I make instructional videos like the one above for business owners and their teams who are using our system to replace small business accounting software such as Quickbooks (the one above took me about an hour). I am amazed more people are not using this really easy way to turn what they know into content and start selling it through the internet to the connected market. I recommend you build your own information product (digital content) from scratch as the return on your investment in time will be higher (profit margin) and you will have the added benefit of being able to learn more about your customers and build more value into your product.

When I first saw how simple it was to create a video and upload it to YouTube or turn it into a podcast it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and I concluded I should share this essential skill with everyone. I can deliver my small business accounting software through just about every modal via the internet and guess what the traffic just follows.

The best instructional videos I have seen have always been produced using a technique called storyboarding this helps you decide and refine how you to best share your knowledge with your audience. As opposed to using pen and paper I generally like to use software slide making tools like Microsoft powerpoint or Apple Keynote as they are really easy to put interesting content into and you can use the output in your video. I am a great believer in doing as much as is possible without spending any money what so ever and gaining confidence in your idea and making some money before you start, I call this getting the rope across the river.

To create your videos I recommend a really good program called Camtasia studio from a company called TechSmith, it will enable you to produce high quality videos for YouTube, Podcasts and download to your customers computer in either QuickTime or Windows media format (don’t download the trial yet, just watch all of the tutorials). The reason I said not to download the TechSmith software yet was to make sure you maximised your use of the trial to create and sell your first video.

OK this was a brief overview of what tools you have to have to hand and get to grips with and in the next lesson which hopefully will be published on this blog in the next few days (owners permitting) I will go through a detailed description of how I create my small business accounting software videos.

Technorati Tags: accounting software for small business, business accounting software, Small business accounting software

Tags: accounting software for small business, business accounting software, Small business accounting software

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Small Business Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.