Information Marketing the MOST Lucrative of all Internet Marketing Opportunities

Information marketing is probably the easiest and fastest way to build a business on the Internet.  (Already I can hear you say “Duh – Everybody knows that!)  Most people won’t try to make money using this venue and when they do, it is usually done wrong.

However, when you think of it, if everyone were great info-marketers the market would be absolutely saturated.  (Kinda like brick and mortar video businesses back in the 80’s.) 

Not to say it isn't highly competitive in certain niches already, but if you know how to target a hot niche or sub-niche, you can still rake in the bucks.

The Reality of the Info-Marketing Business – or – That Dirty Four Letter Word

I like to frequent forums where IM newbs (slang for Internet Marketing newbies) hang out.  Most of them are wide-eyed optimists, and right out of the starting gate, they make posts like this:

“How can you make $2000 a month selling info-products?”

“Frustrated with trying to make $$$ online”

“I’m totally broke and desperate and need to make good money now!!!”

You know, the usual.

My response to them is:

“Did you think this was going to be different than starting any other type of business?  It requires A LOT of WORK!”

Just like Edison used to say, “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”

Information marketing IS lucrative, but you have to work it like a madman or woman to make money at it.

Consider What You Need to Do to Make Money

Outside of actually creating the actual product (videos, eBooks, reports, blog posts, etc.) you still have a load of work to do to actually get your product onto the market.

Market Research

Let’s say you’re going to sell a 100 page eBook.  You need to research first to see if there’s a market for it.  If you do it right, it may take you a few days or more of work to find out whether your product has merit. 

The reason I say this requires a few days of research, is because you really need to find out on the front-end of your project whether or not there is a marketable niche.  You need to find out if the market is large enough and hungry enough to buy what you’re trying to sell.

If you watch ABC’s Shark Tank, you’ll see that this is where most enthusiastic and new entrepreneurs fall short on that show.  People come into it expecting to go into business with seasoned, filthy rich venture capitalists on their ideas and products. 

Unfortunately, these venture capitalists are very experienced and business savvy.  If the budding entrepreneurs haven’t sold too many units, or have any existing market data to back up their claims, they won’t get a deal.

As one of the sharks on the show likes to say, “You’re dead to me.”

Marketing Plan

Once you've finished writing, formatting, branding and packaging your product, you still have a crap-load of work to do. 

You've got to figure out how you are going to attract your target market.  What methods are you going to use to attract and keep the attention of the people you want to have as paying customers?

What type of a sales funnel are you going to use? What is your unique selling proposition? If you structure a plan based on the sales funnel model, you’ll need to decide what channels you are going to use to broadcast your message.

Execution

Once you've figured out how you’re going to market your business, you've got to execute it. 

The Most seasoned marketers will tell you to use as many different types of marketing channels that you can manage.  That way, if one channel goes out for one reason or another, you’ll the other channels that you can still promote your business through.

For example, if you are accustomed to using nothing but YouTube videos to promote your product and then Google decides to kill YouTube for some reason, you’ll still have 4 or 5 other channels like social media, blogging, or whatever that you’re still using.

Selling

Once you get your crowd through your sales funnel, you’ll want to set up a sales page.  (Actually the sales page is part of your funnel, but let’s not split hairs here!)

You've got to have a page that convinces your readers that if they don’t buy what you have to offer, life on planet Earth will end.  You either have to have the skill to write compelling copy or hire someone that’ll do that for you.

Delivery

Once you get everything else in place, you’ll need to make sure you've got a way to collect money and deliver the product.  There are all sorts of ways to do this from making on line delivery systems to sending your product directly to the customer by way of snail mail.

Hot Tip #1 - If you have a PayPal account you can sell eBooks online relatively easy.  PayPal will process your transaction, but it will not DELIVER your eBook. For that, you’ll need an intermediary site.

  

There is a site called Upload –N- Pay that you can use as a delivery system.  The setup is fairly easy and you can be running in no time.

Hot Tip #2 – if you want to produce your own physical Audio CD’s or Video CD’s there’s an excellent company called Kunaki that silkscreens the CD and packages it in a nice case.

 A while back, I was making sports videos for kids that wanted to get scholarships for college, and I needed a way to get the video CD into a box.  I used Kunaki because they print on demand.  

I uploaded the video, sent in the case photo and for an extremely reasonable price got my video and case created. 

An absolutely amazing service! Here is their price list: Kunaki’s Prices 

To Your Success!

Mark “Elmo” Ellis

"When it Comes to High-Response Copy - I've Got Your Back!"

www.MarkEllisCopy.com

(859) 797-9560

elmo033057@gmail.com

Use eBooks to Cheaply Drive Free Traffic to Your Website or Blog

I have written eBooks, and as a marketing tool, they work pretty well.  There are two schools of thought on how to create them.  One is to sit your butt down and knock it off and the other is to hire a ghost writer to make one for you. 

Since most of you are like me (lazy), in this post I’ll tell you how to hire a ghost writer to create an eBook. In the next post, we’ll explore how to write your own and some of the pitfalls to avoid, but for this episode we’ll go the ghost writer route.

What Are eBooks and Why Does Everyone like Them So Much?

Just in case you’re brand new to Internet marketing, here’s a brief description of electronic books or eBooks. You can easily become a publisher without having to print up books the traditional way.

These are electronic books that you can get online and read on your computer.  These are sometimes called .PDF files. (PDF is the file extension that means that the file is basically text and graphics in book format.) You can have great pictures, and text laid out in such a way that makes the book look great, and the book can be as big or small as you want it.

One of the best thing about eBooks is that you could really load one up with pictures and graphics and you’d save a lot of money over traditional publishing because using traditional methods, you’d have to spend butt – loads on money getting full color pictures into a book.

Not only that, but distribution costs are super cheap.  They can be downloaded as file from one place on the Internet to the other, and they can also be sent as an email attachment from one place to another.  You can also sell them from a variety of places online such as Clickbank, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.   

Another super-plus benefit to eBooks is that they can also be Interactive.  Just like the Internet, you can place links to websites and products you’re trying to sell, and you can even embed video into them.  However, the computer that you are reading them on needs to be connected to the Internet for the links and video to work. 

The main benefit of creating an eBook is that no longer will you need to go through a publisher and all of the traditional routes to become an established author.  You can call yourself an author without needing anyone’s backing or permission and you can do all of this for next to nothing.  Amazing!

The Downside of eBooks and How to Overcome It

As I see it, there are two main setbacks to using an eBook.  First, everyone is making them and giving them away.  Some of the best eBooks I have read were eBooks I’ve gotten online for free.  (I’ll leave links to these at the end of this post.) 

However, a lot of the eBooks that are given away SUCK.  Plain and simple. We’re not going to go that route.

The other drawback is taking the time to sit down and write them.  The two disadvantages go hand in hand when overcoming them, as you’ll see in a moment.

 So, let’s tackle both problems at the same time in steps.

Step 1: Identify the Niche You’re Operating In.  If you don’t know what your business is all about, you are in an extreme disadvantage.  You’ll need to figure out where you are and how you’re going to get there.  If you haven’t taken the time to read the post I’ve already written on exploring niches, check it out here: Ways to Find Niches

  

Another method of finding out what your niche is, as well as your unique selling proposition (USP) is to actually sit down and write out a business plan.  The way I wrote mine was I got a copy of Conrad Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing Workbook.  This book is not only a great marketing book, but it will help you write out a fairly decent marketing and business plan.

Step 2:  Gather Resources.  Once you’ve identified your niche, go online and

peruse books and courses in your niche from Amazon, eBay and other book – type resources.  Find out what’s really hot in your niche and start buying and gathering information from them.  If you have to buy books from Amazon, you can get them cheap by buying them used.  You are looking for the absolute best information you can find in your niche.  The best way to determine this is by looking at the Amazon ratings as well as the number of comments that are on the site. 

TIP: Another awesome place to get this type of information from is forums.  Start reading and copying and pasting the best posts, questions and answers you can find from them.  Some of the most incredible advice I've gotten is from forums, so copy and paste your favorite readings into a word processor and keep them.

You’re going to need quite a stack of resources on your subject.

Step 3: Start Reading and Highlighting Your Resources.  Now, take the resources that you’ve been gathering and start reading.  Whenever you find something in them that you think is dynamite or useful, highlight it with a highlighter.  Do this to all of your resources. After doing this, you should have quite a pile of information.

Step 4:  Get reasonably priced writer and have theme write your material.  There are many places on the Internet to find writers that will do your ghost writing for you.  Here’s a partial list of places you can go to on the Internet to outsource writing:

Moving AheadCommunications 

Ghosts R Us – Specializes in outsourcing eBooks     

Fiverr - A unique site that vendors can only charge $5.00 a gig.  

oDesk 

eLance 

Freelancer 

99designs 

Hire the World  

There are loads of outsourcing sites and you’ll need to get used to using the one or two that you’ll feel most comfortable with in order to get your eBook or eBook written.

Step 5: Send your highlighted material to your ghostwriter and have them rewrite it.  Once you have your ghostwriter hired, send them your highlighted books and have them rewrite the material for you.  You are not plagiarizing, but rewriting the material into someone else’s words.  Not only that, but you are picking material from a variety of resources.  So, you are not copying, but using the material you highlighted as source material. 

Step 6:  Brand your eBook.  Make sure all of your marketing information is in the eBook before you give it away or sell it.  Make sure that your Web address, email, business number and any other contact information that you have is in the eBook.

Pretty much, that’s all there is to it.  One thing to keep in mind, you’ll need to check and read the material sent back to you by your ghostwriter.  You don’t want to have your name on anything substandard because you’re trying to build an excellent brand and reputation, here.

To Your Success!

Mark "Elmo" Ellis

www.MarkEllisCopy.com

Free eBooks that are just outstanding:

How to Make MoneySitting on Your A** by T.J. Rohleder

Magnetic Marketing by Dan Kennedy 

Web Savvy Content Creation to Generate FREE Traffic to Your Website

If you are going to use free content to drive traffic to your website, then you need to pay close attention to this one important tip I’m going to throw at you in a second.  Free content online is huge, and there is a lot of competition. 

However, for those of you out there in the vast Internet heartland, reading this message might be just what you need to push you to greater heights of Internet marketing glory.

The Giant Failure-Filter…Don’t Quit Your Day Job

If the statistics are close to accurate, Internet based businesses have a 90%+ rate of failure within the first 120 days.  There are many reasons for this that have been cited:  Lack of business experience, very limited technical skills, poor understanding of starting and running a business, no capital at all, unrealistic expectations. 

Should I go on?

This is why my blog is dedicated to teaching you how to work the Internet as cheaply as possible.  If you've never had a business before, start and learn as cheap as you can.  The most beautiful thing about the Internet is you don’t need to spend a wad of money to get started, and therefore, if you don’t succeed, you’ll financially live to fight another day. 

But don’t quit your day job, no matter what the gurus tell you.  Every stinking’ one of them had failures along the way.  Rarely, (emphasis on rarely) are the ideas, economic conditions, and your personal life so perfectly in sync that you’ll hit a homer on the first swing.

If you are persistent in business, you’ll bounce back from your failures.  You will find, especially on the Internet, that you’ll fail more times than you succeed. 

Writing Content for Free Online Traffic

Writing content in order to get free, organic traffic to your site or blog is

probably the cheapest way to get Internet traffic.

Just think of these benefits:

• If you wrote a post or added a webpage every single day of the year to your site, at the end of the year you’d have 365 pages of content out there on the Internet working hard for you, every day of the week.  Over two years you’d have 730 pages of content over three years that would give you over 1000 pages.  Those pages work 24/7/365 for you and the charge will be almost nothing. 

• If you did keyword research correctly for those pages, they would definitely bring in some traffic.  

• You could also post short notices to social media sites about those posts, generating a flood of traffic, and you can use the same post on social networking sites months later to generate interest in it again.

• If you organized those posts, and put them into a .pdf file, you could also brand it as an eBook and either sell it online or give it away free as an incentive for giving you their email address.

• Not only will you get comments from people visiting your site, but your website or blog will definitely draw attention from Google and other search engines.  People contributing to your blog by commenting on it will help it generate more attention from Google, and therefore, move you further up the search engine results pages.

The Downside to Using Free Content

I present to you now, the downside to this strategy:

• Most of us are lazy, let’s just face it.  In order to pull this off, you are going to have to write and actually enjoy it.   The only way out of this is to hire a ghost writer, but that costs money and the good ones don’t come cheap.

• You’re going to have to set a part of your busy day away to write and post.  This requires discipline as well as commitment.

• Quality is the order of the day.  In order to pull this strategy off, you’re going to have to give people the highest quality content you can muster.  It doesn’t matter what your services or products are, if you aren't producing excellent information and content about them people will ignore you.

• You need to know how to write.  If you write posts or pages that people can’t easily understand, then chances are they will click and go elsewhere.  Yes, this blog is about using the Internet as cheap as you can to make money, but don’t think for a second you can give out used Volkswagen efforts and get Rolls Royce results.  

• This is time consuming.  You’ll need to spend at least an hour or more writing every day.  Anything less is ludicrous.

• You need to know what you are talking about.  If you have no clue about your area of, ahem…”expertise”, then it will definitely stick out like a sore thumb. 

• You’ll need to know how to post to the Internet and do Keyword research.  You can use WordPress, Blogger or a website editor like Dreamweaver.  If you are going to build an actual website, you should learn how to hard code HTML so you can create the pages that you’ll post your writing to. 

  Blogging the “Easier” Solution

If you want my two cents about the easiest way to get content onto the Internet, I’d say Blogging is the way to go.  Both WordPress and Google’s Blogger are very easy to use and you can get free versions of both to cut your teeth on.  I personally use Blogger, both the free version and I also have a .com I pay for on another Blogger blog as well. (www.markelliscopy.com) 

Blogger is the cheapest way to go because even if you get a .com (URL) for that blog, all you have to pay for is the .com.  To have a URL with WordPress, you’ll have to have a hosting package from a company like HostGator and know how to set up the blog through the control panel. 

Here are some resources for you to consider:

Dreamweaver : Web Design Software

Learn HTML and how to build websites online...FREE!

Blogger

WordPress

In my next post, we’re going to explore how to organize your subject matter and research it in order to be able to write blog posts that people are actually going to WANT to read about.

Until then…

To Your Success!

Mark “Elmo” Ellis

"When it Comes to High-Response Copy - I've Got Your Back!"

www.MarkEllisCopy.com

 (859) 797-9560

elmo033057@gmail.com

Web Savvy Methods of Converting Facebook Visitors Into Buyers

In my last post I wrote about how you should know where your Facebook business page fits in your sales funnel.  If you didn’t get a chance to read that post, here’s the link:

Method of FillingYour Sales Funnel 

The Traditional 3-Step Process

In case you don’t know, I don’t claim to be an expert in all areas of Social Media. I do use it on a daily basis, and over time I have seen results from it.  However, to be totally honest with you, I don’t claim to know some Top-Secret Super Guru Method of using social media to generate thousands of dollars daily.  

If you are looking for a good resource like that, you may want to hire this consultant:

So, this is what I've been doing in social media, it is what is called by some marketers as the 3-step process.  Very simply, it looks like this:

Breakdown of the Steps:

Step #1 - Facebook With this step, you are going to update your status in some way.  If you look at the Nature Valley Granola Bar Facebook page, you’ll see that they have all sorts of updates.  They don’t promote their items every day, because when you’re selling all of the time it is “Big-B” BORING! 

Nature Valley shows pictures taken by fans of the great outdoors.  Once my wife and I were hiking around Colorado, and Nature Valley was asking people to post pictures of themselves holding their product in the great outdoors.  My wife was only too thrilled to have her picture posted with a granola bar.  Sheesh!

This is a case of Nature Valley promoting AND getting customers to add to their Facebook Fan page.  So they were getting customer involvement and getting their Facebook page updated at the same time!  Double the Fun! (Wait, that’s a gum product!  My bad!)

Step #2 - Your Blog or Website Once you've engaged your prospects, you can now get them to your website or blog, where they can read information that is of importance to THEM.  (You always want to make sure that you’re not writing things that interest you; it’s your audience that counts!)

You need to have links to your coupons, squeeze page, irresistible offer, or whatever else on the page that they are reading.  Don’t overdo it, but place the links where it can be plainly seen and if possible make them a part of your website’s landscape. 

You can do this several different ways too!  You can have an advertisement close to your valuable content while at the same time, you can also have an RSS feed next to your content and an opt-in box as well.  

What these last two options will do, is allow you to build your marketing list so you can send them a well written offer…eventually.

Step #3 – Conversion…Cha-Ching!  In your final step in the 3-Step Process, you’ll have your sales page work its magic.  In reality, this is the page that’s going to require the most skill to craft, because you’re going to have to use words to sell your service or product.  Not as easy as it looks.  The best way to do this if you have no experience yourself, is to hire someone to craft your compelling copy.

Depending on what you are selling and how much you are charging for your goodies, your message can run from about a page or two, to ten pages!  I just read a sales letter a few days ago, and it was over twenty pages in length!!!

Usually, if you’re selling a high ticket item, you’ll have to use a pretty long sales letter to overcome the load of objections in the mind of a prospect.

  I can tell you that if you hire a good copywriter it will run you big bucks.  In some cases they’ll charge you a minimum of $3000 and half of that is up front, non-negotiable and non-refundable. 

On the other hand, you can hire a cheap copywriter and have low conversions.  It all depends on how much you really want to make.

To Your Success!

Mark “Elmo” Ellis

"When it Comes to High-Response Copy - I've Got Your Back!"

www.MarkEllisCopy.com

(859) 797-9560

elmo033057@gmail.com

Web Savvy Facebook Method of Filling Your Sales Funnel

Social Media, especially Facebook is very popular.  The Internet is loaded with entrepreneurs that are jumping on the social media bandwagon, thinking that it will reel in loads of customers and prospects. 

If you don’t believe me, just hop onto Facebook and type “Make Money” into the search field.  You’ll see volumes of people that are trying to get you to immediately buy their wares.

Usually, these are big picture ads telling you to “click here” to find out how to make boatloads of money by either following their advice or selling you a product.  Unfortunately, this is not the way social media works.

Sure, you might get lucky and out of 5,000 or so posts of that nature, you could sell a person or two.   However, the chances of that are slim.  You first need to identify and clarify your sales funnel and its relationship with your Facebook business page.

TIP:  By the way, many people think that if you just use social media channels,

you can make mega-bucks with your business and walk away a winner.  I recently saw an episode of Shark Tank wherein a woman did just that.  She would post items she saw in stores and different places and people would buy similar items from her through her social media site.

However, what if the social media site goes down because it was hacked into?  What if someone banned her account or in my case, the hosting company wanted to charge me a large fee for bandwidth because there was a flood of people on my site buying stuff. (True story!)

The fact of the matter is, to quote Dan Kennedy, “If you are using only one channel or method of selling your product or service, then you are in a very dangerous position. And that’s because if something were to happen to that channel, you’d be out of business!”

‘Nuff said!

So getting back to our Facebook strategy, ask yourself a question:

How does my Facebook page relate to my sales process or where are my prospects at in the buying process?

Will Facebook fans actually buy from me?

How can I track my conversions so I can see whether or not Facebook is worth my time?

Dealing With the Reality of Facebook Marketing

If you cannot answer at least two of the questions above, then you may be wasting your time.  There are social media forces at work that you won’t understand and that could lead to you wasting a lot of time and money. 

Let’s take a good look at question #1 “How does my Facebook page relate to my sales process?”

You first need to have a sales funnel for your product.  Usually, Facebook pages are very early on in the sales process, thus putting it near the very top of the funnel.  On very rare occasions, you’ll have someone that will but from you right out of the starting gate, but that is rare.

You need to keep in mind that Facebook pages, like other social media pages, are trust and relationship builders.  (That is actually the answer to question #2!) 

Once a person likes what you represent, they will join your page and begin to participate.  However, in the scheme of things, very few people out of many will join your page, very, very few will participate.   Social media experts will tell you that a whopping 90+% of the people that go to your Facebook business page are browsers or lurkers. 

They know what they’re talking about.

I think the very first marketing book I read years ago, was by Jay Conrad Levinson in his CLASSIC marketing book, Guerrilla Marketing.  I say “classic” because you should go back and read it once a year.  Mr. Levinson made the observation that in order for people to trust you, they need to see you over and over again. 

This is the reason why mainstream businesses like Progressive Insurance and McDonald’s are always in your face.  Billboards, TV commercials, coupons in newspapers, magazine ads, etc.  The more you see these companies’ ads the more you feel like you know them.  No matter how bad Mickey -Dees hamburgers are for your health, you still want to buy from them.  This generation can barely recall a time that you didn't see the “golden arches” in almost every town you went to.

Not only that, but I think their Big Macs taste good, and people like them.

Checking Conversions from Your Facebook Page.

I’m sure that there are all sorts of high-tech methods, but being a cheap skate marketer, I like to do it up right and NOT spend money on tracking. So, here is my method…Cheap and easy.

Have an exclusive page on your site or blog with which to send your Facebook traffic from.  Google Analytics is a tool a lot of people use to track their traffic with. If you follow the directions on Google Analytics, which usually is nothing more than dropping a bit of code into your site, you should be able to see how much traffic that’s being generated from your Facebook page. 

If you’re like me and use Google’s Blogger, you can use the “Stats” checker in Blogger.  There is a menu in Stats that lets you check traffic sources.  The cool thing about Blogger’s traffic checker is that it is built into the system already, so you shouldn't need to place code into any of the Pages I’m sure that someone will tell me that this is not the most accurate way to go, and they would probably be right. 

However, most businesses on the Internet are not MASSIVE BEHEMOTHS, and therefore in the early phases of client and customer acquisition, can keep it cheap for a while. But this should give you a good idea if you’re getting any traffic from your Facebook page.

Reference Section:

Ten Ways to Check Traffic to Your Site

Getting Started With Google Analytics Video

To Your Success!

Mark “Elmo” Ellis

"When it Comes to High-Response Copy - I've Got Your Back!"

www.MarkEllisCopy.com

(859) 797-9560

elmo033057@gmail.com

You've Made Your Web Savvy Traffic Generating Video, Now What?

Ok, the next thing you’ll want to do is save your video so that you can easily upload it to YouTube, Vimeo or any other Video site.  Before you do that, you’ll need a basic understanding of how to compress video. 

If you haven’t been keeping up on how to create traffic generating videos, here are the links to previous posts that you’ll find very helpful: (These are in the order of how you should read them.)

1.  Use Web SavvyYouTube Traffic Generation to Get Prospects to Your Site 

2.  How NOT to CreateYouTube Videos That Will Get Traffic to Your Site 

3.  What Type ofSoftware and Hardware Should I Use to Make YouTube Videos With? 

4.  How to Make Web Savvy YouTube Videos That Will Generate Traffic

  

Compressing your video files --- The Basics

It would be a good idea to understand how video file conversion works when getting ready to upload them to different sites.  Basically, whenever you are compressing a file of any type, it is basically reducing it in some manner.  The smaller the file, the faster it will load. 

If you have ever reduced a typical photograph file for a website, you’ll notice that when you reduce the size of that file, the picture becomes a little less clear and sort of grainy looking.  That’s because you are taking out some of the pixels in the picture. In a nutshell that’s basically what you’re doing to a video.  

In video however, the camera stores or records anywhere from 23 to 30 STILL images which somehow makes the movement more clear and fluid. So, within the frames, the compression function stores the changes there instead of storing more frames.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW IS: Whenever you compress a video or picture, it will be less clear because the file is smaller!

Here is a video compression chart to help you understand a little about it:

My recommendation to you is if this is the first time you’re compressing a video file and placing it on the Internet, is to compress it into a standard mp 4 format and upload it to YouTube.  That is the easiest way to get your first video online.

How to Compress the Video File

If you read my article on which video editing software to buy, you’ll know that I’m partial to Camtasia and Sony Vegas.  These programs have video compression built into the programs, so just like any other video program, you can pick the type of compression or file extension that you want.  My recommendation is to:

A.)  Use either Sony Vegas or Camtasia for video editing

B.) Compress the video file into MP4 format

C.)  Upload to YouTube because it is very easy and YouTube will give you step by step directions on how to do it.

Why I’m Not Recommending HD format.

There is an area of Internet users caught in an area called The Digital Divide.  These are people that because of where they live, their economic situation or they may not be computer savvy enough keeps them from getting the fastest and best Internet service. 

I live in a rural community where the only way I can get Internet is by way of a “Hotspot”.  I am only allowed 10 gigs a month on my Internet service. So, watching videos at home is totally out of the question, so I only use static pages. 

I’m in an extreme situation, however.  Usually, most people can get regular full-blown Internet but, there’s an awful lot of people that can’t get the best Internet service.  Either they are living in an area where they can’t get it or they can’t afford the best.  So, for them to wait for a HD High-Definition video to load on a slower bandwidth is unrealistic. 

And if you are trying to market your services, you could be cutting a whole segment of people out of your sales funnel.  So go with a medium range MP4 compression if you can.

If you still don't understand how to compress video files, watch this:

To Your Success!

Mark “Elmo” Ellis

"When it Comes to High-Response Copy - I've Got Your Back!"

www.MarkEllisCopy.com

(859) 797-9560

elmo033057@gmail.com

What Type of Software and Hardware Should I Use to Make YouTube Videos With?

If you haven’t been following my posts this week, you should probably go back and check out the other posts I made on the subject of marketing on the Internet using videos. 

You can read them here:

Use Web Savvy YouTube Traffic Generation to Get Prospects to Your Site 

How NOT toCreate YouTube Videos That Will Get Traffic to Your Site 

This post I’m going to cover what types of software that you should buy in order to create high quality videos for your Internet marketing efforts.  In my last post I hit on the idea of teaching your prospects something of real value in your videos, rather than using your videos to merely sell them something. 

Personally, I think that’s the way to go, and that’s what I've been doing. 

Here’s the Good News…

The great news is you don’t need real high-end video software or equipment to create a good video quality video.  Most of the small video cameras on the market today mounted on a sturdy tripod is all you need in a camera. 

I used to do wedding videography, and what I was told at the onset of starting my business is that the main reason to have a huge camera with all the bells and whistles on it was so that the client would see it and think you were professional.

I’m not saying that there aren't really great wedding videographers out there that don’t really need that type of equipment.  There are some truly incredible videographers that Hollywood sized projects.  They are also very expensive to hire too. 

But for creating an instructional or marketing video, a decent video camera that you can buy at Best Buy, Amazon or Costco will easily fill the bill.  You can very easily get a great camera for this for under $500 if you so desire.

The other recommendation I would make (if you can afford it) is to pick up some cheap clip on microphones that’ll hook up to your camera.  Now, once again, you can still make great videos without that stuff.  I made one once without a pickup mic and it came out OK. 

Another recommendation I would make is to get some cheap tele-prompting software.  This is software that you can use to have your script scroll up your computer screen so you can read it while looking directly at your camera. 

I usually mount my camera right behind my laptop so that when I face the camera my scripts scrolls upward and I can read it while looking at the camera.

Here is a clip I made without using a clip on mic and using the software I just told you about.  

I’m reading from a computer screen while looking directly at the camera:

InstructionalVideo on Blogging   

The Type of Software That You’ll Need

I usually use two software programs: Sony Vegas Pro and Camtasia.  Sony Vegas is great because it gives you excellent production quality editing at a relatively inexpensive price.  There are also other Sony Vegas editing products for around $100, but Vegas is still a good deal for around $300. 

There is a learning curve using Vegas, and there are one or two books that I’ve used as a reference for it.  Actually, what I usually do is surf around YouTube to find videos on what I’m trying to specifically learn on Vegas.  There’s tons of videos on YouTube about Vegas however, you’ll have to go through a bunch of poorly made videos in order to find a good one that gets to the point and explains things clearly.

The other software program that I mentioned was Camtasia.  Camtasia is screen capturing software and it records what you are doing on your computer screen for instructional purposes. 

However, everyone uses Camtasia even marketers use it to get their message out.  You can get a copy of Camtasia for about $200 and I recommend that if you start making videos and you can only afford one of these programs, Camtasia is the one I would buy. 

Here is an example of what Camtasia can do:

Instructional Photoshop Video

In my next Blog Post, I’m going to show you the proper way to structure your videos so that your customers and clients can really get some value out of what you have to offer and come to know you as a source of information they can know and trust.

Until then…

To Your Success!

Mark “Elmo” Ellis

"When it Comes to High-Response Copy - I've Got Your Back!"

www.MarkEllisCopy.com

 (859) 797-9560

elmo033057@gmail.com