From Mark Ling:
Hello, everybody. You're listening to Mark Ling, and in this video we're going to look at how to record affiliate videos. The first thing we want to look at is...
Why wouldn't you want to just send people an email or make a web page that links to an affiliate offer and not have video in it? That's all well and good, and you can make great sales through email marketing directly to a web page - I do it all the time.
You can make great money from your regular affiliate pages having no video on the page at all. However, sometimes video can help serve a few extra functions:
Sometimes you might want to even interview a product owner on video and give away a bunch of valuable free information and then, at the very end of the video, I will link to their particular product. I'll show you an example of one of those at the end of this video.
There are a lot of great reasons for recording affiliate videos, and often they lead to higher conversions as far as sales are concerned. There are a lot of good reasons for recording affiliate videos.
One is videos based on a PowerPoint presentation, and the other is videos where you're actually in front of the camera and people actually see your face. The video above is an example of a PowerPoint presentation.
To record your PowerPoint presentation, the best software is Camtasia, which is what I use, or you can use ScreenFlow if you're on a Macintosh.
The good news is that there is a free alternative to PowerPoint. If you don't want to spend money on Microsoft PowerPoint, then you can just use Impress from OpenOffice - you can get that for free. A free alternative to Camtasia that you can use is CamStudio. Those are options that you can do. I happen to use Camtasia with PowerPoint, but you might want to use those free alternate options, and that's fine too.
When recording your PowerPoint presentation, audio quality is really important. The best low priced microphone that I can recommend is an Audio-Technica USB condenser microphone. You can get that from tinyurl.com/ATmicrophone.
It's really important that if you're shopping around for microphones that you strongly consider this particular model because it's relatively low priced and the audio quality is the best that I've seen by any microphone within that price range by a country mile.
In fact, it's the only microphone that I've found that has reasonably good audio without having to plug it into an Mbox or some sort of external device to condense the audio so that it sounds right. So it's really important.
Just to give you an idea of what it sounds like anyway I'm using an Audio-Technica USB condenser microphone right now in this particular audio recording. Here's a photo of what one of those microphone looks like.
I highly recommend that particular microphone, because it's relatively low cost especially when I compare it to other microphones that I've bought in the past where I've spent hundreds of dollars on the microphone and more hundreds of dollars on the actual Mbox and Pro Tools and so forth to get good quality audio.
I can get almost the same quality, pretty professional sound for a low price. The only reason why the sounds that you're listening to may not be 100% professional is just simply because I'm going to compress the audio so that the video takes up less bandwidth. I could definitely save it as a higher quality audio file if I wanted to. Anyway, that's the microphone I'm using for this particular video if you're wondering.
To record your video in Camtasia, you simply click on a button that says "Record the Screen" on the left-hand side.
Make sure to check that the correct microphone is selected in the audio settings, because the default might not actually be your Audio-Technica USB microphone.
Even though you've plugged it in, it might be recording audio straight from your laptop or from somewhere else, in which case it may not sound right and that's because it's not actually recording from your microphone. Make sure you double check that.
To record yourself speaking in front of the camera, I recommend using a Kodak Zi8 video camera. As you can see, at Amazon.com, at the time of recording this video, they are $122.49. They're on special - in the shops, they're usually about $180 -that's US dollars. So in other countries they might be more expensive, but they're relatively low cost for a video camera.
Now they produce very good quality video, and the reason why I choose the Kodak Zi8 camera instead of other types of video cameras is because they've got an external microphone jack.
A lot of the other flip type cameras, these small cameras that fit in your pocket that are relatively low priced, they only record audio from the actual camera itself. At least at the time of recording this video that's the case. So make sure you look out for a Kodak Zi8, unless you've already got a high quality video camera that's fine, but this is a relatively low price yet you get great quality video recorded with them and it's got an external microphone jack.
Now the only problem with the microphone jack is that the Audio-Technica microphone, that I showed you before, that will be fine for recording Camtasia videos. It won't be fine for recording audio to your Kodak Zi8.
You actually need to have a microphone – I think it's called an analog microphone, I'm not 100% sure – that has a jack that looks like that as opposed to a USB plug. Any $20 or $30 regular microphone seems to work pretty good though, and that's what I've gone along with to go with my Kodak Zi8. So you may want to just get one of these Sony microphones or something like that for $20 to $30 to go with your Zi8 video camera.
When it comes to editing your movie that you record on your video, I happen to use Sony Vegas Movie Studio. At the time of recording this video, the Movie Studio HD Platinum edition is $95 US. There's a special going on, on the version below, this version and it's going for about $45. You really only need that version. You don't even need this version.
What you do is you drag and drop your video from your Kodak Zi8. It's got a USB plug on the Zi8. So you just plug that straight into your computer, and you just drag and drop it into Sony Vegas Movie Studio.
Then you can edit the video. You can cut out the start and the end or any bits that you don't like. Then you just click a button that says "Produce Video As," and then make sure you save it as a WMV file.
The WMV file, once you've produced it, you can open that up in Camtasia, and then you just click "Produce for the Web." I recommend using the settings of 30 frames per second, mp4, bitrate encoding, 268 kilobytes per second.
Click "Produce Video As." Then, "Custom Production Settings" and then after that, select mp4, frame rate 30, 268 Kbps, and that's in bitrate encoding mode. That's it.
If you want to see an example of an affiliate video that I recorded using a Kodak Zi8, which was quickly edited using Sony Vegas Movie Studio and then it was outputted in Camtasia, just as I stated here, then go tinyurl.com/marksvid and you can have a look at one affiliate video that I recorded there.
In that particular affiliate video, what I did was I interviewed a guy on video, in front of the camera, who happened to have a product that taught men how to attract women by using magic tricks. He's got some interesting ways of starting conversations with women and getting them laughing and stuff using magic tricks. I got him demonstrating a few of them in front of the camera, and then at the end of the video, we promoted his product. Again, it's just an example of an affiliate video using Kodak Zi8 camera.
My findings are that affiliate videos in general tend to do better when I actually just do them as PowerPoint slides, like what I'm doing now, while I'm voicing them over. I think that's because it's a little bit easier to keep the structure there, and it's easier to spell out the benefits of a product in front of people and so forth. That works out well.
But I like being in front of the video camera as well, to mix things up, so people know I'm a real person and also because it's adds a better interaction level if I'm interviewing somebody else, in which case that happens to work very well too.
But you can't always get someone else to interview, in which case sometimes it's better just to do what I'm doing right now and just record a PowerPoint presentation when you record an affiliate video.
I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Check out the other video that I've got on the screen now just by typing tinyurl.com/marksvid into your browser, and you can see another example of an affiliate video that I recorded using a Kodak Zi8 video camera.
All right guys, bye for now.
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