Ok, I know that James Brausch has been in many of my blog posts recently, but I just had to share with you something interesting that he brought up regarding your voice and how it affects your customers. Your ability to speak effectively while demonstrating your product (or anything) in a camtasia video as pointed out by James Brausch may not be as easy as it sounds. You may be someone who outsourced your sales letter to a top rated copywriter for example. Thus your visitor may have an entirely different impression of you after he/she actually hears your voice for the first time. Do you sound like a mechanical putz? Hmmm, He got me thinking about my own series of videos for the AmazingCloaker. Even though I wrote my own sales copy, I couldn't help but to wonder what type of impression my own voice leaves on the collective public. I supposed if I were to critique myself, I would have to say that I need less pauses and faster speech in some areas. I think really, the key to giving your customers a good impression is to speak in exactly the same way as if your best friend was standing behind you watching as you explain what you are doing. I think that it helps also to have someone un-biased to critique your video after you're finished as well. My wife is very good at that, because if she thinks that what I have just created really stinks, then she will give it to me straight. I respect that because she helps me see things from a different perspective. When making a video, this is what works for me. I will first list out on paper the main topic areas. Then I will make quick notes in sub-topics on what I want to cover as I go along. Whatever you do DON'T WRITE OUT YOUR DIALOG WORD FOR WORD! Remember when I asked you about sounding like a mechanical putz? It just doesn't work with video. An audio file or CD may be a different story. Ok, now that I have a general outline of where I want to go, I can convey my message in a way that my customers are going to easily grasp. Making your customers feel comfortable with your product is extremely important, especially if it's a software product. Most people are already intimidated by new software applications as it is. If you can convey a friendly and reassuring aura into your customer's computer room, they will immediately feel confident that they made the right choice in purchasing your product. Even though I prefer to create both documented and video help with my sofware, I can certainly see the point that James has with only creating a Camstasia video to explain your software. It's a major time saver to put your help files in video format. At the same time the visitor can have the sense of actually seeing the software in action. Visual tutoring is really all that most small applications require anyway. If you create your own products or if you simply wish to have a video intro to a product that you affiliate with, the camstasia video route can be a very effective strategy. Maybe it's time you beef up your marketing plan with some video. Don't let the pro's intimidate you, give it a try, you just might surprise yourself and boost your profits at the same time!

Most people starting out in affiliate marketing pretty much have the same dilemmas. What software should I use for making my web pages? What kind of products should I promote? Do I need content? And the list goes on. Well here's my two cents for what it's worth. If you're already web savvy, Dreamweaver is an excellent product for creating web pages, especially if you are doing large multi-page projects. For strictly smaller websites & pre-sell or sales pages its pretty much over kill and over priced for what you need. When I first started on-line marketing, XSite pro was my weapon of choice. This is a sweet app that is designed specifically with Internet marketers in mind. It has a simple to use built-in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) page editor and templates to make creating a web page a snap. There are features for adding ad-sense ads, forms, navigation menus, buttons, and much more. You can optimize your page for the search engines, add meta tags / keywords, etc. Many people swear by this software and use it to generate hundreds of quality search engine friendly sites. Other great software for web page design is the Coffee Cup HTML Editor . This is my personal favorite, and is the software I used to design the AmazingCloaker website. The Coffee Cup HTML editor will allow you to design your website in an easy to use WYSIWYG editor as well, but also gives you the added convenience of having full control over the HTML code. I like to have the ability to easily modify (or clean up) my HTML code and this editor let's me do this very well. A very NICE app is also the BlueVoda website builder. You can build a web site in 30 minutes. It's easy to use and has many templates. You can layout your website exactly the way you want in the WYSIWYG editor. You can add multimedia, javascripts, plugins, the works. The only hitch is that it will only interface to a bluevoda web server. You could get around this of course by simply previewing your finished page and copy/paste the source code into wordpad and save as html. nyuk nyuk nyuk… Products that you promote should ideally be something related to what you like, but if you want to make any real money you need to diversify into many different products. Keep your web pages specific to your products of course. I use dreamhost, because you can host unlimited domains under one account! This means that everytime you come up with a new webpage/domain, you don't have to pay for another web host account to go with it. Just add it to your existing account. All you pay is the 9 or 10 bucks for the domain registration! In my opinion, this is the only way to go! Products that have recurring payment are great affiliate products to promote. Dating sites, membership sites of any kind, products that you would enroll monthly like hair loss products, anti-aging, etc are all excellent, because you get the option of residual income rather than the one time deal. Content. Yes, you need to do a little work and write content. It's really not that hard. If you've ever written an email to a friend, then you can write a review about a product. If you don't know anything about the product you are promoting, then "Google" it and find some articles and re-write the review into your own words. It's not cheating, and you'll be in business before you know it. Well, hopefully this little tidbit of info will get you pointed into the right direction if you're new to the game and feel lost and overwhelmed by all the horse-crap in the forums, junk "how to affiliate market" products designed to tease you but really steer you away from what the big boys are "really" doing, etc. Remember, 99% of any successful journey is taking that first step. You just got to resolve yourself to do it. Don't know what to write? Just start typing without trying to write a masterpiece, and you'll be surprised at what starts coming out!