Use Multimedia To Increase Sales

The Power Of Audio And Video

Hello everyone, as I promised last week I have a real juicy newsletter for you this week. I am going to be looking at the power of using multimedia (audio and video) to increase your sales!

As you may (or may not!) know, I have been producing video and audio in different forms for almost a year now. You can use audio and video for just about anything; let’s do a quick brainstorm:

– Audio Books
– Video Reviews
– Video Tutorials
– Audio Reviews
– Interviews
– Ebay Store Welcome Message

As you can see from the list above there are a lot of potential uses for audio and video.

In the past audio and video was frowned upon due to the large file sizes and long download time. Now, in the broadband age web users no longer face that problem and more and more are choosing to download audio and video. So why not get a piece of the action!

I’ll show you an example of how I have used video in the past. You have no doubt already seen people promoting products using a review and a link to the product at the bottom of the page, well why not use video instead – a picture is worth a thousand words!

Click the link below to see my video review. (it opens in a new window)

http://imguides.com/membership_riches/membership_riches/membership_riches.html

Now that’s just a simple video that took me twenty minutes to put together, you don’t have to be a pro (as you can probably tell going by my video!) anyone can do it.

You don’t even need a big fancy sales page, just send people to your video and I can assure you they are much more likely to watch a video review than read a long page of text.

All you need is a Microphone/Headset, I got a cheap £29.99 (about $55) Mic and it works without any problems. I then use Camtasia to record the screen and produce the video in flash.

That’s only one example of using video and audio instead of the usual methods. Everywhere you look you will be able to see audio and video appearing. If you watched my video to the end you will have been redirected to the sales page, even Jason James has recorded a personal audio message for you.

Personalising your sales pages with audio is a great touch; it turns you into a “real person” rather than just another web page!

The above methods are both great methods for increasing sales, but how about increasing the value of a product you already sell?

Turn your E-Books into Audio Books and add an extra $20 to the price!

Audio books are great; people can transfer them to a CD, I-Pod, MP3 player and listen to them at their leisure. I know a lot of people that actually listen to audio books in the car whilst driving to work. If you have written an E-Book then you would be crazy not to offer it in Audio format.

Simply read the book out loud and record yourself at the same time. Audio books are slightly different than videos; you do need a certain type of voice to narrate audio books. With video the voice isn’t as important as you can look at the pictures but with audio books all you have is the audio.

That’s why I get a professional actress to narrate my own audio books for me, it sounds much better than me rambling along sounding like a Yorkshire farmer trying to read a novel 😉

Incidentally, in 2007 I will be launching a number of audio and video services. These will include custom video work as well as offering professional voice over services. So if you have an E-Book that you would like turning into an audio book by a professional actress then do get in touch with me. The site won’t be launching for a few weeks yet but I will be happy to help you, leave a comment or use the contact me link at the top of the page.

That’s just about it for this week’s newsletter, I hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and seeing your videos!

Thanks again,
Dan

How To Utilize Your Auto-responder

How To Utilize Your Auto-responder

Greetings everyone, I hope your November is going well. This week’s newsletter focuses on making the most from your auto-responder (or mailing list) by using follow up emails.

As usual something happened to make me think about this subject in detail. As you may know I run an affiliate program for my Auction SOS software product. An affiliate of mine kindly added an Auction SOS promotion to their follow up sequence earlier this month. Yesterday the affiliate made two sales earning them a respectable $47 – for doing nothing!

This wasn’t a one off promotion, the affiliate added the promotion to their auto-responder series to send out after x number of days. All it takes is a quick email with the affiliate link included and that affiliate is on a nice little earner every month via my program, just for typing out a single email.

Let me quickly take you through how this works from an affiliates point of view, step-by-step:

1. Affiliate set’s up a message sequence using the auto-responder to send out an email promoting product x
2. Affiliate set’s up the auto-responder to send out the email 10 (or whatever you choose) days after the user signs up for the newsletter
3. Affiliate sits back and counts the money every month!

That will take you at most 30 minutes, after 30 minutes work you can be earning a nice income on auto-pilot via your auto-responder! If you already have an auto-responder then why not try and put it to the test, you don’t have to use the Auction SOS affiliate program, find a product that will suit your list and promote it to them via your auto-responder sequence.

Imagine if you get 10 new subscribers every day (which is very manageable), after 10 days each of those subscribers receives the email promoting “product X”. That’s 10 people each day clicking on your affiliate link, all on autopilot.

10 people a day may not sound like a lot but it’s 70 clicks a week, over 300 clicks a month. If your product has an average 2% conversion rate that’s not a bad return for doing no work is it?

Why do you have to stop at promoting one product though? You could send out another offer after another 20 days, then another and another and so on. Each offer making you a nice little income each and every month on autopilot.

Thanks for reading and as always I hope you put the information to good use, let me hear some of your success stories! Remember that you can always leave any comments that you may have about this weeks article, I enjoy reading them – good or bad! (Just try and keep them clean ;-))

Regards,
Dan

How YOU can become an expert in any field

How YOU can become an expert in any field

Hello everyone, welcome to another article. This article has been inspired by something that happened to me earlier on this week. It also has something to do with that sexy little banner that you can see to the right of your screen 😉

This week I will show you exactly how easy it is to become an expert in your field!

There are experts in all walks of life, you will see experts every day on the TV, Radio or in your daily newspaper, experts are like tourists on a sunny Yorkshire day – they are EVERYWHERE!

But how did they become experts and what benefits are there in becoming an expert?

The experts you will see on the TV will have no doubt studied for years and years on their chosen subject to become an expert in the field. Over the years they become respected experts that everyone wants to know, their word is gospel, when they speak people listen!

Imagine if Sir David Attenborough walked into the room now and told you that a new species of Rhino had just been discovered, I can guarantee that you would listen to his every word and that’s the most important part of this article. I think I will make it bold just to emphasize it a bit more 🙂

When experts speak, people listen!

That’s great but what does this have to do with us? More than you would think actually, on a lesser scale all of you reading this now have the power to become an authority figure in any field you have chosen.

Any of you reading now have the knowledge available to become an expert in your field. Everyone, and I do mean every one of you has something in your head that others would love to know. We all have hobbies and interests, all you need to do is document these and get people to read them, and before you know it people will be looking to you for guidance and advice.

I will use my own experiences as an example. A couple of months ago I began posting these articles from my blog onto a popular article website. After my articles were reviewed and posted on the website I was able to display the “Expert Author” image on my websites. (As you can see at the top of the page)

Displaying this image automatically gives confidence to you the readers, and more importantly potential customers. It proves that you are not some cowboy that doesn’t have a clue about the subject and it instantly gives confidence to your subscribers.

So what are you waiting for, start writing your reports and guides then you can become an expert in your field and start to reap the rewards!

****End Article****

Just a quick sidenote this week. A lot of you will have downloaded Internet Explorer 7 this week via the windows update. My initial impressions are quite good as a user, but as a Webmaster they are not so good, infact they are downright terrible.

A lot of my sites are starting to display incorrectly in IE7, I emailed Microsoft about this and their reply was:

“Dear Mr Thompson,
Thankyou for contacting Microsoft with your concerns.

We have reviewed the websites listed and can confirm that your problem lies with your code. Your HTML code is no longer valid as Internet explorer 7 now only follows code that has been written to W3 standards.

This standard has been used for over 5 years now and all webmasters should be now following the W3 guidelines.

Thankyou for contacting Microsoft
Regards,”

So by the looks of things a lot of us are going to be very busy changing our websites to comply with the W3 coding standards, which I’m sure you will agree is a massive pain in the a*** 🙁

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OK, I made all of that up but I bet for a split second there that you believed me. You believed me because you perceive me as an expert in the field and you would believe what I told you, even if in this case it is a load of rubbish! Have a read through the “email” again and you will realize how crazy it sounds, but you still believed it for a split second because it was me spinning you the tale!

That really is the end of this weeks newsletter, I hope you enjoyed reading it and I promise I won’t make up any fake emails next week but I hope I managed to get my point across.

As always please leave any comments you may have!

Thanks,
Dan