This week I volunteered to setup a simple website and shopping cart for my church to sell Christmas trees and tree stands.
I went to Jimdo and created a free site and make a couple of pages, put in some pictures of Douglas Firs and Nobles and poinsettias. I then went into my Infusionsoft account and created some products and a custom shopping cart and published the site.
Here’s Where the Gay Times Began
To welcome people we made a little welcome video just so people could see us from church and maybe recognize us and put them ease and let them know they’re in the right place.
No big deal, right?
To make it easy for people to find us on YouTube I also put in a description and I tagged the video and then (here’s the GOTCHA) I selected from YouTube’s categories “Nonprofits & Activism.”
HEY, YOUTUBE! WTF? WHY DO YOU LUMP ACTIVISM WITH NONPROFITS?
YouTube has a cool (at least I thought is was cool) little feature whereby it shows related videos at the conclusion of your video.
Under normal circumstances this would be good as it helps you get your video found and it helps visitors find relevant information.
HOWEVER, when you put your nonprofit video in its true category the related videos are DOMINATED by activism videos, which are dominated by gay videos.
AGAIN I ASK, “HEY, YOUTUBE! WTF?”
So today I lived and learned the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished. Imagine my HORROR when the guy I’m helping calls me and says “Hey, Wes, WTF? Why are there all of these gay videos on our site? I’M NOT KIDDING! WHY ARE THERE A BUNCH OF GAY VIDEOS ON OUR CHURCH SITE?!”
To which I calmly and coolly stated, “ARUGH?”
While I had remembered there was a way to disable YouTube’s related video feature I wasn’t concerned about it since I knew I had tagged and described the video properly and I thought, “What’s the worst that can happen? People will see some Christmas song videos?”
WRONG!
But YouTube places more emphasis on the Category from their drop down menu than their tags and description.
SOOOOOO, if you’d like to NOT show your kids and church gay porn through YouTube you need to perform a little “hack” to the embed code YouTube gives you when you upload your video.
Just add “&rel=0″ to the end of the embed src URL.
Here is my code for the video above with the “hack” in red:
<object width=”560″ height=”340″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/GP-3ROgUpNc&hl=en_US&fs=1&”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/GP-3ROgUpNc&hl=en_US&fs=1&&rel=0” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”560″ height=”340″></embed></object>
It’s really not that hard, and truth be told, it’s really not that important AS LONG AS you select the proper category and then test your video to see what YouTube thinks are “related-videos.”
On second thought, do the hack. You don’t want people seeing anything you don’t want them to see, ever. Especially on your church site.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Throw down some graffiti below along with your thoughts, comments, experiences and suggestions. 
Wes Schaeffer is founder and owner of “The Sales Whisperer®,” the best dang social media marketing, copy writing, sales training and Infusionsoft Small Business CRM consultant this side of the Mason Dixon Line. He has traveled the world serving his country, selling high tech gizmos and gadgets and training business owners, entrepreneurs and professional sales people how to sell more, faster, at higher margin, with less stress and more fun. He even has a “Double Your Sales in 12 Months” guarantee. Contact him here today to start doubling your sales by tomorrow. When you’re done you can subscribe to his “Southern Social Media” podcast on iTunes here.
