SMF Ad Mod Installation

For those of you who know I run a forum using Simple Machines Forum software you'll know that I have been wanting to run ads on the site. For those of you that don't know, SMF is a free software package that allows you to create your own forum on your own server and customize it to the best of your abilities.

I downloaded two of the Ad Mod Zip files from the site. Being unfamiliar with the software, despite having the forum up for almost a year now, I unzipped the files and uploaded them to my server. Then I tried running the install.php. Of course it didn't work because thats not how you are supposed to do it.

So from the amount of bad information online and the number of posts requesting help I thought I would explain how to do it right.

Under the Main section there is a link called Packages. Click that to go to the Packages page. On that page click the Download Packages link in the middle of the page. scroll to the bottom to find the field called Upload a Package. Click on Browse and find the location of the zipped file you downloaded with the Ad Mod, or any other mod for that matter. Click Uplodoad and let SMF do the rest.

The good thing is if you try to upload the same zip file twice the program will let you know that that file already exists instead of overwriting the whole thing.

The problem is that I can't get the Ad Mod to work no matter how I configure it despite it being good for my current version. Look for another post on that soon as I work around it adding other Mod's and My own Banner Ads by making Template Modifications.

SMF Simple Machine Forum Forum Software

YouTube Marketing

Recently I have been trying to enact my two part plan of A) Increasing the amount of High Paying Keyword Microsites that I operate and B) Increasing traffic across the board to every one of my websites.

This is where I realized that my weakness lies in driving large amounts of traffic to my sites and not so much in the creation or Search Engine Optimization aspects of building Microsites.

The truth is that I just don't spend enough time online. And when I do it isn't always productive time.

So the other day I was thinking about building traffic and wondered what could be done with YouTube, esp. since I had so many videos and short animations laying around that hadn't been uploaded yet.

First off was changing my channel type to Guru status, this allowed me to add a hyperlink in my profile to the blog for which I opened the YouTube account.

Next was uploading a new video. For that I found one of my first animations and uploaded it including the domain name of my blog in the description. I could have went ahead and included it in the title of the video as well but this is all learning phase stuff here and I thought that a URL in the title would seem a little spammy.

I added as many relevant keyword tags as possible then embeded the video into a blog post and tagged that and pinged some of the major blogging services.

Even though I am not focusing on highly searched keywords for YouTube or including an eye popping, attention grabbing video as my first experiment I do expect to see some increase in visitors to my blog. And whats great about this is that my video will stay up there generating traffic for as long as I keep the account open.

What more could I ask for from videos that I already created and were laying around doing nothing?

This experiment also showed me that YouTube takes frames from the center of a videos timeline to use as a thumbnail image. You do have a choice in the matter later by going to edit video info under your account page, but for the most part the middle of your video is the default thumbnail image.

So plan accordingly.

I'll be keeping you updated on my attempts to increase traffic to my blog by uploading old video to YouTube here, but if you want to see how the YouTube videos look embedded into a blog check out Things Going Smoothly for a preview.


YouTube Marketing Blogging Web Traffic