If you’re a video fan like us, you love all the different Video Sharing sites available today and you’ll love the new Video Cracker software…

It’s great being able to find your favourite music, hobby, how-to, and even business, and educational videos online and we spend a lot of time doing just that.

But we’ve always wanted to be able to just download them to our computer and watch them whenever we want. (And it would be great to not always have to have an internet connection just to watch a video).

We looked long and hard to find some software that would allow us to do just that — but, once you start thinking about it you realize you need more than just a video downloader. For instance wouldn’t it be great to not only download the videos you want and then convert them into different formats.

Well guess what? we never found that software, so we decided to create our own!

It’s very cool and so simple to use – it’s called VIDEO CRACKER

And once we started using it, we knew there would be a whole lot of other people just like us, who would appreciate it as much as we do so now you can grab a copy too

What Does Video Cracker Do?

• Download videos from YouTube – Metacafe – MySpace – DailyMotion – Vimeo – BlipTV – Break – GodTube – Revver and more…
• Save in the original download format or automatically convert to AVI, MP4, MP4 (PSP) 3GP, MOV, WMV
• Convert Videos To MP3 Audio tracks to play in your IPod or other player.

And the best thing is the conversion process is fast and easy (just one click) – You can even take videos you already have on your computer and convert them into any of the formats listed above!

To find out more about Video Cracker Click Here

What are some of the best easy-to-use and free web analytics tools?

Having great data is crucial for building a successful website. That said, a new website may not really want to pay for data in the beginning.

=> General Analytics

There are three primary analytics platforms that provide a full spectrum of data including referral data, traffic data, content data, search data and more.

* Google Analytics – This is the 300-pound gorilla of the tracking space. Google Analytics provides just about all the data you could every want, 100% free.

The downside to using Google is that a lot of people don’t feel comfortable having all their sites linked together by Google, especially if they’re experimenting with unconventional back-linking techniques or other “grey” areas of marketing.

* GoingUp – GoingUp provides just about everything Google Analytics does, and a little more. GoingUp also provides heatmap tracking in addition to the typical analytics data, meaning you can actually see where people are clicking on a graphical display. This can give you a lot of useful information about your user’s behavior.

* Piwik – Piwik is an open source self-hosted tracking solution. If you prefer to have your tracking hosted on your own servers rather than risk having it on someone else’s server, Piwik can be a great way to do it.

They have a strong reputation for building great software, the code is written by hundreds of dedicated developers all over the world and their platform provides all the functionality that Google Analytics does.

=> ConceptFeedback.com

Want to know what people think of your design before you launch? Why not post it to a group of marketers and designers for review?

ConceptFeedback.com is a free website where people can post their business, marketing and design concepts to be reviewed by their peers free of charge.

It’s a great way to get a gauge of what experienced designers and marketers think before you launch.

=> Compete.com

Compete.com is a competitive research platform that allows you to spy on your competitor’s keywords and traffic statistics.

Though their data isn’t “accurate” per se, it can still give you a very good gauge on where their traffic is coming from, as well as what kinds of keywords are working for them.

Though you do need to pay to get complete access to Compete, the free version gives you a limited number of keywords and traffic sources – enough to get a very good sense of what your competitors are up to.

These are some of the top free web analytics tools available to webmasters today and most of these tools are easy to use and can provide you with data that will make running your business much, much easier.

If you’re starting a new venture and need sales fast, then use one of the following techniques to give your business a jump start.

=> PPC Advertising

PPC advertising is perhaps the most direct possible method for jump-starting your sales. Start with your most targeted keywords. These should include your product name and the most direct keywords someone in your market might type in.

For example, if you’re selling a pair of V-Mod Bose headphones, you might bid on keywords like:

* V-Mod Bose
* Bose headphones
* Best Bose headphones
* Best bass headphones (what V-mod is known for)

Start with a low daily limit and work your way up.

=> Direct Advertising with Related Websites

If there are a few websites in your industry that are very closely related to your site, try directly advertising with them. Contact their site owners and ask them for their advertising rates. You could even try asking them if they’d be interested in testing out a revenue split.

This type of deal can often bring you a ton of targeted traffic quickly. Depending on the site, the traffic could convert even better than PPC traffic because people already trust the site they’re coming from.

=> Content Network to Direct

An extension on the above technique is to find direct advertisers using the Google content network.

Bid on a wide net of sites and keywords. Let your ads run on a multitude of sites and track where your conversions come from. If you lose money on this test, that is O.K.

Once you know where your conversions come from, contact those sites directly and arrange for a direct advertising deal. You’ll often be able to cut your costs by as much as 20%-40%, since Google takes an estimated 50% cut from AdSense bids.

This is a great way of finding advertising spots that you would never find just by browsing the net on your own.

=> Get On an Affiliate Network

Affiliate networks like Azoogle, Neverblue, Affiliate.com and Commission Junction are all great places to get affiliates.

Getting into most of these networks is quite difficult. For a network like Azoogle or Neverblue, you’ll usually have to put down at least $10,000 as a deposit, often more.

That said, however, if you want to really jump-start your sales, getting on the radar of super affiliates is the way to do it. These are the affiliates that can drive literally tens of thousands of dollars in business to your site every day.

The key to working with affiliate networks is making sure you can handle the traffic and making sure that your back end works out profitably. Often times you’ll have to pay out more than you actually make – for a $30 profit product, you might have to pay out $40. You need to know that you’ll make money before taking on that kind of deal.

These are a few powerful ways of jump-starting your sales quickly. The first three techniques work great if you have limited capital and are just getting started. The fourth technique can send a fire hose of traffic your way if you have the bandwidth and capacity to handle it. Go on grab some more sales!

Should you still be doing your own social media marketing, or is it time to hand it off to someone else? There are many factors that go into whether or not you can hand off your social media.

Here are some of the things to consider when you’re weighing your decision.

=> Is Your Social Marketing Personality Driven or Process Driven?

Is your social media primarily driven by you and your personality, or is it primarily driven by processes?

One example of personality-driven social media marketing is a comedian.

In his case, it’d be very hard to outsource his social media, because he has such a unique voice. Finding someone who could emulate his voice enough to still build an audience would be very tough.

An example of process-driven social media marketing might be an artist or band.

The primary jobs in managing their social media is responding to friend requests, deciding which gigs to take and updating the event listings. This is something that could easily be handed off to someone else.

When you’re deciding whether or not it’s time to hand off your social marketing, one crucial question you need to ask yourself is whether or not you can hand it off without losing your voice.

=> How Much Time Is It Taking?

If social media marketing is sucking up all your time and detracting from other areas of business that actually generate income, then it may be time to seriously start looking for ways to outsource it.

If you’re constantly checking Twitter, Facebook and MySpace for updates, chances are it’s becoming more of a distraction than a profitable business activity. In fact, if you spend more than ninety minutes on it per day, you should really think about getting that activity off your plate.

=> Who Can You Outsource To?

This is really the all-important question. If you’re not doing your social media marketing, who is?

Do you hand it off to someone in India for $3 an hour? Or do you hand it off to someone on your staff who really understands the spirit of your company?

Again, the issue really comes down to how important the voice is. If people come to your social network pages expecting to get constant updates from your unique voice, then you really need to carefully select your social media managers.

If managing your social media is mostly technical, then you can hire anyone with the capability to do it.

In short, it is absolutely worth thinking about outsourcing your social media marketing when it gets to the point that it’s distracting from other more productive activities. Put special attention on what your visitors expect when they visit your pages and who can actually replace you from a voice and brand perspective.

Increasing your web presence through business forums will give you a different kind of clout than search engine optimization, PPC or any other method of gaining visibility.

People who see business forums as just another method to drive traffic are really missing the point. Business forums can not only drive traffic, but also build up your personal brand and reputation. If increasing your web presence is important (and it should be) business forums can help you land speaking engagements, joint venture partners, interns who will work for you for free, high PR backlinks and a whole lot more. Of course, you’ll also get highly targeted traffic.

=> Focus on Providing Value

The people who become really well known in online communities are the people with reputations of helping people. Find questions that you really believe you can help answer and answer them. Become known as someone who knows what they’re talking about and can help others.

Pick a specialty. Rather than answer questions on everything, answer questions on just the things you know.

If you’re a killer copywriter but a poor PPC marketer, then don’t hang out in PPC forums. Instead, give spot-on reviews of other people’s copy and help others learn the art of copywriting.

=> Provide Case Studies

Provide case studies of things you’ve personally done. If you’ve successfully launched a website, share your step-by-step formula for how you made it happen.

If you created a campaign that converted at 6%, share how you made that happen. Share your sales funnel, how you interacted with your users via email, how you optimized your sales page, etc.

If you build a successful PPC affiliate marketing campaign, share how you made your process work. Share your keyword research tips, bidding methods and how you selected your affiliate programs.

Hold back only enough so that your business isn’t damaged. Don’t give away your specific markets or keywords for example, but be generous with methodology and advice.

=> When Should You Link to Your Site?

Only link to your site from your forum signature, your forum profile and occasionally forum posts if you can genuinely provide more value by sending people to your website.

Never spam. Never, ever spam.

People who land on your site should be the kind of people who’ve already had exposure to you and want to learn more. They’ll deliberately seek out your site in your signature, because they’ve seen the quality of your content from your posts.

Forum marketing is less about “LOOK AT ME!” marketing. It’s more about reputation building and gaining exposure. Once you have that exposure, people will seek you out as the expert in whatever industry you’re in.

For any online business increasing your web presence is an important task and when used properly, business forums can catapult you to a completely different level of success use them to build connections, reputation and traffic.