Producing video for your offline or online business is no longer a novelty. Videos allow you to get more eyeballs to your business website and even dominate the search engines (if you optimize them for ranking). The level of video that you need to produce your business and its nature come down to what your business is all about and what you want to accomplish with your videos. Sometimes, you just need a camcorder to take videos on the go and capture your business events or conferences that you attend. Depending on the type of your business, you may be better off creating your very own web show. Many top marketers have done just that and reaped the rewards in the process.

Whatever the case, you are going to need some decent equipment to capture video for your business. At the very least, you are going to need a decent video camera or camcorders. How much should you spend on a video camera? That really depends on what you hope to accomplish with your video, but the sky’s the limit as far as how much money you can spend on your equipment. At the end of the day, your equipment does not matter. What you do with it does. With that in mind, here are 4 video cameras and camcorders that can enable you to produce content for your business:

Panasonic Professional AG-HMC40 AVCHD Camcorder: one of the most impressive (and affordable) prosumer camcorders on the market. This is a tool that could come in handy if you are thinking about creating your own commercials or high quality web show on the web. It’s not cheap in comparison to regular camcorders on the market. At the same time, it gives you a lot of bang for your buck.

Canon EOS Rebel T2i 18 MP CMOS APS-C Digital SLR Camera: one powerhouse of a digital SLR that lets you take super high quality pictures and HD videos all with the same time. It could save you money if you intend to hit two targets with one shot. Continue reading How To Produce Videos For Your Business – Part I: Equipment

Forums have been around forever or so it seems. They may be old, but they are still one of the main ways people communicate each other and create content online. Social networking websites have stolen some of their thunder, but if you own a business, you owe it to your customers to give them a way to discuss issues and questions about your product or service. If you already own a business website, adding a forum to provide support is a no-brainer. Besides, you are going to learn a lot from watching your customers communications among each other. Thankfully, there are very easy ways to get the job done (unlike a few years ago). Here are 4 ways to get it done fast:

Forum software: the no-brainer way to do it is by picking up a copy of vBulletin or PHPBB and install it on your domain. Some of these solutions require you to pay for your license. There are plenty of open source forum scripts available on the market as well. So you have some options here. If you happen to own a Wordpress blog, you can use plugins to connect your forum to your blog. So you can bring it all together and build a more solid community with your forum.

Wordpress: this is my favorite way to do it. If you do not expect your forum to grow too large, you can always rely on Wordpress to host your forum. You get all the plugins and benefits of using Wordpress. Besides, it will be much easier to customize your website when you are familiar with the platform. It does help that Wordpress is so easy to use.

BBpess: if you have used Wordpress in the past, you have probably heard of BBpress as well. It’s a forum software by the same people behind Wordpress. The platform may not be identical to Wordpress, but it does have a familiar look and feel. You can pick up a decent BBpress theme and get started with your forum on your domain fast.

BuddyPress: another innovative solution by the folks behind Wordpress that lets you start your own social network without having to spend too much money. It goes beyond your everyday forum software. This piece of software can be used to create highly sophisticated user-driven websites fast.

Adding a forum to your website is only the start. Managing it is much more complicated and challenging. At least, you can get a head start with your forum by using the above scripts.

If you have surfed the Internet enough lately, you have probably seen those websites that come with their own talking figure. Talking figures can help increase your sales or can be annoying. That’s why you want to make sure you test it out to see how it affects your conversion rates. But thanks to talking figure services that are available on the market, you won’t have to hire a model to add a talking figure to your website.

Your Website Spokesperson is one of those services that lets you add a male or female talking figure to your website fast. The website enables you to choose from various models that are available through the service. You can choose the size, look and feel, and your model’s wardrobe. You can even choose to add your own script or choose the professional quality service offered by YWS. Continue reading How To Add a Virtual Spokesperson To Your Website

Blog directories can be a good source of traffic for your personal or business blog. You do need to have decent content on your blog to keep people coming back for more. But you can’t just sit on your content and hope for others to make it to your blog. You’ve got to promote your blog. One of the best ways to do that is by making sure that your blog makes it to Alltop. Alltop is the brainchild of Guy Kawasaki, top entrepreneur and venture capitalist. You can think of it as the yellow pages of websites and topics on the Web. But here is the catch. Only quality sites make it to AllTop. So when you log on to the site, you know you are not going to get a bunch of splogs.

Adding your website to Alltop will not allow you to gain more credibility with your readers, it can help bring more people to your website as well. As AllTop grows, your traffic grows as well. So everybody wins. Before submitting your website to Alltop, you want to make sure you have a decent, professional looking website with a decent amount of good posts on it. So if you have just started your blog, you want to take the time to develop 10 or 20 high quality posts before going after top blog directories such as Alltop. Once there, you are ready to submit your blog to Alltop:

Continue reading How To Add Your Blog To Alltop