Now both hardware and software for video creation is cheap, simple to use, works well with dial-up as well as high speed, and is amazingly effective at increasing your opt-ins and sales, you really need to know about it. So here's a crash course. What makes video so universally accessible and popular now is the free Flash plug-in anyone can download from Adobe. Just as their Adobe Acrobat reader made e-books accessible to everyone -- PC and Mac users alike -- their Flash plug-in is bringing about a similar revolution. Add to that the fact that, according to Nielson-Netratings, 78% of home users in the USA now have high speed broadband and video is the word.
You probably already own a suitable computer. If your computer runs on Windows 98E or later, has a 400Mhz processor, or faster and 128 Mb of RAM, you're ready to roll. You will need a digital camera, but you can probably pick up one very cheaply on eBay.
On top of that you need a video editing program. The one I use has 125 special effects and 175 transitions, yet works like Microsoft Word with the familiar techniques of copy and paste and drop and drag being the only skills you need. All this, yet the software only costs $45. But, if you have Windows XP, you can save yourself that expense, as you already have some video editing software on your computer.
Proper lighting is essential, yet a trip to Home Depot or Lowes, in the USA, or (B&Q in the UK) will give you everything you need to produce really professional lighting for less than $100. Until recently, it would cost you around $500 for software to actually create the streaming video from your edited footage. But no longer. Not only do I use a piece of software costing less than 100 bucks, it has all the features of another software program I've seen for $1,000.
And it also comes with a free, fully featured teleprompter, just like the professionals on TV use. Until recently, you would need to put your video on a special video streaming server, costing around $175 a month. No longer: the highly compressed Flash file produced by my software is simply loaded, like your other files, onto your regular server. I recently timed myself and a simple streaming video can be made from scratch and be on the internet in 29 minutes! Add that to the fact that, once you have video on your site, you can start tapping into good quality traffic from some little known new sources and there really is no reason why your web site to continue to languish in the twentieth century.