First of all apologies if you’re waiting for the next part in my blogging series, I’ve been in bed with flu for the past couple of days.  I’m on the mend and the nest part will be here tomorrow but in the meantime I wanted to share something with you that made a massive difference to my business.

While I was in bed yesterday I watched a free DVD I got from Russell Brunson which I’ve not watched in probably a year.  Even though I probably watched it three times when I first got it, there were still new ideas I picked up from it yesterday.  I checked the website, and amazingly Russell is still giving these away for free (you just pay postage) so go and grab a copy, and check back here tomorrow for the next part of my blogging series!

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I had an email from Joe Lavery yesterday telling me about Jo Han Mok.  He’s the author of ‘The E-Code’ and a very succssful marketer.  He’s put together a series of 15 videos covering his favorite free traffic generation techniques and is virtually giving them away.  Check them out here.

Since I totally trust Joe and the videos are so cheap I decided to take a look and all I can say is I’m impressed!  Now I’ll be honest, the video’s are not great quality - in fact it gets a little irritating sometimes when the audio skips but that doesn’t matter, it’s the content that is pure gold.  These videos cover a range of subjects, each one focussed on getting free traffic from various sources - Web 2.0 sites, MySpace, eBay, Squidoo, Articles, Spyfoo and many, many more.  Jo’s approach is to let you look right over his shoulder as he explains the various techniques and how to make the most of them.

I’ve only had time to watch a few of the videos so far, and although a lot of it is stuff I alreayd knew, I’ve already picked up a few gems - things that will help me drive fresh traffic over the next few weeks which I’ve never heard anyone else teaching.  In fact, just one of these little secrets I’ve already implemented and seen a fresh stream of traffic on my stats - in less than 24 hours!

So, if you want to get a whole load of free traffic to your site, blog, or promotion check out these videos and see what you think!

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OK, tomorrow I’m posting the first part in my mini-series on blogging, and using a blog as a launching platform for an online business, but right now I just want to share a really cool free resource with you…

I’ve been doing a lot of PPC recently, in particular I’ve been using Adwords to drive traffic to my web design seminar signup page, and a separate affiliate promotion.  I’ve been consuming every morsel of information I can find on the subject from books (Perry Marhall’s Ultimate Guide is my favorite) to articles, ebooks, blog posts and videos in order to increase my CTR and keep my costs down.  Well, what I just found this morning is something I wish I had when I started because it’s one of the best resources I’ve come across on the subject of PPC and Adwords, and it’s really easy to get your head around…

Basically it’s a completely free 5 part series on using Adwords, and you can get your free copy here.

Now don’t let me hear you saying you never get anything good for free!

If you’re not sure whether you ought to be using PPC, just remember that it is without doubt the fastest way to drive traffic, and can literally have you in profit in hours (rather than in weeks or months from SEO).  Even if you’re concentrating on generating your own traffic by creating content (which is what we’ll be talking about in the blogging series) you should still learn PPC as it’s a great tool for testing new markets, promoting affiliate products, and getting an extra stream of traffic and income!

See you tomrrow for the start of the blogging mini series…

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I found a nice little free resource today… It’s a free acess membership site with a ton of resale rights and PLR content.  You can get free access right now.

The content covers quite a range of niches, and although I’ve not gone through a lot of it yet, what I’ve seen so far looks pretty good.  There’s not an awful lot of PLR content on the free account (although you can upgrade to a paid account with a lot more) but there’s certainly enough that you’ll probably find something of interest, and there is a lot of resale rights content (well over 100 products) and quite a few banner and e-cover templates in PSD format.

If you’re after some freebies, or a little inspiration for your next article then check it out!

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I’m sure you’ve heard of YouTube, and maybe MetaCafe, and maybe even Viddler…. but what about Blip.tv, or HowCast, or Sclipo? The truth is that, while YouTube is far and away the market leader, there are lots of other sites where you can publish your videos, and if you’re not using them you could be missing out on valuable traffic.

Until fairly recently, submitting to all of the different sites was very time consuming but no longer - enter TubeMogul!

TubeMogul is a free service which allows you to publish videos to all of the main video sharing websites from one central control panel, PLUS they throw in free tracking to boot! Currently the list of supported sites is:

• 5min
• AOL Video
• Blip.tv
• Break
• Brightcove
• Crackle
• Daily Motion
• Google Video
• Graspr
• Howcast
• Imeem
• Metacafe
• Myspace
• Revver
• Sclipo
• StupidVideos
• Viddler
• Vimeo
• Veoh
• Yahoo Video
• YouTube

Getting started is very easy, just head over to TubeMogul and register for a free account. You can then start publishing right away. You start a submission by uploading your video to TubeMogul, and then filling in some details (such as title and description etc.) while you’re waiting for the upload. You then select which sites to upload to, hit the submit button and you’re done.

Just like social bookmarking using the Social Marker tool, you’ll need an account at each of the individual video sites. That means the first time you use TubeMogul it will take some some, but from then on it’s a simple matter of uploading, filling out the form and bam - you can publish to a bunch of different sites in no time.

Once your video has been uploaded, you can start to view stats after 24 hours. A great feature is that you can track viewing stats for videos, even if you didn’t upload them through the service. For example, I use TubeMogul to upload to several sites, but I do my YouTube submissions manually (since Youtube are by far the market leader, it pays to give them special attention!) but I can still track my Youtube stats from within TubeMogul.

All in all it’s a great free tool. Without TubeMogul I probably wouldn’t bother submitting to any site except YouTube, but this tool makes it worth the time to submit. Since using TubeMogul, approximately 15% of my views have been on sites other than YouTube, and those are views I was missing out on before!

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OK, part five of this series on creating content and this is a tutorial on creating video content in the form of screencasts. Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the past 2 years, you can’t help but have noticed that video has become massively popular on the Internet.

Until fairly recently, using video online required specialist and expensive tools and hosting, but with the techniques I’ll show you today, you can create and host your videos free of charge, and use them as a marketing tool to drive more traffic to your site!

Here’s the video, and below you’ll find the rest of this blog post if you’d rather read along than watch. (Plus you’ll also find all the links mentioned in the video below!)

Links

Download Camstudio: Camstudio (Windows only)

Download Copernicus: Copernicus (Mac)

Camstudio Tutorial - Recording and publishing video content

You already know how powerful video is. The problem is that many people are put off, with the misconception that producing video is difficult or requires skills they don’t have. Not true!

Download the Camstudio software above, and by the end of this tutorial you’ll be able to create awesome video tutorials, reviews and vlog (video blog) posts.

When you install and open Camstudio, the first thing you’ll notice is that the application is very small and quite simple. In fact, it’s so simple that if you click on the File menu you’ll notice that there isn’t even an Open or Save function! Don’t worry though, it’s not a limited demo version, when you record a new video you’ll be prompted to save automatically.

Setting up the software

Although it’s very simple software, we still need to set a few things up before we start. First go to the Region menu and you’ll notice that you can record full screen, or a region of the screen. If you’re producing video for the web (Youtube, blogs etc.) then I would suggest you don’t use full screen. The reason is that once your video is reduced down to the size you’ll publish at, it will look too small and squashed. I would suggest recoding a region of 640 by 480 pixels which is large enough for most applications, and is exactly twice the height and width of a YouTube video so your final video won’t look squashed.

The next thing to set is your audio input. Just like with Audacity yesterday, you need to select which input your microphone is plugged into and you do that from Options > Audio Options > Audio Options For Microphone. And finally it’s a good idea to set some keyboard shortcuts for Record and Stop in Options > Keyboard Shortcuts.

OK so we’re finally ready to click the record button. When you do (or hit your keyboard shortcut) you’ll see a bounding box at the size you specified earlier. Drag it to the correct position on the screen and click to start recording. When you’re done, click Stop or press the key you set as your shortcut and you’ll be prompted to save.

Branding your videos

Since Camstudio is so simple and doesn’t have any editing capabilities, here’s what I suggest you do in order to get the most from it. First of all, plan your recording before you start. Since you’re recording an area of the screen, rather than a single application, you can start your video with a splash screen. Using GIMP or OpenOffice create a screen with some title text, and your branding (i.e. the name of your site, business or product and the URL of your site). Now position that on screen so that it will show at the beginning of your video.

Branding showing below the application you’re demonstrating

If you create your splash carefully, and you have enough screen real estate in the video, you can have your branding showing all the way through your video.

Publishing and Promoting

Now here’s the key to getting the most benefit from your videos, while getting free hosting thrown in! Head over to YouTube and sign up for a free account. You can then upload your video and go to the video page. On the right side of the screen you’ll see an EMBED box with some HTML text beneath it. Copy and paste that into your blog, or web page, and you get your video on your own site while Youtube handles the hosting for you!

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