If you want to add video and audio to your blog / website (and you should!)  there are a number of inexpensive turnkey solutions to this, the best of which is Armand Morin’s Generator suite of products including viralurl.com/moneygym/instantvideogenerator">InstantAudioGenerator and InstantVideoGenerator.

However, my mentor in all of this is Mike Stewart who you can find at www.FromTheDeskofMikeStewart.com - he owns his own recording studio in Nashville and speaks at every internet marketing event as he’s passionate about this. He has some very inexpensive tutorials on DVD or to download, and walks you through all the equipment you need (and never more than you need!)

TECHIE STUFF:  I use either a handheld digital FlipVideo (great quality and perfect for testimonials) or a simple inexpensive camcorder on a tripod, and a really decent mic which makes a huge difference (either a hand-held mic or a lavalier mic which clips to my collar and plugs into the camcorder) or a desk based studio quality mic, which connects to my computer via an Edirol soundbox.

I have a lightsnake which connects a mic to the puter without a soundbox, but have never managed to make that work - same with my firewire which connects the camcorder to the puter. So I soldier on with USB connections and they work fine.I use Mike’s simple bit of software which captures the sound and video together into a short .AVI video which I can then edit. To edit, you can use Windows Movie Maker (Start menu > Accessories > WMM) or now I use Sony Vegas Movie Maker - allows you to layer the “5 essential elements of great TV” which is moving pictures, still pictures, sound/music, effects, text. I then turn the edited .AVI file into either an MPEG or WMV file for uploading to YouTube / Google Video, or a FLASH movie for streaming from our own site.To create the latter, I use Mike Stewart and Jim Edwards FLV Producer software (very inexpensive) then their FLV Player Creator, which uploads the video and the code for the “little TV” you see.