, then GAS is also not far behind. Currently, GAS has been staying at about 30-50% of NEO’s price. So let’s look at the relationship between the two coins.

NEO and GAS both have 100 million tokes as their total possible supply. The thing that separates the two from each other is that NEO cannot be divided. GAS, however, can be divided into smaller shares distributed across the total supply of coins. While I personally do not believe that GAS will ever be able to pass NEO, the ability to divide the coins does make it likely that one day the price of GAS may get much higher than 30% of NEO’s price.

When it comes to choosing NEO or GAS as a coin to invest in, my advice would be to actually make a choice. They are both great coins with strong futures, but since their movements seem to mimic one another, it would be better to invest in only one of the coins. This would allow you to allocate part of your portfolio to other coins with potential. Now that you understand a little about NEO & GAS, let’s look at how to buy NEOGAS.

how to buy neogas

Using Kucoin to Buy NEOGAS

While technically the name of the token we are looking at is NEOGAS, you will most likely only find it under the name GAS on most exchanges. You can buy GAS on many bigger exchanges such as Binance. The exchange we will be looking at is Kucoin. The Kucoin exchange is unique because it offers more options than just trading ETH or BTC for its coins. You can actually trade NEO on this platform (which demonstrates the usefulness of NEO itself).

Before you begin to learn how to buy NEOGAS, you need to be able to get your money on an exchange. The obvious choice is Coinbase. Chances are that if you are looking into how to buy altcoins such as NEO or GAS, that you already have experience with Coinbase. If this is your first time moving your money from Coinbase to an exchange, then welcome to the real crypto world!

On Kucoin, hover over the $ symbol on the top of the page. Then move your cursor down to click on “Deposit”. The default coin to trade with on Kucoin is KCS. This stands for Kucoin shares and is the coin ran by the exchange. Simple click the dropdown to select Bitcoin from the list. Then send your BTC from Coinbase to the Kucoin BTC address you are provided with. From that point, all you need to do is make the actual exchange. To see exactly how this is done, watch the tutorial video, “How to Buy NEOGAS”. It’s a very simple process.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your crypto investments!

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Website Building

How to Install WordPress – Full Tutorial

How to Install WordPress

how to install wordpressDuring our Web Wednesday series, we have been showing you how to create a website from start to finish. We have walked you through choosing a domain name, choosing a hosting package, & setting your nameservers. Now it is time to move on to the next step and we are going to show you how to install WordPress to your website.

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Tech Tuesdays

How To Create a Whiteboard Explainer Video in Minutes

How to Create a Whiteboard Explainer Video in Minutes

how to create a whiteboard explainer video in minutesWe are going to show you how to create a whiteboard explainer video in minutes. There are many reasons to consider adding an advertising video to your website or social media account. People love videos. They consume them at such an astounding rate that YouTube has now passed Facebook in popularity (in terms of number of monthly visitors). While your marketing video most likely won’t go viral due to its lack of cute babies or frisky felines, it can mean a lot to your business and customers.

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