That sounds great, but an entry level wireless microphone system can cost as much as your camera did. You also have to order them online and wait to test them once they arrive.

I decided to see if it was possible to create a battery powered (i.e. portable) wireless microphone system from components that are available locally and for about $60. I also recorded myself while I did it. The result is this three part series where I literally show you every detail.

It turned out to be quite easy to find components and add battery power to them. The down side is that the sound quality isn’t very good and, without some sort of mixer, the audio comes in on only one channel. Aside from that, this is an easy, fast and inexpensive way to build a portable wireless microphone system for your Kodak Zi8.

Remember to leave me a comment telling me what you think and if you used my suggestion.

Part 1, Components and Assembly

Part 2, Testing and Permanent Assembly (AA Batteries)

Part 3, Build 9V Battery Assembly

Happy Recording!

One thing you’ll notice is that I don’t spend a lot of time talking about the actual coding, because there isn’t really very much at all.  Using my approach (I show you in the video) nearly all the heavy lifting can be done using the “easy buttons” that are available with most modern hosting companies.

Here’s what I cover in this video:

• What alternatives there are to WordPress and why I still use WordPress
• Why Google loves WordPress blogs
• Email list segmentation and membership websites
• A little trick that will save you money finding premium solutions online (that’s all I can say in this teaser, but you’ll thank me once you see it)
• Prevent spam on your blog
• Protect your digital content
• When and how to upgrade your site (this is so easy it hurts)
• Best places to host your membership web site
• The top reasons to buy premium themes for WordPress

This is the full 1:15 video.  After you press play you might have to wait a minute for it to start loading (be patient).

As I asked questions and drilled deeper with them on this point, I discovered that they got the method of gathering and scoring survey results from Glenn Livingston.  In fact, you can sign up on his email list and get a scoring sheet that tells you how he mathematically calculates the value of each response to help you isolate the hyper responders that are most likely to give you the pulse on your niche.

Before I get into all the details, here’s a quick download that will help you see a birds eye view of the process:

Critical Questions

The basics of his survey method center on the following questions

• What’s your single most important question about ___ ?
• What happened today in particular to make you sit down and search for ____ ?
• How difficult was it for you to find a good answer for the above while searching today? (Not at all, somewhat, very)
• Specifically, what would finding an answer to this problem mean to you?  How would this affect your life?

The first three “critical questions”, as he refers to them, can give you a lot of information about your niche.  Some insights include commercial intent, availability of existing solutions, triggers and events that prompt people to search for solutions.

Perhaps the most interesting is the fourth question.  When the first three responses score well, the fourth question can give you the actual sales copy.  Answers to the last question are almost sure to be loaded with emotional benefits that someone wants to get from a potential solution.

You might notice that this approach is a lot different that the typical approach.  Usually multiple choice questions are used to increase response and facilitate scoring.  The big problem with multiple choice questions, as opposed to the open ended questions mentioned above, is that you impose your best guess on the respondent and end up with their best choice from the listed options.  With open ended questions you get the raw meat of what they really want.

Process

Let’s turn out attention to the functional details of how to survey.  There are several things you’ll need to figure out before you start directing traffic to your survey.  Here’s a short list:

• Copy or video that will sell someone on taking the survey
• The actual survey mechanism
• Thank you page
• Viral inviter and social media share

The idea here is that you want to give someone a reason to take your survey and then attempt to maximize the traffic you get by inviting them to share it with their friends.

Here’s what I used for my latest survey:

• Video
• Survey Gizmo
• Thank you with direct download links
• OpenInviter

Before starting my survey I did research and made some guesses about what my audience would want (you need a starting point).  I then created a script for my video that I thought would appeal to them and get them to take my survey.  For my survey I identified my traffic source which enabled me to draw some conclusions about them and use those in my video (e.g. they were very frugle).  I decided to make the video as a voice over with images and text.  I went through my script and recorded it about a dozen times until I felt like it flowed pretty smooth.  By the way, I recorded each time I went through it and listened to it.  This helped me to eliminate things from the script that didn’t work and to put things in that did work.  Once I felt like I had it mostly where I wanted it, I slept on it overnight.

The next day I recorded it a couple more times and ended up with the master audio track that I wanted to use.  I then moved into my video editing program (this doesn’t need to be fancy) and started to add in the images and text.  I should mention here that you could just as easily create a powerpoint/keynote presentation that would have the text and images that you wanted and use a screen recorder program, like camtasia, jing, screenflow, etc. and have the video and audio in one go.  The free video editors like Windows Movie Maker and iMovie will also work just fine for this.

I used images from the site http://www.sxc.hu and http://www.istockphoto.com throughout my video.  While I was creating the video I just downloaded the images with the watermark on them and replaced them later with the images that I decided to purchase.  I also used pretty basic fonts with simple bold to highlight what I thought were the most compelling points.

The entire process took me between six and eight hours and I ended up with just over two minutes of video.  That might sound a little crazy, but the more time you spend, the more likely you are to effectively communicate with your audience.

It’s also worth mentioning that I hosted the video file and splash image on amazon S3 to reduce the risk that a visitor to my site would have any trouble or delay watching it. This essentially reduced the risk that a traffic spike would slow down my site or the survey.  This is always good practice, especially when you go to the expense of buying traffic.  You don’t want people to leave because they couldn’t load the survey.

Survey (service or self hosted?)

As I mentioned above I used http://www.surveygizmo.com to design and capture my survey.  I have used the open source LimeSurvey software in the past, and it is powerful, but it’s not very user friendly.  Self hosting would also require my server to do more work, which might slow down the survey if I got a large bit of traffic all at once.  Since the services and self hosted options have roughly the same features, it was really a choice of which would be easier and keep the survey responsive.  I chose Survey Gizmo.

My traffic source for this survey was from another blog.  As a result I knew that I wouldn’t have any keyword data associated with each survey response and so I decided to include an initial profiling step in my survey.  I know that Ed Dale has said that each question you include can reduce your overall response rate on a survey.  The reason for the profiling step was to ensure that I ended up with enough data to classify my responses and identify other traffic sources that might be a match for the products I ended up with.

Thank you page

I offered an incentive for taking my survey in the form of free software downloads.  These were linked to directly from my thank you page.  BE CAREFUL.  The incentive that you use will affect your survey responses, for better and worse.

While it may be true that an incentive will increase your response rate, it’s important to realize that if the incentive is too good you may attract unqualified respondents or you might even skew your results with bogus data or duplicate entries.  Remember that you’re looking for the hyper responders.  These are the people that are so desperate to find a solution to their problem that they’ll fill out yoru survey just to talk about their problem.  If folks aren’t interested enough to fill out your survey without the incentive, that might be a really good indication that market demand is weak or that your traffic is lacking in commercial intent.

I know that Joshua Boswell suggested that you use the product you plan to create as the incentive.  So if you were going to produce a set of cooking videos and wanted to purchase traffic on keywords such as “how to cook for your in-laws”, you would explain that you were about to complete a set of videos that would teach you everything you needed to know about cooking for your in-laws, but before you finish it, you need a little more input.  In exchange for taking the survey you’ll give them a free copy of the finished product, up to some number of total copies that you’re willing to give away.

This appears to be a sensible approach, since the incentive will presumably motivate your target customer.  They self qualify in a sense.

Viral inviter

Oh the lure of everyone in the world sharing your stuff with their friends.  In the end, I think there’s a lot of luck to this.  Either way, you can increase your chances of people sharing the offer with their friends in two ways.  The first is to make it easy and automatic.  The second is to provide an incentive to do so.  I do think that incentives to share the survey are different than incentives to take the survey.  In the case of an incentive to share the survey, they’ve already given you their response, so you don’t really skew their results.  The negative to this would be if they invited unqualified respondents just to get the incentive, but then hopefully your survey incentive will work to help those invited self qualify.

For my latest survey I chose to both automate and provide an incentive.  I used the excellent OpenInviter software which allows someone to provide their email address and password and then choose to send the canned message to all of their friends.  Here’s an example of a canned message:

Hey,

I just took a survey and entered a drawing to win a free video MP3 player.  You can still take the survey and be entered to win until midnight on Sunday, February 28th.

I hope one of us wins!

[link to take survey]

I automatically insert the link at the bottom of the email so they can’t fiddle with that, but they can customize the message above if they like.  This script doesn’t capture and store any personal information.  It only uses it to send this one email address.  In my opinion, it would be unethical (and possibly illegal) to do otherwise.

Once they check the boxes next to all of their friends and click send, then the entire survey flow is complete.  It’s also important that you are able to identify traffic that comes from the viral inviter as opposed to traffic from your primary source.  To accomplish this I created a link using Google’s URL builder and the pretty link plugin on blog.  This way the link looked normal, but my analytics kept track of how much viral traffic I got.

Embed in your blog

Now that we’ve covered the basics of how the survey runs and what to ask along the way, we can tackle the question of how to host the survey.  As it turns out, the easiest way (and the way that I do it) is to create a WordPress page and embed the components of the survey there.

The specifics of how to do this will vary slightly depending on whether your used video or copy to “sell” the survey.  If you use video this may still look different depending on whether you self host or use a service.  I prefer to self host my video, but there are times that I use YouTube too.  In the case of YouTube it’s very easy.  You just go to your video page and copy the embed code.  It’s in the little grey box to the right of, or just below your video.  If you’re using copy, just type it in.

In surveygizmo, after you finish setting up your survey you’ll need to click publish.  Scroll down about half way and you’ll find a section entitled “Advanced Publishing – Embedded Surveys”.  They give three options there and recommend the javascript method.  The javascript method may give you trouble when trying to embed into a blog page, so I suggest the iframe option.

Make sure that you switch from Visual to HTML before you paste the embed code.  Another quirk about wordpress is that when you switch from HTML back to Visual, it will often change your code.  This can break the embed.  I recommend you paste the embed code very last and publish with the editor in HTML mode.  If you ever need to edit it either edit in HTML mode or redo the embed code before updating the page.

Do your own survey

That turned out to be a really long post, but I can’t think of anything I would take out.  I could write an entire report on the specific details.  Now that you know the steps involved, go get a free surveygizmo account, create some copy or a quick video and make a survey.  If you get stuck come back and post a comment here.  Happy hunting.

One reason this is so cool is that I was able to use a few hundred dollars worth of technology and perform a live broadcast for all my website members members and have a high quality finished product for members to download.

Example clips

I think it goes without saying that this wasn’t a Late Show quality set with three studio quality camera setup, but it didn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars either. First off, let me give you a little clip from the interview. The first clip shows you the quality that was broadcast (cropped down to what I call internet HD 640×360). The second clip shows you the quality of the HD recording I provided for download.

Now for the HD recording

The interview was conducted in the evening and so there was no natural sunlight to filter in. Some minor color correction was performed on the original HD footage before rendering.

Equipment

The single biggest problem I’ve had while recording videos and broadcasting has been lighting.  There are a few ways to overcome lighting problems, but none of them have been easy.  More expensive cameras provide better low light performance.  Expensive lighting can compensate for lower end cameras.  Lucky for you, the inexpensive technology and a trick I’ll show you here, can give you really stunning results on a tight budget.

Here’s a picture of what my front room looked like for my latest internet broadcast.

Here’s the list of equipment that I used to do my broadcast.

• Dell PC (about $500)
• 1.2M DSL connection from Qwest (that’s the standard speed) ($32 per month)
• Logitech® Webcam C500 ($50)
• Kodak Zi8 HD camera ($180)
• Lights on a 2×4 ($20)
• Adobe Flash Media Encoder Live 3 (Free)
• Ustream.tv account (Free)

Lighting

The lighting that I used for this broadcast workout out really well.  I started with a basic bathroom light fixture from Lowe’s (like this one http://bit.ly/doKn9U).  I bought several feet of electrical cord and a plug end.  I then purchased a 2×4 for $1.34.  I also purchased four 100 watt equivalent florescent white bulbs (not soft white since that gives a yellow cast).  After putting it all together I used some saw horses from my garage to make it stand up.

I should say that I’m an electrical engineer and I’m reckless.  Putting something like this together can be dangerous and may represent a fire hazard.  If you’re not comfortable with this then don’t do it.

Since the four bulbs are separated be a fixed distance from each other, you want to keep them far enough away from the subject that they shadows can blur together.  You also want to use a light that can illuminate the background somewhat.  These two techniques will prevent a hard cast shadow from distracting viewers.  In some cases you can also use Styrofoam or some type of translucent cloth to diffuse the light and soften it (not in color, but in terms of shadows).

Since neither of my camera’s supported manual white balance, I’m stuck adjusting the color in software after the fact.  If it’s important to you to have a properly white balanced image for broadcast then you’ll need to spend more on your cameras, although what Logitech calls Right Light technology does a pretty good job of compensating for low light and white balancing correctly.

Setup

The setup is a lot easier than it might seem.  I purchased the webcam and installed it with the standard software that came in the box.  I followed some instructions on ustream’s website and downloaded and installed Adobe’s Flash Media Live Encoder (let’s just call that FMLE), which enables me to make several tweaks that are very useful.

For example, FMLE allows me to do two things that really improve the quality of the broadcast and provide me with a backup video in case my higher quality camera chokes.  First is that I can send the video into it from my webcam at the optimal image quality for my webcam.  In my case it was the native 1.3 mega pixel frame size of 1024×768.  Doing this reduces image quality loss and reduces the amount of work my computer has to do for the camera.  I can further crop, position and define the adjustments I want to make to prepare the output image for ustream.  In my case I wanted to broadcast at 640×480.  Along with these settings I have the freedom to define my bit rate for both audio and video so that I can be sure my internet connection will accommodate it.

Aside from the video quality settings above, FMLE allows me to record the stream locally, before it goes up to the server.  The file is save in flv format (ready to play on the internet) and doesn’t suffer from any loss due to network speed issues.  In other words, the recording is much higher quality than if I used ustreams record feature.  For some people the quality of this video will be all you need to post to your membership website.  If you are also recording with a higher quality camera, this is a good backup.  The very second you finish your broadcast you also have a finished video ready to view.  You don’t have to convert, render or do any other processing.  Just double click and watch.

As with all of these details, I recommend you play around with FMLE as much as possible beforehand so that you don’t miss something during the broadcast.  Things that you might mess up include not triggering the recording before starting the video stream and choosing a bit rate that broadcasts choppy over your internet connection.  Don’t forget to adjust your power saving and screen saver settings before you start broadcasting.

Broadcast vs. Download

I usually like to do some editing after a broadcast before I make the video available for download.  Sometimes I’m editing the content to get just the right segments and other times I may just be color correcting and adding a watermark.  Even if I don’t plan to do any editing, I make sure that I’m recording with more than one device, because I’m paranoid.  You should be paranoid too!

In my case, my Logitech C500 produced a great quality video and there were no glitches.  However, my Kodak Zi8 produced an even higher quality HD recording that enabled me to provide both enhanced sound and image quality.  I used Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum to apply basic color correction and to do an overlay that identifies the source of the video.

Starting with a higher quality original also gives me more options when it comes to converting the video for use elsewhere.  For example, the footage from my Zi8 allows me to easily put the interview on a DVD, broadcast it over the internet, upload full HD to youtube and render my self termed “internet half HD” format to my own website.  That’s a lot of flexibility, and the flash video file alone wouldn’t provide me with that.  But if you’re on a real budget then the $50 webcam with FMLE is too good to pass up and give’s very decent quality.

Improvements

As I watch the recording I can see a few things that I would like to improve (aside from my interview style).  The first is the seating and scenery.  Even a fake tree in the corner would have added a lot to the recording.  Nicer chairs or a cool couch and a band to provide a musical sound track would have given this broadcast a considerable bump!  Maybe a new shirt too.

Overall, i put this broadcast together in under an hour (technologically) with only a few hundred dollars of equipment and both me and my members are happy with the result.  As soon as I have some construction and furniture budget I can work on the improvements I mentioned.

As always, please comment below.