Of course, I didn’t end up going to the Halloween party after all that trouble, but that’s another story.

Here’s an excerpt of my Steele Agency post. You can view the whole thing here.

Amazon.com is one of the biggest retailers on the Internet. Originally launched as an online bookstore, the site now sells everything from books to electronics to diapers. It’s popular with shoppers because of its selection, low shipping rates and fast service. But Amazon also is popular with website owners, who can make money through the retailer’s Amazon Associates program. It’s a simple concept: You place links to Amazon products on your site, and Amazon gives you a cut of the money spent by shoppers who follow those links. The amount you get depends on the number of sales you refer to Amazon, starting at 4 percent and going up to 8.5 percent. Building Amazon Associates links is easy. Once you sign up, every time you visit Amazon you’ll see their “Site Stripe” at the top of the page. Just navigate to the item or category you want to promote, and click “link to this page” on the stripe. Then you’ll get the HTML code to add the link.

Convert videos to FLV
SoThink Flash Video Encoder
One of the few things the client had to purchase to make the site work, encoding software not only makes the video viewable online, it also drastically reduces file size. SoThink’s video encoder is $45 and is designed for Windows. But if you have a Mac, try iSkysoft Video Converter.

Upload the videos to the server
FileZilla
Each video file was at least 50 MB, so transferring files with FTP was the logical choice. There are any number of free FTP clients available. Though I use FireFTP on my own computer, it’s a FireFox extension and the client uses IE. So I recommended FileZilla, which is a great free FTP program.

Display the videos on WordPress
Wordtube plugin
I tried several different plugins for displaying the FLV files. I finally settled on this because it has an easy user interface that makes it simple to add videos to the backend, and places an “insert Flash video” button in the post creation window. It works in conjunction with the JW FLV player from Longtail Video, which is free for noncommercial sites.

Keeping it private
WordPress Password plugin
This plugin protects your entire WordPress site with a universal password. Just give it to anyone who you want to access the site. You still have to enter your own password to get into the admin pages. It’s also easy to change the password if you ever need to.