I submitted this article earlier today to one of the online article directories, covering some of the basic elements of making money with a video blog, and how quickly you can really be doing this, and doing it well.  The article is worth reading, especially if you aren’t familar with creating a splashcast, which is a totally free service for hosting, publishing, aggregating and monetizing ( although this part you’ve got to figure out on your own..:-) online video.  There are alot of these companies out there on the bleeding edge, doing a lot of very cool things, and splashcast does a few things very well for me that would be difficult and time consuming to do on your own.

1) They host all of the videos that you create – obviously saving a ton of bandwith and potential hosting cost (not unique – a lot of them do this)

2) You can embed html, pdf, powerpoints, text files, etc – right in the video.  Why is this relevant?  You can simply create little breaks between the video clips to offer product links, advertising opportunities, little messages that add unique and entertaining content, etc.  A very nice option to have!

3)It is not only a great looking player with the usual aggregation options ( rss, email to friend, etc for huge VIRAL marketing opportunities) it can be incredibly segmented for very specific offerings per your demographic.  For example – your main channel may be "Psychic TV" – but your individual shows can be broken down, within the player itself to be things like " Psychic Readings", " Become Psychic", " Psychic Books and History", etc.  This way you can truly break down a marketplace into small chunks, through one main channel and also have the ability to offer very specific advertising opportunities – ie – "hey, for $100 a month you can advertise on my  "psychic readings" show – which is one of 10 specific shows on my Psychic TV channel located at psychic.tv ( or whatever URL you are using to host this particular channel)

4)Lastly – and this is the most powerful element of this for me – you can simply collect all of the videos related to your market with pushbutton simplicity.  As I outlined in the very basic article below, you simple tell splashcast to "fetch" all of the videos tagged with your keywords, it will go out, bring them into your interface and allow you to pick, prune and re-order the videos you want to use for your channel.  You can import RSS items for an autoupdating channel as well based on the content on other publically available streams as well.  I love it, and am betting you will as well.

I highlighted how easy it is to make money from one of these below as well – if you need more ideas, shoot me an email. In the meantime here is a channel I really like – ( this is how I discovered it in the first place) ====> ZenTV.  They really aren’t monetizing it because, well – I guess nothing would kill a site whose purpose is the quest for authentic purpose and meaning in life with a whole bunch of text link ads or advertising banners..:-)   Most of these videos are aggregated from other providers as well – meaning, they aren’t hosting them, or creating them, rather they are pulling them from other sources.  Here is a client of mine who has a splashcast of their own stuff, a non – profit Police Organization who we took their existing videos and uploaded them, did a little light editing with Windows media maker and created a little show to "show off" some of the kids who participate in their annual charity races, etc.   Their site isn’t pretty – but the splashcast looks pretty good, and based on our analytics and feedback, the people who visit are watching, and spending  A LOT more time on thier site – and for marketers like you and I – that is what we want.  But for those of you who need to make some MONEY, simply apply the basic principles outlined above, and below – and you should have an income producing asset in less than 4 hours of total work to start.  Enjoy!

How to Quickly and Easily Make Money with a Video Blog – Even if You Don’t Have a Camera or a Clue!

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who wanted to turn his passion (a small but very active collector/hobbyist market) into a full time business from home. Having worked in a corporate setting for a long while, and with two small kids at home that he fears missing out in seeing them grow up, he decided he is ready to take the plunge and turn his hobby of twenty some years, into a bankable income. Knowing that this it the type of consulting work I do, he stopped over last week with a business plan in hand to gage my thoughts.

I loved most of his ideas, you could see the passion and tender loving care he had put into the process of coming up with the plan, but there was ( to me anyway) one major flaw: Out of a budget of approximately four thousand dollars that he had set aside for getting this up and going, he had almost 75% set aside for “video production and equipment” costs. I sort of scratched my head a little bit, and wondered what he had planned to film for three grand his first month in business?

He proceeded to explain that in his marketplace, video, especially online, was very hot, and a lot of the hobbyist sites that he visited had video and didn’t’ want to be left behind. So he was going to go out and buy and expensive camera and pay for a whole host of production work to get the same effect on his own site.

I sort of chuckled to myself and explained how EASILY it is these days to put up a fully INTERACTIVE and engaging video site, with no video camera, no expertise and without even having to have any videos of your own! There are any number of ways to get this done, and do it well, but even people who are really familiar with the popular video aggregation sites are by and large not doing it like this, so I will share it with you as well. Here is what you need to do, and it is not going to cost you ONE red penny.

Set up a “channel” for your niche market at Splashcast.net, which is a free and very powerful video service that not only will host your videos, put them into a killer attractive player that you can easily embed on your site, it will also aggregate all of the videos for your marketplace FOR you, simply by searching public media sources ( Like You Tube for example) for multimedia tagged with your keywords. Let’s say you are starting a fishing site: You would simply create an account, and either upload your own stuff to their servers, or much more likely for a newbie marketer, do a search for ALL media on You tube tagged “fishing”.

It will shoot you back a long series of thumbnail video images that you can review, and check for ones you want to include in your presentation. You can also embed your own html, pdf’s, power points and text files, for an infinite amount of ways to make your particular channel unique ( and monetized – think affiliate links to stores, free reports, re-directs and much more from within the player itself). Each player has an rss feed so that other viewers of your vids can embed them on their own pages, and even email the video link to their friends and subscribers. Talk about viral, wow! Or – what I like to do is simply create unique shows within my channel, so using our fishing analogy we might have individual shows on “deep sea fishing” , “fly fishing”, etc….This offers a whole host of segmentation possibilities that will not only cull more viewers, but also allows for unique advertiser approaches if you plan on monetizing your site through direct ads. ( Rather than Google, yahoo, etc)

I will leave you with this thought. If you are stuck on how to take that next step in getting your online business off the ground – you can have a single page site, with one large multi-media channel right smack in the middle featuring OTHER PEOPLES videos, and have it done in about 3 or 4 hours. People will come to your site, watch you stuff, and click on your ads, sign up for your list ( if you include one) and you are in business, out of the gate, and you can realistically do this from halftime of a bad game, to the final fourth quarter whistle, and be making money by the ESPN wrap up late Sunday night. I know because I have done just that, and more than once. No excuses, get going – you can do it, I promise!