No, I’m not kidding — what I’m laying down here is well worth a million bucks, but most people will never see what it is, nor will they attempt to even explore, let alone master, the contents thereof. So be it — it’s none of my affair, just a traffic accident in the rear-view mirror, and good luck to you when you land.
If you’re still vague on the subject of photoshop, let me tell you right off the bat that it’d take an entire weekend of intense personal training to just get you past the basics and into a routine approach to photoshop.
If you go pro, you can’t afford to piddle.
To the pro, every action is subject to smoothing-out, meaning the fewer moves and the smoother the routine, the better things will go. Sometimes you design your product to accommodate that inescapable fact, that people will be people. If you want to pass any information on to them, you need their attention, and before you can get their attention, you MUST have their interest, and in order to get their interest, it must be about something that’s bothering them RIGHT NOW.
Failing any one of those steps, the whole thing collapses into a heap of ashes on the cold stone floor. In short, you’re dead in the water before you even take a single step.
How to avoid this catastrophic calamity? You can’t, so you might as well gird your loins for the eventual collapse of your well-planned victorious parade through social media, and begin to build a base of strength, which is a fundamental to the exercise of power, which is a disturbingly accurate picture of what social media really is — an exercise of the power to grab the attention and hold it and to persuade in the process.
This is called “marketing”.
In order to ATTRACT the attention sufficiently to arouse INTEREST, you’ll need to slap the client across the eyeballs and tickle their curiosity. The most obvious example of this would be this:
That’s the sort of “Wet Paint” thing that most people, being people, can’t resist. They’ve just got to test it — is it REALLY wet, or is that some sort of Deep State Conspiracy that they’ve been fed by the crazy-ass Left/Right/Center Wing Extremists?
Another equally amazing and compelling button is this one:
Any variation on the theme will do the trick, just don’t overdo. Once is enough. Okay, now that you’ve shot your biggest cannon, what’s left in your bag of tricks?
Clearly, you need a product to promote, right? It can be any kind of product, including no-product products, such as extreme intangibles like workshops, clinics and trainings, or weekend seminars, retreats, sweat lodges and more.
The Magic Button can be used to sell almost anything, from a single donut up to a house or business, and maybe even a country!
Well, maybe not an entire country, but 40 stunning acres of gold claim with 1,000 feet of river and two streams on it is a great deal more country than most folks have on their payroll.
In short, you can buy the claim for $5,000, which includes $2,500 worth of mining gear and an entire caseful of gold-bearing paydirt packaged for retail sales at only $5 per packet, each guaranteed to contain SOME high-grade gold!
You also get the panning contest pans, tubs and all the equipment you need to get a group to learn how to pan for dollars! They actually pan b-b pellets, which are copper-clad lead balls that behave exactly as gold does in a gold pan.
You get ten pellets in the pan along with a shovelful of dirt, then pan down and try to keep all ten b-b pellets. The one who keeps the most pellets wins the gold nugget, see?
In fact, to run this gimmick — should I say “side hustle”? — you don’t need any paydirt at all, just some b-b pellets, a few dozen goldpans and a couple of water troughs to catch the spill. This removes the very real possibility that tenderfeet will let actual gold go dumping downriver without a twinge of respect or understanding of the natural forces at work here.
In short, gravity wins again.
Gold is heavy. Gold is really, really heavy, and it tends to head toward the nearest gravity well, which in this case is Planet Earth’s core. It buries itself down, down, down through dirt and gravel, and tucks itself into the deepest crevices in the bedrock, where you’ll find it encrusted with a thick layer of “false bedrock” which must be chiseled out before the gold will come up.
This happens underwater, generally, in a drysuit with a tank. It’s real salvage diving at its most dangerous. You’re prowling around with a dredge nozzle underneath a 40-ton boulder that’s being held up by a strap tied around a tree at the river bank.
This is not a good way to earn a living. It’s a fast way to bring yourself to the end of the road, though, if that’s what you have in mind. Okay, so let’s see, where were we???
Oh, yes, we need a thing to promote or market or sell or sell tickets to. It doesn’t matter at all what the thing is, by the way — it could be absolutely anything, even something absurd.
Let’s take the Teniers oil for an example. One way to use this button is to implant it into a blog, as I’ve done here, but another possibly more effective usage would be to embed it as a button into a video about the Teniers work, perhaps a short lecture on his time and his work, and why we think this is an authentic Teniers — the concept is that there were no museums in which to copy the original painting which was in the home studio of Teniers.
Consequently, it had to have been painted either at Teniers’ studio or at the home or studio of the buyer of the “original”, which is merely the version of this scene that was discovered first. The reason we know this is that there were no color photographs, no color prints and no public viewing places such as museums and strolling galleries where this might have been copied by an outside hand.
No, it had to be by the hand of Teniers or one or more of his apprentices, all of whom worked on every painting made by the master. Here’s how it worked: the master sketched in the “cartoon” of the piece, generally on the gessoed or fish-skin or rabbit-skin prepped for reception of the toxic and volatile oil paints, which without gesso, would devour the canvas in no time flat.
So how do you construct one of these incredible marketing buttons, anyhow???
Well, you start off with a basic photo or screenshot or whatever kind of graphic you decide you want to use to represent what it is you’re selling. Try to make it something that an idiot can decipher on a microscopically small cellphone screen. It should be readable from a distance of ten feet.
Any text should fit onto a bumper sticker. If the aforementioned bumpersticker cannot be read from a distance of 4 car-lengths back, it’s got too many goddammed words on it, if you ask me.
So let’s take one item at a time here:
This thing measures exactly 1028 thingies high, which is what I want to start with, and it’s a lot taller than it is wide, which is what I also want.
So here I’ve gone into “IMAGE” to the drop-down menu that reads “Canvas Size”, and I make the WIDTH 1900. You can just hit the drop-down to Canvas Size and go ahead and type in the “1900” — the default is already in place to take the data, so you hit that, then “Enter”, and you’ll get a pair of “wings” on the sides of your interior photo, sort of a photo sandwich.
Now, of course, you’ll hit your “Type Tool” on the photoshop toolbar, and if that leaves you puzzled and confused, it’s a clear indication that you should have taken our online marketing clinic a LONG time ago — you didn’t miss a thing, because it’s all available again at this year’s winter social media clinics!
Now to put that button to work for you, merely use it as a thumbnail on a youtube video, but something more can be done with it if you add it as only one of some twenty or so buttons that you load onto your moviemaker — I use OpenShot, but any good editor will do — and make a video of those stills, which produces the effect of a slide show, with a music bed.
You may wish to use our music for this purpose, and it’s perfectly fine to do so — we’re automatically paid for the musical usage as long as the stuff you use for your viral videos comes from our actual CD BABY releases — anything privately recorded might not get the same treatment, but it’s entirely up to you which music you use, as long as the maker of the music allows it, and we do.
So how do you prepare your edited video for youtube? Simple. After assembling the shots you want into one track, and the audio onto another track, you’ll compile the whole thing into a single video result that you can upload onto youtube.
- Press the red “Export Video” button at the top of the video editor. It will provide you with a pop-up menu that offers File Name: put in the name of your video file, something you’ll remember easily.
- Folder Path should be wherever you want the video to end up, so use the “BROWSE” function on the right to find the folder destination you want to designate as the terminal.
- Okay, now set the PROFILE to “Web”.
- TARGET is set to “Youtube-HD”.
- VIDEO PROFILE is set to the lowest item on the list, at 30fps.
- QUALITY is set to “Medium” — it defaults to “High”, which you don’t need and can’t use.
- ADVANCED to AUDIO SETTINGS: AUDIO CODEC = “aac”.
Then hit the export video button and watch it compile or do something else like process images or upload a video or get a cup of tea and a slice of toast or something. Don’t just sit there.
Well, on the other hand, that could do some good, too — it worked for the Buddha. Did you know that the very first Buddha was named Irving Wasserman, and that he lived in a mud hut just outside the tiny village of Bethlehem, a notorious hangout for criminals and prostitutes, by the way, something on the order of Trump’s hotels, where they show violent films for the amusement of bloodthirsty Republicans looking to re-fight the Civil War.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml10GIDbAMo
And here you have a working result of the foregoing data. Go thou and do likewise, and may your many videos go viral.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby