These days there is so much going on with video on the internet. I can remember back in my early days on the net when we had to limit a video clip to ten seconds or so and a tiny little frame (160x120) because anything more would take forever to download on a dial up connection. I used to go to the Real Networks convention every year to find out what the latest codec was for making video better for streaming. (I don't even know if they even do that anymore, seems they are more in the music biz these days)

It all seems sort of funny now, spending all those hours editing and encoding tiny little ten second clips of some video for the web. Now days anyone can load any amount of video up to the web for viewing by everyone and it does not even have to cost you anything. Internet video has come of age and then some.

One of my early web sites ended up costing us more money than planned just because we filled up the company server with so much video that they had to buy more servers which were expensive in those days. NOW you don't even have to host the video yourself or pay anything for it. With all of the video sharing sites in the market you can serve your video up in many different places (think links, think social).

It really is quite amazing when you think about it.

Now to the point. You must use video in your business. It is essential these days. It works.

AND it is easy to do and cheap to produce. Trust me here. No longer do you need to be from Hollywood to do video for the web. Now to avoid it being pure garbage you should spend at least a little time in the planning and execution of the video but never the less you can get video that promotes your business on the web very easily.

The easiest thing to do is to take your product and do what we call a screen capture recording with a voice over. Basically you walk the customer through a tour of your product while capturing the screen on video. There are a variety of tolls to do this with ranging from the free to ones that cost $250. Camtasia at $250 is at the high end but man does it rock in terms of options, ease of use and quality output. On the other end is CamStudio (camstudiodotorg) which is free and can do the basic recording.

Now for video recordings other than screen capture you can use your cell phone if it can record video, a camcorder with USB or Firewire connections to make simple live recordings of you talking about your product. Customers like to see and hear you. It helps in their buying process. Trust me on this one.