How to Take a Video Screen Capture in Jing and Send it to Youtube.com

Wow, what a painstacking process this was!
It took me so long that I decided to write a blog entry about it while I am waiting for the conversion.

Here are the ingredients that I used to capture my screen and get it on youtube for sharing.

I went to jingproject.com by techsmith which is my favorite free screen capture tool (and I hope that it stays that way).

When you download and install this program you can then easily create screen videos of whatever you do. Simply talk over what you are doing while recording to create a video. You have a maximum time of 5 minutes and you can pause the video while recording.

It takes a little getting used to, but there is no editing available in jing as of this post. That is ok, we have ways to get around that for now. I personally used Sothink SWF Quicker to edit my SWF file for places where I needed to blank out sensitive information.

I could not figure out anything else I could do with this software, although my intention was to somehow edit it to fix the ending. Regardless... its good enough. This whole process is taking me longer than I would like anyway.

I also found a free flash to video encoder to then get my swf file to a youtube friendly format. I chose mpg as I know this should be small. Now be ready to wait at least 15-25 minutes. You can specify how the length of the conversion (ie you may cut some of the end of the video... wow which is exactly what I wanted to do since I somehow added 10 minutes of nothing at the end while messing with it in the previous program!) But please note that the demo version for the converter I downloaded actually ended up putting up some real annoying ads over the conversion. I would not mind in most cases, but it bounces around in the most annoying fashion all over the screen. Oh well- if I find a better tool, I will post it here. For now, at least I have my video on youtube!

Now that you know how... you should be ready to take your video and upload that baby!

By the way, I recently found out the sothink has a swf to video conversion tool which is much better than the one that i originally used. All the software mentioned here has at least a 30 day trial limit.

Futher Evaluation of BuildTraffic com and Adwords

On my site, I don't have that great of a bounce rate. I attribute this partially to the Ajax programming that does not require page loads to view further content.
Regardless, it is one of the few ways that I can see whether people are using the site. I tried to setup a goal in Google Analytics to measure how much I am converting in click throughs but it is a little bit tricker than I had anticipated.

Regardless, After running my ad campaigns with BuildTraffic.com, the Bounce Rate is 86.94 (How many people only load 1 page).

However, if I look closely, the bounce rate for just my build traffic campaign in and of itself is 98.53%. This means that hardly anyone clicked through or used the site as a result of the campaign. The average pages per user is a low 1.02. I suspect that some of this might be the same user getting the same advertisement rather than actually using the site. I kept a close watch on my stats and I am sad to say that although the traffic was targeted as promised and the numbers were fairly impressive; the conversion rates are so bad that its probably not worth it.

Now to be fair, any marketing campaign might change for you. You might have the midas touch. For instance, my campaign with build traffic would probably work better if I offered something for free rather than getting people to use my site and come back to it. At worst, I wasted my money. At best, I gained some web presence - but I cannot verify that ny of my sales through affiliates came from buildtraffic.com traffic. Again there was nothing wrong with the targeting of the users sent our ways, but I did find that our stats differed greatly from what they said that they referred to us. Even though they told us to check the server logs, I was suspicious that their javascript based system would not show up in our counters. I am not sure what, if any, limitations there are to statcounter.com or google-analytics.com (i'm running both to try and get as much info as possible), but our 3rd party counters did not match up. In one case about 1000 users didn't show up for a campaign which I found highly suspect.

I have started using adwords a bit to see whether that is worthwhile. Although I try to make money from adsense myself, I have a few affiliate programs which have higher payouts for conversions. I will try some experiments with adwords as I have already seen that the conversion rate is much better than anything with build traffic. Bottom line is if the ad is being pushed to you, chances are the user will do their best to ignore it. If you entice a prequalified user directly to a targeted landing page, you will have much better luck. That is all the time I have to post tonight. I must get some sleep now.