Using Screen Capture Software to Create Marketing Videos

Everywhere I look now, people are putting video on their site.  And why not?  It’s highly effective and much more personal than reading text. Today, creating your own video is fairly inexpensive. All you need is a decent digital video recorder and you can post your video to a video sharing site like YouTube or
Viddler and it doesn’t cost you anything.

Online video is a perfect opportunity to share your knowledge with people, while making your site feel more personal. I’ll be using this approach with my Yoga and meditation website. But I’ve also been playing around with something new…

It’s screen capture software called Camtasia.

Camtasia allows you to record whatever is on your computer screen while also recording your voice in real time, giving you the capability to create video presentations or video tutorials. It’s also great for creating howto videos as well as adding audio to a PowerPoint presentation and posting it on a website.

Camtasia has some amazing capabilities, and I’ve only touch the surface of it, but you can see the work I’ve done with it to create these WordPress training videos. The piece I like the best is the ability to create a “theater,” where you can link videos, one after another in a series. This allows you to create training video presentations, and also include a table of context that allows users to jump ahead in the video presentation series. See an example of that with this online video tutorial

The power of Camtasia is it’s ability to pack powerful features into an easy to use presentation. The learning curve was very low for this product. I was able to plug in my microphone, watch one Camtasia video tutorial, and I was on my way to creating video tutorials. And Camtasia comes at a reasonable price, just $299. I’d expect to pay a lot more for something this powerful.

If you’re looking to add video to your site, I’m working with a local videographer who can utilize digital video or HD technology for your video project. Conact me to find out how we might work together to add video to your site, or create a video product to enhance your product offerings.

SEO Book

While reading John Chow’s book, I stumbled upon this great little book called SEO Book by Aaron Wall.  The book is 331 pages of genius for $79.  I’ve spent a lot of time learnign SEO through trial and error, so anything that allows me to take a few short cuts is worth it.  The book comes with lots of extras, including a list of SEO tools, including SEO forums, conferences, social bookmarking, analysis tools, keyword tools, link-building tools, pay-per-click and a ton of others.  It could take you hours of Internet research to find all the information that’s been neatly compiled in this book for you.

The book starts out at the beginning, helping you to select the right product, domain name and hosting.  Then Aaron walks you through selecting the right keywords for your product and putting them to use by optimizing your pages and your entire site.  Then you start registering with directories and link building.  All of this is presented in a clear, straight-forward way that leaves out all the guesswork.  By the time you’ve read this entire book, you will be an expert in SEO, and you’ll have access to all the tools (many of them free) that you’ll need to properly optimize your site.

However, if you know anything about SEO, then you know that this type of information changes rapidly.  So you might be thinking, why should I spend $79 on a book that will be out-of-date in a month?  Aaron’s thought of that, and he includes free updates with your purchase.  So far, the book has been update 20 times, so you know you’ll be on top of the changes when they happen.

 Of course, if you don’t want to do it youself, consider hiring me.