There’s always that bit of a particular YouTube video that makes you laugh more than the rest and combined with a baby laughing hilariously and a 10 second clip of Rick Astley dancing, it would make for a pretty entertaining piece of film. If only there was a way to make this masterpiece without going through the painful task of acquiring video editing software and downloading the videos individually…

You guessed it – there is. With Dragontape, it’s suddenly a quick and painless process to mix your favourite YouTube videos into a piece of video artwork. Find out more about the app after the fold.

Overview

Dragontape is a cool new app that allows anyone to mix their favourite videos from YouTube together to make some really nice mashups. Whether it’s just for personal enjoyment or to share with your friends, mashups are a great way of taking everything you love about certain clips and mixing them into fantastic videos to share with whoever you want.

User-Interface

The unique design of the Dragontape website makes it stand out. With a huge button and a heavy emphasis on typography, it’s somewhat reminiscent of a magazine-style design. The actual app’s design is also not one to be ignored. They’ve taken some of the elements of the main website’s design and fashioned them into a really nice app.

Creating A Tape

When you first visit the site, you’ll be greeted with a huge button that allows you to create your first tape on Dragontape. Once you’ve clicked this, you will be then taken to the editor. In here, you will be able to create your videos

When you’re creating your video, one of the most important things you’ll need is a good collection of footage. Dragontape allows you to add almost any video from YouTube and once you search for a term, it automatically chooses the top results which can then be dragged and dropped onto the timeline. A nice little feature is the ability to find your YouTube favourites by searching for “favs: USERNAME”. You can then choose which of your favourite videos you’d like to import and throw them onto the timeline.

Once you’ve finished editing your video together, you can play your video by either hitting the space bar or pressing the play icon. Immediately, videos should play in the background and you can hover over the monitor icon to make them full screen.

Once you’ve taken all of the pleasure and enjoyment from watching your creation, you can then rename your app through the dropdown menu in the bottom left corner of the app to give it some personality and then choose some other options which we’ll come to later.

Adding an Account

To save your tapes or share them with others, you’ll first need an account. There is a “Register” button in the top right of the screen and once you’ve entered your name and email, you’ll be sent an email with your password. Despite the inconvenience that is randomly generated and there’s no way to change it, at least you’ll be able to take delight in the fact that you can now save your mashups and share them with whomever you choose.

Sharing Videos

Once you’ve finished your tape, you can then share it with your friends. You can also choose to make your tape available publicly in the Dragontape gallery where videos are promoted and you can get yours viewed by the community. This can be done by expanding the section with your tape’s name and then choosing to make your tape public.

The link to your now public video can be found in the bottom right corner of the app and you can then give this out to anyone you think would like it. A “Share” button also appears that allows you to automatically share your tape through a couple of popular social network and bookmarking websites.

Through the bottom right corner menu that you used to make your app public and rename it, you can also allow others to edit the video. This is great if you’re collaborating to make a really good video that several people can bring ideas too.

Final Thoughts

All in all, I think Dragontape really is one of those great gems that is fun for even the most inexperienced of budding editors. Its quirkiness allows it to be usable for people of all ages; overall widening its reach and potential. The design is unique and is consistent throughout the app, thus giving the user a great experience.

Although it does lack a great wealth of features that would probably add more to the overall usability, it is still useful nonetheless when you don’t have the experience or the money to invest in software to edit videos together professionally. Despite its frustrating temperament for some major browsers, it is a great app overall and definitely one worth checking out if you’re ridden with boredom.

Despite having a slightly shady and unprofessional sheen to it, affiliate marketing largely works as a business model. There are a lot of respected brands who offer hefty commissions to sell their products in your network of influence. For those of us who do not want to hire a costly sales force to push their products, affiliate marketing is the easy way out.

Key to affiliate marketing success is that it should be specific to your customers. zferral helps you run tailor made affiliate marketing campaigns & manage your affiliates at the same time.

Overview

Simply put, zferral lets you create and manage an affiliate program to push your products or services via an informal business network. By crowd sourcing sales and marketing, zferral allows you to scale your business painlessly.

The sign up process is simple, but all the fields are mandatory and, once done, the password and login info are sent to your email address.

Pricing

zferral has paid plans in four tiers ranging from $49 to whooping $999 a month. Plans are differentiated by the number of campaigns managed & the payout limits to your affiliates.

All paid plans have a full featured 30 day trial period along with a free plan, which allows managing two campaigns and 10 affiliates.

Dashboard

zferral has a brilliantly designed dashboard which has a bit of help resources, quick action links and summary. Summaries are displayed in three sections – Affiliate, Campaign and Analytics summary.

You can create and manage your custom affiliate and referral programs from this powerful dashboard.

Customizing Affiliate Panel

zferral recommends its users to start by customizing the affiliate panel with your logo and custom  color scheme. this is not a mandatory requirement, but custom design is bound to infuse a sense of confidence in your brand.

Customization options include color theme, font, header of the page on top of adding a custom logo. Custom colors can be selected both for backgrounds and buttons by just selecting from a color palette.

Creating a Campaign

Creating a campaign is a four staged process. In the first stage, you get to name the campaign and a set a timeline for it.

Campaign events are the part of the second stage and events being a measurable action you wish to take place. In simple words, you can define the landing page for affiliate sign up, registration, sale and email opt in options.

Commissions can be planned in the stage. They could either be monetary or non-monetary compensation and, if you choose to go with non-monetary commission, you can create your own currency. Commissions can either be flat rate or revenue share based.

In the final stage, you can set up tiered commission levels and recurring commissions. To track and analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns zferral provides you with a snippet of code on the successful registration complete page. Multiple methods of tracking are available and it is just simple copy and paste.

Managing Affiliates

Once the affiliate campaigns are created, you can upload banner ads, create text ads and social media posts to promote it. All your affiliates will receive a code with their unique link identifiers for tracking these ads.

Creating and managing affiliates from the dashboard is a breeze. You can either create them manually and generate strong passwords for them or alternatively import a list from a CSV file.

Final Thoughts

zferral’s dashboard design is outstanding and provides vital sales information at a single glance. However, there is a bit too much scrolling involved to access all the sections and a side by side view would be nice. Being new to this affiliate marketing concept, I was not sure how well I could understand and handle this app.

But, zferral was incredibly simple to use and literally walked me through the steps. So even if you are a newbie with a product to push, zferral is a great way to go when it comes to affiliate marketing.

Facebook, the most popular social networks in the world, has now become one of the most powerful online marketing tools. Businesses everywhere are beginning to use Facebook fan pages to promote their business and connect with the millions of users who log onto Facebook every day. These fan pages are easy to create, manage, and use, and are perfect for anyone looking for a cheap and effective marketing strategy.

Whether you’re a successful businessman, a starving blogger, or a world renounced singer, using Facebook fan pages can help you reach out and expose yourself to the millions of people on Facebook. With over 500 million users on Facebook (and quickly growing), just imagine the number of potential customers you could dig up!

In today’s How-to, I’ll  guide you through the steps of creating and customizing your own Facebook fan page. Get ready to get some fans!

Like the intro. graphic? Get “People Network Icons and Elements” at GraphicRiver.net by solarseven.

Pages vs Groups?

Before I get started, I’d like to address the differences between Facebook Pages and Groups. Both tools have similar features, and it’s very easy for users to get confused about which they should be using. To make things easier on you, here are some differences between Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages:

• Facebook Pages are indexed by search engines while Groups are not.
• Groups can only send messages to 5,000 members. There is no limit for Pages.
• Groups are run by administrators who post under their own name, while Pages post under the business they represent.
• Group admins can restrict access to unapproved members or make the group invite only.
• Pages support applications.

Simply put, if you’re looking to create something for a school club or small organization, then you should start a Facebook Group. If you’re looking for a way to promote your business or website, read on and learn how to create your own Facebook fan page.

Building Your Fan Page:

Ready to build your own fan page? The actual process of building the fan page is quite simple, but customizing the page can get quite complex. Here’s how you can build own Facebook fan page in 3 simple steps.

Step 1: Find the Page Creation Menu

The hardest part of creating a fan page is the fine the place on Facebook where you actually create the page. Apparently, the developers at Facebook didn’t want too many fan pages popping up because they hid the page creation menu quite well. You’ll have to do a little digging to find it. There are many ways of accessing the page creation menu, so I decided to list multiple ways below. Use the method that is the most convenient for you.

Method 1: The easiest way to get to the start creating Facebook Pages is to log out of Facebook (if you’re logged in of course). Look under the “Sign Up” box and click on the “Create a Page” link.

Method 2: If you’re too lazy to log out of Facebook, you can use this alternate method. To get started, click on the “Advertising” link on the bottom of any Facebook page.

Find and click on the “Facebook Page” link.

Click the “Create a Page” button near the top of the screen.

Method 3: Click on this link.

Step 2: Create Your Fan Page

Now that you’ve finally found that evasive page creation menu, you’re ready to create your new page!

This section is very self explanatory. Select what type of page you want to create and name the page accordingly. Try to be as accurate as possible when describing your page because this will help others find your page.

When you’re satisfied, click on the “Create Official Page” button and continue.

Step 3: Edit Your Page Information

After you create your page, you’ll be presented with a screen that allows you to customize many aspects of your new fan page.

Upload a profile picture and start updating your status!

That’s it! Congratulations on creating your first Facebook fan page!

Now What?

Now that you’ve got your new fan page created, what’s next? Of course, you could just leave everything as it, but I don’t think your fans will be very impressed with an ugly fan page. Let’s take a look at some neat things you can do with your new fan page.

Invite Some Friends:
The first thing you want to do after you set up your new fan page is to invite some friends. You can’t have a fan page without any fans, right? Just click the “Suggest to Friends” button under the profile picture and choose some friends you want to invite. Unfortunately, I can’t show you what it looks like because I don’t have any Facebook friends.

Set A Custom URL:
If you take a look at your page’s URL, you’ll notice that it’s a mess. There’s no way anybody would be able to remember that! Luckily, you can create a custom URL for your fan page. The only catch is that your page needs at least 25 fans. Head over to www.facebook.com/username/ and set a username. This will make it much easier to share and promote your Facebook page.

Customize Wall Permissions:
Depending on the type of fan page you want, you may or may not want fans posting or commenting on your page. To change these permissions, click on the “Wall” tab of your page and click the “Settings” link.

Add Applications:
The great thing about Facebook pages is that you can add Facebook applications to your page. Get a tab for Twitter, RSS, polls, and more. Find an application you like in the Facebook Apps directory and add it to your page. (Note: Not all apps can be added to your page)

If you’re serious about tweaking your fan page, then I highly recommend you read Justin’s amazing article on apps to customize your Facebook Fan Page.

You can manage your applications by clicking the “Edit Page” button and scrolling to the Applications section.

Tip: Need some inspiration on creating a cool fan page? Check out our roundup of the best Facebook fan pages!

Final Thoughts

While Facebook may not appear to be a great platform for attracting customers/readers, if you have an awesome fan page and play your cards right, you just might see a huge influx of new visitors. Besides, it doesn’t hurt to try! While you’re at it, don’t forget to be a fan of the Web.Appstorm Facebook page. Also, be sure to check out 35 of the Best Facebook Fan Pages!

Do you think Facebook fan pages are useful? Have a Facebook fan page that you’re proud of? Know of any other tricks for customizing a fan page? Share your thoughts below in the comments!

Nowadays, people want to get involved with websites, if only to boost their online image. If you’re a blog owner and you want to get more from your readers, it can be a good idea to allow them to submit their own posts. If you don’t want to have to constantly worry about editing submissions and then scheduling them for publishing on the main blog itself, why not create your own community blog section dedicated to just reader submissions?

Kapost allows you to do just that and although your submissions are hosted with them, you can seamlessly integrate them into your blog to suit your requirements.

Overview

Kapost is an app allowing you to add an extra community-driven section to your blog where your readers can contribute posts and be rewarded if they gain popularity, by exposure in your main blog. It works mainly with the WordPress publishing platform but also allows bloggers to install the widget code into the sidebar of their blogs on almost any platform through the use of Javascript.

Quick and easy to install, the app provides a seamless experience between your blog and your new community blog section that will surely give your readers a say and then promotion for the privilege.

Pricing

At the present time, all pricing plans for Kapost are available free of charge due to the fact that it is in beta. Though the pricing for the premium plans is quite a big investment if you run a small blog, larger blogs would definitely pay off with adding this functionality and in terms of connecting with your readers, it is something that will greatly yourself and your blog.

The free plan is still quite good and doesn’t compromise much functionality compared to the premium plans, and could still be quite a good thing for small blogs to have, despite the small limit on contributors.

Getting Started

The first thing you’ll need to do to get started is to register your blog with Kapost. This won’t take too long and all you have to provide is some basic contacts details, and information about your blog, such as the URL and platform.

For the purposes of this article, I will be using WordPress as the platform as it is one of the most popular, but I assume that the steps will be quite similar for all platforms. From here, you will be able to choose a Kapost subdomain for your blog where the community-submitted section of your blog will be hosted. It’s all quite straightforward and once you’ve done this, you will be able to access Kapost through the subdomain you chose.

Install the Kapost Plugin

Now that you’ve got an account, you’ll need to add the widget onto your blog. Because we’re going to be using WordPress and we have full access to the plugins system, we can do this easily. If you do not have access to the plugins system on your blog, you can opt to use the Javascript Widget by accessing the Settings page of Kapost, and you can then integrate this into any blogging platform that allows custom code or design.

To install the plugin, visit the dashboard of your WordPress installation and in the left sidebar, find the Plugins dropdown and select Add New. If you’re unfamiliar with this section of the administration panel, it allows you to install plugins directly from the WordPress plugin directory. In the search field, enter “kapost”.

Underneath the name Kapost Social Publishing, choose Install Now and when prompted, confirm that you wish to install it. You may then be prompted to enter the FTP details for your server. Once you have done this, you can activate the plugin and it will then be integrated into your blog.

Configure the Kapost Plugin

You must then authenticate your Kapost account. You can do this by expanding the Settings dropdown menu in the left sidebar and then select Kapost. To login, simply the username and password you chose during registration as well as the subdomain for your Kapost community.

Add Kapost Sidebar Widget

You can now add the Kapost widget to your blog’s sidebar. To do this, go to Appearances and then Widgets in the WordPress administration panel or simply click the link in the Kapost notification to go directly to the page.

Drag the “Kapost: Feed” widget to the chosen widget area and then you will be given the option of changing some related settings. You can choose a name for the feed, change the feed’s appearance, select how many items you wish to display from your community blog and also show a link to where your readers can submit their posts.

Promote Posts

Another cool feature of Kapost is the ability to promote posts to the main blog automatically. You can either choose to do this when a post reaches a certain number of votes or simply automatically when a post is published. This is a useful tool that will allow you to reward good writers by giving their work some extra coverage on your main blog.

Customize Design

You can customize a variety of elements of the Kapost newsroom on your website to allow the community section of your blog to be well-integrated into the main blog. From the Layout Manager page of Kapost, you can choose different elements to customize and with the live preview pane below the customization pane, see exactly how it’s going to look before it’s saved.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I think Kapost is quite a good idea that’s been put to use well. It’s a great way for rewarding your contributors and giving them a way to speak out without having to go through the long process of creating a blog themselves.

It’s a really simple process to set up Kapost on your blog and it’s clear that they’ve thought a lot about implementing this idea and it’s paid off, showing that the app has a lot of potential.

To best serve your website’s audience, you need to understand them as best you can. The best way to do that? Analytics. There’s a few ways to track your website’s traffic, though Google Analytics is probably the most popular due to its price — free.

However, Google Analytics has several important features missing that other analytics providers offer; namely real-time stats and heatmaps. Reinvigorate is one of those providers, which we’ll take a look at today.

The Reinvigorate team has also generously offered a sweet promotion for our readers, so be sure to take a look!

Overview

So what makes Reinvigorate different than other analytics providers, namely the ever-so-popular Google Analytics? Well, here’s a few features for starters.

• Real-time traffic and user reporting
• Registered user identification with NameTags
• Estimated end of day traffic
• Heatmaps

Real-time Traffic and User Reporting

You may not realize it but if your analytics provider doesn’t offer you real-time traffic reporting, you’re missing out.

Although you probably won’t be ogling your site’s live traffic every day, the ability to see what’s going on right now is very beneficial to better understanding your visitors and how they’re consuming your content. When you can see today, not yesterday or last week, you’ll be able to make changes that will benefit you and your visitors right away rather than a day late.

I’ll be honest, I love watching real-time analytics for my sites and would probably spend more time watching stats come in than I should and I suspect you might as well, at least initially. Realistically though, we don’t have time for that, which is fine considering there are still detailed reports of your traffic up to the last five years.

Registered User Identification with NameTags

In addition to real-time traffic reporting, Reinvigorate brings us real-time identification of your site’s registered users. This may seem like an unimportant feature, and it may be for you, but it’s fantastic to have the ability to see your users identified and their browsing (only on your site) reported to you in real-time.

To your users, this may seem big brother’ish, but in reality it’s giving you a better insight into your returning visitors so you can do a better job of giving them what they really want.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps can be a hugely beneficial tool to better understand what your visitors are doing from the time they enter your site to the time they leave and everything in between. They give you a better visual guide of the elements and paths your visitors are navigating to.

I have a feeling there are far fewer people taking advantage of heatmaps than there should be, but I suspect it’s largely due to the fact that certain popular analytics providers don’t offer it or don’t make it easy enough. Reinvigorate does.

The heatmap above was viewed after installing the tracking code a few hours prior. No waiting for results!

To get a better idea of a longer term heatmap, check out the one for Reinvigorate’s home page.

An interesting point to note is that the heatmap will change along with slideshows, as found on Reinvigorate’s website.

Pricing

The most common issue I hear from people considering making the switch from Google Analytics to another analytics provider deals with pricing. Maybe the pricing structure is too complicated, or more commonly it’s just too expensive.

Reinvigorate’s pricing certainly isn’t complicated, which I appreciate, but it may be a bit on the steep side for some. Each plan also comes with a free 14-day trial, making it well worth at least trying out.

Don’t want to pay? No worries, they also offer a freebie plan with a few less features. However, I’d like to see a lower level plan that includes real-time reporting for say, $5 per month. It seems for many average bloggers that are interested in analytics, that would be the sweet spot.

User Interface

One of the attracting features of Reinvigorate is its interface design. It was clearly designed by people for people, unlike some other analytics apps available that might be more oriented towards non-visual people. Overall it’s very easy to navigate and find the information necessary to help you improve your content for your visitors.

I love to nitpick sites in this area but there’s really not much else to say; the design looks good, is easy to navigate and very easy to see relevant information quickly.

Website Integration

Integrating the tracking code in your site is just as easy as Google Analytics, using just a small snippet of JavaScript. There are options for SSL Enabled tracking and a few other advanced options.

The tracking code is delivered via CDN for the best performance, with 18 available locations around the world.

Of course any quality analytics software wouldn’t be complete without WordPress integration. Reinvigorate doesn’t fall short here, although it might be beneficial for them to provide a few other options for popular publishing platforms as well.

Desktop and Mobile Apps

Taking Reinvigorate further, a desktop app is provided enabling you to easily look through your stats, users, etc. and even get “dinged” for certain events.

Unfortunately there aren’t any mobile apps (that I could find) available yet. But, considering the app is just waking from its beta stage, there are bound to be many more improvements, apps and features already on the way to solidify this as a killer analytics app.

Final Thoughts

Reinvigorate is definitely an analytics app worth trying out. It may not fulfill all your needs just yet without mobile apps and other features found with other competitors but what it does out of the gate, it does very well. It’s user interface works and looks great, real-time tracking and heatmaps keep you in the know for your site’s traffic and their overall pricing is certainly competitive.

In partnership with (mt) Media Temple and serving sites such as Virb.com, Reinvigorate has a fantastic start coming out of beta that you know you’ll be able to trust.

However, as great as Reinvigorate already is, it also has improvements that need to be made. Mobile apps, campaign tracking, etc. are a few features they’ll need to offer at some point. They appear to be well aware of that though and are likely already working on more fantastic improvements. In fact, during this review they even launched a performance update, which I was quite happy to welcome.

I definitely recommend giving Reinvigorate a try, even if only to see how fun real-time analytics for your site is.

Discount from the Reinvigorate Team

The Reinvigorate team has been generous enough to offer a massive 50% permanent discount, but only for the next 30 days. After 30 days the discount code will be valid for a 20% permanent discount. With a 14 day free trial, you have nothing to loose. If you try it out and take advantage of the awesome discount, be sure to pop in a thank you comment to the awesome Reinvigorate team below.

Discount code: envatolaunch

We’ll be starting to publish more content than ever across the AppStorm Network over the coming weeks, and we’re looking for a handful of talented writers to join the team. If you love apps as much as we do, you could make a fantastic addition to our ever-growing team of awesome writers!

Interested? Read more and fill out your application!