New Florida Business Idea – Audio Books

If there is one area that is being neglected at the moment with ebooks and video taking center stage – it’s audio books.

We spend a lot of time in our vehicles. You can’t read a paperback book, ebook, or watch a video in your vehicle. What you can do is listen to an audio book on mp3.

A couple of years back I posted on IncAnswers.com about a good way for someone to break into an online business that was (and is to my knowledge, still) wide open. I told my readers to find the top blogs in a certain niche – internet marketing, and start writing query letters to see if they could turn the articles these top bloggers had written, into audio articles.

I’m going to take it a step further here and suggest that you contact top book authors – Joe Konrath comes to mind, and ask if he is interested in having you turn his very successful ebooks into audio book versions. Currently Joe is experiencing unexpected growth in the sales of his ebooks – he’s one of the new group of ebook authors that have foregone the traditional publishing path, and created their own ebooks – self published, and are raking in the cash.

Funny enough, very, VERY few of these authors are doing anything with the audio rights to their books. That’s where you might step in. Find a few people with great voices and turn their already successful books into audio books for which you share a percentage of sales. I guess I would ask for 25-35% of royalties, or you could ask a one-time payment, but royalties will come out much better for you with successful books. With unproven authors you could ask for a one-time payment to cover your service.

If you became a preferred provider for some of the top authors, you could do quite well.

Whatever happens, don’t forget to incorporate your new Florida business!

Best of luck to you!

Online Florida Business Idea – Website Design

If you can design a site for yourself, you can likely do so for other people too.

Design your Florida business site, incorporate your business, and then get friends to comment on it – truthfully. See what areas you’re lacking in – and get them up to speed. If you already have a base and can make websites that work to some degree – it doesn’t take much to learn how to do it well. When you can do it well, you can get paid for it.

We use a webmaster that lives in southeast Asia. He’s good, and he works for $10-15 per hour, since we have such a big project for him to do. You might not be able to live on that, but could you live on $20 per hour full time and live in Florida? Sure you could – near anybody could.

It doesn’t take that much to be able to program – create websites at the $20 per hour rate and call yourself a “Florida business”. Incorporate using your name, “Michael Forest, Inc.” if you want. Online businesses are low-overhead, and when you create one – you create your own job. You have no boss. You have no set hours. You have nobody to answer to except whatever client you’re working with. You can structure contact hours and methods so they are ideal for you – and stress you out little.

When you first start out as a web designer, creating sites for other Florida businesses, or just personal sites for others there are a couple of friends you’re going to want to make.

One is a graphics person. Graphics are another beast than coding a website, and they are not that easy to do at a high level. If your skills are less than 9/10 – you’ll want to get to know a good graphics person that can help you when you need professional level graphics. The other person you’ll want to find is a database programmer. Databases power sites with search functions, membership sites, etc. Database programming is NOT intuitive and you’ll need help for a while – until you “get it”. You might choose never to get it – it’s really a specialty all it’s own.

So, if you can program and build a website now – any site. Get to wrok on your skills and ramp it up a notch… a couple notches. Turn it into an online job – and incorporate your new business.

Good luck to you!

5 Tips for Jump Starting Your New Florida Business

Getting a new Florida business up and running takes some effort and some luck. Here is something you can do on the effort side of things to help your business hit stride…

1. Brand it! Initially branding takes some money in addition to utilizing all free resources available. Utilize social media as much as possible. Get a logo, business cards and brand the packaging on all your products.
2. A website is essential – and don’t skimp. If you can’t do it yourself, don’t – you’d just present a poor picture of yourself and your business.
3. Make sales. As fast as possible start making sales, small sales are fine – they are income too. Build up to bigger sales later. It feels great to make the first sale, and then successive sales.
4. Get honest testimonials from your very first buyers. Don’t wait for this. The power of testimonials is legend, and essential for new Florida businesses.
5. Do something out of the ordinary to start people talking about your new Florida business. Offer something free – but only if a puzzle is solved. Geo-cache some free stuff related to your business and have people go try to find it.

Using Podcasts (Audio) to Market Your Florida Business

Don’t let the word podcast scare you. Reading the word conjures up visions of sound engineers mixing your voice with modern sound effects and controlling 60 variables – none of which you need to worry about at all.

Podcasting is simply recording an audio file to release on your website. Marketing your Florida products or services using podcasts is another good way to reach people with your business message.

Why do podcasts work?

People love multimedia online. Youtube has shown billions of videos already and podcasts have been heard billions of times. The written word – or the typed word as is the case online – is a bit boring. It shows nothing of the person behind the message. Your message is made up of 3 components. Who you are, what you sound like – and the intonation you use… the tone of voice you use… and your message itself. If you’re only writing your message online – you’re missing the personal aspect which can add a lot to your message.

Podcasts are easy to do and easy to edit. I use Windows XP “Movie Maker” software to edit my podcasts.

What microphone do I use? My cell phone. I have a Nokia e71 phone which gives me a voice recorder software program that records brilliant sound – amazing sound, and there’s no need at all to pick up a microphone or digital recorder. However, if your phone is no good – either upgrade your phone or you can pay just over $100 USD for a good quality Sony or other digital voice recorder that have exceptional microphones for voice recording.

For myself – I think my message is most well received when I don’t script out everything I want to say and read it like I’m standing in front of my high school class. Use a natural voice and have an outline ready that reminds you of each topic you want to talk about during the podcast.

When you’re finished you upload the sound file to your computer and you can use “SUPER” or “Audacity” or some other audio conversion program to change the file to just about any valid sound file format that you wish.

Apple has a huge podcast directory – and you can find many more to submit your files to. Put links on your own website with instructions about right clicking the link and choosing “Save file as…” or “Save target as…” and saving the file to the hard drive to listen to later.

Many people like to listen to the audio files on their iPod or similar gadget. Can even use their phones now…

Try some podcasts and see if it works for you!

Using Video to Market Your New Florida Business

One of the clear focuses of online marketing groups in 2009 is encouraging companies to use video to promote their online or offline business.

Why Video?
Video marketing used to be a territory that few small businesses bothered with. The space was dominated by companies with on-staff videographers with expensive Canon GL-2 camcorders and professional lapel microphones hiring easy to look at spokespersons to spread the word about their overpriced products.

Video marketing has changed quite a bit. Anyone with a video camcorder or even a digital camera that offers 640×480 resolution video as a feature can record decent web video to promote their Florida business products and/or services online with a minimum of effort and expense.

Video production companies are invested in spreading the message that “it’s impossible to do quality video on your own without us. You need to pay us x amount of money to create a top quality video marketing message for your Florida business. Without us – you’re lost.”

Here are 6 things video production houses don’t want you to know:

1. Hosting your website with video is not any more expensive than hosting your website without video. Unless you need streaming video – and you don’t, because the rate of transfer for files has reached a point where a viewer isn’t waiting long to download the entire video anyway, you don’t need to pay a lot to host your Florida business website. Look into Bluehost.com, GoDaddy.com – two of the easiest, cheapest, and best places to find web hosting for your business at VERY affordable rates.

2. Camcorder quality must be mini dv 3-Chip in order to be any good for online web video. Wrong. As I said, a simple sony cybershot that provides 640×480 video resolution can work just fine with a tripod, good lighting and sound. A 3-CCD chip camera can record cinema quality movies that will be shown on a 20-foot screen, not a 320×240 square one foot away from your customer’s face on the computer screen.

3. Final Cut Pro or some other ultra-expensive video editing software is required to edit your videos to the point where they are professional enough for public viewing. Wrong. Even Microsoft Windows free “Movie Maker” can be used in most cases. We use no expensive editing software for editing our Florida incorporation videos on this site.

4. Videos must be compatible with other platforms and on many different sites. Truth is they already are. If you create a Windows Movie Maker file – in .wmv format, you can upload that to YouTube – where they convert it to flash for you – and it’s compatible with almost every visitor’s computer that visits YouTube. Likewise with MPG or any of the other major formats.

5. Marketing your video will be extremely expensive! Wrong. If you just put your video on YouTube and some of the other free video websites and provide some links to them from your Florida business website then people will find them and you’ll gain customers. Optimization of your description of the video on YouTube is of key importance, but it’s not brain surgery.

6. It’s difficult to create your own Florida business videos. Wrong. It’s not that difficult. In a week of research and trying and practicing, you can create better quality videos than 80% of what is on YouTube today. Most people don’t even pay attention to lighting. Professional bloggers don’t even light their videos correctly. 99% of all videos on Youtube are not done by professionals. They aren’t done correctly either.

You can create great looking videos for your Florida products or Florida services by researching basic video instructions and practicing for a week. You CAN do it on your own and market your Florida business with online video – either on your site, on YouTube, or both. Learning to create your own business video is a skill that will help your business grow over it’s lifetime.

START LEARNING TODAY!

Florida Business Multimedia Resources

This category is for posts that contain or link to multimedia resources that will help you with starting, incorporating, or growing your Florida based business.

Multimedia includes: video, mp3 or other audio, PDF, and basically anything that is other than a traditional web page. Business multimedia can include word docs, Knol posts, Youtube videos, video downloads for your iPhone, iPods, Nokias, Blackberry phones, etc. Multimedia might include Word Docs, Txt Files, RTF files, Powerpoint presentations, Google Docs, e-books, or anything else that someone creates that might help you with your Florida business.

Many downloads will be hosted here on site. If you find one of your files that is not properly credited or referenced, please email us at the address found at the top of the right column and we will correct it as soon as possible. We don’t claim to own any video or other multimedia file listed in this category except those we explicitly state as being ours.