MRR Central Blog

Written on May 30, 2009 – 7:23 pm | by Jeffrey |

By simply recording your voice to audio using a microphone and the free software found here http://www.streamingaudio4free.com/dlpefa you are able to add the audio to your website or burn it to CD giving you an immediate physical product. The great thing is that the CD only cost pennies but you can charge $19.97 for it. The audio CD is also a great entry level product for more expensive up sells and backend sales.

You could even take that audio and open an iTunes account so that you drip feed your content as a weekly podcast. iTunes has a massive market of people looking for content to listen to on their iPods while they go about their lives. You never know, some of your future customers could be listening to you while they shop, ride the train or while they’re working out in the gym. Be a superstar in your own right.

You could have a regular slot where you add new content weekly and gain your own group of followers.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/podcasts/fanfaq.html

Why stop there? Video is huge right now because media that engages the audio and visual senses is more attention grabbing than the written word alone. We are a generation that is accustomed with video and because it is such a natural part of our lives and a medium we all recognize, it makes sense to use it.

There are several ways to do this:

Video yourself talking about your product. These days most people have access to digital video cameras. You can easily upload your video to the multiple video sharing sites online.

You just import your video into Windows Movie Maker if you use Windows or iMovie if you use a Mac using a firewire IEEE 34 video card. This allows you to transfer big chunks of video to your computer in real time ready to edit. You can add titles to your footage. You can keep it simple, you don’t need any Hollywood style special effects to make your video effective, just you, some titles, a little music and your imagination. Once you complete your video you can save it to MPEG, AVI, MP4, WMV, ASF, MOV to name a few of the recognized formats accepted by YouTube then create an account and upload your video. They also have a new feature where you can mass upload videos to YouTube through their special new plug-in.

Always make sure that the videos you upload are original and are your own work.

http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_multiupload

You can submit videos up to 10 minutes in length on youtube.com and up to 1GB in size. If you want to create longer videos then I would suggest submitting to youtube.com and for mass submissions to other video sharing sites I would keep the length to a couple of minutes and the file size to under 100 MB. This is because the video sharing sites each have different file size maximums and when mass submitting keeping your video under a certain size will enable it to get accepted more readily.

You could even create little mini snippets of video about your product, upload to www.youtube.com and embed the video on your web page. Having video on your webpage can increase your opt in subscription rates and sales conversions. Getting subscribers to opt in to your ezine newsletter allows you to build a relationship with them and offer them quality products on a regular basis. This is where you want your business to be and building a long term solution that enables you to keep in regular content with your subscribers should be your long term goal.

http://www.youtube.com/sharing

In addition to creating video and placing it on your site, if you’re a little shy you can create your video using Camstudio

http://camstudio.org

Tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kiug3H3c4gk

or Camtasia http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

Camstudio has some of the basic functions Camtasia does and best of all, it’s free. Camstudio lets you film anything on your computer screen, this is a great feature for giving tutorials and giving demonstrations and talking about your products. This is also great for embedding in your web site and for mass submitting to video sharing sites.

If you want your videos to jump out at your viewers, here is some professional, completely royalty free music you can use that doesn’t sound like those cheesy midi files of the late 80’s and early 90’s. If you want your slideshow video to sound like an old version of Donkey Kong or Super Mario Brothers then midi’s got your name on it but if you want something a little more sophisticated then try:

http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free

The artist has very graciously made his music available to anyone wanting to use it, you just have read his terms of use and just give him credit in your work. His stuff is great and he composes all of his own tunes and loops on his site.

Here’s another good link:
http://free-loops.com/download-free-loop-5599.html

If you have iMovie then you probably also have Garage band, this has lots of royalty free beats and loops you can use in your videos and they sound great too.

If the whole black and white look with music is a little bland and you absolutely don’t want to narrate your own video then you can add pictures and get someone else to do the narration for you.

You can purchase stock photos from www.istockphoto.com for as little as $1 each. Because you are using these pictures for your own personal use and are not reselling them, you have permission to use them.

For the narration side you have a choice of several professional actors that can voiceover your video for you. Visit their site and you will be able to listen to voice over samples. Much of their talent are multi faceted and are able to read in different tones and styles. Go to www.voicetalentnow.com and check it out.

They charge $50 for a 30 to 60 second spot. Not bad considering it cost thousands to do this in a regular sound recording studio with voice talent.

I’ve used them on several occasions and they usually deliver within 48 to 72 hours. You give them a copy of your written script via email. Read it over and make sure that you time yourself. It can’t stretch too far over your 60 second time slot. If it does your voice talent will just read it a little faster so that it fits within the 60 second allotted time frame. What you don’t want to do is squeeze 2 minutes into 1 a minute recording, it will sound too rushed and your customers will lose precious information.

Once you read it over, trim the fat by getting rid of any information or unclear dialogue you don’t need so that your 60 second script is as good as it possibly can be. Then all you do is fill out the order form where you specify which talent you liked best based upon their audio samples. You also include a couple of other choices in case they aren’t available at that time. You pay your $50 through PayPal and you’re away.

A few days later you will receive your voice recording. The great thing is that they give you 3 different voiceover styles for you to choose from.

All you do from that point on is upload it to your Windows Movie Maker or iMovie timeline and synch it with your pictures and your written titles. You can also add your music too but keep it low in the background so that your visitors can every word of dialogue and it doesn’t distract them from taking the action of signing up as a subscriber or checking out your product. Then add it to your web page.

What you can then do with all of these videos is burn them to DVD and use them as promotional tools for your products very effective especially with your little 60 second professionally voiced promotional teaser.

Don’t forget you don’t have to go to the lengths of having a professional voice over artist, research shows that people tend to react just as strongly to videos and audios where a real person is narrating. They are able to readily more connect with that person. The voiceover route is there for you if it’s something you feel more comfortable doing.

Did you know that if you decide to transform your product into an audio CD or DVD that you don’t need to hassle with posting them out to your clients? Pretty fantastic eh? Who wants to mess around with filling orders and running to the post office everyday when you don’t have to?

www.kunaki.com takes care of that for you. You just send them your audio or video file uploaded as an MP3 file or MPEG4, mov, wav, etc when you fill out the form on their web site. Kunaki can produce an outstanding, high quality physical product in jewel casing from your digital file for around $1.75 each and for as low as $5.00 each including drop shipping directly to your customer. They fulfill all orders on your behalf which means no trips to the post office and the price is reasonable. You pay Kunaki the amount for the product plus drop shipping and you keep the rest.

This is great if you’ve chosen a private label rights product to fully revamp but what if you chose a master resell rights product instead? How do we make it new without altering it?

As we touched upon before you could write your own related ebook to accompany your resell rights product. You could create a mini report as a review to accompany your master resell rights product. Very powerful when you give a personal endorsement and it carries more weight from you as a user.

You should also try the products; give your own perspective on them. If it’s software write what it was like to use, how easy was it to navigate? Did you save you time? Did it serve a purpose or fulfill a need? If was an ebook how did it help you? what tips did you apply and what was your outcome?

This is also a great way to know if the product does what it claims to do and you have tried and tested proof to back it with.

Did that Article Content Creator really save you time? Was it user friendly? was it all it claimed to be? What were your likes and dislikes? Do you give a balanced viewpoint not every product can be 100% perfect and you won’t come across as all sales pitchy like you would if you have nothing but praise for the product, people become skeptical and think that you’re just trying to make the sale rather than what’s in their best interest. That’s not to say that there are genuine products out there that really do live up to their expectations. Just be honest and fair.

If the product doesn’t live up to its claims it’s best you don’t promote it anyway. Remember, you’re establishing a reputation which will be like currency later on and people will buy based upon the strength of your recommendation alone.

So start writing your own review, it’s a quick way to get started and you don’t need testimonials because you are the testimonial. If you give details of the product you tested and provide social proof of your success people will buy from you.

After completing your mini report you should then convert it to PDF (Portable Document Format) which is the most widely used format for sending and reading information on the internet, .exe ebooks have the disadvantage of being unreadable on Mac operating systems. It’s best to stick with PDF so that you can access a global audience without any
limitations. Free versions are great to start with if you’re producing a mini report but they have their limitations, they lack a lot of the functions that the paid versions have and can only produce reports of up to a maximum size of 1-3 MB, not suitable if you want to create larger ebooks with graphics.

www.openoffice.org works extremely well and has had lots of positive reviews and is free.

I’m very happy using www.cutepdf.com. It’s not free but for only $49.95 is very affordable and with a sale or two you’ve easily made back your money.

Another reason why I like Cute PDF is that it preserves links when viewing from a Mac operating system through Preview, the equivalent of windows Adobe reader, whereas some PDF converters don’t.

If you decide to go with Cute PDF you simply install the software upon purchase. When it comes time to convert your word document to PDF format the icon appears as a print engine. You select it and within 10 seconds you have a readymade PDF ready to go.

Don’t forget to run your ebook through your spell checker. Forgive me if I missed a few spelling errors myself along the way, I tend to write quickly so a few may have slipped through the net.