How to Do a Google Hangout on Air (using YouTube) In 2018

How to Do a Google Hangout on Air (using YouTube)

Today I am going to walk you through the steps of doing a Google Hangout on Air.

I’m also going to:

  • define what a Hangout is
  • explain what the difference is between a Hangout and a Hangout on Air
  • what prerequisites you need to have before doing a Hangout on Air
  • talk about the benefits of doing a Hangout on Air

In the tutorial portion of this blog post, I am going to:

  • explain how you can edit your Hangout on Air
  • how you can add a description to your Hangout on Air
  • how you can access your Hangout on Air once it’s on YouTube
  • how you can share your Hangout on Air
  • and how you can embed your Hangout on Air in a blog post

Plus, I’m going to share a true story about the Hangout on Air that I recently did!

What is a “Hangout”? What is a “Hangout on Air”?

A Hangout allows you to connect with others and talk to them virtually, face-to-face. It’s similar to a video Skype chat. However, a Hangout allows a total of 10 people to connect at the same time! So you can invite 9 of your friends and/or colleagues to join you for a chat, a mastermind session, or even a webinar-type presentation.

“Hangouts can be public, allowing anyone to join, or they can be private, available only to those people you invite.”

A Hangout on Air is a live event that YouTube records as it is happening. When you’re finished your Hangout, a video of it is immediately posted to YouTube. (No waiting forever for the video to upload!) Cool, right!?!

What are the Benefits of doing Hangouts or a Hangout on Air?

There are many benefits of doing Hangouts and Hangouts on Air.

Through both, you can share information, give a presentation or speech, teach others, have a panel discussion, host a product (or book) launch, and even share your screens with one another, which is useful if you have an issue that someone else can help you solve.

There are even benefits of using Hangouts for your business, such as connecting with employees, doing interviews or client consultations, doing interviews, promoting your products or services, and more!

Hangouts cost next to nothing, too. All you need is laptop or computer with a webcam and an Internet connection!

Hangouts on Air get posted to both YouTube and your Google+ profile/page, allowing you to reach many people. They also allow you to boost your authority online and deepen the relationships you have with others.

Plus, Hangouts on Air allow you to join the video marketing trend. Videos are more popular than ever before! In fact, 64% of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it. Videos also help boost your website’s SEO. And videos perform well on all devices!

What Prerequisites Do You Need to Have Before You Can Do a Hangout on Air?

You need 3 things before you can do a Hangout on Air.

1: You need to have a Google Plus account. Get yours here.

2: You also need to have a YouTube channel. Learn how to create your channel here.

3: Finally, you need to have either (A) the email addresses of those you want to hang out with OR (B) have those people in your Google+ circles. Learn about creating and adding people to circles here.

Hangouts Have Changed

Google Hangouts on Air are done differently now (in 2018) than they were five years ago.

I know this because I just did one with The Blogger from Paradise, Ryan Biddulph. The process was much different than the ones I did in 2013!

Ryan Biddulph headshot

Although I had an asthma attack while we were filming, it was great to sit and chat with one of my longtime colleagues and friends!

My kitten, Squeakers, and Jake, one of the dogs Ryan is currently dog-sitting for even made an appearance during the video! 🙂

What Ryan and I Chatted About

Ryan and I talked about SO MANY things… from his meeting with The Blind Blogger, Maxwell Ivey, to our dream jobs to vacations to his marriage to Kelli Cooper to blogging to being authors to freelancing to the writing process… and more!

Ryan was the guy who influenced me to take my dream vacation in February 2016. I strongly urge everyone to take your dream vacation NOW. Here are 12 reasons why.

Listen to our chat here or watch it on YouTube.

How to Do a Google Hangout on Air (using YouTube)

You can start a regular Hangout here, or you can do a Hangout on Air using YouTube.

In my quest to learn how to do a Google Hangout on Air with Ryan, I turned to my friend, Google, for help, and came across this article: Hangouts On Air with YouTube Live. It was fairly easy to understand, but I’m going to break it down for you even further.

As I mentioned earlier, before you start, make sure the person you want to “hang out” with is already in one of your Google Plus Circles AND ready (and waiting) to accept your invitation!!! Otherwise, when you get to Step 9, you are going to run into problems!

Step 1: Create a YouTube channel.

Read More

How to Customize the Size of Your Blog Post Images #video #tutorial

How to Customize the Size of your blog post images

Have you ever needed to customize or adjust the size of one of your blog post images? Have you ever edited an image using Colorcinch (aff link)?

I have done the former… especially when I learned how to create image quotes.

I also learned a little trick that some of you might know about. It is simple, really, and I created a video for this blogging tip, too.

In fact, I created this tutorial using some new screen recording software I have never worked with before, and am quite pleased with how it turned out! (*pats self on the back*)

It took a while for me to learn how to use it, but now that I have, you can probably expect more videos from me! 😉

Please watch the video to learn how to customize the size of your blog post images. This tutorial shows the steps you need to follow. They are simple, and you’ll be able to easily customize your blog post images once you watch it.

FYI, if you want a transcript of this video, you can find it below. Thanks goes out to my transcriptionist, Angela Shirley, whose services you can use, too!

How To Customize the Size of Your Blog Post Images: Video Tutorial

One Important Note about the CUSTOM Image Option

I didn’t mention in the video is that the Custom option is only available once the image has been uploaded. Therefore, the steps are:

1. Upload the image.

2. Edit the image. Choose Custom Size.

3. Save.

Video Transcript of How to Customize the Size of Your Blog Post Images 

Here is a transcription of the video, for those of you who can read faster than you can listen:

Hi, this is Lorraine Reguly from Wording Wel,l bringing to you a bite-size blogging tip you can use any time you need to customize or adjust the size of an image in one of your blog posts. In fact I am going to show you how to do it using three different scenarios, one from each of my blogs: Wording Well, Laying It Out There and Poetry Perfected.

Now what we are going to do is we are going to is look at three different scenarios, the first dealing with a square image, the second with the rectangular one, and the third involves adjusting an image on a free blog on WordPress.com. I know not all of you have self-hosted blogs yet, and so I don’t want to exclude anyone from this tutorial.

Let’s get started.

Now, once you have uploaded an image from your computer into your WordPress dashboard, and notice that it’s not the right size – perhaps it’s either too big or too small – all you have to simply do is click on the picture. And here, in the “Interview A Blind Woman” post that I have yet to publish, but is coming soon on Wording Well, I am going to adjust the picture of Kerry, to make it a just little bit smaller. So click on the image and you will see two little squares pop up on the left hand side. If you click on the edit option – automatically a window will pop up. Now under the display settings, the first line shows you where the picture is located. Here I have it in the center. And then underneath is the size. And this is the part we are going to focus on.

It’s a dropdown menu, and if we click on it you’ll see there are some pre-set options: thumbnail, medium, large, full size, or custom size. Now we are going to click on Custom Size as sometimes the pre-sets simply aren’t good enough. So if you click Custom Size, underneath you will see the width and the height. We only actually only have to change one of them. WordPress will change the other one for us. From past experience, I know that I can choose 600 to be a good width for my pictures or my images. Now, if you don’t really understand the numbers, that’s okay. You don’t need to. You can learn as you go, through trial and error.

So now that we have selected 600 – because it is square, it is going to be 600 x 600 – we’ll update the post. We will update the image and then save this draft of our post… and once that has been saved, we can take a little preview of it and see if we made a good choice.

So when we preview it, we can see that Kerry’s picture shows up quite nicely within one window screen, and then the post goes on. So we made a good choice.

So let’s move on to the next part, on Laying It Out There, where we are going to deal with a rectangular image.

Here I have chosen a post called “Who I am + How I Became a Self-Published Author,” because you can see my little calling card or online business card is quite small and hard to read. Now because since this post has already been published, we are simply going to click Edit Post and change the size of the image.

So, again, here all we have to do is click on the image – our little boxes come up, we’ll select edit. And because, when we click on our sizes 541 x 247, I am actually not going to check the Custom Size. I will check the Full Size instead, simply because the writing will be more legible than if we were to Custom Size it and make it quite large. And I will show you the difference. So if we Custom Size it to 600, WordPress automatically calculates the height and it looks a little bit blurry. So let’s go back and change it to the Full Size and you can see how the writing is clear here. So we’ll update the post with this nice, new, re-sized image that’s legible, clear, and perfect. And we can just hit View Post to double check.

Excellent.

Okay, now we’re going to look at an image on a free blog of mine, which is Poetry Perfected. It’s on WordPress dot com, and in kind of keeping with the same theme – here is a poem I wrote called “My Blind Friends Taught Me To See” and Kerry is allowing me to use her image once again in this post.

And the only problem is that when we click on it, nothing comes up on the left-hand side. However, we do see a different bar show up on the right where we have our different alignments and the Edit. So we will click on the Edit and we will change this to Custom Size once again.

Although the large is 605 x 605 we could choose that. But we will choose custom size, we’ll go to 600 again. We will update this, and we’ll save our draft. And then once we have our draft saved, we can preview the post and see if we made a good choice.

So here we can see Kerry’s picture, very pretty girl, and underneath, because this is a poem called “My Blind Friends Taught Me To See,” there’s also a picture of Max, but Max’s image right now is really, really small and it is really not fair to him to have such a small image when Kerry’s is so big.

So what we are going to do is go back to this post. We’ll go underneath Kerry and click on Max, and we will edit this image here. So you can see this is just a thumbnail. We’ll go to Custom Size and we will make it … the width as being 500. The height we see is 889. So that is still a little bit big. So let us make this part 600 and then the width will be automatically calculated at 338. We’ll hit Update and let’s take a look and see how this looks.

We’ll save our draft, and then we will preview the post, and if it all looks good, then we are good to go. And yes, it looks perfect. You can see Kerry here, you can see Max here. We can actually make Max’s picture just a tad bit bigger. So let’s go back and edit it once again, and this time we will choose 700 instead of 600 for the height. We’ll update it. We will save our draft, and we’ll will take one final look at the Preview and see if this looks good… see if they kind of balance each other out. And they do.

So there is Kerry, there is Max, and there’s the poem. So that looks like we have made really good choices.

So as you can see, there are different ways you can customize your blog posts. You can choose either a pre-set, custom size, or one of the pre-sets – medium, large, thumbnail, full size, whatever. So there you have it.

So this has been a little tutorial for you. I hope you’ve learned something and don’t forget to stop by Wording Well and grab your free e-book (compliments of me), “20 Blog Post Must-Haves.

You can get it right here.

Thank you so much. Have a good day.

UPDATE:

FYI, An Interview With A Blind Woman has been published.

So has An Interview with a Blind Man.

I hope you have enjoyed this post, How to Customize the Size of Your Blog Post Images #video #tutorial.

Please remember to share it on social media!

Blog Awards: What are your views?

This is a picture of a stick man I created who I like to call Gimpy. He's frustrated because he doesn't know what is going on! He's trying to comment on my blog, but can't.

What are your views on blogging awards? Do you think they serve a purpose? Have you ever received any?

Please see the end of this post for a few other questions I have for you . . .  and please weigh in!

(Note: This was first published as a page on this site. I’ve deleted the page and am republishing it as a post instead, because I’m still proud of my “newbie” accomplishments from last year!)

Awards for l’il ol‘ me?

Wording Well used to be called Lorraine Reguly’s Life (back when I was a newbie blogger). Lorraine Reguly’s Life received many awards. I’m proud of them all, too! 🙂

What awards are for

Awards seem to be mainly for “new” bloggers, don’t they? Newbies are recognized in the blogosphere through them. Awards provide recognition and inspiration. They are like a pat on the back from an older sibling or parent. They also help you connect with other bloggers, and even offer a new blogger a few backlinks.

What else are awards for? Read More

Have You Experienced Soundless YouTube?

THIS IS A ‘TRUE TALES TUESDAYS’ POST

This is a funny, cute video of my nephew Ali (Alistair). He’s Sammi’s only brother, and is three years older than she is.  Although he has nothing to do with my story, I felt like including this YouTube video of us shopping because he liked the dancing Mickey Mouse.

Thanks to my recent discoveries, I can now hear Mickey Mouse talk.

For the last few hours, YouTube has been soundless for me. If finally figured out why I couldn’t get any of my YouTube videos to play, and why I thought I had no sound on my laptop.

MY TRUE TALE: Read More

Adding Links to Your Blog Posts + Accepting Awards MADE EASY! (Video Tutorial)

Before I get to today’s post, which is mainly of a video of how to add links to your blog posts, which I made using a free screen recorder called Camstudio, I have to announce the two winners of the paranormal giveaway that ran on my blog from November 1st to the 22nd. The lucky commenter who also tweeted about it is (drumroll, please…) Diana Marinova! She has already received her copy of Donna Jean McDunn’s Nightmares. The winner of Donna’s giveaway is Sherri Matthews. Congratulations, winners, and a big “thank-you” to all who participated!

FYI, my blog is currently running another giveaway (update: this is now closed) but the type of book being awarded to the winner is, admittedly, not to everyone’s liking since it is a male/male erotic romance. If you want to read a good story about  the love between two people and perseverance in the face of adversity, then Memory’s Prisoner is the book you should read. I’ve read it, and have already posted this review to Goodreads:

Although Memory’s Prisoner falls under the genre of male erotic romance, the story the author tells is one of perseverance. When an unfortunate incident renders both of the main characters helpless and in the hospital (one in a coma), the plot thickens, and this tale takes on an air of suspense. It is interesting to see how the lives (and health) of the characters are changed forever. Without giving away the ending, I will say that I think that this book is one that may earmark a new future for the writer. 

Now, let’s get down to business, shall we?

Remember when you were a new blogger?

Do you recall some of the struggles you had?

Were you ever intimidated by other bloggers? Did you constantly compare yourself to them?

Did you love, love, love getting nominated for your first award? Did you go into a panic because you didn’t know what to do? Or are you still a new blogger with questions? Read More