Nov 15, 2008 Posted in Fun and Inspiration, Marketing Ideas

Crazy Little Thing Called “Jing”

I was in a quagmire the other day. I wanted to turn a bunch of the stories from the Trek Escapes website into audio podcasts and slide shows so I could put them on their site and blog as well distribute them across the web to get links and traffic.

The problem is that the consultants are spread across the country and explaining how to set up and use software via email is a pain in the butt.

So I decided to make a screencast yesterday to show people how to use Audacity to record audio. Audacity is a powerful free audio editor that allows you to take any audio file, edit it the way you like and export it into the format that best suits you.

A screencast is a movie that allows viewers to look over my shoulder as I use the software. The movie is then saved and viewers can watch it as many times at their convenience. Perfect solution because I only had to record the video once and it can be viewed by an unlimited number of people as often as it takes to understand it. If you’ve never seen a screencast before you can view the one I did yesterday right here.

This is very cool technology but it isn’t anything new. It has been offered by a brilliant company named TechSmith for a number of years under the brand Camtasia for about $300.

What I am excited about is the fact that they just came out with the Jing Project which is a free, dumbed-down version of Camtasia. I used this software to create the training video yesterday.

Apart from the fact that this tool is free and that they host the files for you (for free) so you don’t eat up all your bandwidth, I want to emphasize the marketing opportunities that this software affords everyone.

If you sell software you will save a fortune on customer service calls and rev up your customer satisfaction levels by offering videos on using your software.

If you sell affiliate products you can highlight the benefits of your recommendations before sending visitors to the partner through your affiliate link

If you’re an educator or consultant you can create videos and sell access to them

If you sell anything through Power Point presentations (isn’t that everyone?) you can record your presentations and let them do the selling (or pre-selling) on your website.

Finally, and in my opinion this is the most important opportunity, once your videos are recorded your can distribute them throughout the web to get immediate traffic and in-bound links to your website. If you’re not familiar with this approach to marketing, visit these guys.

As you can tell, I am pretty excited by this. There are a few drawbacks to the software but I’m sure that they’ll all get ironed out as the product matures. In the meantime, it is more than just a really fun toy when you look at it from a marketing perspective.