Image by Rev Stan

Unless you’ve been walking around in ear-muffs and dark glasses for the past few months, you’ll have noticed that a new excitement is gripping the UK.

Everywhere you turn, red, white and blue merchandise is creeping in to supermarket shelves, and people are discussing what tickets they have managed to get hold of, and organising time off work.

Finally, after much discussion and planning, the Olympics 2012 are coming to the UK!

Although it’s interesting stuff, we ought not to let ourselves get distracted from regular activities like running our businesses and blogging.

All this hype about the sports events and interest in the Olympics has led me to consider how blogging itself is like an Olympic sport, and at times seems to need the same levels of dedication, preparation and hard work that it can take to excel on the track.

So, for your sporting delectation, here’s what blogging and the Olympics have in common…

Improving your stamina

The blogging process can seem long, arduous and painstaking when you first start out, but the beauty of it is, the more you do it, the easier it gets.

That’s because you find your voice and soon get in to a strong routine, understanding how to approach your site to make the most of it, and knowing when your personal peaks in performance are likely to be for writing and enhancing your blog.

Just like with training for running or other sports, as you become set in to a firm routine and your stamina grows, your blog will become easier to manage.

Knowledge about blogging is daunting at the outset, but the more you learn, the easier and more satisfying it becomes.

The best bloggers are at the peak of their performance, and understand how best to use their own energy levels and inspiration to make the most of their site. Increased revenue, enhanced marketing and more traffic comes when you find your peak performance, and work with it.

Taking breaks

Even the most prolific and successful Olympians know when it’s time to shut down and take a break from training, and blogging is no different.

No matter how dedicated you are to your business and blog, you do need to take time out from it to recharge your batteries and have some space to reflect on your recent performance.

Walk away from your site from time to time, and your enthusiasm will grow, just as your personal performance will be enhanced by some quality time with friends and family away from work.

Only a machine can keep working all the time, and we humans need to strike a firm balance between training (work) and resting (leisure).

Having clear goals

The best athletes will tell you that one of the things which drives them forward at all times, keeps them focussed and enhances their performance is a full understanding of where they are currently, and where they want to be.

For an Olympian, this goal-setting could involve visualizing themselves picking up the Gold medal for their country, standing at the top of the podium.

For you as a blogger, it means having a firm idea of what you aim to achieve from your site. Whether you simply want a platform of your own for self-expression, or you are looking to increase traffic to your site, generate more customers or sell more e-books, you need to keep this in mind at all times to stay focussed and perform to gold standard on your blog.

Achieving Gold

With blogging, there is a hierarchy right across the World Wide Web.

There are the blogs which everyone has heard about, and discusses each time there is a new post.

There are favourite blogs relating to specific industry sectors which are niche, but enjoy a steady footfall each day.

There are small but useful blogs which have a loyal following generated over time, even if they are not particularly well-known, and manage to appear somewhere on the major search engines because they are quietly well-run and well-maintained.

Finally, there are the blogs that don’t even place on the podium, because they have been neglected, are out of shape and stamina, and their owners have got bored or moved on.

Achieving blogging Gold is tough.

Just as the top athletes who make the top spot are completely dedicated to training every minute of every day, so the top bloggers have found something at which they excel, and then dedicated considerable amounts of time, energy and revenue to becoming the very best at what they do.

Understanding that second is a very good place to be

For most of us as small business owners and bloggers, achieving the gold standard in terms of ranking first on the search engines and becoming internet billionaires is probably a little out of reach.

However, placing second or third in the blogosphere is an outstanding achievement.

Gaining a silver for blogging would convey itself in terms of having enough traffic to ensure consistent revenue, developing a reputation for being a useful, interesting and indispensible site which customers choose to visit every day, and having the quiet confidence that your blog will support you to achieve business success, while those around you fail to even place on the podium.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t aspire to the Gold standard of blogging.

Each one of us has the skill, knowledge and dedication to achieve this if it’s our principal aim.

However, for most of us, blogging is not our primary business purpose. It usually functions as a marketing tool to support our main industry objectives.

If that is the case, we can comfortably seek out Silver or Bronze standards for our blog, and feel confident that we have given our very best to our trade, and achieved an outstanding result.

Bringing people together

The Olympics will showcase the very best of sporting talent from across the globe, bringing together people of all ages, nationalities and skill levels in a unified celebration of a common passion.

In a way, that is what it has most closely in common with blogging – the ability to transcend geographical and cultural barriers, and bring people close together for a short time, all sharing a common interest.

Each one of us runs a blog which shares information, reveals a small part of ourselves and our lives, and reaches out to people all over the world.

Through our blogs, we may not always achieve the Gold or even be standing close to the podium, but we can feel confident and satisfied that our sites are breaking down boundaries, unifying people with shared goals and passions, and contributing to our industry in a useful, interesting way.

Do you approach your bog like an Olympian and what affect has it had?

About the author: Andrew Rondeau operates the blog-building service We Build Your Blog. He didn’t send me a bio and said I could make up stuff about him. Instead of doing that, let me just say it’s absolutely true that in his spare time he puts on a pigeon costume and sits in a park feeding crackers to a small flock of Ken dolls scattered around his feet.

Image from BigStock Photo

Once your site has enough traffic, you will receive automated guest blogging requests. These are sent out automatically by software programs, which scan sites looking for contact forms and which automatically fill them out and submit the message.

By the time you reach this point, you’ll also be getting real guest post requests from actual people, so at first it may be tricky to tell the difference between the two. What we’re going to do here is take a look at a typical spam guest posting request and point out the features that make it spammy so you can spot them in the future. Cool? Cool.

Here is an email I received just today (and which prompted this post):

I am Stewart, a member of a financial community. I just visited your site “remarkablogger.com” and trust me you are doing a great job for your site. I found such uniqueness  and worth reading values. The quality of your content is excellent.

I would love to write financial articles and contribute for your site. I can give you an original guest post related to refinancing, personal finance, credit advice, short term loan, budgeting, make money, mortgages, small business
or whatever topic you suggest

I can become my link partner and exchange contextual links.
Please let me know your thoughts. We have many good financial sites from where we can provide you links from the content pages or by doing article exchanges.

If your are not the concerned person, please forward the mail to the Web-master concerned.

Thanks and Regards

These awful pieces of shit always follow the same formula. Once you know the formula you can spot these a mile away:

• Introduce themselves as part of an industry completely unrelated to your site.
• Say they just visited your site with a cut-and-paste URL, which is a complete lie: their crawler visited your site, they personally did not.
• Offer praise which is generic enough to apply to any possible site and which of course is meaningless.
• Propose a guest post that is “original” and about a topic completely unrelated to your blog or “whatever topic you suggest.”

The stuff in this one about exchanging links doesn’t always appear in these sorts of emails. I’m so curious about how he “becomes his link partner,” I’m tempted to reply to him just to get a reaction out of him about this. Surely, evil sorcery is involved!

The first time you get one of these, unless you know what to look for, you may not recognize it as a “robo-email” because how do you know this isn’t just the dry, lifeless writing style of a real person? After you get more of them you may see the pattern, but hey, why not be able to spot them before you ever get one?

What to Do about Spammy Guest Post Request Emails

Most often you’ll get these because automated software is filling out your site’s contact form and submitting it. The problem with attempts to combat this is that they make your contact form more of a pain in the ass for real people: by making them type in CAPTCHA codes or check boxes or solve math problems to prove they’re human, you’re punishing THEM just so YOU don’t receive spam. To my way of thinking this is not the way to go.

Unfortunately all the research I’ve done into a solution for this has turned up nothing but complex PHP or .htaccess scripting solutions that you can’t implement unless you’re a bit of technical wizard.

In other words, I’m sorry to say you just have to put up with the spam in order to make life easier for some very important people: your customers.

NEVER REPLY TO THESE EMAILS. You’d think that doesn’t need to be said but in my experience there’s no such thing as “goes without saying.” Call me Captain Obvious all you like: it’s a title I wear with pride!

It may not be a good idea to mark them as spam, either, because the server which actually sent the email is your own! Remember, it was your contact form on your site that was filled out and the message was sent from your hosting.

So, in the end, all you can do (for now, until a better solution comes along) is delete these emails.

Such terrible first world problems we have!

Do you get these “robo-emails?” Have you ever gotten one that’s particularly funny or replied back? Share your experiences in the comments below!

Not a real infographic! Image by BigStock Photo

If you were to hold the edge of your hand across your throat, just under your chin, that would be the “here” I’ve had it up to with the infographic craze.

I know I’m not alone.

But I’m not here to rant… I’m here to help.

Because people just freaking love the damn things and if you want to get in on the action, it’s easier than ever. It’s also easy to create stupid, lame infographics.

There is a very good reason for displaying information in a visual format: because it conveys understanding more powerfully than any other format such as text, video or audio. You’re welcome to disagree with me on this, but I’m of the opinion that any other reason for an infographic isn’t good enough.

You know why people create charts and graphs? Because that’s the best way to instantly understand changes and measurements taken for a set of data.

So let’s talk about how to create the perfect infographic:

1. Accompany your infographic with text

Infographics have no text which can be electronically read, which is bad for SEO and tends to piss off blind people.

At least, not yet. So unless you create a correct title (as in the HTML title tag), permalink, headline and body text, your infographic will score a big fat SEO zero. On the plus side, if it gets shared a lot, it won’t create a duplicate content issue.

There are millions (PDF document) of blind people and others with some kind of impared vision. Because of the efforts of these people and their advocates, we have laws in the United States and elsewhere in the world that regulate how certain things like buildings and webpages are to be constructed. These laws may not actually apply to you, but it’s been the consensus among conscientious web designers & developers that web content be as accessible as possible. One of the big no-no’s was text within images. And what is an infographic? Often it’s text within images… just what blind people LOVE.

Here’s where the delicious irony part comes in: if you can present all the information in your infographic as text and provide alongside infographic… then maybe you didn’t need to have an infographic in the first place. Not always… but maybe. Something to think about.

Lastly, translation software can’t read infographics, either. So there goes anyone who doesn’t speak your language as well as all the visually impaired and SEO.

Good job.

So when you post your infographic, be sure to give it context by including relevant text information in your post: Good for SEO, good for the visually impaired and it’s able to be electronically translated.

2. Your infographic must have charts or graphs

I avoid broad statements that use words like “never” and “always.” But remember when above I asked the question: why do people create charts and graphs? The answer (for those of you suffering from short-term memory loss) is that they are the best way to convey certain kinds of information. If the data you’re working with can’t be displayed somehow as a chart or graph, you’d really have to question why you’re bothering with an infographic in the first place (probably it’s just because everyone else is doing it, and we all know leaders do what everybody else does, right?).

If you want to show trends over time or some other kind of change, or you want to visually show categories of data so that viewers can instantly make comparisons and understand your point at a glance, then charts and graphs (and by extension, infographics) are the way to go.

If your infographic is just a bunch of fancy font text and vector clip-art from a stock image site, as far as I’m concerned you’re likely doing it wrong.

You want examples? Here ya go. How to do it right, presented by the U.S. Census: Then and Now – 1940 and 2010. Now that’s an infographic. That information would not be as compelling if it were just text. The charts really drive home the differences between the two datasets.

Here’s good example is: Is Technology Racist? At first glance there’s still too much “info” (boring text) and not enough “graphic.” However, when you look at the chart that shows the disparity between whites and people of color, the impact is immediate because you understand it at a glance. Well done!

And racism (especially when it’s revealed among a group of people who don’t consider themselves racist) is a hot-button issue that gets reactions and gets shared. Again, well done.

3. Your infographic needs to be vertically linear

Huh?

Vertically what?

Infographics are meant to be vertically long and vertically scrolled. What you get out of this experience as a viewer is that as you scroll down, more information is revealed which, ideally, builds to an ultimate effect. But if your infographic lacks continuity and forces the viewer to scroll up and down repeatedly to follow along, you blew it.

Think of it like a vertical timeline (Facebook says hi). The top of the infographic is the beginning of your “story,” the bottom is the end. How do you want the story you’re telling with your infographic to end? What’s the punchline? The call to action?

What would you say?

These are only three tips. Surely, there are more. What has your experience been with using infographics? Do you have any tips to share? Pitfalls to avoid? Let us know in the comments and share this post with your friends so they can chime in, too.

Image by BigStock Photo

Warning: I’m gonna get a little “sneaky” in this post.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that it’s not enough for me to succeed, my “enemies” must also fail. And I do believe in showing mutual respect and taking the high road when dealing with people.

But I’m also playing to win, to dominate the market. I plan on remaining number one for the search term “blog consultant” for a long time.

How about you?

Want to dominate your market?

Not all of the tips below are “sneaky” but a few of them definitely are. Why? Because it’s good to win battles without ever fighting. Leading is better than following. By the way, some of the links below are affiliate links (because, you know: beer money.)

So, here we go:

1. Know your customer better than anyone else does, and use the right tools to arm yourself with that data, such as Quantcast, encouraging replies to your marketing emails, blog comments, hanging out in forums and Facebook timelines, and searching for keywords on Twitter. The more you interact with them, the better you will be able to get inside their heads and create content which will seem to talk to them like the voice of God.
2. Use your products as lifestyle triggers. Sure, people certainly covet products, but it’s a mistake to focus the energy on the product itself. What does that product signify for the customer? What meaning does it give them to have the product? Focus on the meaning and use the product as the “trigger” for that meaning.
3. Understand how your customers really search for information. Use tools like Wordtracker, SEMRush and Google’s keywords tools to see what keywords people are truly searching for. If you really want to go big guns, give Market Samurai software a try.
4. Let your customers create your content for you. Use product reviews, interview your own customers (use video for this if you can) and use customer Q&A and FAQs and help desk inquiries as material for blog posts. When your customers know you regularly and publicly answer questions, they’ll send in more. You get free content and insights into your customers. Your customers get relevant content and feel cared for.
5. Engage your customers outside the blog to drive traffic back to the blog. This means having an active presence wherever your customer spends her time online, be it Email, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest or even real life locations (depending on your business).
6. Check your analytics against your goals on a regular basis and act on what you find. Make sure you have analytics for web, email marketing and social media. At first it’s easy to spend too much time poring over the data as you learn the ropes of the software. But once you’ve got the hang of it, figure out what you need to know on a weekly and monthly basis. Then create those reports to go out automatically (or schedule it in your calendar). Make sure you are proactive, not reactive. If the data show you’re not reaching your goals, don’t move the goal posts. Change what you’re doing in order to try and hit your targets.
7. Subscribe to your competitor’s blogs and email lists so you know how they’re marketing. Use a fake email address that doesn’t give you away as a spy. Don’t do this in order to copy what they’re doing, do it in order to see what they’re missing and fill in that gap. Zig when they zag. How are they talking to their customers? How are their customers taking it? What is the level of engagement for comments and social media?
8. Audit your competition’s site design. How is their home page designed in comparison to content marketing pages (blog posts and other pages) and product/service pages? Does their design indicate they’re gunning for the same crowd as you? Whether yes or no, what differences can you capitalize on with your design?

   Don’t assume your competition is more successful than you, but if it’s obvious they are, then you can learn from them: where do they place conversion elements in their page designs and what do they look like? You want to steal these ideas like a great artist, not copy them like an ignorant fool. Know the difference.

9. Figure out where you can be bold, and hit that sucker head on like a truck. Boldness stands out and attracts attention. Also-rans and “me too” copycat approaches do not. You’re not a leader if you’re following so-called “best practices.” Best practices are the opiate of the mediocre business masses.

   Do not confuse boldness with loudness or rudeness. Boldness can be found in the decisions you make, not just in how you carry yourself. For example, simply standing up for what you believe is right in your industry, and standing against what you believe is wrong is a very bold thing to do. Do not be afraid to turn people off and polarize them, because you will be filtering out people who are a waste of your time and you will be bringing “the faithful” closer to you.

10. Be strong where your competition is weak. This can apply in so many ways it would be impossible to list them here, but just as an example let’s take a look at general freelance services. What sins are most freelancers guilty of? Not getting work done on time. Not finishing projects at all. Having a snotty elitist attitude and making the customer feel ignorant and small.

    If you wanted to differentiate yourself as a freelancer, you could easily do it by simply being reliable and delivering excellent customer service. This will come out in your marketing content if you follow the previous tips in this list and you’ll stand out as a bastion of reliability in a sea of inconsistent flakes.

    Another way to think of this: don’t just be better than your competition. Be something else, entirely.

11. Educate the hell out of your customers and provide more information than anyone else in your market. This is what content marketing is for, people! Whether you’re blogging to sell products or services, the best content marketing is educational and an educated customer is the best customer. Customers are going to trust their educators, so you want to be the educator, the leader, and get the most sales. Hell, you can even beat Wal-Mart if you put your mind (and blog) to it.
12. If you’re gonna use online advertising, use “remarketing.” Remarketing is when people visit your site and tracking cookies are placed on their computers (this is perfectly normal, by the way, in case you’re a tech noob and didn’t know this already). As these folks go about their days surfing the web, ads for the products they looked at on your site keep showing up wherever they go.

    Overstock uses remarketing like it’s going out of style, so if you want to see an example, just go look at a product there, and then go about your online day as usual. Don’t be surprised if you see ads for the exact product you looked at showing up in the sites you visit.

    While this may seem sneaky, it’s definitely not illegal or even unethical. It’s a service provided by Google and they explain everything you need to know about it.

What Are You Doing?

Are you doing any of these now? How’s that working out for you? Do you find any of these intriguing? Gonna try them? Let me know in the comments!

Editing, Pacing and Effects

• Editing is when you cut, re-order and modify the media clips in your video editing program’s timeline. I consider zooming and panning (moving the “camera” side to side) to also be editing, rather than effects.
• Pacing is the perceived speed of the presentation. By using a series of rapid scene cuts and speaking rapidly, you can create the impression of a fast pace. By using slow fades and a relaxed manner of speaking, you can slow the pace down.
• Effects, or special effects, if you like, are routines we can add in or apply to our media clips in the timeline which provide visual stimulus. Camtasia doesn’t let you put in explosions and lasers, but it (and its Mac counterpart, Screenflow) has a decent number of effects in various categories for you to use. For example, you can add transition animations between scenes, remove background noise from the audio or speed up a media clip to 200% of its original playback speed.

Let’s take a look at these in more depth.

Editing

One of the reasons why I encouraged you to record multiple shorter bits of screencasting instead of one big honkin’ single recording is so that you have more flexibility when editing. What you’ll do is add media clips into editing program and then add these media clips onto the timeline.

All modern video editing software of any kind that I’ve seen uses a timeline. The timeline runs horizontally across your screen, often with multiple tracks stacked vertically atop each other. At the very least, you’ll probably have at least two tracks: one for video and one for audio. Look for controls that allow you to zoom in or out of the timeline for greater control when cutting.

The video clips in your timeline may have thumbnails in them to give you a visual indicator of their contents (certainly their clip names will be displayed on them). Audio clips usually display a representation of the audio sound wave. If you recorded your audio and video clips separately, you’ll have to place them both onto the timeline.

If you recorded your audio at the same time as the video, then adding the video clip will also add the audio in a separate track. However, it’s likely the video and audio tracks will be linked together. This cold potentially be bad, because it’s pretty likely you’ll want to edit something in the audio but not the video or vice versa. In this case, you’ll need to unlink the video track from the audio track.

First Things First: Noise Removal

If you did not perform background noise removal in your audio editing program, then you’ll need to do it now in your video editing program. Usually this involves sampling a segment of audio in which no one is speaking to use as a control for removing noise from the entire audio track.

If you find the noise removal is too strong, it will introduce audio “artifacts” into the track, causing speech to sound oddly… squeaky and clipped. If that happens, just undo the noise removal and adjust the strength of the effect and try again.

I cannot stress enough how noise removal will improve the quality of your audio for the screencast. Audio quality is important. Even when you have a decent microphone, you will still want to run noise removal on your audio.

Matching Audio to Video

A big part of editing is matching audio to video. Since your face isn’t making an appearance in a screencast (how many of you just said Thank God to yourselves? heh…), you don’t have to worry about synchronizing speech to mouth movement. What you want is to make sure that what’s happening on the screen jives with what the narrator is saying.

To this end, make sure your audio and video tracks are not linked together, or edits to one will affect the other and we don’t want that. We want to edit them independently. Here are some of the edits you’ll likely need to make:

• Cutting dead space from audio and video tracks where nothing is happening.
• Inserting silence or cutting out bits of audio where mouse clicks or other sounds intrude (this isn’t always possible but clean it up as best you can).
• Speeding up video clips. The pace at which you operate on the screen may seem fine to you, but it can be pretty damn boring for others to watch. Speeding up the clip will also shorten its duration, affecting all the clips which follow.
• Extending frames. A frame is a single still image from the video. Twenty-four frames per second (FPS) is the minimum needed to fool the human brain into believing it sees motion on the screen. Sometimes you need the visuals to last longer than what was originally recorded. If your program doesn’t have a built-in frame extension, you can fake it by taking a still screenshot and then placing that in your timeline. When you place still image files in your timeline, you can simply enter a duration for how long you want it onscreen.

Generally speaking, you’ll have a much easier time matching video to audio, rather than the other way ’round. It’s also easier to record your audio to a specific duration so that your video will be the length you want it.

Zooming in and Out and Panning

At any point in your editing, you can zoom in from the recording’s original screen size. Once you’ve done that, you can then zoom back out to max. When your camera is zoomed in on the screen, you can also move (pan) it around from one location on the screen to another. Zooming and panning can be done simultaneously, so that, for example, you may move diagonally from the top left of the screen to the bottom right as you pull the camera back from a close up to mid-range.

Zooming and Panning Tips:

• Consider the display size of the final video: if it’s expected to be watched at 640 pixels or wider (such as full screen), then extreme close ups wouldn’t be a good idea.
• The farther you have to zoom in, the longer it should take. The shorter a distance you have to zoom in, the faster it can take. The default zoom time isn’t always the best: one second may be too fast, three seconds may be way too slow, depending.
• When in doubt about whether to zoom in or not, remember that the viewer doesn’t know where she needs to be looking unless we direct her eyes. Zooming is a highly effective way to do this.
• You don’t need to zoom out at the same speed you zoomed in. I often zoom out instantly, which simply looks like a scene cut back to full screen.
• Even though you may have the ability to simulate a tilt of the screen and make it seem as though you’re zoomed in and flying over a landscape, I don’t recommend using this feature for instructional videos. It’s distracting and you’re making it harder for people to learn because you’re distorting what they’d normally see.

Pacing

Pacing is mostly controlled by how fast you spoke when you recorded your audio. If you get the sense that, overall, the pacing is too fast or too slow, the solution is to re-record rather than try to apply anything fancy during editing.

Having said that, programs such as Audacity do let you change the tempo or play speed of a piece of audio without changing its pitch. In Audacity (or any audio editing program) and in your video editing program you can insert periods of silence or cut dead spots out of your audio tracks.

We can also control the perception of pacing without changing the actual speed of anything:

• Rapid scene cuts and edits create the perception of a fast pace, even if the audio is spoken at a normal rate.
• Using slow fade transitions and video without a lot of rapid motion in it will appear to be slow-paced even if it were used with the same audio.
• Background music can also affect perception of pace, especially if played in opening credits before any real content is delivered.

Next time you watch a television show or a movie, note how the speed with which scene cuts takes place changes depending on the action. A fight scene will have a lot of fast scene cuts, whereas a dialogue scene will not. Check out the preview below (actually the first 5 minutes) for Steven Soderbergh’s film, Haywire (contains violence):

Notice how long the scenes are as they are speaking, but then once the fight begins, the cuts come much faster. This pacing is purely the choice of the editor. These scenes were no doubt filmed many times and from many angles and while the fight could have consisted of long shots, short edits gave it a heightened sense of action because of pacing.

Effects – Transitions and Callouts

I used to teach a lot of PowerPoint classes. I would show my students how to do everything in the book and then I would tell them that if they ever actually included all those effects in a single presentation, it would be the worst presentation ever! And that if they did that I would hunt them down and swat them over the head with a rolled-up newspaper.

Programs like Camtasia and Screenflow are like PowerPoint for video instead of slides. They have all manner of whiz-bang special effects and transitions. Resist the urge to use them. Think again about what you see when you’re watching a movie or a TV show: 99% of the scene transitions are a simple cut. The remaining 1% are nearly always fades or “wipes.” Nothing fancy.

Why?

Because “fancy” distracts. Fancy breaks immersion. Fancy doesn’t actually help tell the story.

Keep your transitions super simple: fades, and don’t make them take too long. The default transition duration for Camtasia, for example, is horribly long. I usually cut it down to one second.

Transitions are one kind of effect. Another kind you’ll need to use from time to time are called Callouts. These are arrows, circles, or boxes of text used to point out something specific on the screen. Some callouts do the opposite: they serve to obfuscate so sensitive information doesn’t accidentally make it into your presentation. Obfuscation callouts are blurs and blackenings.

Go back up and watch my Smart YouTube plugin video again, only this time watch it to observe the callouts and the transitions between scenes such as the opening credits  and the main content.

Practice Makes Perfect

When you are new to screencasting, this kind of editing will feel disjointed at first. You will feel like you have a big pile of mess and you have no idea how to form it into anything coherent. This will not last as you gain experience. Remember this: your audio is your “anchor” point. It controls the pacing and it controls what video clips will appear when. Slave everything to the audio and remember this awkward feeling will not last long at all.

When I launched my first ebook, I had 500 subscribers on my email list.

I remember that day vividly. My heart pounded as I hit “Send.” The gurus voices echoed in my head. I remember hearing that 1,000 was the magic number, that you shouldn’t even think about launching a paid offering until you have at least 1,000 subscribers. What the hell was I doing?!

Okay, if I make just one sale, I’ll be happy… Just one. I told lied to myself.

Image from BigStock Photo

It turns out there was nothing to worry about. I made over $4,000 that month.

For a first launch, I was pretty happy…

Conventional Wisdom can Shove it

Thank god I didn’t listen to the blogging gurus. Had I waited to hit the 1,000 mark, I would have left a lot of cash on the table! Not to mention the nice confidence boost I got knowing that I had a viable business on my hands (something every early-stage blogger pains to hear).

Plus, nobody tells you this, but launches do wonderful things for your growth. My subscriber base more than doubled in the weeks following my launch. (I’m way over 1,000 now, bitches!)

Where the Gurus Go Wrong

Here’s the thing: the pros aren’t totally wrong. It’s just that when they say you need a big list to make sales, they’re assuming you to be “average.”

The presumption is that you do what every other blogger does, send out the same boring emails, and that you have about the same levels of community engagement as most bloggers your size.

This Advice is Discouraging, and Kind of… Offensive

Should teachers really be presuming their students to be simply “average”? People live up — or lower themselves — to the expectations that are set for them.

As someone privileged enough to be in the position to teach, you should believe in your students. You should see them as intelligent, creative, and hard working. Hold your readers to a higher standard than “average.”

Here on Remarkablogger, Michael doesn’t put up with comments that don’t contribute to the discussion, even if they’re generally pleasant. He holds his community to a high standard, out of respect for you guys. (Coincidentally, he also encourages bloggers of any size to launch an ebook– Go Michael.)

This Advice to Wait Fuels Our Fears

When blogging pros make blanket statements like “you need 1,000 subscribers to launch a product,” beginner bloggers can easily become discouraged. Hearing this advice, they might wait and wait and wait, terrified of “doing it wrong.”

We’re all perfectionists, and we all like reasons not to do something that scares us, especially when those reasons are backed up by “authority.” In other words, the advice to wait, is fueling all of your fears.

The Reason a Small List is Irrelevant: Quality Trumps Quantity

The reason that I made so many sales during my launch, isn’t just that I had a killer offer that my community wanted (this is a given. You need a solid offer, regardless of the size your list), it’s that my puttypeep feel a close, personal connection with me. They trust me, because I’ve shown them over the months, just how much I trust them.

What “Quality” Means in Terms of Numbers (and Sales)

Before we get to my specific strategy, lets talk about what a strong relationship with your community means in terms of numbers.

I have an open rate of 60-70% on my emails. (They say that the average is somewhere around 20-30%.)

You can bet that when it comes to launching a product, an open rate of 60-70% helps BIG TIME.

In fact, people can’t buy your ebook, if they don’t even open your emails. So you’d better get them opening those emails from the very moment they sign up to your list.

How to Massively Boost Your Email Open Rates

I take a very unconventional approach with my weekly emails. I don’t do what most bloggers do and paraphrase my blog content or send out an RSS blast of my latest blog post, formatted in some generic HTML template.

Nope, my approach to email is very different, and it’s what I accredit most of my launch success to.

The Secret Sauce: Emails that are Unpolished, and Sometimes Embarrassingly Personal

Here’s my strategy for writing emails:

1. Write like you’re speaking to a close friend, and be organic

I write every email as though I’m writing to a close friend. No HTML template, no SEO-esque subject line.

With the exception of the rare emails that are part of a launch sequence, I don’t plan out what I’m going to say. I simply sit down, and write about whatever happens to be on my mind that morning. Sometimes it’s relevant to my theme of multipotentiality, other times it’s just the unpolished thoughts of a multipotentialite.

In the past, I’ve written about love, fights, and personal revelations– the kind of things you’d discuss with a friend.

This approach to emails,means that I regularly get comments like, “I’m on a bunch of lists, and your emails are the only ones I read,” and “I literally cannot wait till Tuesday mornings!”

2. Don’t repeat blog content

I rarely republish or paraphrase my blog content. In fact, I don’t usually push the blog much at all, unless I have further thoughts on that same topic.

I do include a few text links at the bottom of the email to the latest articles, but that’s usually the extent of it.

3. Encourage people to respond

I almost always a question at the end of my emails and encourage people to respond.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with having them reply on G+ instead of through email. This means more engagement, more social proof, and fewer emails in my inbox.

The “It Just Feels Right” Approach

I’m sharing my “marketing secrets” here, but this strategy was in no way premeditated. It was never some Machiavellian attempt to tug at the heartstrings of my community (if you use it in that way, you suck. And also, your phoniness will come through, and it won’t work).

I genuinely love connecting with my people and sharing my ideas. I’m also incredibly interested in hearing my readers’ thoughts, since I know just how smart and compassionate most multipotentialites are.

I began writing emails this way, not because it was “good marketing strategy,” (actually, it breaks most of The Rules,) but because it was what felt most comfortable. It just turns out, that being open in your emails also happens to be an awesome marketing strategy.

“Yeah, but I’m Lazy”

You might be thinking that this sounds like an awful lot of work, and that you don’t want to write what amounts to yet another blog post each week.

First of all, these are unpolished emails. I started writing in a personal tone specifically because I was lazy and didn’t want to even think about structure, grammar, or any of that junk. I do enough of that when I write my blog posts, and so this approach to email actually feels like a huge relief.

Second, putting in the time and not just re-purposing blog content, is smart from a long term perspective. As I’ve already explained, it will increase your open rates and help you immensely when it comes time to launch a product.

Finally, this approach to email will allow you to work through new ideas that are percolating in your mind, but aren’t fully formed yet. Many of my emails end up being precursors to blog posts or products later down the road.

With this approach, you can gauge the interest of your community and get a feel for how they respond to a particular topic. In other words, it’s market research.

Focus on Growing Your Numbers, but Don’t Neglect the Quality of Your Relationships either

I’m not saying not to focus on growing your list. What I’m saying is that you should never neglect the quality of your relationships.

Put your imperfect self out there every week, speak as though you’re writing to a close friend, ask your peep what they think, and soon your community will be itching for your emails.

Your open rates will soar, and when the time comes to offer up something juicy, they will actually read your offer, and snatch it up.

How personal do you get in your emails, and what affect has it had on your revenue?

Emilie Wapnick helps you figure out what to do with your life and make a living when your interests are diverse and not specialized. She calls these folks “multipotentialites” and her awesome site is called Puttylike.

Image from BigStock Photo

Reading most of the blogging advice out there would suggest that a successful blog has little to do with the actual quality of its content. Success, instead, would appear to be determined by the blog’s use of SEO tactics, social media integration, WordPress templates, and affiliate marketing.

While all of these approaches can certainly bring in traffic and make your blog more successful, there really is no way to get around the fact that content is king and that the arguments you make and the topics you cover are ultimately far more important than anything else.

Of course, it’s harder to give advice about boosting content on a blog than it is to tell bloggers to engage in SEO practices. Content, after all, can cover a broad range of subject areas and audience demographics. But most internet readers share certain stylistic preferences when it comes to blog content. They want content that is provocative, engaging, and informative. They want content that can be easily skimmed. And they seek content that is presented in a “laid-back” and conversational manner.

Being truly conversational entails writing your content in a manner that maximizes its syntactic flow and makes it more natural to read. Here are a few suggestions for helping you make that happen:

-Ask questions. Breaking up your writing with questions is a great way to add a conversational tone to your content. Your questions can be used rhetorically, followed by explicit answer, and placed alone in a single-sentence paragraph. This diversity of use can help break up a writing style that is more pedantic in nature.

-Avoid traditional transitions. When trying to make your writing more fluid there is no better place to start than by considering your transitions. Although transitions such as however, therefore, and consequently make seem natural to writers, simpler ones (but, so, and, yet) can actually make your writing flow more naturally.

-Proofread out loud. Perhaps the best way to make your writing more conversational is by turning it into an actual conversation. Some people will speak their article out loud before writing it down, while others will take the opposite approach and read aloud while proofreading, after the initial writing has been done. Both approaches can help you quickly eliminate awkward sentences.

-Have an argument. This may seem obvious, but a dry and wholly informational piece is, by nature, less likely to come across as conversational than a piece that contains a strong argument. Whenever possible, try to incorporate an explicit argument into your writing. A more conversational style will hopefully flow naturally as a result.

-Split up paragraphs. Keeping your paragraphs concise and focused on a specific point can help your writing flow better both within that paragraph and in the piece as a whole. The best way to insure such concise focus is to err on the side of making paragraphs shorter rather than longer. This makes transitions easier and provides an added level of precision to your core argument.

-Try to forge grammatical balance. Different types of punctuation have different impact’s on a piece of writing’s flow. A period creates stark divisions between one thought and the next. An overuse of periods, then, can make your writing seem fragmented and cluttered. But an overuse of commas, on the other hand, can create a syntatic flow to such a degree that the reader grows confused and disoriented. For this reason, it is always best to maintain a balanced approach towards punctuation use.

-Be personal. When all else fails, adding a personal angle or anecdote to a written piece is a sure-fire way to bring into it an element of intimacy and a stronger conversational tone. People tend to write more fluidly and accessibly when talking about themselves. Doing so can also make your article more interesting in the first place.

Hopefully these tips can help you make your blog content more fluid and conversational. While such a style cannot compensate for poor content or shoddy writing, it can complement most internet topics in a way that better appeals to the average reader.

Sam Peters manages The Education Update and enjoys writing about ways to stand out and have a unique voice as a blogger.

Image by BigStock Photo

So far, we’ve covered planning your screencast and scripting & recording audio for your screencast. In this part of the series, we will cover how to create the visual portion of your screencast and get it ready for editing. Our goal here is to create pro-quality screencast videos that are head and shoulders above what most other content marketers are creating.

Out of Many, One

Just as you may be piecing your narrative audio soundtrack from several takes, the visual portion of your screencast can be made more professional by the same methods. Instead of one big “single shot” (as it were) video, you can record several videos and then edit them into your timeline to go along with the narration.

This way, you’ll have plenty of material to choose from and you’ll be able to arrange it more easily in the order you want.

Creating a screencast isn’t necessarily like having a person watch over your shoulder as you show them how to do something in a piece of software. Nor should it be. That doesn’t mean you never should do it that way, however…

Out of One, Many?

You can record a single long sequence of actions and then afterward, cut and rearrange to create your visuals. It may at first feel more natural to do it this way because it’s the most like how we would show a person in real life how to do something when we say, “Here… watch me.”

The downside to this is that it takes much, much longer to cut this long “scene” into the chunks you need. Your experience may very well vary from mine, but to me it’s always been faster to record short bits that correlate to the steps of the screencast in a modular fashion.

You might think that if you didn’t record your audio separately, this would be the way to go. After all, now you’re killing two birds with one stone, right? Aside from the fact that is a horrible metaphor (I mean, really… what kind of sicko wants to go around killing birds with rocks more efficiently?), you will run into a huge problem.

The problem is this: inevitably, you will want to cut out a visual part but you will not be able to do it the way you want to because it will screw up the audio portion so badly the whole thing will be unwatchable. You’d have to go through so much effort and pain to get away with it you may as well have done it the “hard” way in the first place.

I’m not going to say “never” or “always” for these situations. Find what works for you. And by “works for you” what I mean is “creates the best product” not “seems the easiest.”

Recording Video Settings

Screencasting programs such as Camtasia and Screenflow will have presets you can choose from when you’re going to record what’s happening on your desktop, but how do you know which one to pick?

The short answer: pick the largest widescreen resolution at which you can record that looks decent at both a smaller and larger display size.

You see, because the user controls the video player, and she may watch your screencast at the embedded size or she may go full screen, you’ll want to try and create something that will work well in either situation. Part of this is addressed in the editing but first we have to do what we can about it here, before we record a single frame of video.

I record at 1280 x 720 unless I need to record my entire desktop. My desktop is 1856 x 1042 (if that seems odd to some of you… it is. It’s because of an annoying conflict between my monitor and video drivers which causes clipping, which I then have to correct). At 1280 x 720, the result is video that looks okay at two common YouTube embed sizes (480 pixels wide and 640 pixels wide). On Remarkablogger, I like to embed videos at the 640 pixels wide format.

But if someone were to want to watch the video in full screen, I would never want to penalize him for that. I myself almost always choose to watch videos in full screen and I hate it when they’re not high enough resolution to do so. Now, some of that also has to do with production settings, and right now we’re only talking about recording settings.

Other Settings

Two other settings you may or may not need to worry about are your screen capture frame rate and what video compressor is selected for your screencasting software to use.

Video is recorded and played back as a rapid sequence of still images called frames, and the speed at which these frames are captured or played back is called the frame rate. Traditionally, film (as in actual good ol’ fashioned optical film which, when you look at it closely, has actual frames on it) has a frame rate of 24 fps (frames per second).

For recording video digitally, you generally want 30. If huge file sizes were an issue and you weren’t doing something that needed a lot of detail, dropping this value would create a smaller file size for your finished video but with lower quality. I don’t know if Screenflow goes any higher than 30, but Camtasia only goes to 30.

For video settings you may want to use a different compressor than the default. Camtasia’s TechSmith compressor that comes with Camtasia created recording problems and I switched it out for DivX 6.9.2 Codec which supports 4 logical CPUs (in other words, I have a quad-core computer chip).

You can research on the user forums of the screen capture software you’re using to learn more about this stuff.

How to Actually Record Video

Once I’ve got the screen recorder running and its window is matched up with the window I’m recording in, you’d think I’d just hit Record and go, yes?

Well, not exactly. Some tips:

• Don’t include anything in the recording area that isn’t directly related to the learning objective of your video. For example, nobody needs to see your browser tabs, address bar or bookmark bar unless it’s part of what’s being taught.
• Likewise, consider whether any scrollbars or toolbars need to show, because probably they don’t. Most of the world uses Windows on a PC and they don’t need to see your Mac windowframes. It’s already bad enough that the majority of your viewers will not identify comfortably with your Mac mouse pointers. If you know the majority of your viewers will be Mac users (like, because you’re demonstrating Mac software) then no worries, of course.
• Before you record, go into your mouse settings and slow that little thing down! Many computer-savvy folks have increased the speed of their mouse pointers for their own efficiency, but you want to make your video as easy and smooth to watch as possible, so slow that zippy thing down a bit.
• Make sure your recording area is sufficiently far away from anything you might mouse over that would cause tool tips or other interface cruft to appear partly inside your recording area. If you can’t help this because of the size of your monitor, then just try to be as careful as you can.
• Do not move the mouse unnecessarily. Try to avoid “gesturing” with the mouse as if it were your hands. This will allow for smoother edits later where your mouse is not magically teleporting to different parts of the screen.
• Record in discrete chunks of action. This way you can assemble them in the order you want later. In other words, do not record one long “shot” of all your steps. Record each step separately as its own file. Later, when you edit your video, you’ll be able to collect everything together and order it the way you want.

Fighting Against Your Computer’s File System

I can’t speak for Macs, but since most people use Windows, this will be relevant to the majority of you. The way your computer wants to organize files on your system is crap.

Windows wants to put video in one library, audio in another, and everything else in Documents. Forget that shit.

You will find it far more efficient and sanity-preserving to collect all your files by project, not media. Inside your project folders it may make sense to create subfolders by media, but only at that point.

Why is this?

Because you will be doing a lot of opening and saving of various files, and having to pick a new file path in order reach where files of a certain media reside every… single… time… is a huge time waster.

Grouping your files by project also makes it easier to transfer files or back them up (you’d better be backing them up!) and restore them.

Intros and Outros

You may want some kind of intro/title to play at the beginning of your video, and/or an outro at the end.

How to deal with these depends on two things:

• Whether or not you’re making one video or many
• The capabilities of your screencasting or editing program

If you’re making many videos, you want these title clips to be very short or they will quickly get annoying to your viewers.

Honestly, Camtasia makes the crappiest titles imaginable. At most, you can have an image for the background and choose your font. There are no animations or any effects except for transitions between segments. It’s pretty damn awful, in my opinion (one of my only complaints).

If you have something that works better, great.

Luckily, I already have something that works better.

I have this program which can make awesome titles called Adobe After Effects which is huge, expensive and complex. I never use it. I have something else I use instead that’s much cheaper and works great.

It’s called PowerPoint.

Yes, I’m serious.

Here’s what to do:

• Create a single slide in PowerPoint
• Set the page layout to widescreen
• Set a nice background and font that matches my brand
• Type in my video title and site URL (or whatever you feel you need, but keep it to two lines on the screen maximum)
• Create an entrance animation (usually fade) and an exit animation (also fade, usually)
• Turn off the mic input of the screen recorder
• Set the slide show to display in window mode so you can match it up with your 1280 x 720 screen recording area
• Activate the screen recorder and run your very short little slide show
• Add this file to the clip bin (or equivalent) in your editing program so you can drag it to your timeline

If you’re creating an intro clip that’s meant to be used for many videos, be sure to add it to whatever “library” function your screencast editing program has.

The Next Step

Once you’ve recorded all your “chunks” of video and audio and brought them into your editing environment, it’s time to start assembling the final video. We’ll cover that in the next part of this series.

Image from BigStock Photo.

This is the 3rd part in a series on Screencasting. Check out the previous post in the series: How to plan a Screencast or start at the beginning: How to Create Professional-Quality Screencasts.

Scripting for Screencasts

Nobody wants to sound like an idiot when they make a recording. You want to sound like you know what you’re doing. It’s really easy to make mistakes and commit all manner of presentational sins when you try to make a screencast with no script.

What do I mean by scripting? Do I mean you actually write a script? Everything you’re going to say?

In some cases, yes. This depends on your presenting skills and ability and your ability to sound natural when you read out loud. Don’t believe for a moment there is any kind of “natural talent” in this. With practice, anyone can improve. Even if you’ve failed the first round of American Idol auditions.

What you don’t want to sound like:

• Unsure of yourself
• Hesitant
• Self-conscious
• Boring
• Stiff and forced, unnatural
• Mumbly
• Mouth-noisy or nose-breathy (pardon the highly technical jargon)
• Crazy or manic (laugh if you want to, but I’m halfway serious, here—people get weird ideas about how they’re “supposed” to sound)

What you do want to sound like:

• Confident
• Friendly
• Un-selfconscious
• Clear
• Engaging
• A boss

Whether you sound good or bad in a screencast has little to do with whether or not you write out an entire script and read it out loud… or simply speak as you operate while recording. You can have a fully-scripted screencast that sound stilted and false… or that sound professional and clear. You can have an “on the fly” screencast that sounds like the presenter can’t even string two cohesive ideas together… or that sounds as natural as if you were speaking with a friend in a bar.

If you write out a full script, it’s more likely you’ll say what you mean to say in the correct order, but you have a higher chance of sounding self-concious. If you “wing it,” it’s more likely you’ll sound conversational and un-selfconscious, but also that you’ll exhibit annoying nervous patterns, make mistakes, and ramble.

Neither method is better than the other: it totally depends on what works best for YOU. Try your hand at both methods and see for yourself. Both can be done well with practice.

The Blended Approach: You can also have a list of points (you should already if you planned your screencast correctly) and you can riff off of those, which will have the benefit of being guided and cohesive, but with a more natural-sounding final result than simply reading off a script word-for-word.

Elements Every Script Needs

Every script, no matter how tightly or loosely you do it, needs the same structure and elements:

• Introduction: Greet the viewer and introduce yourself by name and give your website URL. When people see your video on a third-party site such as YouTube you need to provide context.
• State the learning objective: Tell viewers what they’re going to learn and why it will be of benefit to them.
• Go through the steps of the main content: Obviously.
• Restate the objective and benefit: Something like, “Now that you’ve learned X, you can accomplish Y more easily than ever.”
• Say goodbye: Give your name and URL again at the end of the screencast and say goodbye. I will often remind viewers as well to click “Like” on the video if they enjoyed it. This only matters if your video is on YouTube.
• But we’ll meet again: You don’t want this to be the only time someone watches your content. Let the viewer know you’ll “see them next time” or that you’ll “see you again soon.”

How to Actually Write Your Script

• Use whatever word processor you like
• Use paragraph breaks to indicate pauses in speech
• Make the font big enough to read on the screen while you’re recording

Recording Audio for Screencasts

You have two choices when it comes to recording audio for screencasts:

• Use the built-in audio recording capabilities of your screen-recording software
• Use a separate program

Using a separate program gives you a couple distinct advantages:

• It’s made for recording and editing sound, whereas screencast recording software will only have rudimentary controls and features.
• You don’t have to worry about accidentally messing up the video as you try to edit the audio.

I recommend Audacity for Windows. It’s free, open source software and it works beautifully. You will want to export your projects as mp3 files, but this ability does not inherently come with Audacity. The reason why is that the mp3 file format is not open source. However there is an add-on you can use to give you this capability, which goes by the funny name of Lame.

If this sounds like it’s starting to get complicated, don’t worry. Instructions for how to set up Audacity and Lame exist online and it’s easy.

You can get Audacity for the Mac, but Macs come with Garage Band already. If you find Garage Band intimidating or to be overkill, you can get a Mac version of  Audacity. I find Audacity extremely simple to use for screencast recording—it does a lot, too, but you won’t need most of it and the interface is not very threatening.

How to Actually Record your Screencast Audio

• Put your script in one part of your monitor or print it out and have it in hand.
• Put your audio recording software in another part of your monitor (or if you have two monitors, one in each monitor).
• Hit “record.”
• Start talking: read your script or loosely follow your points.
• If you mess up: you don’t have to start over. Just pause your speaking (not the controls) and then pick back up again. Later you can edit out your flub.
• Record several different takes in different styles: try being faster, slower, more boisterous or more intimate. Pick the one you want to run with.
• If you feel like you’re sounding forced and stiff as you read, keep creating takes until it sounds more natural. Or until it all deconstructs into a mental cacophony of circular logic like some kind of nitrous oxide trip (I recommend stopping before this point).

Recording Tips

• You want the quietest environment possible in which to record. While it may sound funny, hiding in your closet with your laptop, microphone and tons of sound-absorbing clothing really isn’t such a bad idea! You definitely don’t want to be in a room where sound reverberates. If you have loud family members, a good solid strip of duct tape across the mouth may be necessary. If you think they might peel it off, use some on their wrists, too.
• You don’t want any surface vibration to reach the microphone. It’s best if you can put your mic on a spring-loaded articulated boom to hold it near your face. If you only have a desk stand or tripod for your mic, place it on top of a folded towel or a couple of old mouse pads to absorb vibration.
• Use a pop filter. A pop filter is a scrim or cloth that goes between your face and the microphone. The purpose of a pop filter is to prevent the little puffs of air from “popping” consonants from hitting the recording surface of the mic (like the letter “p” or “t”).  It often looks like black pantyhose stretched over a circular wire frame. You can buy these or you can improvise.  Simply draping a piece of cloth or some craft foam over your microphone will work—although it will look completely stupid.
• Make sure your chair doesn’t squeak or groan or otherwise make any noise. Especially noises that sound like bodily functions or wild animals, because the worse they sound the more likely it is your mic will pick that up. That is a fact of the universe.
• Do not rub or scratch your face or touch the microphone directly, these sounds will also be picked up (especially if you have a beard or stubble) and be very annoying to listeners.
• Keep some water on hand.
• Make sure your nasal passages are clear. You don’t want any “whistling booger sounds” to be in your audio.

Editing Your Screencast Audio

As is, your audio—though it is recorded—is not ready to be in your screencast just yet. You have to edit it. How the hell do you edit a digital audio file? What do you do? This is what Audacity or Garage Band can do for you. The audio track is presented in the form of sound waves in a time strip. You can click and drag along it and cut, copy, paste, apply effects or whatever. Here are the steps I take with mine:

• Noise removal: the background noise of fans or humidifiers or just ambient white noise needs to be edited out. To do this, you have take a sample where there is only background noise and then run the noise removal feature of your recording software. Combined with having a good microphone, this will dramatically improve the sound of your audio portion.
• Editing out vocal mishaps: It’s easy to see the spike in the sound wave on the editing timeline when you say “um” or accidentally make any sound you don’t want. In most audio editing software, it’s a simple matter to click and drag to select the offending portion and then delete it.
• Adding or removing blank space: Sometimes you speak too quickly and other times you may have paused for quite a bit in order to recover from a flub or to get your bearings. You can insert swaths of silence or remove dead spots in your audio to improve the pacing. You want to have only about one second of blank space before you begin speaking and after you are finished speaking.

That’s it, there’s really not much you have to do with the audio.

You might be wondering about intro music or whatever, but the truth is that stuff gets added in separately later (if at all) when you are editing the video in your screencasting program. That is not a part of this piece of audio.

The Next Part in This Series:

We’ll be going over Recording and Assembling Your Media Collection for a Screencast.

Any questions or comments? Leave ‘em below! Did you enjoy this? Make sure you signed up to receive updates in the form below so you don’t miss anything.

(Can’t see the video? Click here.)

Why is thing so cool? Well, from my viewpoint it’s amazing, because it gives me everything I want in video embedding: fast & lazy and with very specific settings and features.

Here’s the thing: WordPress lets you just throw a YouTube URL into a post (right in the Visual tab, no pasting of <iframe> code necessary) and it will automagically embed the video, like so:

What you see there is the default settings, which I don’t want.

What I want is what you see in the first embedded video on this page, which is the same video except it’s taking advantage of Smart YouTube.

Once you install Smart YouTube you configure it so all your videos have the settings you want. I wanted bigger videos, I didn’t want related videos to appear afterward and I wanted the YouTube logo removed (yes, it does that).

To trigger Smart YouTube for your video URL, just sneak the letter “v” into it right after the “http” with no spaces, like this: httpv://.

See the “v” in there?

THAT’S ALL YOU HAVE TO DO.

Smart YouTube also solves a problem I was having. The way I was embedding videos before was to just paste in the <iframe> code into the HTML tab in WordPress. That was a great way to do it before WordPress upped its game, but what happens is that the video rests on top of anything else and blocks it from view. So nobody could +1 the post on Google+ because that button’s flyout menu was blocked by the video.

That could be fixed by adding ?wmode=transparent at the end of the URL string in the <iframe> code, but what a pain in the ass to have to that every time! I thought to myself there has GOT to be a WordPress plugin that solves this problem. After only a few minutes of searching around I found the Smart YouTube plugin.

I love this thing.

And by the way these are not affiliate links nor do I get anything out of this other than a better video blogging workflow—for myself and for you.