Get More Clients Online

Screentoaster

Have you ever viewed a tutorial where the speaker is giving a tour of a website or some software and instead of seeing this person speak, you're seeing a view of her computer screen? This is commonly referred to as a screencast, and was most commonly created by purchasing Camtasia Studio software.

Now, you can create the same type of screencast for yourself with the free web-based screen recorder,  Screentoaster. ScreenToaster is designed to capture screen activity in real-time to rapidly create and share tutorials, demos, training, lectures and more. You can then share and stream videos online in Flash, embed them on blogs and webpages or send them by email.

To record a screencast video, simply click on "Start recording" or "Record", start recording using the shortcuts or via the recorder. You can add audio and an embedded webcam while you are recording. When finished, you can add subtitles, choose your thumbnail image, and describe and tag your video so other users can easily find your screencasts.

ScreenToaster is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux and is optimized to run on Firefox 2 +, Internet Explorer 7 +, Chrome, Opera 9 and Safari.

Create your screencast  here.

Video Hosting and Editing

Q:  What is a recommended software program to use to create and edit videos to place on a website or blog?

Kelly Johnson
CornerstoneVA.com

Hi Kelly-- Great question!  I'm just now exploring video options and here's what I have discovered.

1. YouTube.com and Viddler.com let you upload your videos at no charge and provide a code to embed them on your site, but you're stuck with the YouTube and Viddler logos on your video. 

2.  GetMoreClientsAudio.com is a great beginning place to start for uploading and hosting audios (can't do any editing with this service).  The directions are simple, and you can create the player in multiple sizes to correspond with the amount of space you have to insert the video on a web page.  However, once you start getting traffic to these videos, your bandwidth usage will increase and you may end up paying more than you intended for bandwidth overages.

3.  Amazon S3 offers really cheap video hosting, but it's pretty difficult to set up on its own.  There's a membership site, www.EZs3.com, that you can join that walks you through the process and incorporates a variety of video players and social networking viral video options.  There is something of a learning curve involved here.

4.  For screen capture video (ideal for online training), I recommend Camstasia Studio,  There's a similar open source version called CamStudio, but I don't know that much about it.

5.  Animoto for Business is a fairly inexpensive option to create PPT-type videos with audio as well.

6.  For regular video editing, I usually hear iMovie recommended for Macs (is part of the installed Mac software) and Windows Movie Maker for PCs (is part of the Windows software).  However, for PCs, I've heard more people mention Sony Vegas Movie Studio. You can compare versions here.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

The Power of Video

Well,if I wasn't already convinced about the power of video, I'd definitely be a convert now.

Site-Reference.com, an online article directory, began a year or so ago to make videos from articles that writers submitted.  They give the writer credit and mention the writer's site in the course of the video, but they mention their own site as well.

The initial videos were pretty amateurish, but now they have stepped up to the plate and are offering fairly sophisticated videos from articles.  I got the idea to make videos from my articles from them and incorporate this into my overall marketing and article repurposing strategies.

One video that they created from one of my articles, 10 Secrets to Using Twitter to Attract More Followers and Get More Clients, has been viewed 35,616 times since Nov. 2008.

To me, that's quite impressive!

Unfortunately, if I choose to do this as well for myself, I have competition from them with my own content.  Not quite sure how I feel about this...guess time will tell.

Anyone else have advice about whether this is truly a problem?

Are videos effective for selling services?

Q:  I offer Business Valuation Services - services that are of no interest to business owners - until they need it - and that may only be once in their lifetime. I also have a 4 lesson free course that is sent out via e-mail, "How to Value Your Own Business." This is a first step primer about business valuation. I have tried an  online chat seminar with a well know branding expert that he  advertised throughout his large network. It was very lonely as he and I chatted for an hour. I'm thinking that 4 online videos - the same as the lessons that a user could download at any time would be a good selling tool. It would include the points and the examples as you mentioned and would add the personal trust, credibility etc. that you suggested. The Call to Action is to get an upsell to one of the various business valuations alternatives offered on the website. My question is this, "Do free online training videos work for upselling to a paid service?" Thank you.

Pete Smith
http://www.Value-a-Business.com

A:  Hi Pete--Great question!  I'm answering this based on the experience of others rather than my own, as I have yet to jump on the video bandwagon.  Those experiences from my mentors have convinced me that the video revolution is here, and those of us not producing videos are getting left behind quickly (me included!). 

My marketing coach, Ali Brown, said in a recent coaching call that her opt-in rate on her squeeze page had jumped 30% or so after putting a video there with her call to action.  Tom Antion, on a recent call I attended with him, gave story after story about how he's doing well using videos as a part of his search engine optimization strategy. 

Before you make any videos, though, head over to YouTube.com and do some keyword searches for other videos on your topic area and see what your competitors (or people in related businesses) are doing. 

I think it might be more powerful to upsell viewers to get on your list rather than to buy your service because once they're on your list, you can begin to market your services to them.  However, the best way to determine your call to action is to test, test, test.  You might create a couple of videos with different calls to action, and see what seems to get the best results.  Track your results with a good website stats program, which will help you track landing page visits.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.