By subscription only! Welcome to your next issue of "Sound Bites Product News". Sound Bites is a division of MSIncome.com. You are receiving this newsletter because you requested a subscription or purchased one of our products. This newsletter is only delivered once a month. Unsubscribe instructions are at the end of the email we sent you. Theme for this month is Converting Audio Formats.
2. From the Editors Desk - (Quentin Brown - Preparing for Success) 3. Special of the week - (Header Graphics) 4. Coaching - (Converting Audio Formats) 5. Tips and Tricks - (Audio C4) 6. Feature article - (An Internet Business Can Be Your "Safety Net"!) 7. What's New - (MSI Web Video Upgrade)
8. Joke of the week - (Getting Married) 9. Back Issues
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK
" Your biggest challenge isn't someone else. It's the ache in your lungs and the burning in your legs, and the voice inside you that yelps "CAN'T", but you don't listen. You just push harder. And then you hear the voice whisper "can" and you discover that the person you thought you were is no match for the one you really are."
Author Unknown
WELCOME FROM QUENTIN and the STAFF
Welcome to another issue of Sound Bites
Preparing for Success - Internet Business Strategies. by Quentin Brown
Building your skill level is one of the most important factors of any net-repreneur. When your business is small you have a great opportunity to do this. As it grows and develops you will be more prepared for growth.
3 years ago when I started this venture I sold a few books and belonged to a couple of affiliate programs. Today I have a number of online and offline businesses and a string of affiliates. I initially managed them manually, however over time I have learnt how to automate many of the procedures.
I guess the biggest secret here is to create a balance between the automation of your business and personal contact. I find it extremely sad that many people hide behind their web sites. Automating your web site should be done so that you can put more time into personal contact with your customers not block yourself off from them.
Whether you run an offline business or an online one, service is still #1.
I was taught early in my business to prepare for growth, so I went out and learned how to set up auto-responders, install different scripts to make it easy for my customers to get information, web creation, product creation and a lot more.
Unfortunately, there are very few universities or colleges that teach these basic skills to the average student. I know I tried to do an IT & Marketing course only to find that the things they taught were overly complicated and not very applicable. Don’t get me wrong, there was some good stuff in there, but I ended up learning more on the Internet from fellow Net-repreneurs.
This is a brand new industry that is taking the world by storm and the opportunities are incredible. You can sit in your home and generate a very good living by just following some very simple steps.
Baby boomers are driving a revolution in home based businesses. Here in Australia there are about 1,000,000 home based businesses, representing nearly 67% of all small businesses. I know this is the trend in many other countries as well.
The thing is that as all these small businesses are needing help in developing web sites and using the great qualities of the internet to run their businesses because they are often family based businesses and need to automate a lot of their every day activities.
The skills you gather over the next year or so will not only help you develop your own business but also enable you to cash in on this revolution. Once you learn how to set up your own auto-responder, send out emails using your own list server, etc. you can then easily add this to someone’s else’s site.
As most of these products are free, your profit margin is almost 100%. If you already own your own business you can then add this additional service as a cross sell program. Hey! You can even train a young person to do it for you.
Some companies charge hundreds and even thousands of dollars to do this. Let me tell you that it is really quite simple. Just take your time and spend a little time developing your skill base. Don’t be to concerned about making mistakes and once you have the basic foundation you can offer the extra service.
Of course if you provide the hosting as well and some other services you will be surprised how quickly your residual income will grow. Learn how to set up your own hosting at http://msconnex.org/ Just send me an email and I will give you a copy for free.
So what preparations are you making for your success? Be sure to look at the bigger picture and remember that as you develop your skill base you are creating a whole range of new opportunities.
Over the next few weeks we will put some more information in the vault regarding the practical development of your skills.
Finally there is one other aspect to prepare for success.
Attitude!!!!
I was reading a recent survey that said most people who start their own business end up generating a similar income to what they were making in their JOB. This is because they forgot that they also needed to develop an attitude of success. How do you do this? By reading how successful people broke out of the morass of mediocrity.
I interviewed 6 millionaires for a magazine I worked for a few years ago and they all said that the secret to their success was not generating the income but maintaining that income. They all spent the majority of their time on personal development.
It finally clicked. What do the workers do? 70% of their time is at work and the other 30% of their time is spent on trying to get over work. Start to set aside some time to develop yourself into a successful person and the rest will follow.
Skills + Personal Development = Successful Lifestyle
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COACHING - Converting Audio Formats
Hello and welcome to this weeks coaching. A special welcome to all our new members.
This month we look at Converting Audio Formats and what it can do for you.
Whether you want to add some audio to your Portable MP3 player, website or just listen on your computer there are some simple software solutions that let you do this easily and quickly.
CONVERTING AUDIO FOR YOUR SITE
Putting music on your site and converting for your own personal listening pleasure is a reasonably simple process.
The first thing we need to do is to determine what format you want your music.
There a basically three major formats that people use to deliver music on the web and they are MP3, Real Audio and Midi. You will also notice as you move around the web a few other formats that are used such as Quicktime, Windows media and wav files.
MP3 is an audio file format. Audio files can be quite large. An MP3 file is an audio file that has been compressed (anywhere from 1/5th to 1/17th of its original size) without any noticeable loss in sound quality. That means a great sounding file, in a package small enough that it can be downloaded and stored on your PC or web page.
Creating an MP3 file is as easy as downloading some software such as MusicMatch and then inserting a cd. It is then a process of what is called ripping the cd or track you want and saving the new MP3 file to disk. Playing the MP3 file is just using the same software. It is important to observe any copyright laws.
Recording from your personal music collection:
To record a digital music file, put an audio CD in your CD-Rom drive. If you are connected to the Internet, track titles, artist name and album name of the CD in the CD-Rom will be automatically entered into the recording fields using CDDB. Click the songs you want to record, and that's it! You can also record from vinyl and cassettes!
Internet Downloads:
There are literally hundreds of thousands of songs available for download on the Internet. When you download a song, it is stored in your music library for easy access.
Producing Real Audio content is a little more complicated as it requires you to first take the song and create a wav file on your computer. You then need the encoder to convert the file. Before you can put it on the web page you will also need to create a ram file. The best site I have found to show you how to do this is Jim Hartley who goes through the process with graphics. It is a little slow to load. Also use Audacity instead of cool edit.
Once you have done one song you can then create all sorts of media. It is just a matter of repeating the process. If you want to hear over 3100 songs he has a great library.
MIDI
Creating midi files from scratch requires quite a lot of expertise and some equipment. If you go to Home Recordingyou can learn all you need. There are a number of libraries for midi files and you can insert them into your webpages quite simply. I have a great tutorial on Midi here.
Streaming Audio
Streaming audio is a method of delivering audio, in real-time over the Internet or corporate Intranets, with no download wait and no file to take up space on your hard disk. Effectively what happens is as soon as you request a streaming audio file - usually by clicking on a button - the first 2 or 3 seconds of the file is downloaded to your computer.
This immediately starts to play and as it does, the server continues to download the rest of the file. By the time the first few seconds of sound have been played, the next few seconds are ready, hence creating a continuous "stream".
Many of the programs available today that allow you to stream the audio require that you compile the audio file in the correct format first. This can be a very time consuming task as you need to balance the quality to size ration to allow streaming over modem connections. The software we will be using will do all this automatically for you.
To listen to audio, you need a sound card and speakers or headphones for your computer. After a somewhat slow start, Web sites that are capable of delivering relatively low-bandwidth audio content are appearing with greater frequency, most likely in response to the increasing number of multimedia-capable PCs hooking into the Internet.
Think of a bucket (the buffer) with a hole in the bottom, being topped up with water (the data). As long as there is water in the bucket, it will continue to pour out of the hole, and will do this as long as there is water in the bucket. Similarly, as long as there is data in the buffer, you will continue to hear sound.
is a software package that creates high quality 56Kstreaming audio from MP3 or WAV files. It uses industry standard LAME compression to produce very high quality output. The program uses flash 4 technology, which is estimated to be on 98% of computers. It will reduce a standard MP3 file by over 50% with almost no loss of quality. You can see more on this product in this tutorial by clicking here.
Free Sound archives for your site (Sites were valid at time of sending)
Free Sound Effects Added 12/21/01. Sound effects include: Car Starts, Door Openings, Clongs, Coffee Pan, Creaks, Door Closings & Openings, Fan, Garage Door, Hanging & Picking Up Phone, Inserting Cassette, Key Sounds, Oven door, Paper Pack, Pouring, Rain, Refrigetor, Toilet Flushing, Water Running.
40
.mp3
Little Music Club Sound Effects Sound effects in wav format. Categories include: Animals, Ambience, Cartoon, Door, Engine, Household, Horses, Loops, Nature, Sports, Steps, Sword-Knife, Vocal/Babies, Vehicles, Various, and Weapons.
1686
.wav
Free Sound Effects Free Downloads of the most requested sounds on the internet, we've taken all the best requests we've had over the past 2 years and placed them here for you to download.
700
.wav
Tingatel Sound Archive Over 800 sounds and midi files for web designers. The categories include Alarms, Animals, Beeps, Bells, Cartoon, Chimes, Clicks, Computer, House, Humor, Instruments, Machines, Midi, Movie, Music, Notes, Office, People, Potluck, Scary, Space, Sports, Things, Whistles. Well organized site!
800
.wav
Sound-Effects-Library High quality downloadable sounds produced by award winning commercial sound designers. Categories include Airplane, Animals, Birds, Cars, Comic, Cricket, Crowds, Drumloops , Explosion, Fireworks, Football, Guns, Helicopter, Music, Snooker, Tennis, Trains, Weather.
50
.mp3
Flash Kit Multimedia Resource Site Flash sound effects (500) and music loops (300) for royalty free use. Coming soon mp3 collections for royalty free use as well.
500+
. wav
HumanWorkShop Added 11/24/01. 3 gig of top quality, royalty free samples. Catagories include: Multi Samples (instrumental), Drumsamples (kits), Loops and Sound Fx. Click on Audio Archieve.
Koumis Productions Alien talk, beep, bite, boot up, bubbles, cd drive, creepy door, dial tone, doesn't start, door knocks, door slams, electric drill, electric motors, electric sounds, eject, electronic arm, evil laugh, fast forward, flushing toilet, frying food, garage door, glass tapping, give up, godzilla, groovy radar, hit tin door, internet sound, microwave, modern phone ring, monsters, pages, paper tear, pour water, scissors, sharpen knives, space sounds, stapler, switch, thunderous hits, tv white noise, typing, wacky, water drops, way out of tone, zips.
It doesnt matter if youre using MP3 Sound Stream, Real Audio, or a 1942 Reel to Reel Recorder in the Basement of an Abandoned Warehouse...Audio C4 will Help You!
FEATURE ARTICLE - An Internet Business Can Be Your "Safety Net"!
An Internet Business Can Be Your "Safety Net"!
I had some good friends around for dinner the other evening. During the social dinner conversations, one of my friends mentioned the interest on investment accounts on offer with the banks at the moment.
She had $10,000 to invest and was happy with an interest rate of 4.75%. The best "at call" rate she had found after much research with financial institutions. She was after a safe investment during these uncertain times.
The stock market or property investment was not her cup of tea.
Another of my friends responded, "I wish I had the spare $10,000 to invest in the first place!". He went on to say that how difficult he found it to save any money after paying his bills each week. (Something you hear all the time)
Later that night, I thought about what my friends had said and their financial mindset on money matters.
My friend had put her efforts into ringing around and visiting the many financial institutions in town. She was happy to find that she could get an extra 0.25% on her money!
So instead of getting $450 in interest on her ten grand for the next 12 months, she would now be receiving $475.... Big deal....
An extra $25 for the year!
What a waste of time and energy if you think about it!
Even on a $1,000,000, an extra 0.25% per annum won't make a huge difference to your lifestyle.... It's still only $2,500.
My other friend on the other hand would love to have an extra $10,000 to invest. However, his day job does not allow him to save enough to "get ahead".
But.... He possesses a crucial ingredient that can earn the extra money he desires.... The ingredient is.... His "spare time".
Without changing or giving up your "day job", asking for a pay rise, or finding a second part time job....
The average PC literate person can earn a substantial extra income from home just by selling simple information products they create themselves based on what they "already know" and all in their spare time.
Marketing information.... Information people want, in the form of ebooks, ebooklets, special reports, audio tapes, video's and CD-roms is still the best home based Internet business you can start.
It's as true today as it was four years ago on the Internet.
Earning an extra $10,000 is not unrealistic for the average part-timer on the Internet today in this business.
People often ask me if it is really possible to earn decent money on the Internet if you only have a few spare hours in a day to devote to your online business. Surely the law of business prohibits you from "gaining a lot for very little"?
Here is the key that many people new to online business MISS....
You might only work 2 spare hours a day on your little Web business BUT your Web business (your website) WORKS FULL TIME 24 hours a day for you!... This is the reason why it does not take much of your time and yet can return far more than an hourly wage for the ACTUAL hours you put in.
Having a well-constructed website that sells for you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on "autopilot" is like having an "electronic employee or salesman" working for you and presenting your product perfectly every time.
It's a business that works unmanned... Like a shop that never closes.
You may have heard the cliché... "Make money while you sleep" and thought.... That's pure BS!
The reason way you can make money while you sleep is "TIME ZONES". This may seem obvious. But you'd be surprised how many people have not thought of this.
While it's night in the Southern Hemisphere... It's daylight up north. And vice-a-versa. The other half of the world are awake and visiting your website while you sleep. Your online business might be small but is on view to the whole global online community for 24 "waking" hours each day.
Nothing is as exciting than waking up in the morning, firing up your PC, logging on and retrieving email notification of credit card orders made during the night!.... 2 years in this business, and it still is a thrilling experience. It's a great feeling of achievement, knowing that the few hours you spent in the evening before working and marketing your little online enterprise has paid off.
But you know.... It's not just the money you make, i'ts about establishing something else....A "safety Net" in hard times....
We live in uncertain times... Of war and global economic downturn. Companies are downsizing both large and small. Employees are losing their jobs in the thousands each week....
Could you be next?
How many of your friends or people you know have had the "pink slip" fly their way? Nobody is immune nowadays. Give it some thought.
Learn to look for the danger signs if you work for a large organization. For example if your share price has been falling and remains very low for more than 6 months with little movement. It's time to re-evaluate your future with the organization.
If you work for a small business, and there are cash flow problems, or no new staff being put on to replace those that have left. These are warning signs that indicate trouble may be ahead for you.
Wouldn't it be nice to have an additional source of income rolling in should you lose your job tomorrow? Would it help to keep the "wolf from the door"?... A safety net?...
A little online business on the side.
A small insurance policy should the worst happen.
Nobody can retrench you from your own business. A business that can never go broke either.... You can even set up a free website and perform zero cost marketing promotions. Zero overheads. Maximum profits.
That's how I started and you can do the same.
Even in hard times.... War, Anthrax scares, recession, have not effected my online business. Sales may not have increased, but they have not declined.
You may also think that you need "talent", writing skills and a certain level of education to succeed in running an online information product business. Not so, the world is full of educated and talented failures. What you do need however is "persistence" and a dogged determination to succeed.
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
My father taught me this at an early age. He was a prized boxing champion in the British armed forces in his younger days. He never lost a fight. He retired undefeated after a long career. Yet he was not the best boxer in the regiments.
However he had the one quality other boxers fear....
He would never give up, even when knocked to the mat time after time, he would bounce right back up again. He had determination and persistence and the will to win so badly, which gradually wore his opponents down, round after round until they eventually tossed in the towel in exhaustion.
That my friend is the key to success in anything you set out to do in your life. Too many people give up too quickly, at the first sign of obstacles.
Success often comes after failure...
After being "knocked down", when you think you're beat.
Is running an online business easy?
No it's not. There are more who fail than succeed. That's the truth. It's no different to running a business in the real world. Many online marketers won't tell you the truth.
(That's why those who know me online call me the "honest" marketer).
It was reported in Bloomberg News, that only 27% of U.S. small businesses with a website use the Internet to sell their products, and of these they average fewer than three online orders per month.
Your online business will be different. You will be selling your own unique information products. Your own creations. You will not be trying to compete with offline businesses all selling the same brands or the large "dot coms" who have failed miserably for very different reasons.
So if you don't have spare money to invest, like my friend did, don't worry, 12 months from now you will have much more than my other friend who has invested her money to earn a measly interest of $475!!
You could have the same $10,000 plus interest from investing your "spare time" instead.
So next time you put your feet up in your spare hours, consider investing some of those hours up online!
WHAT'S New - MSI Web Video Gets an Upgrade
MSI Web Video has gone through an upgrade!
We have added a the ability to add your own jpeg to the front screen making a much more attractive product. This jpeg can be anything you want so you can advertise etc right in the screen. I have only just received this and the tutorials are just being completed. See the new product and if you already have the old copy you can login and download the new copy.
A young man excitedly tells his mother he's fallen in love and is going to get married. 'Just for fun, Mom, 'he says, 'I'm going to bring over 3 women and you try and guess which one I'm going to marry.'
The mother agrees. The next day, he brings three beautiful women into the house and sits them down on the couch and they all chat for a while.
He then says, 'OK, Mom. Guess which one I\'m going to marry.'
She immediately replies, 'The red-head in the middle.'
'That's amazing. You're right. How did you know?'
'It was easy...I don't like her!'
COPYRIGHT
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Quentin Brown MSIncome.com L P O Box 168 Mansfield, QLD. Australia 4122
