Passive Income Tips - Edition #3
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Passive Income Tips - Edition #325 subscribers! Thank You for Being one of them.
1.) Product of the Week - Camtasia
3.) Jon’s Business Update
4.) Website Spotlight - The Headline Analyzer
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Product of the Week
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This week’s product is Camtasia. It is a screen capture video
production application. Since it can also capture video input and do
titles and effects it is really a complete video editing application
that can spit out your finished movies as flash, avi or windows media
player files.
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp
More on Camtasia in my business update. Camtasia does not have an
affiliate program.
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Jon’s Business Update
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Overall an encouraging week. My first week with “Rich Dude” [for
those that are new this week that is my mentor] has provided an
interesting shift in focus for my business. More on that in a bit.
My James Martell style affiliate site is gaining some traction in MSN
and starting to get a few visitors from Google too. In the past 7
days, it has averaged about $25/day and what is more encouraging is
that most of the money, by far, has been from affiliate sales, which
is very encouraging. It shows that following the guidance of someone
who has done what you are trying to do can be the quickest way to
enjoy success.
But Rich Dude doesn’t want me to continue working on affiliate sites,
he recommends moving to the top of the Internet business food chain
and creating my own products. I’m very excited about this idea, a
little depressed that I had to pay someone pretty decent money to
tell me something that seems so obvious, but that’s life.
So, I’ve moved full on into this new direction. I’m planning my first
product launch for this Friday, July 14. And I’ve been working on a
follow up product which I’ll try and get out a week later.
For those that caught my Robo Form video on Art of Money this week,
you have a pretty good idea of what these info products are all
about. The Robo Form review video was a practice for me to ease into
the idea of doing screen capture video while narrating over top. The
toughest part is to not forget any vital information I’m not really
smooth enough yet to follow a script, so I end up having my head
spinning by the end. For the products I’ve already decided that I’ll
break them into smaller segments to make this easier.
I though I’d follow up by giving some of the details of how the
example video was made. Firstly as you may have guessed it was done
with Camtasia which is this week’s featured product and linked above.
I started using a very cheap alternative but then I discovered that
Camtasia has a 30 day full functionality free trial and it is so
superior to the alternative that I immediately went to the trial. I’m
hoping that in 30 days I’ll have 2 or 3 products launched and have
easily made enough to pay for the screen capture software [ $299US ].
Camtasia actually does a lot more than just screen capture, it can
capture video camera or web cam input as well and is a full featured
video editing suite that can make titles and special effects. Then it
will allow you to press a button and create a web page with the flash
file embedded in it. From there all you need to do is upload the
entire folder to your server and link to the html file and you’re in
business. It was very simple to use.
Now one major consideration is that these are big files. The problem
with screen capture is that you need to present your video in about
800×600 for the audience to be able to see what is going on [ie read
stuff on the screen]. In a regular movie you can get away with a
smaller viewing area but in screen capture you can’t so the file
sizes are big. The 8+ minute Robo Form video came in at 16megs which
is a very large file. If someone was to link to it from Digg or
Slashdot, I have no doubt I would use up my bandwidth in a hurry and
probably crash my server too.
What this means is that I probably won’t do too many videos on site
or I’ll do them in a smaller size and people will have to live with
not seeing things too well. The other alternatives are to host your
videos offsite. There are services that will host your video and
allow you to show it on your site. Some examples are:
I’m not sure if they have size limits or not, but I have used both of
these services and they work great for standard movie style videos.
For the screen capture videos though, mostly I’ll be making them as
products so if I find they’re getting a ton of traffic, then I’ll be
able to pay for more bandwidth or to beef up the servers to be able
to handle the load.
But since I really do like doing the info videos, and I think they
are just the greatest way to sell affiliate products too, I did
search around for a hosting company that was a bit more generous with
their bandwidth limits…enter Dreamhost.
They offer an insane 1.2 Terrabytes a month on there basic hosting
plan. You can check it out here
http://www.dreamhost.com/shared/comparison.html if you do sign up you
can enter JIGSAW into the promo field and you’ll receive a discount
anywhere from $25 - $47 depending on what plan you order…yes they
have an affiliate program too…my link is
http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?206777 if you feel like sending a
little love my way 
Okay that’s it for this week’s newsletter thanks for subscribing and
if there is anything you’d like to see me talk about or you’d just
like to comment, hit reply or use my comment link below.
Until next week,
Jon
http://artofmoney.org/
http://artofmoney.org/contact
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Links that relate to the above article
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http://artofmoney.org/affiliate/who-the-heck-is-james-martell/
http://artofmoney.org/internet-business/robo-form-review-video/
http://artofmoney.org/internet-business/info-product-creation-guide-review/
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Website Spotlight
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This week’s website spotlight is on a simple free tool that will help
you determine and improve the effectiveness of your headlines or
titles.
http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm
An effective headline or title even on your blog posts can make a big
difference in getting visitors to your site. It is their first contact
with your article if they are using RSS or if your site comes up in a
search engine results page. I use is often.
