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How to Make an Electronic White Board for Your Videos

A lot of people have been asking me for a more detailed explanation about how I create my electronic white board videos, so I decided to create a video that explains it better than any blog post or podcast episode could do.

If you’re not sure what an electronic white board video is, it’s a video that records a person drawing on the screen, which mimics the idea of a teacher drawing on a dry-erase board or chalkboard.

Here are some videos I’ve created in the past that utilize the whiteboard effect:

Electronic white boards (EWB) videos work extremely well because: Click Here to Read More about Electronic White Board Videos

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Reader Challenge Roundup: Creating a YouTube Video and the Next Challenge

YouTube Reader Challenge “Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.” -Joshua J. Marine

Every few months, I offer a new challenge to my readers.

In November of 2010, I asked you to write a Pillar Article, which resulted in 51 posts, over 200 hours of writing, tens of thousands of additional visitors to your blogs and one person even landing a book deal.

In January of 2011, I then asked you to write a List Post, which yielded 1,003 “things” in a total of 63 posts that were shared and spread all around the blogosphere.

Two months ago, I then asked you to step out of your comfort zone and publish a YouTube Video, and the results are what I’m happy to share with you today. Click to continue…

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SPI 019 : Everything You Need to Know About YouTube for Blogging and Online Business

The Smart Passive Income Podcast

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In this session of the Smart Passive Income Podcast, I explore the world of video and start from scratch with YouTube to show you exactly how I make sure I give myself the best chance to get the most views and have the most impact for my business and blog.

As I mentioned in a previous article, Are YouTube and Podcasting Worth the Effort?, YouTube has been huge for me not only for traffic, but for engaging my existing audience and reaching brand new ones. I still get emails every day from people who say they have found me through YouTube, and it’s no wonder because 2 billion videos are viewed on YouTube every single day.

Whether you’re on YouTube already, or have yet to create your first video, make sure you listen to this session to get the most out of your efforts.

Click to continue…

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My Home Office Green Screen Setup and First Video

My green screen equipment had been collecting dust in a box for two months, but this past weekend I was finally able to setup everything and record my first chroma-key video!

Green screens are primarily used in the movie industry and by meteorologists (weather people) to put a subject in front of a background that isn’t really there, but a lot of internet marketers have also used the technology to enhance their videos when teaching or promoting something. Because I have a number of products coming out in the future and I love to record videos, I thought it would be a wise investment to buy a green screen for my business.

Another way to stand out from the crowd.

I setup my green screen in my home office, as you can see below:

Green Screen Setup - Home Office The most important aspect of green screening is the lighting. I can’t emphasize this enough. The lighting in the background needs to be as even as possible or else you’re going to have a hard time replacing your background with any chroma-key software.

Typically, a setup will have a three point lighting system: 2 on the side to evenly light the backdrop and 1 in the front to light the subject.

Unfortunately, I did not have a front light setup yet (actually it’s being shipped right now), and you’ll be able to tell in the video I share with you below. Still, I thought it came out great!

For those of you interested, here’s a list of everything I purchased (amazon affiliate links):

Total price: $295.20

Definitely not a bad price, especially when you consider that studio space with a professional green screen setup could potentially cost several hundred dollars an hour to use. You could also save even more money if you decided to tack the backdrop on a wall instead of use a support system and clamps like I did. Green spray paint might work too, although I’d make sure to go with a flat sheen (as opposed to something glossy) if that’s something you plan on doing.

To shoot the video, I used my Kodak Zi8 pocket cam, and to edit and chroma-key I used iMovie on my iMac. I was really surprised at how simple the chroma-key process was – it literally took just a few seconds to put in a new background, but I think it helped that I had a nice evenly lit backdrop.

I’m sure there is chroma-key software available for PC, I just don’t know any off the top of my head. Anyone care to share?

My First Green Screen Video

Well here it is – my very first video (2 minutes) using green screen technology. Enjoy!

(Watch Green Screen Setup for Smart Passive Income on YouTube)

Now that everything is setup, I’m really excited to start shooting some more videos like this for you. Stay tuned, and thanks for all of your support!

And thanks to Perry Lawrence, Jaime Tardy and everyone who commented in my gizmos and gadgets post who helped me figure out how to make this work. Cheers!

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How to Find Your Google Keyword SERPs Ranking

As many of you know, I’ve been doing my best to keep you up to date on the latest going-ons with my niche site challenge with Tyrone Shum. To make things easier for you, I recently created a niche site duel hub that will list all of the posts surrounding this challenge, from all of the competitors’ blogs.

Currently, it’s just me, Tyrone Shum and Mark Mason, but I’m happy to add anyone else’s case studies to the list who may be participating in this challenge too. All I ask is that you do not hide your niche and url in your reports, since the purpose of this challenge is to be as transparent as possible so our audiences can learn as much as they can.

If you’re participating, just contact me with a link to your first report and I’ll add it to the hub.

This post isn’t an official niche site duel update, but I am happy to say that as of 10:30pm PST on August 29th, I am currently ranked #186 in Google for my target keyword.

I definitely still have a long way to go to reach the first page, but for a brand new, one-week old site and 46,000 competing webpages, that’s not bad at all, and I expect to quickly climb much higher.

I’ll go over my exact strategy, in detail, in the next niche site duel update, but today, I wanted to share with you how you can track your website’s rank in the search engines for your target keywords.

It can be tough, especially right when you’re starting a new site, to know where you are on the radar. You don’t want to spend time flipping through each page of Google to find your site.

That’s why I recommend using one of the three methods I show you in the video below:

(Watch 3 Cool Ways to Find Your Google Keyword Search Engine Ranking (SERPs) on YouTube)

Items Mentioned in This Video:

Hopefully, we’ll all get to a point where we’re all sitting in the number 1 position for our target keyword, in which case, these techniques wouldn’t be necessary. But until then, I hope you find these techniques useful.

Thanks for your support!

Cheers!

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Are YouTube Videos and Podcasting Worth the Effort?

Last year, I made a conscious decision to turn my growing Smart Passive Income blog into the Smart Passive Income brand.

I knew nothing about “branding” at the time, except that I knew that successful brands utilized all different mediums to reach their audience. Stick to one medium, and you’ll limit your reach to only those who use that medium.

That’s why you see major brands on television and on the radio (and everywhere else it seems), or why you see many of the top bloggers syndicate and expand their written content with videos and podcasts too.

I wanted to do the same, and that’s why I have my YouTube Channel, and most recently, my Podcast.

So is it worth all the effort? Click to continue…

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YouTube Tips and Tricks For Bloggers – Part 3

This is the final installment of my YouTube marketing tactics series. In part 1, we covered how to approach video marketing, as well as what to include in your recordings for maximum impact. In part 2, we discussed the importance of optimizing the Title, Description and Tags of your video, and I included a few cool tricks to help you “snipe” traffic from other popular videos.

In part 3, we’re going to cover some tips and tricks that you can do with your video after it’s uploaded. Much like with blogging (and iPhone apps), the work should not stop once your content is live. There are a few things you should do before you can just let YouTube and the Internet do it’s thing and drive traffic to your videos and ultimately your blog automatically. Again, it’s about putting in the hard work now, so you can continuously reap the benefits later. Click to continue…

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YouTube Tips and Tricks For Bloggers – Part 2

In part 1 of this mini series about video marketing on YouTube we discussed two important topics:

Your mindset as you begin to push videos onto YouTube for brand expansion and traffic generation; and
A number of things you can do to your video recording to optimize it.

In part 2 we’re going to cover some tips and tricks for what to do after your video is recorded with the title, description and tags. Click to continue…

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YouTube Tips and Tricks For Bloggers – Part 1

YouTube.

It’s been around for over 5 years, yet for some reason most bloggers still haven’t explored the video sharing platform where millions of people around the world are watching over 2 billion videos a day.

I took the SPI brand onto YouTube on September 26th, 2009 for the same reason I do everything else I report on this blog – to see if it’s a worth while place to invest my time.

276 days later, I can truthfully say that I’m more than pleased with the results of my experiment with YouTube to expand the SPI brand and audience base. Here are some quick numbers from my account as of today:

15 Uploaded Videos
59,582 Total Views
720 Subscribers

That’s an average of about 1 new video every 2 to 3 weeks. Considering that the average length of my videos is about 6 minutes in length, you can get a feel for just how much time I’ve really dedicated to this “experiment” – 6 minutes every 3 weeks.

Not a huge amount of time invested, but you can see that I’ve earned a considerable number of views and a good amount of subscribers as a result, which has ultimately increased traffic to my blog as well as helped to earn a few affiliate sales here and there. Without much additional effort, my daily viewership continues to grow as you can see below:

By no means would I call myself a YouTube expert, but I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way that may help you expand your brand, increase your views and grab more subscribers if you do decide to expand onto YouTube, if you’re not on the platform already. Click to continue…

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