High Tech Gadget Sales Guru – Leads With How To Guides With Pictures And Videos
The popularity of hi-tech gadgets is sweeping across the world like a storm and almost everyone wants to own one or more of these amazing gadgets. The problem is that not all potential buyers of these high-tech gadgets are tech-savvy and have little to no knowledge of these gadgets, except for the fact that they want to own one.
This can cause you some problems as a reseller of these devices, especially if you only provide text instruction guides for your customers. What’s worse is the fact that many resellers provide the same text guides they received from the vendors, many of which come from other countries like China and are probably written in very poor English.
The result: customers would be disappointed and frustrated reading these text guides. Many potential customers will be hesitant to buy from you and will look for other resellers with better services. And if they buy and eventually find they can’t make head or tail of the text guides you provided, you’ll end up with a lot of customer complaints posted on your website or product listings, and that’s bad for business.
But hope is not lost as I can share with you some of the most effective ways to increase your sales and avoid customer complaints through well-prepared how-to guides, with the help of videos and pictures. The following will show you how.
The Benefits of Video and Image Based Instruction Guides
Giving your customers plain text how-to guides just wouldn’t cut it. What they need is a guide that even fools can understand and you can do this using pictures or videos. Contrary to what people may believe, it really isn’t that hard to create graphic instruction videos and guides. All you need is a camera and some creativity to get you on the right track.
Image-based how-to guides are cheaper to make. Digital still cameras are less expensive than their video counterparts and it would take less time to make an image-based how-to guide than to make a video. Other than that, by using innovative presentation software, you can create videos using only images and text.
However, if you really want to wow your customers and create the biggest impact, video production is the way to go. Not all images can be captured in image-based presentations and some clients would really like to get into the minute details and absorb each step in a video instruction, which they couldn’t get from images alone.
How to make your instruction guides based on videos and images
The first thing to consider when making how-to guides is whether you want a full video presentation, use images only, or use a combination of both. You don’t need to buy high-end camcorders or high-definition cameras for this purpose. Digital cameras larger than 3 megapixels would suffice, as long as you provide enough lighting when taking photos or recording videos.
Most of today’s digital cameras can take photos and videos, so it would be better to have a kit like this. Better yet, use a good camera that you’re selling on your site, and make sure viewers of the video or how-to guide know about it.
You’ll also need a script before you even start taking pictures or capturing video footage. Scripts, just like in movies, are the backbone that establishes the flow of how the how-to guide should be done. It guides you along the way so that you only capture and include relevant pictures and images for your guides. The scripts will also guide you on what to say during a voiceover or dialogue while making the videos.
You don’t need to buy expensive video editing or image processing software to complete your how-to guide. Open source applications are available online that you can download and use for your purposes. GIMP or the GNU Image Manipulation Program and PhotoScape are both good open source and freely available photo editors that you can use. For video editing applications, Open Movie Editor is a good open source video editing software for Linux based systems, while CineFX (or Jahshaka Reinvented) would be a good choice for Windows based systems.
Publishing your video and image based how-to guides
When you publish your image-based how-to guide, you must first convert it to PDF format to allow customers to download or open it from your website or product listing and prevent them from making changes to the material. Just make sure you have full contact information included in the material.
The best way to post a video how-to guide is to first upload them to a video-sharing site like YouTube. Video files are large and consume memory allocations for your website or product listing. If you upload it to YouTube, you can simply copy the video link or HTML embed code and use it on your website.
The way you present how-to guides can be very important in attracting potential customers to learn more about your high-tech products. Using images and videos for this purpose will make your how-to guides much more effective than plain text and ultimately convince potential customers to buy.