Last week, we asked for a little input on that service. If you already had a chance to submit yours, THANK YOU! If you haven’t had a chance, we’re leaving it open for a few more days and would love to hear from you. Click here for the quick survey…it only takes a moment and helps us ensure we provide the best service possible.

In the survey, we asked if you had any questions about transcription or our services. Here’s one we got (and we will be answering the others soon as well)…

Q: “I’ve considered transcribing my teleseminars but was going to go through Elance or Odesk — so one question I would ask as a prospective client is ‘How is your service going to be different than what I can get through Odesk or Elance’?”

—————— START ANSWER ————————

There are plenty of places to find freelance transcriptionists and some of those places include job sites like Elance or oDesk. If you’re not familiar with these sites, they are places where businesses like you can post projects and people seeking work can bid on projects.

There are few things to consider when working with freelance sites:

* It’s time consuming to go through responses and decide who is the right one for the job.When you choose us, there are no applications to review. We make sure our team of transcriptionists get your jobs done. It’s that simple.

* While there are some great people working on these sites, you can bet there are plenty of bad apples. There are unqualified people applying for projects and plenty won’t bother to complete the project.

With All Custom Content, you’re dealing with a company that has reliably provided transcription service to our clients for the past 4 years.

* It’s not always easy to find people for ongoing work. We know that oDesk tries to put its focus into ongoing work, but there is no way to guarantee that. Many freelancers working this site are placing their work bids low, just so they can get the job and then realize they can’t afford to keep working at that rate, so they are off looking for the next best thing.

Again, we’re an established company that continues to provide this service on an ongoing basis. Sure, we have transcriptionists come and go, but our ultimate responsibility is to make sure YOUR project is done. We put our clients first…period.

Overall, you’re going to save time and money. Plus, you can rest assured that your projects are completed month after month, without the
hassles you might get elsewhere. Of course, you have to weigh the pros and cons for your own unique business, but we think you’ll be pretty happy with what we’re cooking up and will have more information for you soon.

—————— END ANSWER ————————

We’ll back soon with more answers. Plus, for next week, look out for some tips on keeping your content publishing “machine” running smoothly, productively and efficiently.

If you’d like to stay up-to-date with All Custom Content, be sure to sign up  for our mailing list here.

And don’t be fooled, despite the growth of multimedia, text is still definitely the most consumed media online.

While my business partner, Annette isn’t afraid to come out and show herself on camera, if you ask me to explain a content marketing concept out loud, I often clam up and stumbles over my words.

But no matter…

Everyone comes to their online business with a different set of skills and that’s what helps us stand out. But just because we have a preference for one media, doesn’t mean we have to limit ourselves.

If you prefer speaking or creating videos, you don’t preclude yourself from using the written word. In fact, you really shouldn’t avoid the written word because:

* It helps you reach audience that can’t access your multimedia content. Internet connections, disabilities and mobile access can all affect this.

* It helps you expand your reach. You can reach prospects who won’t consume video and publish your content in more places.

* It makes you easier to reference. If someone gets a great tip from you, it’s easier for them to find it again in print. Plus, it makes it easy to quote your awesome tidbits too.

So How Do You Get More Written Words out There?

You can use speech to text tools like Dragon Naturally Speaking. It takes some practice to get it working correctly and you do need to make sure to edit, but it’s a viable option many people swear by.

You can also have your audio and video recordings transcribed. And, by golly, we offer that service here.

When you transcribe, you can:

* Give your readers and customers an easy-reference tool after they consume your multimedia content. And you bet it’s a good reference tool for yourself, if you ever need to go back to something you’ve said in the past.

* Take that content and turn it into articles, workbooks or full-blown information products. You’re putting together stellar content in your multimedia content. You should definitely be making the most of it.

* Add valuable upsells to your information products. Whether you give the verbatim transcriptions or create a workbook out of your transcription, that is EXTRA stuff your customers will want to pay for.

Whatever you’re publishing online, there are so many ways to maximize it. Always make the most of your hard work.

Get more! If you’d like to stay up-to-date with All Custom Content, sign up for our mailing list here.

photo credit: [benthomas]

Video content is one of the most powerful ways you can connect with your visitors. Videos give your visitors much more of a sense of who you are than text or even audio.

Yet many marketers choose not to do video posts, not because they don’t want to, but because they believe it’s too difficult. Or that it’s too complicated, or that it’s expensive, or that they can’t learn how to do video posts without spending exhorbitant amounts of time.

None of that is true. Here’s how to create video posts in just 3 easy steps.

Step 1: Setup Your At Home Recording “Studio”

Your “studio” can be as simple as an iPhone camera and a stack of books to get the iPhone to eye level. Gary Vaynerchuk, author of “Crush It!” who took his father’s moderately successful wine business and turned it into a multimillion dollar success did it primarily through video blogging – With just his iPhone.

So you don’t need an expensive camera. If you don’t have an iPhone, get a cheap HD camera for $100 at Best Buy. Or use a comparison shopping service like Newegg or Pricewatch to find great cameras at very low prices. Your video recording equipment doesn’t have to cost you more than $200 if you don’t want it to.

Once you have your camera setup, try recording a video. Get to know your system. What kind of lighting does it work well in? Does it pick up or filter out ambient sound? What are the best angles? So on and so forth. Experiment to get a feel for your camera.

After blogging for a while, you’ll probably want to invest in a good mic. A good mic is more important than a good camera; as audio quality is really what matters in informational videos. But lack of equipment should never be an excuse not to get started.

Step 2: Editing Your Videos

Learning to edit basic videos should take you about a week to learn. If you put in a few hours a day and just tinker with the software while reading online tutorials, you’ll very quickly get the hang of it.

iMovie and Windows Movie Maker both come with certain versions of Mac and Windows. They’re very simple video editing programs designed to be easy to learn by just about anyone.

There are a number of free video editing programs you can download off the web (i.e. Wax.) Many of these are almost as good as commercial versions. Though they won’t have many of the more advanced features, it’s good enough for editing simple videos.

Finally, if after trying video blogging for a bit you decide that you want to make videos a permanent part of your business, you’ll probably want to invest in a full fledged video editing program. These include Sony Vegas, FinalCut or Adobe Premier.

Again, much like cameras, lack of an expensive program shouldn’t keep you from getting started. Software can cost as little as nothing (iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, Wax) to less than $100 for basic software (Adobe Elements, PowerDirector.)

Step 3: Uploading, Formatting and Blogging

Once you’ve edited your video, the next step is to render and upload your video.

Depending on your software, you may have a one-click “render for web” setting. If so, just use that setting.
If your software requires you to choose your own codecs (encoding methods,) play with a few different versions. Try to get the best quality video you can, while keeping file size low.

Once you have your video formatted, upload it to a video player of your choice. YouTube is generally the #1 choice for getting distribution. Vimeo has a higher quality player and can display higher quality videos, but don’t expect any fresh traffic from Vimeo. Finally, you can also upload your video to a number of self-hosted players.

Learning to render your video properly could take half a day to a day, while learning to upload a video should just take an hour or two.

Once your video is on the web, all you need to do is put the embed code in your blog posts.

Is Video Blogging Easy or Difficult?

To sum it up, I’d say video blogging isn’t “difficult” to learn. It just requires the willingness to put in the time and a small amount of money.

Your total investment? Between $0 and $200 on the low end and about a week or two of learning. Not a huge investment for more credibility with your readers, more exposure and higher conversions.

Here’s the monthly All Custom Content newsletter that we like to share with our Contentrix readers. By the way, email subscribers get monthly tips and a special offer on our services. You can sign up as well, plus get a free outsourcing content guide right here.

This month’s topic is all about transcriptions…and how to reuse, repurpose and make the most of yours.

Top 9 Transcription Uses for Your Online Business

You’ve probably heard that transcriptions can be very valuable for your online business…but have you stopped to think about the MANY uses  transcriptions actually have?

We’re all about making the MOST of your content and reusing and repurposing it where you can and transcriptions are no exception. That’s why we’ve come up with the “Top 9 Transcription Uses for Your Online Business”.

But first, if you’re not familiar with transcriptions, let us explain. A transcription allows you to have your audio content in written format. If you have any webinars, teleseminars, mp3s, podcasts, videos etc., you can have transcriptions created for you. They’re valuable pieces of content with a variety of useful functions.

1. Include the transcription with audio/video. This helps your readers who may have hearing impairment, can’t listen to audio online or prefer the written version of your content.

2. Turn the transcription into an ebook or other written product. Make it for sale or give it away as a bonus for signing up for your mailing list.

3. Make the transcripts and audio recordings an upsell for your webinar/teleseminar participants.

4. Repurpose your transcriptions into a blog post series. Break up the content into logical chunks and simply schedule and post.

5. Repurpose your transcriptions into an autoresponder series. Be sure to add promotions for your products or other products that you recommend.

6. Create a transcription of a call with one of your clients (with his/her permission, of course) and give it away as a  learning tool for your readers.

7. Entice experts to be interviewed. Offer them full rights to a recording and a professional transcription of their interview.

8. Use transcriptions as search engine fodder for your website. While audio content can’t be indexed by search engines, your text can!

9. Create articles and other content. If you are more comfortable with speaking than writing, you can record your articles and other online content. Have those recordings transcribed and your content is ready to go.

Just like with your other written content, there are always plenty of ways to use transcriptions. If you’ve taken the time to create high-value audio content, make the most of it by turning it into written format too.

If you need a hand with transcription, we can help you and for the month of November, you can save 40 cents per audio minute.

Check out our transcription services.  When you complete the service request form, tell them you’d like to take advantage of the “November 40 cents of
Transcription Discount” and we’ll take good care of you.

Your partners in great content,

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Screen capture videos are most effective for:

• demonstrating a process or skill done on the computer, such as how to use a particular software
• showing what’s “inside” a digital product, like an ebook or a membership site
• documenting an event that happens on your computer screen, such as an online event

If you’re new at creating screen capture videos, here are a few tips for putting together your script:

Begin with the Benefit

Although web users enjoy watching videos online, their attention spans are very short. They’ll quickly click away if they don’t realize what’s in it for them right from the beginning.

So open your video by stating what benefit your viewers will get from watching. You can even state the benefit in the video title. For example, “How to Find a Niche in 10 Minutes Using Google’s Keyword Tool.”

Follow a Logical Series of Steps

Be logical, rather than jumping around your computer screen. If you’re demonstrating a process, begin with step 1, followed by step 2, and so on.

If you’re showing the inside of an ebook, start with the cover, then the table of contents… you get the idea.

For a membership site, go from the home page, then to each significant part of the site.

Summarize

When you finish your demonstration, tell your viewers what you just did. They have short attention spans, remember? Besides, you’ll never know when somebody skips ahead to the end-part of your video just to find out what it’s really all about (and then decide to watch the entire video or not).

It doesn’t have to take more than a sentence to say, “I just showed you how to use Google’s keyword tool to find high-traffic and potentially high-profit niches.”

Tell Them What to Do Next

End with a clear call to action. What would you like your viewers to do next? Most of the time you’d like them to head on over to your landing page or sales page. Tell them to do so and why.

For example: “To get more tips for finding profitable niches, go to findmoneyniches.com.” No need to say “www” and certainly watermark your video with the URL you’re promoting.

But DO You Need a Script?

If you’re a beginner, I suggest you write out a script. It will help calm your nerves and give you more confidence. You don’t have to follow it to the letter, but having it in front of you will be reassuring once you click the “record” button.

If you’re more experienced, an outline will do.

Whether you’re a newbie or advance video maker, it never hurts to practice. Make a test recording. Take note of parts where you tend to stumble over your words, or where your viewers could get potentially lost. Rework those parts in your script or outline.

Keep practicing until you’re comfortable and confident. Your video doesn’t have to be perfect – far from it! Don’t worry about occasional “ums” or stammers. Just be clear and be yourself.

Now go and make your screen capture video!