Membership sites are becoming increasingly popular these days due to the fact that some initial efforts can reap fantastic returns for many years to come. The Internet space has been a free space for many years now. However, there is an evident trend that indicates that a large number of websites shall be converting from free to paid websites.

This trend is becoming popular due to the fact that many website owners feel confident that the consumers are adequately hooked on for them to pay for the services that were earlier free. Pay-for-content sites, in fact, have already taken off in a big way. The Online Publishers Association has revealed that Internet users in the US are already paying more than (more…)

OK, so you’ve signed up for an ExtremeMember.com account and now you want to add video to your site. You’ve heard different things about how to do video and different options but you’re just not 100% sure how to go about it.

I want to take some time now to debunk some of the video myths and get to the point on what to do and what not to do so you get good quality video that downloads SUPER fast so your members and visitors have a good experience with video on your EM site.

I’m somewhat biased towards the Apple Mac platform, so if you’re a PC user bear with me and I’ll try and accommodate best I can. I’ve used both platforms for many years (around the past 20 years) and I definitely prefer Mac’s for their ease of use, especially when it comes to graphics, audio and video + the software is normally always cheaper.

As far as being a video master or guru that we are not! We do not know everything about the technical aspects of video for that you may need to go to school or some other resources on the net. So if you have something to mention please do so in the comments below. This post is really aimed to be useful to people who don’t know how to go about getting a good result with video. Not meant to give you a Bachelors degree in Video Editing

There’s really only 2/3 types of video that I want to deal with they are:

1. Motion video (e.g. video camera)

2. Screen Capture / Screen Cast videos (e.g. Camtasia / Snapz Pro X etc)

or a bonus one 3. Hybrid (e.g. just a combination of both Motion video and Screen Capture)

Motion video will normally come off your video camera in a variety of formats e.g. .mov .avi etc They’re all standard formats that pretty much any decent editing program can use.

For Screen Capture there are many options. We currently use ScreenFlow (MAC only) $99. It is awesome and has some great features that Snapz Pro X below doesn’t have.

We have used Snapz Pro X (MAC only) $69 and on the PC we’ve used Camtasia (MAC / PC) $299. Yes, there are lots of other ones out there, we’ve tried and purchased ‘many’ of them BUT these are the best ones we recommend and use.

If you’re going to use Camtasia make sure you save it as a .avi file not in Camtasia’s native format, I think it’s called .camrec or something like that. AVI files can be used everywhere, CAMREC files can be used ONLY in Camtasia.

Some other software tools I use: iMovie (on the MAC it comes free), Final Cut Pro (MAC: expensive and full professional editing suite), e.g. iMovie is great if I have recorded some Screen Capture in ScreenFlow or Snapz Pro X (which both output a .MOV file) I can just import that directly into iMovie and then add other effects or music etc. very very easily – drag and drop stuff.

You can also use iMovie to record video e.g. basic video using the iSight camera built into MacBook’s and MacBook Pro laptops. Using iMovie you can also import any other video camera footage (standard stuff unless you’re using some super high end cameras like RED you will be fine – you’d need Final Cut Pro to use RED video but that is well beyond the scope of this post).

OK, so if you’re doing
Screen Capture Recordings:

MAC 1st Preference: ScreenFlow ($99) produces .MOV Files (worth every cent!)

MAC 2nd Preference: Snapz X Pro ($69) produces .MOV files

PC: Camtasia ($299) or find a cheaper one (like CamStudio which is FREE) out there (there are lots) as long as you can OUTPUT a single .FLV file that is good quality and good file size e.g. it’s say 2MB per Minute of screen capture, so if you have a 10 minute screen capture and the .FLV file size is 20MB you’re OK. Yes, there’s variations on this e.g. if you have lots of movement or it’s a hybrid where you use motion video as well it will be bigger but that’s just a ball park.

For Video Editing:

MAC: iMovie (beginner – intermediate and it’s FREE when you buy a Mac). If you’re a hard core video dude then use Final Cut Studio.
PC: Camtasia or something like Adobe Elements Premiere (beginner/intermediate), Adobe Premiere (intermediate/pro)
The main thing that you want to be able to do after you’ve done all the fancy stuff is OUTPUT a SINGLE .FLV (to use on the web), .AVI or .MOV file (that can be converted later to a .FLV file to be used on the web. If your editing program can’t create one of those file types then I’d look around for one of the other ones.

I’m going to show you one of the BEST video conversion software programs around which works AWESOME if you have a .MOV or .AVI file or infact any of these: .dv, .mov/.qt, .mpeg, .mp4, .3gp,.asf/.wmv we should be fine and the beauty about it is it’s cheap. This company was recently bought out by Google, so you know they must be doing something right if Google wants them.

So you’ve got your video / screen cast done now. You’ve either got a nice quality .FLV file ready to get on the web OR you’ve got some other format like .MOV, .AVI or one of the other fancy ones above.

If you’ve got a program that spits out a nice quality, ‘not excessively large’ FLV file then don’t worry about this part.

File Conversions:
MAC: On2 (MAC/PC) On2 Flix Standard ($39) or On2 Flix Pro ($249). Flix Standard will do the job or if you want to do Batch Processing then get the Pro version. I bought the Standard one and then got the Pro version because I had hundreds of videos to do. Well worth it and the result is AMAZING! Very Very Very Impressive. Small file sizes and GREAT quality.

One quick example. I had a client who had some issues with their video and needed some help. I checked it out and they had Jumbo videos. From memory they were .MOV files. Anyway, I ran them through On2 and the file size went from being about 95MB down to 40MB – Quality was awesome too.

PC: On2 as above, or another little beauty is FlashVideoStudio ($49.95). Check it out. It gives an excellent result. Batch processing built in which makes it alot cheaper than On2 Flix Pro, but I still think On2 Flix Pro is slightly better.

Now we have a small .FLV file and we’re ready to get it on the web.

If you’re on the PC (Not MAC) then I have a great piece of PC only software that you may like to try if you’re wanting to get great FLV files. It’s called Flash Video Studio.

NOTE: we do NOT have 4 different javascript files, .swf files or other junk that programs like Camtasia can spit out. All we want and need is a SINGLE .FLV FILE If you don’t have that then go back and don’t proceed. I will show you in a minute how to handle the Camtasia files for each video if you really want to go that way but personally I think it’s a pain in the butt.

Getting it on the Web:
IMPORTANT: Things you need

1. AmazonS3 account – It’s free to sign up. Yes there are ‘very minimal’ costs for storing your videos on Amazon.

2. Amazon CloudFront account - Make sure you have your AmazonS3 account up and running first then get this one. Yes, there are minimal costs for running CloudFront too, but it’s very well worth it.

3. EzS3 account – This is where you manage all your cool video/audio players. It links up with your Amazon account and you can get your Amazon Buckets on the CloudFront CDN (Content Delivery Network) This is how we get your videos flying down.

I see alot of people totally screw this up where they just don’t get it right including big time internet marketers. When you’re videos are on the CloudFront network they will be shoved super fast down that internet pipe (that’s tech talk for saying your content is cached on different server locations through out the world so your vistors and members get it from the closest location to them = faster download), you’re visitors and members will be singing your praises for time and eternity! If you don’t understand it, just believe me.

Then once you have joined EzS3 you can download their desktop uploader and upload your FLV files direct into your S3 account ready to create cool players. Then you copy and paste the code on your site. They have all the info you need on their site to do it right. There service is $20/mo. and well worth it. I’ve used it now for ages just after they started up and haven’t looked back. Infact it was John B. from New Zealand one of our clients who recommended it to me way back! Thanks John.

Now, I’ve had people lots of people ask about security so only their members can watch their videos and they not be passed around to the world.

This is a good question/point. There’s a couple of simple things you can do here to ensure that your content will be kept on your domain and not passed around all over the web for free.

1. Cloaking the source URL of your video. Using EZS3 it doesn’t disclose the actual source URL of your video. So that’s a good start.

You get code like this to paste into your site:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var playerhost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://www.ezs3.com/secure/” : “http://www.ezs3.com/players/”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + playerhost + “flv/video/E07D68855-1322-1D54-B15A262E7A6FE7A9.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>

So that’s the first goodie.

2. Video Player Security – Protecting your videos so they’re only viewable on your domain. This stops those smarty pants who decide they will just copy and paste that code above onto their site and play the video from there.

As you can see you simply enter your domain (in this case http://www.photoshopzoo.com) into the box and that will LOCK the video so it can only be played on that domain.

3. Protect your page! This part is super easy and all handled via the back end of your Extreme Member site. You can either protect the whole page so no-one can see any part of it unless they’re logged in or you can protect part of the page possibly the part that has the video.

The End…

Feel free to leave any comments below. We hope you find this helpful and useful in your “Video on the Web” adventure!

If you’re an iPhone user and you’re on the go wishing you could update your Wordpress / ExtremeMember.com sites as you go then this could be the answer to your prayers.

Wordpress have released v. 2.1 of the new iPhone app and it seems to be working great (from my ‘limited’ use).

You can add, update, edit any pages or posts, approve comments and add multiple sites (not just .wordpress.com sites ANY e.g. EM sites! using this cool app. Personally if you wanted to create a fancy page I wouldn’t use this app to do it given there is no visual / WYSIWYG editor included so you’re working with the raw HTML code. Also, if you were going to write a lengthy post or page then unless you like typing huge amounts of content on your phone this could get annoying too.

Here’s the demo video from http://iphone.wordpress.org/

Click for more info: http://iphone.wordpress.org/

If you would like to ‘Hide’ your Cancel button from your members when they login to your membership site simply turn on this option located here: SETTINGS > EM SETTINGS

We’ve added this option taking the feedback from our members who didn’t want their members to be able to just cancel by logging into their account. So now you have the option to ‘Hide’ the cancel option. This way your members will need to contact you to cancel their account.

We’ve just added a new feature to the Affiliate Module to allow you to either turn on or off the ‘New Sale Notifications’ which is an automated email that notifies your affiliates when they have a new sale.

This is great if you want to pump up your affiliates so they know immediately when a new sale has been made.

The automated notification lets the user know they have earned an affiliate commission and it includes their commission amount (determined by the fixed amount or percentage that you have previously set for them), the membership product it is for, the time of the sale and a link where they can check their statistics if they want. We hope you enjoy this new feature for the Affiliate Module.

You will need to have the ‘Advanced’ account level to have this feature enabled.

To find this option just go to the ‘Affiliates’ Menu > ‘Affiliate Options’ and scroll to the bottom.

To subscribe to the EM RSS feed is simple and can be done directly from your web browser.

Simply go to www.extrememember.com Then in the browser / address bar click on the RSS logo (this may vary in design depending on the web browser that you’re using)

Click on the RSS logo

You will then see this:

If you want to subscribe to the feed for posts then click the top option: Extreme Member RSS Feed.

That’s pretty much it! A great way to keep up to date and not miss any important updates.

You may have decided that you would like to have a single header image for the top of your site rather than the split header which requires 2 separate images. We’ve got a work around for the standard settings in One-Theme for you…

e.g. This… (Specimen A – Single Header)

Rather than this… (Specimen B – Split Header with 2 images)

As you can see above Specimen B is the standard header setup and for many people this is great. You can replace both the images on the left and the Right (fishes) with whatever you like.

Simply go to the ONE THEME > IMAGE UPLOADS menu, follow the image size specifications for the best results. If you start using completely different size images it will not look good. So follow the recommended sizes in there.

Now if you want to have a Single Header image then you will need to FTP up a new ‘header.php’ file that we have prepared for you. Click here to download the header.php file that you need (RIGHT CLICK TO SAVE FILE AS to save it to your computer), You will then need to upload it to the /htdocs/wp-content/themes/one-theme directory and OVERWRITE the existing header.php file in there.

Once you have done that all that is left is to upload you header (single header image).

Go back to One-Theme > Image Uploads (your header image will need to be 898 pixels wide and 141 pixels high. Upload it to the Header Logo section once you’ve done that check the public site to view it.

If you decide that this is too complicated for you we can do it for you for $20 then all you need to do is supply us with your header image 898 x 141px

Hi guys, just a quick one. We’ve just been testing the ‘Post Alert’ (automated email notifications) for when you create a new post and we accidently made one live so a new email was sent out.

We apologise for that.

Have a great day,
Shane + the EM Team

We’ve just added the ability to allow you to select what memberships you want to be available for your different memberships.

Example: You have 3 Membership Levels Gold ($99/mo), Silver ($79/mo) and Bronze ($49/mo) and you want to offer a coupon code for people who subscribe to the Gold Membership Level only. So you create a coupon code and then simply click on the Gold Level membership in the new options that allow that coupon code to ONLY be used with purchases of the Gold Level membership!

If anyone tries to use the coupon code for Silver or Bronze it will not work!

• We’ve added new criteria to the filtering options to create Lists. It now includes Affiliate Levels. This is great for those who have multiple affiliate levels you can segment them and create email lists to communicate with the all directly.
• New Layout for Email Lists: we’ve re-designed the email lists section to give you more room and make it easier to manage. We hope you like the changes there. (found in the Email + SMS > Lists menu).
• Clicky Analytics: We’ve upgraded to the latest version of this plugin now. You will be prompted when you log in to your admin area to re-enter your Clicky account details. Once you’ve done this your analytics will function as per normal.