Steve Wagenheim’s Home Business Blog

In this entry, I’m going to show you how to get the most out of your Xtranormal membership. This is some really cool software, but if you take it to the next level, you’ll be way ahead of the competition.

Let’s begin.

First thing you want to do is get a premium or commercial account. If you want to make money from the videos, you need a commercial account. The reason you want to go premium is because you get access to more features such as characters, settings, and so on. Trust me…it’s worth every penny.

Next thing you want to do is get yourself a camcorder of some kind. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Just something that can take movies. The reason is this. The videos themselves are fine, but imagine mixing in live human beings interacting with the characters. It takes the whole thing to a new level. Very few people will do this.

Finally, you will need some editing software to splice the live action in with the characters. If you can’t afford Camtasia, which is what I use, you can get CamStudio for free.

Okay, now, as far as making the videos, I’ve developed a process for doing this that will make the whole thing go a lot smoother. Remember, you are now taking bits and pieces of many videos and splicing them together. This can get really hairy without a system. So here it is…a very good one too.

Write the script for ALL the characters, including yourself if you’re going to be in the video. You need to have everything written in advance.

Here is my sample script from the last video I did:

Steve:

This is an XNN special news bulletin. Steve Wagenheim reporting. This just in. Home business owners reported being scammed.

Character 1:

Yeah, I was robbed.

Character 2:

Me too.

Steve:

Tell me, just what exactly has gone down?

Character 1:

Some jerk promised me that I’d be making all this money if I bought his crappy e-course. Instead, all I got was a load of horse manure.

Steve:

Could you be more specific?

Character 1:

It was crap.

And so on…

Okay, you will notice that the dialog is back and forth, just as it would be in a normal conversation. However, you don’t want to record each piece of the conversation one piece at a time. For a long script, that’s a nightmare.

So what you want to do is this. Type in ALL the dialog for A character and create a whole video for THAT character. That way, when you import it, all you have to do is edit each segment for the specific dialog you want.

Xtranormal has an option where you can upload your video to YouTube. Do it. THEN, use one of those online downloaders to download the video to your PC.

Here are two that I use.

http://www.mediaconverter.org/

http://www.forinside.com/

After you have each character completed, including your own character, import each video into your editing software.

What you then want to do is go through your script, line by line. Find the WHOLE video that contains THAT dialog and drag it to the time line. You’ll have more than you really need. This is where the editing comes in.

What you have to do is delete all the dialog BEFORE and AFTER the dialog that you actually want to appear at THAT part of the time line. The software makes this fairly easy to do.

After you’ve finished with that piece of dialog, move down to the next piece in your script and repeat the process.

For a long script, it DOES take some time. But trust me…the end result is well worth it.

When you’re done, compile the finished video into whatever format you want. If it’s for YouTube, I suggest FLV. It’s smaller than SWF.

Here is the latest video I’ve done so you can see how it looks when it’s all finished.

I’ll have more great Xtranormal tips for character creation and a whole lot of other stuff coming soon.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

This article probably applies more to Internet marketers who are marketing to other marketers, but can be applied to just about any niche. When I talk about preaching to the choir, I’m referring to marketing to people who are a little more knowledgeable about the subject than most. In those cases, you might want to take a different approach because they might not need quite as much info as somebody who is totally green. Let me try to explain so that I don’t end up confusing you totally.

Let’s say that we’re selling a make money online product. Let’s also say that our target market is somebody who is just coming onto the Internet. They know absolutely nothing at all. In that case, we might include statements in our marketing message like, “You really CAN earn a good living from the comfort of your home.” This is to reinforce the possibility. Many new people will be skeptical. We need to remove that skepticism.

On the other hand, let’s now say that our target market is somebody who has been at this for quite a while and is maybe even having some success. Our message should be about increasing their success. So we might have something in our message that reads, “You can easily increase your earnings to thousands more per month with just these few simple steps.” This is going to appeal to the person who is already at this and trying to improve.

Point I’m trying to make is this. Not everybody is brand new out of the gate, and thus should not be treated as such. For one thing, they’re going to think that the product you’re pushing isn’t for them. They’re going to think it’s too basic. This is why I get so many emails from really bright marketers that say, “If you’re brand new, this probably isn’t for you.” They want to make it clear that this information is NOT for new people. This narrows down your market. And while it might actually decrease CTR, it will INCREASE conversions for the people who DO check out your offer.

Okay, got it. If you’re marketing to an established crowd, don’t preach to the choir. They already know the basic benefits of working from home and so on. Get right down to what the product will do for them to help them improve their business.

To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html

I remember, as a kid, growing up and listening to Paul Harvey and “The Rest of the Story.” It was the most fascinating radio show you’d ever want to listen to. Paul would talk about some small event or piece of information and then he would reveal some things that you didn’t know, or as he called it…the rest of the story. This is actually a technique that article writers can use as well. This article will explain how.

Top begin with, in order to use this tactic, you have to write about something that has little known information. You want the main item of the article to be something that most people might already know so that they can identify with it. If they don’t get the original point, the rest of the story isn’t going to have much meaning for them.

For example, let’s say you were writing articles on New York Mets history. In this particular article, you were writing about the only Met to ever get two hits for two teams in the same day. Now, true Mets fans will probably know that this was Joel Youngblood who was traded after game one of a double header to Montreal and then got a hit for the Expos that same day. What they may not know is this. The two hits he got that day were off of two hall of fame pitchers, Ferguson Jenkins and Steve Carlton. This could be uses as the material for “the rest of the story.”

It’s a great tactic and works well for one very good reason. It keeps the reader interested. It makes them want to find out what the rest of the story is. See, when you give somebody a topic that they’re already interested in and an event or story that they’re familiar with, when you then go on to tell them that there is something that they might not know about the event, they’re going to want to know what it is. It’s human nature.

Naturally, this type of article is not one that you’re going to write often. If you’re writing about a health problem or cure, it’s going to be a little hard to incorporate this strategy. But trust me, when the opportunity arises that you CAN use it…do so.

It will keep your reader hanging on every word.

To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim

Want to write articles that get people’s attention and can earn you up to $200 per article written? Then check out my Complete Article Writing And Marketing Guide that you can find at http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/tcawamg.html – This is my own book that I wrote from over 30 years of writing experience.

Does anybody remember the days of MFA sites? If you don’t know what MFA stands for, then probably not. If you do, then you know what happened to them. They’re deader than Davy Jones. The marketers who put all their money into MFA sites literally went broke. They had nothing to fall back on and had to start all over again from scratch. If you’re one of those who puts all your effort into just one thing, you might want to read this article. It could just save you from ending up like poor old Davy.

Everybody talks about diversification. Wonder why? It’s because the last thing you want as a businessman is for all your hard work to go up in smoke because you put it all into just one thing. Yes, I know, there are some really great products out there that you’d think will stand the test of time and be around forever. DLGuard is one I can think of off the top of my head. I mean who doesn’t want their digital downloads protected and get a great automated delivery system in the process?

But how many DLGuards are there? I can’t think of two many off the top of my head and I’ve been in this business for over five years. The truth is, many products in the IM niche have limited life spans, even some of my own. That’s why I’ve created a number of products so that if one doesn’t sell or stops selling, for whatever reason, I don’t have to worry about it. I always have the other ones to pick up the slack.

Not only that, but I have also diversified and gone off into other niches besides IM. I’m not going to reveal them here, but they’re doing quite well for me. I hope that someday they’ll do well enough so that if the IM niche should ever dry up for me, I won’t have to worry. I’ll have the other ones to pick up the slack. Knowing that you have something to fall back on is a great feeling, whether it be another product or another brand new niche altogether.

So, are you putting all your chickens in one hen house? If you are, you might want to start thinking about diversification. I’d hate for you to end up like those marketers with the MFA sites. It was not a pretty picture.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html

I don’t know why people say that email marketing is dead. I’ve been doing it for over six years now and it’s as healthy for me now as it was back in January of 2003. Maybe the reason that people aren’t having success with their email marketing campaigns is because they’re simply doing too many things wrong. In this article, I’m going to share three simple tips to help you improve the conversions of your emails. I hope you will find these helpful.

For starters, and this is a BIG thing, you really need to make sure that your emails are going out the way you intend them to. Most autoresponder companies will allow you to send a test email to yourself. Do it! Make sure that everything is just so. Click on the link to make sure it’s working. Check out the email in different mailers to make sure it displays properly. Aweber has a formatter that shortens each line to a certain number of characters for those mailers that don’t read beyond a certain point. These seem like little things but can make a big difference if people either can’t read your emails or can’t get to your site because the link doesn’t work.

Another thing you should do is combine content with the sales pitch. Most people join your list because they want to be informed of things. They want to learn. They don’t want to be constantly pitched to, email after email after email. After a while, they’re going to tune you out and you will begin to see your conversions slowly go down the tube. Mix in some helpful tips. If you write articles, like I do, point your list to some of these articles in the email itself. If the article is relevant to what you’re selling, there is a good chance that you’ll make quite a few sales in the process.

Finally, learn to read your list. If you’re emailing everyday and you’re getting many people opting out, then that’s a sign that your particular list doesn’t like to be emailed that often so you might want to cut down. If, on the other hand, many people write to you asking why you don’t send more news letters, then maybe you need to ramp things up a bit. You have to learn how to read your list and understand what it is they want. Once you do this, you’ll see that conversions will increase because you’re keeping them around longer.

There you have it. By doing these three simple things, you can greatly increase the conversions of your email campaigns.

To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

I love the things that people complain about. Today at the Warrior Forum, somebody brought up about how they don’t like these videos of people sitting on their couch or in their car, talking about their great life because of Internet marketing. He called them “sofa videos” or something like that. Well, the question is simple. Does all this glitz work? The answer may surprise you as well as make you very, very angry.

In short, it does. If it didn’t, marketers wouldn’t use it. Think back to when you were a kid (for me it was a long time ago) and think about all those TV commercials you used to see of some guy driving down the street in his car talking about the great life he has because of some product. Marketers wouldn’t have spent all that money on these commercials if they didn’t work. But why do they work? The answer to that question is also very simple.

People do not buy with their heads. They buy with their hearts. Nobody buys a new PC because it has all this great processing power, super huge hard drive and dynamite graphics card. They buy that PC because they want to get their work done faster, so they can go out and have fun sooner, be able to store all those photos they took of the family get together and want to play the coolest video games. They don’t care about the specs. They care about the fun that they can have BECAUSE of the specs.

Same is true with make money opportunities. People buy into all these make money products not because they tell them that they’ll learn PPC or article writing or whatever. They buy into them because they want to go out driving in their OWN Porsche or have their OWN big screen TV and super sound system or whatever it is that they want in their lives. They want the good life. And when they see somebody else living that good life, they believe that IF they buy their product THEY’LL have the good life too.

When marketers finally understand this, they’ll stop complaining about things that don’t apply to them. They don’t like these videos? Or more bluntly, YOU don’t like these videos? Guess what? Then YOU are not the target market…so get over yourself.

Here’s an idea. Instead of complaining about all these things that you DON’T like, how about making a note of them and see what it is that the big boys are doing that’s raking in the cold hard cash every month.

Maybe then you’ll have a bank account that’s worth more than a few pennies to look at each month.

It’s just a thought.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html

I know this is going to sound like a really odd question, but as an Internet marketer, do you know who you’re selling to? If not, it could be costing you a lot of money. Why is that? Well, there are a lot of subtleties about selling that really DO involve understanding WHO your target market is and how to reach them. This article is going to try to explain in some detail with examples. Hopefully, you’ll get what I’m talking about.

Let’s start off with the music market. More specifically, let’s target that individual who wants to play guitar. No, let’s make it even MORE specific. He wants to learn to play rock guitar. Actually, we can do even better than that. He wants to learn to play rock guitar lead. He’s not interested in being a background guitarist. He wants to be right up there in the spotlight.

Okay, what does this tell us about this person? Most likely, he wants to be cool and thought of as cool. He wants the attention of all the ladies out there in the audience watching him. He probably wants other musicians to watch and listen to him play and tell him how great he is. In other words, he’s looking for attention…lots of it.

So in communicating with him through your articles, sales letters, videos, or whatever medium you’re using to reach your target market, you want to stress how cool learning these guitar leads is going to make him look and sound. For example, when making a video, you might want to preface the actual lesson by saying something like, “Let me tell you, you learn these licks and you’re gonna sound absolutely so awesome that everybody’s jaws are gonna be dropping to the floor.” You have to stress how cool they’re going to look and sound. This is the big benefit, for them, to getting your product and learning this stuff.

In other words, you’re appealing to the person’s mind. Nobody cares about the technique that you’re going to teach them that it’s world renowned or whatever. All they care about is how cool they’re going to sound.

Got it?

What about the poor guy suffering from migraine headaches who can’t take aspirin? What if you had a natural remedy that would take is headache away in a flash? In that case, you don’t need to be fancy. He doesn’t care about looking or sounding cool. He just wants his pain to go away. So something like, “Try this natural home remedy for just a day and I can almost promise you that your migraine will go away and you’ll be pain free” will be more than enough to have him running for the order button.

Understand what your target market wants and give it to them in words that they understand and respond to. Yes, it’s THAT simple.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Sick and tired of spinning your wheels trying to make a buck online? Visit the products page of my blog at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/products and get a 6 figure education for pennies.

Too many article writers are under the impression that they can write the same way for every market that they are writing for. People respond differently based on who they are and what they are looking for. Hank Hot Stuff, who’s looking for a way to score with the hot chick next door, is going to need a different style of article than Stan Sickly who’s simply looking for a treatment for his sinus headaches. You need to put yourself in the place of the person who is going to be reading your article and THEN decide how to communicate with them.

For example, let’s say you’re writing an article on how to write killer rap tunes. For starters, you have to understand who your audience is. For the most part, it’s going to be young African Americans who want to get into writing rap. You need to understand how they think, how they talk and how they feel. Your words have to include the colloquiums that they’re accustomed to using. Case in point, the way I am writing this article would NOT appeal to them AT ALL. This formal style will send them running for the hills.

On the other hand, if I were writing an article on indigestion and how to combat it naturally, using sentences like, “Hey man, you wanna get rid of that burn in your gut? Try some of this stuff on for size. It’ll have you purring like a kitten and howling at the moon like a dog in heat” will send them away from your article faster than a speeding bullet…and probably laughing their tails off in the process. Your credibility as a health expert will have just gone out the window as well.

Okay, the above is an extreme example. I realize that. It’s a lot easier to tone down an article than it is to liven it up. The hard niches to write for are the entertainment ones. You really need to have a flair for the dramatic as well as a great sense of humor. It is why I rarely write for those niches…which brings me to one last point.

Know your limitations. If you know that you’re not going to be able to pull off the lingo to write for the rap crowd, don’t do it. You’ll only end up sounding like a fool. Play to your strengths. There are plenty of niches out there that are suited to YOUR style of writing.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to write articles that get people’s attention and can earn you up to $200 per article written? Then check out my Complete Article Writing And Marketing Guide that you can find at http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/tcawamg.html.

Affiliate marketing has to be the easiest and cheapest ways to make a living online. Think about it. You don’t have to create products, you don’t have to make sales pages, you don’t have to recruit an affiliate army…heck all you have to do is find a good product and promote it. But if you’re an affiliate marketer and you’re doing this ONE thing…you are heading for disaster. Know what it is? Keep reading and you’ll find out.

But first…a story. Hey, I’m old…I’m entitled. When I first started affiliate marketing, I was green. I mean REALLY green. I had no idea what I was doing. So I went for some help. Believe me, I needed it. Anyway, I ran into this retired school teacher from Indiana. I kid you not. I almost knocked her on her behind. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a joke. Anyway, she took me under her wing and gave me some good advice. One piece of that advice was to get this book on affiliate marketing. So I did and read it.

Well, I tested it out and son of a gun, it worked. I was shocked. No, I was stunned. Nothing I had ever done had worked like that before. Well, I was so excited about my results that I told everybody I knew about the book. I showed them proof of my results. I even wrote up a little review on what the book was about and what people would learn if they got it. I didn’t leave out a thing.

As a result, my sales skyrocketed. Why? Because I honestly found something that worked. I was proud of my accomplishments because of it and because of my pride and enthusiasm, I got others excited as well. I was making sales like crazy…as an affiliate marketer…selling this simple $20 book. Go figure.

Okay, know what the key to my success was, outside of learning a few basic marketing principles? I was honest about what I found. I not only told what I liked about the book but I told what I didn’t like too. I left nothing out. I didn’t want people going around calling me a liar.

And there you have it folks…the one thing that IF you do it, it will ruin you for good.

It’s called lying.

Trust me…it WILL catch up to you eventually. And once word gets around that you’ve lied to sell a product, you can forget about selling any other products ever again. Nobody is going to believe a word you say.

Want to see if I’m right?

Try it at your own risk.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of being an affiliate failure? Want to turn yourself into an affiliate assassin like I am? Want to land in the top 20 of every affiliate promotion you tackle just like I do? Check out my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/affiliateassassin/index.html and start earning a solid income as an affiliate marketer.

As article marketers, we have a lot of tools that we can take advantage of in order to take our article marketing to the next level and achieve some real success. The key to using these tools is to use them and NOT abuse them. This article is going to explain as clearly as it can.

One of the best tools any article marketer can want to use is this very directory where you’re reading this article. EzineArticles is one of the top directories on the Internet. It has a high PR and many people read the articles posted here. However, this isn’t the wild west. There are rules to using this, and any other directory. It is important that you read those rules, understand them, and follow them. Failure to do this can result in you getting banned from using the directory. This can cost you big time in the long run.

Another tool that the article marketer has at his disposal is the article submitter. These submitters make it so that you can submit your article to more than one directory at a time. Some sites actually provide services that will do this. This can really cut down on the time it takes to get your articles out there. But these tools can be abused as well. Submitting tons of articles at one time can end up having serious consequences…not the least of which is having them end up in Google’s sandbox.

Finally, there are the actual sites that article marketers send prospects to. Today, we have so many options. Aside from sending people directly to a sales page, you can send them to blogs with reviews of products, web 2.0 sites, squeeze pages and many other platforms including video sites. With so many options, there is no need to send somebody to a site that has absolutely no value at all other than to maybe get an AdSense click or two. I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve seen that have the absolute worst content. To me, that’s abusing the tools you’ve been given.

Article marketing can be a wonderful thing. It can also be abused.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Sick of not getting your articles read? Fed up with resource boxes that don’t get the job done? Want to write articles that will turn you into a killer article marketer? Get my book on article writing and marketing located at http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/tcawamg.html – This is my own book written from over 30 years of writing experience.