Part 1: Making a Video to promote your Accounting Website.

It is becoming increasingly common to use Video to Enhance search engine listings. You can use this technique also to increase your CPA Website Design Search Engine Presence. We’re going to start out by showing you how to make your video.

This can get pricey if you do it wrong so let’s skip the high priced director, expensive cameras, and actors. We don’t need to make a commercial here. We just need a video.

The trick to making this into a video is using a screen capture video utility. My guy here uses Camtasia, but the price tag is pretty high.  I found an easy to use screen capture utility on download.com called Easy Screen Capture Video for 10 bucks:
http://www.download.com/Easy-Screen-Capture-Video/3000-13633_4-10288385.html?tag=mncol&cdlPid=10288386

If you don’t have all the expensive trappings, however, there is one thing you DO need… Good Content. Give the viewer something for his trouble. Choose a topic that you know about that other people don’t. Choosing a subject is easy. You get questions all the time that serve no useful purpose other than to chew into your billable hours. How can I track my return? How can I change a vendor name in my QuickBooks? Whatever.

Come up with a question, then answer it. Make it a question you can answer by showing me how on your computer. Now all you need to do to make a good, informative video is use the screen capture utility to record yourself actually doing it. Work slowly. Its much easier to edit chunks of screen time out of your video than it is to stretch them out, and if you move your mouse around too fast the screen capture utility may not track it properly.

Be careful what’s showing on your desktop while you’re recording. You don’t want anyone seeing a social security number, credit card number, email address, password etc.

Next write your script.

Finally voice over your video (Screen capture utilities won’t record sound). I can’t get too bogged down on the niceties of making videos, but I have three words for you: Windows Movie Maker. If you have a windows operating system you likely already have this program installed on your computer. If you can’t figure it out turn the job over to any kid older than 12. It really is that easy. You can record your soundtrack right into Movie Maker. Everything you need to know is right here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/getstarted/default.mspx

If you don’t have a windows operating system you’ll need to find some equivalent application.

Next week we’ll take the next step. I’ll show you how to submit your new movie to video sharing web sites. This step alone can provide good exposure for you practice, but there are even more things we can do to get your CPA website design a better search engine rank.