Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

The best favor you can do for your­self and your busi­ness is to always focus on one task at a time, and always finish what you start.

How the heck do you do that on the inter­net, when there are dis­trac­tions everywhere you look, and in affi­liate mar­ke­ting… when there are new offers every day ripe for you to promote?

The ans­wer is: if you’re going to pro­mote a new affi­liate offer, write all your emails and blog posts in one sit­ting, before you get bored or dis­trac­ted with another offer.

Sounds inti­mi­da­ting? It doesn’t have to be.

Remem­ber that when you pro­mote someone else’s offer, they tend to give you at least one cut-​​and-​​paste email. Sche­dule it as a future broad­cast and paste it in as-​​is, because time is limited!

If the email they pro­vide is more than a page long, I’ll split it up into two parts and sche­dule the second email to go out a week later.

Once you have those first cou­ple of emails, look at the sales let­ter and see if there are any huge chunks of sales copy you can paste into an email to further pro­mote the offer.

Any decent sales let­ter usually has an inte­res­ting story, a bene­fit list and a fea­ture list… so there’s three more emails right there.

After chec­king out the sales let­ter, I’ll tend to think of one or two things the sales let­ter hadn’t thought of, and I’ll write two quick emails explai­ning each one. Emails don’t have to be long, just a cou­ple of para­graphs will do, with a call-​​to-​​action at the end to get peo­ple to click on your affi­liate link.

And finally, I’ll type up a cou­ple of remin­der emails for peo­ple who might have mis­sed the offer and need to see it again.

Now you have 7 or 8 emails to pro­mote the affi­liate pro­duct. Don’t save them in a text file for later… sche­dule them in your auto­res­pon­der right now to send out a month apart.

Using this tech­ni­que, you can sche­dule over six months of email pro­mo­tion for just one pro­duct, in 10 to 30 minutes.

If you were really moti­va­ted, you could find the hot­test con­ver­ting pro­ducts in your niche (I pre­fer to look at the Click­bank mar­ket­place since those sort by the best pulling offers first) and in one day, fill up your auto­res­pon­der with affi­liate email promotions.

Or simply make it a point to add one new offer to your auto­res­pon­der every Mon­day mor­ning, before you do anything else.

If you have a blog of your own, you only need to write posts and sche­dule them on the same dates the emails get sent out… don’t overthink it.

That’s the key to finishing what you start: work in sprints so you can sche­dule it on a timer and not have to work on that promo, or even think about that promo ever again!

I hope you enjo­yed this series on affi­liate mar­ke­ting. Please leave your com­ments below so I know peo­ple like it and I can write more of these. If you want back-​​issues, here they are!

1. Add Your Own Unique Slant to the Offer.
2. Interview the Originator or Add Your Own Bonuses.
3. Bring Something to the Table: List and Traffic.
4. Invest in Your Business: Don't Ask for Review Copies.
5. Write Affiliate email and Blog Posts in One Sitting.

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

No pro­duct ven­dor likes poten­tial affi­lia­tes to ask for free “review copies.” It reeks of inex­pe­rience and penny-​​pinching. If you want to pro­mote a pro­duct and need to see what it looks like on the inside, just bite the bullet and pay for it like ever­yone else.

As an affi­liate, you have two rela­tionships to work: with your buyers, and with the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor. When you try to go the cheap route, you burn too many brid­ges early on.

Let’s also remem­ber that whe­ne­ver you pay for something, you’re more likely to take action with it. Just ima­gine you’ve work and saved your entire life for your dream car. Once you buy it, you’re going to actually use it and take extra care of it, right?

Then ima­gine some­body gives you the car outright. You didn’t earn it, you didn’t work for it, and didn’t pay anything for it. You still might che­rish the car but you aren’t going to enjoy it the same way.

The same is true for get­ting “affi­liate review copies” of pro­ducts. If you actually buy the pro­duct, you’ll have more of a drive to pro­mote and make your money back.

There is also no excuse for trying to save money buying from your­self as the affi­liate to get your review copy. Peo­ple have tried to jus­tify them­sel­ves doing this for years, but there’s simply no way to explain it without soun­ding cheap.

Can you really see Michel For­tin, John Reese, or Frank Kern asking for review copies from each other? No way… $20 or even $100 is a drop-​​in-​​the-​​bucket invest­ment for their busi­ness. You want to model those people.

Did you know that Rus­sell Brun­son and Matt Bacak attend each other’s $20,000 workshops, and pay each other for hourly coaching? There is no “kee­ping score” to see who makes more money off the other’s coaching.

If one of them needs an extra boost in their busi­ness, they pay for the tools and it pays off.

Usually I will pay full price for even my clo­sest busi­ness part­ners’ pro­ducts, even though I “could” get it for free — I’d pre­fer to have the tax wri­teoff, stron­ger rela­tionship, and extra moti­va­tion that comes with paying full price.

I don’t always buy the pro­ducts I pro­mote as an affi­liate… but if you want a review copy, pay for it ins­tead of calling in favors. You owe it to your­self, your pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor, and your cus­to­mers to actually invest in your business.

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

Affi­liate mar­ke­ting is not a “push but­ton solu­tion”… it’s just a dif­fe­rent type of selling than pro­duct launch mar­ke­ting or AdSense marketing.

You are not going to be able to just sign up as an affi­liate to some pro­gram and expect to make money… you have to DO something with that link!

The big for­mula for inter­net mar­ke­ting is:

List + Traf­fic = Offers.

When you sign up for something as an affi­liate, that affi­liate pro­duct or ser­vice is your offer. Once you have that offer, you need a list and you need traf­fic if you ever expect that offer to convert.

You’d be sur­pri­sed at how many peo­ple for­get this step!

For this rea­son, I don’t recom­mend pro­mo­ting affi­liate offers right out of the gate in inter­net mar­ke­ting. Build up a list first, even if it’s built from a small $7 report or a free ethi­cal bribe.

Join list buil­ding givea­ways, place your sig­na­ture link at the bot­tom of your forum posts, com­ment on blogs, leave tes­ti­mo­nials for pro­ducts you own, publish artic­les about your niche… do wha­te­ver you can to get as many eye­balls in your niche in front of that opt-​​in box. Add an e-​​mail subsc­rip­tion box to sites that need it, such as your blog.

Bot­tom line: build a list first, and then send offers to that list once you’ve built up 100 subsc­ri­bers or more. Does that sound like a lot? Okay… then focus on 8 subsc­ri­bers a day.

Do you think that with forum, article, blog, and givea­way mar­ke­ting, that you could get a measly eight subsc­ri­bers in a day? If you can, then keep it up for 12 days and you have your­self 100 subsc­ri­bers pri­med and ready to receive your affi­liate offers.

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

As someone who runs affi­liate pro­grams for over 50 of my own pro­ducts, I can tell you 99% of affi­lia­tes are worthless.

They’ll sig­nup and send no traf­fic, or send traf­fic and only bring in a cou­ple of sales. What’s the com­mon thread behind all these affi­liate fai­lu­res I see again and again? It comes in two parts: not making an effort, and not brid­ging their mai­ling list to your offer.

I would be thri­lled if an affi­liate came to me and said:

“I want to inter­view you for 20 minu­tes about (a topic directly rela­ted to both our pro­ducts and skills). My list con­tains (size of list) subsc­ri­bers, and the last offer I pro­mo­ted con­ver­ted at (this per­cen­tage) and brought in (this amount of sales). I’ll record the inter­view, con­vert it into down­loa­da­ble form and get it out to my subsc­ri­bers within 24 hours, with a link back to your offer with me as the affi­liate, at the end of the inter­view. What’s a good time for me to call you up?”

Do you see all the points this e-​​mail hit?

Most impor­tant: this affi­liate already brings in results. He has a decent sized list, already had a pre­vious suc­cess pro­mo­ting affi­liate offers in this niche. He’s doing most of the work: he chose the topic, he will be inter­vie­wing you, calling you, and recor­ding the call.

He’s also going to take imme­diate action once the inter­view is finished, and pro­mote this offer to his subsc­ri­bers within 24 hours.

When you inter­view the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor with you as the affi­liate, it shows that you care about giving your subsc­ri­bers a good offer, and not just cut­ting and pas­ting the e-​​mail he gave you.

It shows you have an “in” with the ori­gi­na­tor so if your buyers aren’t get­ting sup­port or need a refund, they can get to that per­son through you… they trust the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor because they trust you.

Finally, it simply injects your per­so­na­lity into the offer. This offer isn’t being made by some outside source, it’s from you and the ori­gi­na­tor at the same time.

If the ori­gi­na­tor isn’t avai­la­ble or you just don’t want to go the inter­view route, offer one of your pro­ducts as a bonus to that affi­liate offer, that way it’s a blen­ded offer.

If your subsc­ri­bers trust you but don’t trust the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor, they can still order from the ori­gi­na­tor with con­fi­dence… because if that pro­duct doesn’t deli­ver in value, your bonus will.

It ticks me off when peo­ple spend too much time on headshots, graphics, and other name recog­ni­tion devi­ces when they should be focu­sing more on web sites that actually make money!

Bran­ding is one of the last things you should worry about — so if you really want to get to the point where you’re wor­king on bran­ding to get that extra 5 per­cent boost in sales, get through these steps first…

The big for­mula is: List + Traf­fic = Offers.

Step 1: Choose Your Niche and Skill Level.

A niche is an area of exper­tise like copyw­ri­ting, stress relief, PHP, article wri­ting, etc., and a skill level is how you will turn that exper­tise into a ship­pa­ble pro­duct. A skill level might mean free­lance pro­jects, affi­liate mar­ke­ting, or site building.

Before you do anything you need to know what your area of exper­tise is. Every­body has one, because every­body has read books, had a favo­rite job, had a favo­rite sub­ject in school, subsc­ribe to cer­tain niches of magazines.

If this is your first time choo­sing a niche, make it a skill you can prove. If you haven’t made any money online, don’t make your niche the “make money online” niche!

Not only that, you need to make up your mind about what your offer will be. If you are brand new, choo­sing free­lan­cing since that is how you will make some quick money.

You might be an article wri­ter for your niche, create videos, make graphics, write auto­res­pon­ders or copy — but it needs to be limi­ted to your niche so that you can esta­blish your­self as an “expert” in that niche and charge more.

Maybe some­day you can move onto site buil­ding, affi­liate pro­mo­tions or even your own pro­ducts, but don’t make that leap until you have some free­lan­cing expe­rience under your belt.

Step 2: Create a Squeeze Page.

Pre­sent an ethi­cal bribe to sign-​​up to a mai­ling list so you can start follo­wing up with pros­pects about your future offers.

This means you’ll have to sign up for an auto­res­pon­der like Awe­ber and paste the sign-​​up code to a very sim­ple HTML page that also lists a cou­ple of quick bene­fits explai­ning why they should get this infor­ma­tion in the first place.

You do this to get peo­ple on a list, so you can send them offers later. These offers aren’t neces­sa­rily pro­ducts but could be entire sales for sale or your free­lance services.

You don’t even need to create the content.

Find the 7 best artic­les in your niche and grab them off article sites, lea­ving the byli­nes and resource boxes intact so the wri­ter still gets cre­dit. Com­pile all those artic­les into a Word docu­ment, put your con­tact info at the begin­ning and end of the book, espe­cially if you are going the free­lance route.

Then con­vert the Word doc to a PDF using either Mic­ro­soft Word 2007, Ope­nOf­fice or a free online tool (you can Goo­gle search for many great “doc to pdf converters”).

Step 3: Fill Your Follow-​​up Sequence With 7 Offers.

This might be 7 more artic­les in your niche and set them as e-​​mail follow-​​ups spa­ced 3 weeks apart. This will keep the leads fresh, and ready for when you have offers for them.

Do you offer free­lan­cing article wri­ting in a cer­tain niche? Your offer then might be that three slots have ope­ned up at a spe­cial price. Or the offer might simply be an affi­liate pro­gram you are pro­mo­ting in that niche for peo­ple who want to pay for the even bet­ter information.

Step 4: Create Spe­cial Offers, an Affi­liate Pro­gram, and Joint Ventures.

Here is the fun part. Now that you have made a cou­ple of sales, you can offer spe­cial deals to your list and repeat customers.

Maybe you want to order a “rush order” option to your article wri­ting ser­vi­ces so for 50% more, peo­ple can get their artic­les from you in half the time. Maybe you’ll give a 30 minute telephone con­sul­ta­tion to each per­son on your list who buys a par­ti­cu­lar pro­duct through your affi­liate link.

Next, you’ll want to setup your OWN affi­liate pro­gram. Most peo­ple think that an affi­liate pro­gram means you offer an e-​​book for sale, peo­ple refer traf­fic, and get a com­mis­sion. But you can also offer an affi­liate pro­gram for your free­lance work!

Just get an account with an affi­liate pro­ces­sor like Click­bank, setup a pitch page explai­ning your ser­vi­ces, a pay­ment but­ton where peo­ple can pay you for ser­vi­ces. Now you’ve given your friends and busi­ness part­ners a rea­son to pro­mote your ser­vi­ces — because they get a cut of the profits!

Take affi­lia­tes to the next level — find joint ven­ture part­ners. Co-​​host an inter­view or webi­nar to pro­vide con­tent (with a link back to your web site).

Con­tri­bute to their con­tent by giving them a ridea­long pro­duct (a report of yours they can bundle with their paid pro­duct). Write a guest blog post.

Create a spe­cial offer just for that joint ven­ture that they can place on their thank you page after they’ve made a sale, where they can get com­mis­sion. Basi­cally, cus­to­mize an offer for them and make it as plug-​​and-​​play as possible.

Step 5: Brand Your­self.

Once you’ve got your niche and skill level, squeeze page to build a list, offers, affi­liate pro­gram and joint ven­ture part­ners, it’s finally time to esta­blish your brand.

But it’s not as hard as you think. If the domain name with your name is avai­la­ble, for exam­ple, Michel​For​tin​.com, regis­ter that domain name and add a blog to it.

You don’t have to make a big deal about your blog. To be honest, for the first few months I had only my resume on my blog. Later on I added a cou­ple of artic­les, but it’s not worth your time until you get some traffic.

Let’s recap…

• Step 1: Choose your niche (copyw­ri­ting, stress, blog­ging, etc.) and your skill level (free­lan­cing, affi­liate offers, site buil­ding, your own products)
• Step 2: Get an auto­res­pon­der, and add a squeeze page using a report com­pi­led from free artic­les as an ethi­cal bribe. Then use even more artic­les as follow-​​up messages.
• Step 3: Create seven offers for this list which might be affi­liate pro­grams, your own report for sale, a site for sale, or even your ser­vi­ces for sale.
• Step 4: Create an affi­liate pro­gram and joint ven­ture sys­tem to reward peo­ple for sen­ding traf­fic over.
• Step 5: Regis­ter Your​Name​.com if it’s avai­la­ble, add your pic­ture and post a cou­ple of your articles.

That’s all you need to know about branding.

If you chec­ked out my pre­vious post, “Websites That Write Your Salesletter For You,” I recom­men­ded Digg​.com as one of the sites to help you write bet­ter head­li­nes and create bet­ter hooks in sales copy.

Spe­ci­fi­cally, find popu­lar news sto­ries that grab atten­tion, and model your head­li­nes based on them using word-​​substitution.

For exam­ple: when I go to the site Digg​.com and choose a ran­dom headline…

“The Dan­gers of Not Drinking”

I can turn that into a head­line for myself.

That article title took something con­si­de­red to be bad (drin­king) and found a way to tell you that NOT doing it… is dan­ge­rous in some ways. The sub­ject in this head­line is “drin­king”… so you can just change the word “drin­king” into something that’s com­monly thought to be bad.

For exam­ple, in the weight loss niche, you might say, “The Dan­gers of Not Eating Des­sert!” In the pay-​​per-​​click niche: “The Dan­gers of Bid­ding Too Low!” All those head­li­nes demand that peo­ple read on.

Check Digg.com once per day and copy down the three or four most attention-​​grabbing or fun­niest head­li­nes you see. This will not only build up your swipe file, but will also make the head­line wri­ting pro­cess intui­tive for you.

How about a cou­ple other great head­li­nes I found?

• 5 Peo­ple Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Succeeded
• Man Steals Car to Get to Court on Time
• The Death Penalty for Porn
• Man Arres­ted Trying to Smug­gle Wife In A Spea­ker Box

Here’s how you make the Digg swipe file pro­cess a daily acti­vity. If you’re using the Fire­fox brow­ser to Digg, click the orange RSS icon to subsc­ribe to that feed, and save it into your Book­marks Tool­bar… NOT the book­marks folder.

This will add a but­ton to your brow­ser that you can click at any time, and read the list of head­li­nes without actually rea­ding the artic­les or visi­ting any web pages where it might dis­tract you.

Add the RSS feed to your browser’s tool­bar and take three minu­tes out of your day to write the best five Digg​.com head­li­nes of the day so you can become a mas­ter head­line wri­ter… and even if you don’t want to wait that long, you can still use word substitution.

When you sell anything on the inter­net… whether you do it using e-​​mail mar­ke­ting, forum mar­ke­ting, blog pos­ting… if you sell e-​​books, phy­si­cal pro­ducts, e-​​classes, even a news­let­ter… the best way to sell anything is using direct res­ponse sales copy.

But not all of us can be world-​​class copyw­ri­ters like Michel For­tin. I con­si­der myself a pretty sloppy copyw­ri­ter, and althought I can whip up a head­line, quick story, bullet point list of bene­fits, test­mo­nials, fea­ture list, gua­ran­tee and a call-​​to-​​action… I will never be a great copyw­ri­ter.  Gary Hal­bert can’t hold my atten­tion for lon­ger than a few minu­tes, I’ve never read Scien­ti­fic Adver­ti­sing, so how do I scrape by wri­ting ave­rage sales copy?

The ans­wer is: prac­tice and resour­ces. I’ve writ­ten enough sales let­ters that I know what my audience wants and how I can pre­sent it to them to maxi­mize sales.  I rarely spend more than a cou­ple of hours wri­ting even 5 or 10 page sales let­ters, and some have con­ver­ted as high as 19 per­cent for me.

Even if you don’t have the skill or the prac­tice, you can still hit the follo­wing sites to pro­duce an ave­rage sales let­ter, enough for a copyw­ri­ter to rew­rite it or cri­ti­que it.

Site #1: Digg​.com
As far as I’m con­cer­ned, Digg is THE best place to find niche head­li­nes from popu­lar, spe­ci­fic and benefit-​​oriented, but funny news items.  Go to Digg​.com, type in your niche key­word and click Search.  Then refine the search to search by the title only (so your key­word is in the title), show all sto­ries (not just front page sto­ries), and sort by most diggs (so the news items “the peo­ple” like float right to the top).  Using the Digg tech­ni­que, I hel­ped a copyw­ri­ter come up with this head­line: “Man Wins Divorce Without a Law­yer In Sight!”  Makes you want to find out more, right?

Site #2: Hard​To​Fin​dAds​.com
Michael Senoff’s Hard to Find Ads is like an ins­tant swipe file.  He shows you ran­dom ads, most of them deca­des old, writ­ten by the most famous and best con­ver­ting copyw­ri­ters that ever lived.  You can take cle­ver head­li­nes, ideas and bullet points from these ads and rew­rite them as your own.

For exam­ple, the first ad I found reads like this: “Top Medi­cal Doc­tor Speaks Out!  An Open Let­ter to Anyone Who Wants to Lose Up to 20 Pounds in Two Weeks the Easy Way.”  If you were wri­ting copy for gro­wing orga­nic toma­toes, you might say: “Top Orga­nic Gar­de­ner Speaks Out!  An Open Let­ter to Anyone Who Wants to Grow 15 Pounds of Toma­toes in 8 Weeks the Easy Way.”  Obviously you’d change the num­bers to wha­te­ver you can prove, but that head­line is bet­ter than anything I could come up with from scratch.

Site #3: Ama​zon​.com
Amazon.com isn't just for buying books. You can use Ama­zon to find out seve­ral things: what KINDS of books in your niche are hot sellers right now.  You can also choose the top selling books and most of the time take a peek at the table of con­tents.  Bingo, ins­tant list of bullet points you can hit on with the sales let­ter.  Ama­zon also gives you a list of key­words rela­ted to that book, to give you even more ideas for bonus reports, videos, and emo­tio­nal hot but­tons.  If all that wasn’t enough, you can read through reviews of the book and make a note of the ter­mi­no­logy peo­ple in that niche tend to use.

Site #4: Archive​.org
Look at one of your com­pe­ti­tors’ sites in your niche.  Then look their site up on the Internet Wayback Machine to see how their page has chan­ged over time.  The other day I was watching the TV show “Mad Men” about adver­ti­sers in the 1960’s.  In one epi­sode, the men in the ad agency are tal­king about a maga­zine ad by Volks­wa­gen.  The ad was ugly, and the car was ugly, and the guys were baf­fled because Volks­wa­gen kept pla­cing the same ad… so it must be pulling in money!

This is the inter­net equi­va­lent of that.  If you know a site pulls in lots of sales, and it was writ­ten by a copyw­ri­ter who tests the head­line, phra­sing, bullet points, call-​​to-​​action, offer, and so on… you can open up the web page as it looks now, and the web page as it loo­ked 6 months or a year ago, and see what chan­ges have been made.  If a copyw­ri­ter kept twea­king the head­line over time but kept switching back to one in par­ti­cu­lar, you know it’s a money-​​maker and you can look at what makes it such a great headline.

Site #5: Goo­gle Ans­wers, Goo­gle Alerts, and (Your Niche) Forums
These sites “should” be a no-​​brainer for any copyw­ri­ter, but so few peo­ple pay atten­tion to them and as a result write very “flat” copy.  When you’re selling something, you’re selling a solu­tion, which means you’ve fixing a pro­blem.  Peo­ple are in pain whether that pain means not having enough money, gro­wing tiny toma­toes or not being able to play the piano.  Look at what ques­tions peo­ple are asking in question-​​and-​​answer sites like Google Answers and in the forums in your niche by searching for your niche key­word plus the word “forum.”

Site #6: Goo­gle Insights, Goo­gle AdWords, Yahoo! Search Mar­ke­ting, Quantcast

Can you tell I’m a fan of Goo­gle?  The fact is, simply searching for your key­word in a search engine and seeing what ads appear on the right side is the per­fect way to see what head­li­nes pull the best.  That’s the most logi­cal place to go and works won­ders com­pa­red to pulling out a head­line or a hook from thin air.

With those six free resour­ces at your dis­po­sal, you have finally run out of excu­ses.  You can write half­way decent copy for your next promo e-​​mail, blog post, or sales let­ter just by seeing what great copy is out there, and “cop­ying” it!

When you use screen cap­ture soft­ware for rapid video creation and record Cam­ta­sia videos with Power­Points or Mind­Maps, the pre­sen­ta­tion pro­cess beco­mes super simple.

A video pre­sen­ta­tion redu­ces the rea­ding time of a blog post from 5 to 10 minu­tes, to three minu­tes or less. That means you get a wider audience, more com­ments and more exposure.

To get more mileage out of an article, con­vert into a video using this very easy method that requi­res less than one minute of pre­pa­ra­tion per article. It relies on PowerPoint’s abi­lity to import text files.

In just a few seconds, you can take your article, apply a cou­ple of sim­ple search-​​and-​​replace actions, import the indi­vi­dual sen­ten­ces as indi­vi­dual sli­des, record, and dic­tate. Here’s the exact procedure:

Step 1: Copy and paste your article (INCLUDING the title on the first line) into a text edi­tor like EditPlus that allows for a multi-​​line search and replace.

Also copy your article title as the LAST line of the article so peo­ple will remem­ber what you just told them.

Step 2: Search and replace the end of each sen­tence to force a new line so that every sen­tence appears on its own line. Replace “.” (a period) with a period, and a newline.

In Edit­Plus, go to Search -> Replace, then click the “More” but­ton to show the multi-​​line search and replace boxes. In the “search” box, type that period. In the “replace” box at the bot­tom, you can simply type a period, hit Enter, and it will add the new­line for you.

Now you should have an article where every sen­tence is on its own line.

Step 3: Save this list of sen­ten­ces as a text file. Then open Power­Point and choose File -> Open. You won’t see the file you need at first.

Go to the drop­down that says “All Power­Point Pre­sen­ta­tions” and change it to “All Out­li­nes.” Browse to the fol­der con­tai­ning the text file you saved, and dou­ble click it. This will set each sen­tence as one slide.

Step 4: Select all sli­des by hit­ting Ctrl+A, right click and change the slide layout to “Title Slide.”

Want to change the layout of the sli­des easily? Go to View -> Slide Mas­ter to change the appea­rance of all the sli­des in that pre­sen­ta­tion. Then click “Close Mas­ter View” to switch back to the presentation.

If you want to knock out a bunch of article videos at a time, simply place seven of your artic­les (with each article title at the begin­ning and end) in one big text file.

Start the Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tion, record your pre­sen­ta­tion in Cam­ta­sia. Stop, save, and start a new pre­sen­ta­tion once you’ve reached the end of the article.

Don’t have the article writ­ten? That’s no pro­blem, just use my mindmap technique to create the pre­sen­ta­tion. But if you only want to con­vert a text article into a Cam­ta­sia video, this is the fas­test way to do it.

Whether you are crea­ting blog con­tent, a sales pitch, or a pro­duct, the fas­test way to create con­tent is with video — no wri­ting required!

If you want to create a fancy-​​shmancy video like Michel and Syl­vie, create a Power­Point slide and record your screen as you talk. This is my pre­fe­rred way of recor­ding video, but if I’m in a hurry, I can whip up a mind­map pre­sen­ta­tion in one-​​third of the time as a PowerPoint.

The easiest kind of video to create is screen cap­ture video. This is where a pro­gram records your desk­top and you talk into a mic­rophone. Use Camtasia if you’re wor­king in Win­dows, or ScreenFlow if you’re on a Mac.

Both come with 30-​​day trials and there is a free ver­sion called Jing which is limi­ted to five-​​minute recor­dings, so nothing is stan­ding in the way of you crea­ting screen cap­ture videos.

Size your reso­lu­tion down to the sma­llest pos­si­ble (I reduce to 640x480), start a Power­Point slide show, record the screen, and start tal­king. (If you can’t afford $79 for Mic­ro­soft Office, use OpenOffice.) That’s all there is to it.

Pre­tend you’re recor­ding live at a semi­nar in front of a crowd and explain what you have to say in one take. No one says it has to be anything near perfect.

The only pro­blem with recor­ding those pre­sen­ta­tions is it some­ti­mes takes a while to make them. For a 20-​​minute pre­sen­ta­tion, I have to make about 15 sli­des with a head­line on each slide and three bullet points. That can take a while! So when I want to whip up an inter­view quickly, I create what’s called a “mindmap.”

What’s a mind­map? It’s basi­cally a brains­torm with thought bub­bles, like you use to draw in grade school when you took notes or out­li­ned essays. You have the root “node”… or thought bub­ble, which is the title of your pre­sen­ta­tion, and other chil­dren “nodes” (thought bub­bles) under them, thought bub­bles under those, and so on.

Because it’s on a com­pu­ter, you can expand or con­tract mind­maps to only show the one sub­ject you’re tal­king about. It’s a per­fect way to quickly orga­nize your thoughts, and makes it per­fect for audio inter­views, webi­nars, or stan­da­lone videos.

Unlike a Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tion, you can pre­sent items in any order and skip over items if you run out of time. You can also export your mind­maps into PDF or HTML form so your atten­dees get the exact notes you used to present.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Grab a mind­map­ping tool. I pre­fer FreeMind because it’s free and works on both Win­dows and Mac. (Go to that link and find the “Down­load” area.)
2. Get an idea for your 10 to 90 minute pre­sen­ta­tion, rename the root node to the title of your presentation.
3. Right click and choose “New child” to create a child node under the root node. Use this as your sub­point and create other chil­dren under the root node for addi­tio­nal subpoints.
4. For each sub­point, create a child node under that to pro­vide details… usually a cou­ple of key­words or some VERY con­cise sentences.

It’s not roc­ket science. Once you’ve crea­ted your nodes, you can drag them above or below other nodes to rea­rrange them in the map. You can drag nodes into other nodes, and so on.

I recom­mend you move all nodes to the RIGHT side of the root so they all appear as a “list”… and limit your­self to 2 to 5 chil­dren per node to keep the map from get­ting messy. Never go more than three levels deep.

I can whip up a mind­map pre­sen­ta­tion in just a cou­ple of minu­tes this way. Using mind­maps, I use seve­ral key­board short­cuts like the Insert key to add new child nodes, the Enter key to add a bunch of “sibling” nodes at once, the F2 key to rename nodes and the arrow keys and spa­ce­bar to navi­gate bet­ween nodes.

For a well thought out but easy to create pre­sen­ta­tion for videos, webi­nars and inter­views… create a mind­map and expand on each point you’re trying to make one at a time as you pre­sent. Com­bine this with desk­top recor­ding soft­ware or built-​​in webi­nar screen cap­ture soft­ware… and you’ve got your­self an ins­tant pro­duct, blog post, or interview.

Accor­ding to our poll, this is currently the most pres­sing ques­tion peo­ple have about star­ting their online business:

Q: “How do I find niche markets?”

A: We had a fee­ling that this would be a popu­lar one. And after wai­ting a few days for all the ini­tial votes to be tallied, we’re glad we were pro­ved right.

After all, the life­blood of all web based busi­nes­ses is to focus our efforts on pro­fi­ta­ble niche mar­kets! There’s just no point in spen­ding time, money, and effort on deve­lo­ping pro­ducts that just won’t be lucrative.

So, we deci­ded we wouldn’t make you guys wait another minute, and in today’s video, we’re sha­ring a resource that is 100% free and can help you zoom in on not just “new” niche mar­kets, but rather, focus in on pro­ven markets.

Your com­ments are wel­come! We’re listening.