In this post, I’m going to take you behind the scenes of my business and show you how to use Jing. This is some of the backend operational stuff that most marketers wouldn’t let you see.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of a cool tool called Jing? Well, it’s basically a free software from the makers of SnagIt and Camtasia Studio, TechSmith, that enables you to make, save and upload short videos in a snap. It really is so simple to use. I can plan, record, save and upload a 5 minute video on Jing in less than 10 minutes, so it makes it the perfect tool to record short videos for outsourcers to illustrate what you mean.
The major benefit I get from Jing is explaining how I want things to appear when asking my outsource team to do jobs which helps me focus on keyword research, content and product creation and marketing my own or affiliate products.
All of these tasks are income generating tasks which deserve more attention and focus than tasks like PhotoShop and WordPress coding. To be honest, I’m really rubbish on PhotoShop and it would simply take me too long to knock these things up due to the learning curve that I’d need to do.
Before I found Jing, I would explain things using Word documents with arrows in and almost long winded explanations for what I was expecting so I stood the best chance of getting the best possible result back from my outsourcing team.
An extract from the document would look something like this…
As you can see, the annotations within the document looks pretty congested, very detail focused and can be a bit frustrating for the marketer to convey EXACTLY what trhe vision is they’re after.
But then in steps Jing and look what happens next…
I plan and rearrange my screen for the video, record the video and finally save and upload the video to my Amazon S3 account, so the outsourcer can get a full playback experience.
I use a great tool called CloudBerry for the PC which enables me to manage my Amazon S3 account easily. If you’re not using Amazon’s S3 hosting service, start today! You amd your customers will experience a much better playback for your media.
The sound quality with Jing is a little suspect, especially using the free version, however I don’t intend to create products using Jing. It’s simply a much faster alternative to using Camtasia as Camtasia has a whole load of production afterwards to get the video into the most suitable file format, etc.
Take a look a this video to see how I explained the work to my outsourcer using a quick Jing video. Oh, and take note of how quick the page loads and the video runs.
As you have seen, the video recording is literally 3 minutes and it’s easier to explain those things that sometimes are just too awkward to explain using standard Word docs and too time consuming to create Camtasia videos to explain them.
The other benefit of using Jing is that you’re able to build a much better relationship with your outsource team which benefits you because you tend to get more flexibility from them and they tend to have a desire to do a great job as a result. Of course with a more accurate explanation of what it is you want, you get a better end result.
To think that Jing is free is amazing. Sure, you could upgrade to the paid version for just $15 a year which is a steal by the way.
If I had any criticisms of Jing, then it would be the audio quality is suspect (with the .swf files) and it only allows you to do 5 minute videos at a time.
In some respects, that may be a blessing in disguise because it focuses your mind on delivering your requirements to your outsource team with increased specificity without gabbling on too much about stuff that doesn’t really matter. Of course, you could record more than one video to explain your requirements if you needed that much detail.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and insight into the back end operations of my business. Most of all, I hope you get Jing today and put it to use in your business. It will save you masses of time, pain and frustration allowing you to focus your time and energy on your income generating activities.
Let me know any other tools you use for quick video recording that would be great for outsourcing.
To Your Online Success,
The Profit Share
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I liked your post. I have never used outsourcing, so it was interesting to see how you interacted with them. Thanks
Wayne,
Jing sounds like a really awesome app. How it handles videos can be so helpful to the people who need those features, makes it so much easier. Thank you for sharing. I’ve been really enjoying reading your blog. And thank you for the download link.
Andrew
Andrew invites you to read First BLog Post
Hi Andrew,
Yes, Jing is a great tool to make quick videos to demonstrate something because the production time is much less than Camtasia or Screenflow.
Wayne Lambert invites you to read Blogging Strategy: How to Blog Strategically