What is Aspect Ratio?

Aspect Ratio is the ratio of a videos width to its height. Every screen resolution has an aspect ratio associated with it. A few of the most common aspect ratios we see today are 4 by 3 (called standard)and 16 by 9 (called widescreen). It’s quite simple: If the aspect ratio of your video doesn’t match aspect ratio of the display on which you want to show it, you will see horizontal black bars at the top and bottom (called “letterboxing”) or vertical bars on either side (called “curtains”), that’s an example of a video that was recorded at a different aspect ratio than it is being presented.

For Best Results

Presentations, images, and videos can be created in any aspect ratio, therefore it is important for you to be aware of your target aspect ratio during planning so you can create all your original content at a consistent size and ratio that will display correctly where you want to display it.

Just make sure you keep the aspect ratio consistent from recording to Production. If you are want to display your video in a standard 4:3, record at 4:3. If 16:9, record at 16:9. Camtasia makes this easy displaying the most common aspect ratios right in the recorder window. 

Then make the same choice as to which resolution and aspect ratio you will edit and produce at.  Be sure you produce at the same 4:3 or 16:9 and you will be all set to go.

Doing it this way ensures that no screen real estate will be wasted, and  your video quality will be much better.

Best,

Take it away Eleanor…

Creating Visibility with LinkedIn

The main goal of a business when creating a company page on LinkedIn is visibility and to create awareness allowing companies to build relationships.

And what better way is there to create awareness then using and creating video to build relationships with your connections. Who better understands the value of building relationships and connections than LinkedIn? Paired with video hosted on YouTube, the two engaged together promise a beautiful business marriage.

By creating a company page you are allowing LinkedIn to promote the interests of your business. LinkedIn company page profiles have the ability to appear in Google search results, just like videos on YouTube. Maybe this is why LinkedIn choose to use YouTube to pull in videos for company pages.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Building Thought Leadership and Credibility

Using Video on your LinkedIn Company Page helps build thought leadership and credibility for your  business. By enhancing the valuable recommendations from followers that continually bring new opportunities to build your brand, secure new clients/referrals, and develop/improve your reputation.

Company pages from LinkedIn serve as a provision for business owners to promote their products or  services (visual aka video only enhances this promotion), and the only cost is the time it takes to create the page and videos, or what you pay your Virtual Assistant to create it for you (Shameless plug) or grab my new PDF guide, checklist, and video “Discover How and Why To Create LinkedIn Company Pages“ 

I Love this quote and now it not only includes people worldwide but companies worldwide. “LinkedIn connects talent with opportunity at massive scale, scale that was never possible before because we did not have infrastructure that enabled us to connect 100s of millions of people world wide.”- Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn

Grab your Report

You can grab your report here and let LinkedIn promote the interests of your company today!

(Guest Post by Eleanor Prior)

Becoming an independent business is not easy. It takes time until you have figured out what the setup is that works best for you. What type of projects, what type of clients. Through a process of trial and error you get to where you want to be, slowly. Allow time for this process to happen, and realize that you will be constantly moving direction (I still am).

• Small businesses tend to under-invest. Old software, slow computers, small screens. All this is a tax deductible business expense/investment, leverage it to do better work and compete with larger businesses.
• Optimize your workflow. Use Gmail with clever filters to make stay on top of email. Use Dropbox to access your files anywhere from any device. Use Freshbooks to track time and do your billing. Enjoy your freedom from the IT purchasing department and pick the right productivity tools.
• Cut yourself free from a specific location. Take your Laptop out of the house. This is a major stress reliever as you won’t be surrounded by stuff you need to clean.
• Pick your niche and aim high. As a one-person business, you cannot be great at everything. But you can dominate a niche. Digital content can now travel anywhere, so the entire world is a potential customer base. If the market is that broad, you can afford to focus, focus, and focus.
• Invest in a web presence and show your portfolio. By the time someone is contacting you, 70% of the sales work is done through researching you online.
• Fixed prices. As long as you are charging your time out by the hour, you are still an employee. Without a boss that is, but still, a resource that has an hourly price tag on it. The moment you let go of this principle, you become a business. Certain projects will give you large profit, for others you will lose money as you did not estimate the time it would take you correctly. Fixed prices attach a value to your service. The market will dictate whether you are worth the price or not. If potential clients are not accepting your proposals, your value is simply not (yet) there. If you are swamped all the time, you are probably not charging enough.
• Always do great work. Even if you are approaching your project budget, or your client somehow managed to get a really low project quote: deliver the great work and invest the hours at a lost if you have to. Clients do not understand budgets, they see the quality of the work, and they tell other potential clients about it. If you make a project time estimate, you take the responsibility. Do great work, or do not do the work at all if you cannot agree a price with your client.
• Not all clients suit you. When you feel that it is just not clicking with a potential client, let it go and focus on getting those that have instant chemistry. Also, there is nothing wrong with firing a client even after you have worked with them for many years. Maybe the relationship got tired and you can no longer get yourself to do inspiring work, maybe the client fit when you just started out the business, but not anymore, maybe the client cannot afford your new prices. Part as friends, it is better for both of you.
• Set your work hours. Do work when you are most productive. Turn work away if it forces you to work at times you do not want to (evenings, weekends, holidays). A fresh and rested mind designs the best presentations.

That is my advice to you so hope you will find it helpful.

Best,

http://vademogirl.com/likes/videotraffic.html

I’m not crazy at all about video without a controller so you can’t tell how long the video runs and it won’t let you rewind but, in a way, it did force me to sit and watch the whole video- which ended up being a really good thing.

While you are watching it you’ll notice the way he (James Wedmore)transitions back and forth between full motion video and his PowerPoint slides. He also colors and animates his text and adds the colored shapes to his slides just to make things more interesting. And I loved the way he has the full motion video play within a little screen inside his slides. That is a great technique that I need to use more often and makes anyone’s video look more professional. As you watch the video you will notice how, when he does use bullet points, he fades out the other ones and put a new icon next to the one he is discussing. That is a technique that is useful when you really need to put a lot of info on the screen. Take some notes as to what you like about the video and let me know what you would like me to demonstrate on my blog.

The creators, James Wedmore and Lewis Howes, are really well known in the video creation niche and, someday, I hope to get James involved in some of the work Lon and I are doing over at Learn Camtasia. I’m pretty tempted to buy the course because of how well it is priced and I would love to get the YouTube tips. Things are changing so fast in the video marketing area that it pays to stay on top if it by picking up courses like this when they are reasonably priced.

http://vademogirl.com/likes/videotraffic.html

If you try some of these techniques please put a link to your video in the comments.

All the best,

1. Unless you are using a broadcast quality headset skip the headset/mic combos. You get extra noise there, such as head movements, wire slapping against something, breathiness, ambient pickup, etc.

2.Turn off the noisy components. When you cannot turn them off, muffle them (with pillows and quilts) as much as possible. Shut the door, turn off the phone ringers, shut off the AC, basically chase noise sources and kill them off.

3. Let about 4 – 5 seconds of "silence" roll after hitting the Record button. This let’s the mic pick up what’s called the "Sample Noise" (or sometimes called Ambient or Room Noise).

4. After recording the sound track, use Audacity to improve the audio before importing it into a Camtasia. There is a pretty effective noise reducer in Audacity that samples your ambient noise, then subtracts those frequencies from the whole timeline. Use a selection of this "sample noise" with the Noise Removal effect to get your "Noise Profile"

5 If you can afford it, purchase a Pre-Amp.A mic pre-amp performs additional processing on the sound and in the recording studio is often more important than even the mic being used. It’s a piece of gear that sits between the mic and the next component in a recording environment (mixing board, audio interface, etc…and is often built into either of those).

6. And our final tip from my LearnCamtasia.com partner Lon Naylor: Make sure you listen to your audio final results on headphones or earbuds. Why? Because that’s how MANY people will be viewing your content in the near future as mobile device access of video content becomes more widespread. Not to mention "convergence" of video between your computer and wide-screen Home Theater systems…It’s also a great way to quickly pick up on issues that you might miss by listening on just your computer speakers.

Hope these suggestions help.

warmly,

• Prospects (US figures): Employment is expected to jump by 50,500 jobs, or more than 23 per cent, to 267,000 jobs by 2018, the Labor Department reports.
• Activity level: Average.
• Stress level: Pretty low.
• Money (US figures): Median annual earnings were $52,120 in 2009. The best-paid 10 per cent made more than $85,860 a year, while the lowest-paid 10 per cent earned about $30,120 annually.
• Tech skills: "It’s helpful to know e-learning and some other technology skills. People who have that would have an advantage in getting a training job these days." 

The last one will, of course, close doors for the many and open doors for the few. So you Instructional Designers, go get those low stress, well paid jobs while they last.

Your job will probably  help direct interactive, Web-based training sessions, multimedia programs, or even video training.

The outlook:

The future looks good for training specialists. Employment is expected to jump by 50,500 jobs, or more than 23 percent, to 267,000 jobs by 2018, the Labor Department reports.

Money:

Training and development specialists’ median annual earnings were $52,120 in 2009. The best-paid 10 percent made more than $85,860 a year, while the lowest-paid 10 percent earned about $30,120 annually.

Activity level:

Average. Much of the time you’ll be in the office, but some jobs call for extensive travel, and some may require you to spend more time on your feet.

Stress level:

Pretty low. Although travel can take you away from home, you’re likely to work an average 35-to-40-hour week.

Education and preparation:

Requirements vary widely among those who enter the field. You’ll most likely need a bachelor’s degree in human resources or a related field, with classes in training and development. Internships will be helpful in finding your first job.

Real advice from real people about landing a job as a training specialist:

Credibility, professional certifications, and continuing education counts, as does experience and expertise in your chosen training field. "Best case scenario is that you’re going to train people to do something you’ve not only done yourself, but have been successful at," said sales trainer Martha Kroodsma.  Social skills and course management experience is also a must for this position. "You really have to have some instructional design skills," says Pat Galagan, executive editor at the American Society for Training and Development. "Things like how to analyze training needs, how to design a course, how to deliver it, and how to evaluate it." Trainers should also practice techniques to engage their students and keep them involved in the learning process. Galagan says tech skills will score you serious points with potential employers. "It’s helpful to know e-learning and some other technology skills," she says. "People who have that would have an advantage in getting a training job these days."

And how to become one you ask? Well, there is no better way to start than by taking our LearnCamtasia.com course!  I teach you how to create awesome video training using Camtasia software and PowerPoint, create an E-learning Portfolio and how to work with your clients. Hope to see you there!

Best,

Online learning is so very different from stand-up training that it is good to take pause to think about it. Yes, both approaches have their benefits and disadvantages, but the ramifications of online learning are huge. First, here are ten things that make self-paced e-learning courses exceedingly valuable.

Top Ten Benefits

1. You can learn at your own pace. 
2. You can stop to look up definitions.
3. You can review what you want to review.
4. You can control the volume of the “teacher.”
5. You can comfortably learn in your own style.
6. You can stop and think about what you are learning.
7. You don’t have to fly around the country for training.
8. You can follow along while doing the task you are learning.
9. The content is consistent for everyone who takes the course.
10. You usually have an opportunity to interact, practice, or check your knowledge.

The businesses i have been working for lately have been slowly moving all their instructor led courses to Camtasia videos and realizing a great return on investment.  Students have so much more control over the pace of their learning and get through the same material much more quickly without being bored. They are also able to review the topics they forget any time they need to. If you’d like to learn more about creating training or tutorial videos you might enjoy the free webinar I will be delivering later this month on “How to Create a Video in 45 min or Less” with my Camtasia business partner, Lon Naylor. Sign up for my mailing list below to get an e-mail with the date and time.

Hope to see you then,

To get to the point, I had a really fun and delightful interview with a friend of Lon Naylor’s (my Learn Camtasia business partner) the other day that I wanted to share. And, granted, he does talk quite fondly about the training we provide but what made it so fun for me was how genuinely appreciative and grateful he was for everything going so well in his life. I would almost pay for him to follow me around each day.  I know my hours would be so motivated and uplifting.

David’s story in a nutshell is that he is a bit over 60, was laid off from a great, corporate job with AT&T and ended up cleaning gutters for a while as he couldn’t find anything comparable to what he was doing and as Seinfeld would say “yada yada yada “ and is now making a great income, living in his dream home and all as a result of having implement material in the course. This interview will fill in the yada part.

Best,

Learn Camtasia

Joseph markets himself as an Internet Radio Virtual Assistant http://www.internetradiovirtualassistant.com/which just goes to show you that not only can you niche down to providing just Virtual Events Services but you can go even more narrow to just doing internet Radio and still make a nice living.

Here are some of the things we discuss on this 30 minute interview.

• How I got started as a VA
• Why it has helped my business to specialize in only Video
• What I see as the future of the VA business
• What tools are integral in my work?
• What the main thing is that I learned about myself through this business

Play Audio

Apparently, the phone lines lit up like crazy when I started talking about rates and money but we ran out of time and Joseph was having trouble opening the lines for questions so it looks like I’ll be back to finish up the conversation on Friday 8/27.  if you are on my mailing list (sign up on the right) I’ll be sending out the exact time.

Hope you’ll join me!

Adding a Unique Selling Proposition

So my job this week is to think about the various benefits our course has over any other course that exists and why people should choose to take it versus taking a live on-site Camtasia class, purchasing a book on Camtasia or just searching for some YouTube Videos on screencasting. As you have your own video course completed you will need to start thinking about what is special about your course.  You have to think about what makes your product unique in the market place and why  your target market would want to spend their hard earned money on it, rather than use that money to buy some competitor’s course or even spend it on some new furniture.

Start Brainstorming

So start brainstorming what makes your course different. If it is exactly like someone else’s course you best hope yours is cheaper. So, after a little brainstorming  today I came up with a some features of our course that set us apart from our competition 

• Videos that can be watched over and over when you are ready to learn the material
• Twice Weekly live Webinar sessions with the instructors (Lon and I) to go over materials
• Accountability and mastermind sessions to keep students on track and focused on productivity 
• Community forum to submit your videos for critique
• Opportunity to meet other students via the social network site for joint venture projects
• Additional Videos showing the exact step by step procedures for how to produce a marketing or tutorial video
• Videos, Templates and files to help students create autorun CDs and DVDs

Now of course, I have to take time to translate those into the benefits students will receive when they use those features such as

• Less frustration in trying to figure out things on their own
• Faster video creation
• Higher quality videos
• Saving time trying to research the answers to their questions
• Live people to bounce ideas off of
• Shortcuts for less stress

etc. etc. I think you get the point.

Translating into Copy

Then you need to take all those items and make them into cool looking copy.  This is always the hard part for me because I feel like I border on the edge of being fake when I take my real honest words and spice them all up.  But what you are really doing is generating excitement for your product. If you can just write the way you talk when you are describing things to someone else on the phone and you get all excited about it it should come out just fine.  i got a lot of my ideas for writing copy from this salesflow document from the Conversion Doctor.

For example something like this (these are not really going on our salespage they are just examples).

• Get instant download access to the exact script template we use to create storyboards for videos for our top clients… to keep them hiring from us over and over again!
• How xxxxxxx not only records 10 videos in a day, they process and upload those videos in one step! You’ll find out exactly how to duplicate our success… and you’ll NEVER go back to the old way ever again
• One of a kind, never before released xxxxxxx  to post videos customized for your members, automatically add your video to your comments and posts, and more!

See how each bullet looks like something fun and exciting? You don’t want your salespages to be all boring or no one is going to read them. They should remind you a little of the infomercials you see late at night where it looks like the salesperson is on their tenth cup of coffee.

Add Some Case Studies

Testimonials are great and all but if you really want more people to buy your course you need to add a few student case studies. I am currently tracking down a few of our Camtasia training students to see what they have created as a result of taking our training. If you have some former students that you have coached or trained live you might be able to see if they have created any products or made changes to their business as a result of your course. This is more valuable proof than just having students say you are a great teacher or they liked the course. Prospective students want to see what others have actually done with the information. During our Camtasia Live sessions I am spending time doing some serious motivational coaching with our students to get them off their booties to start creating those videos they have been saying they want to do. I want to have tons of case studies to add to our salespage over the next year.

If you want to see the before and after you can look at our current salespage here LearnCamtasia.com then come back to look at it in about a week when I have spiced it up and let me know what you think.

Best,