I am totally convinced that being able to design and produce videos (like the one above which took one hour to make!)selling your expertise is the way forward as I have had unlimited success using video to help the customers of my low cost replacement for small business accounting software (i.e. QuickBooks or Peachtree) learn new skills such as marketing or improving their sales. Here is a really quick way of selling what you know online to potentially thousands of people worldwide and start supplementing your income. I would recommend you take the time to design and create your own product (digital content) as the margin you earn will be higher and you have the added benefit of learning from your customers what you could do to refine your product and maybe sell more.
Ok lets get started I am going to assume you have heard of podcasts, iTunes and YouTube, these and online video are central to the approach I going to share with you. Don’t be fooled by a lot of the irrelevant content you see on these platforms asunderneath all this debris is a market of buyers for information products about just about anything from how to knit to how to buy small business accounting software.
The best way to decide what content you are going to include in your video is to start by creating a storyboard that lays out the structure and format of your video(s) content. The simplest and the easiest way to create a useful and easy to refine storyboard is to use Microsoft powerpoint or Apple Keynote as you can use the material you create on your slides in your video. The really good news is that you can produce a storyboard, create your video and fine tune it and get it to market without spending any money what so ever the most this exercise is going to cost you is time and effort and believe me you will learn so much that you will look back and see that this is time well spent.
TechSmith Camtasia Studio is the video producing software that I recommend as it will let you produce your video in YouTube, Podcast, QuickTime and Windows Media format and there are some great tutorials you should watch before you download their trial software (please don’t do this now). My sound advice is to get your storyboard completed and watch all of the Camtasia Studio tutorials befor downloading the thirty day free trial as you want to make best use of this time to build your confidence and get your video to market.
I will be sending another article to this blog in the next day or so (owner permitting) where I walk through in detail (and at no cost) how to create a detailed storyboard using some of my small business accounting software videos as real live examples, but first you must go and study the tools I have discussed here.