VidPenguin Productions Blog

Gene Wilder was a movie star, director and arguably one of the funniest people who ever lived.

During an interview, he gave this account of his start in comedy:

“I was 8 or 9 years old when my mother had a heart attack. When she came home, the doctor said, ‘Don’t ever get into an argument with your mother because you might kill her.’”

No pressure there, right?

“And the second thing he said was, ‘Try to make her laugh.’”

“I had never consciously tried to make anyone laugh in my life, but I d...

While people are getting better at Zoom meetings, there are still a few things we can do to improve the experience for everyone:

1: Don’t use your built-in microphone and speaker. They’re designed to pick up as much information as they can, which will include background noises and voices. Instead, use a wired headset, preferably with a boom mic, because it will pick up just what is in front of the mic.

2: When you are speaking, look a little to the side of your screen. When we look directly at...

Some online marketers just naturally do far better than others. Why is that?

They get heard, they are remembered from one week to the next, they are followed socially online and they sell stuff. A LOT of stuff.

So the question is, how do they stand out from everyone else in their niche? How do they keep from looking like everyone else, and thus becoming nearly invisible like everyone else? I’ve been watching, and here are three things I’ve noticed that they all have in common and how to apply ...

This is for everyone who has procrastinated on building an at home business and suddenly finds they have the time and the inclination to do it…

…but the thought of creating products, building funnels and recruiting affiliates is just too much.

Step 1: Pick a small, hot niche. Weight loss for women is too big.

Weight loss for women over 50 who work from home and hate dieting and workouts might be good.

Step 2: Write your compelling story. This is YOUR story of why YOU are in this niche.

For ...

You walk into McDonald’s and order a burger, fries and a drink. But before you check out, the cashier asks you a helpful question: “Would you like me to Supersize your meal for you?”

Well isn’t that nice of the cashier to ask that? Of course you would like her to do that, and you might even thank her for being so thoughtful.

Congrats, you’ve just discovered how to increase the size of your orders on your website.

The most difficult part of marketing is getting the sale. But once someone has c...

You already know that it’s far easier to sell to a customer you already have than it is to get a new customer.

Then again, it can sometimes be easier to get a new customer than to retain the old ones, depending upon the mistakes you’re making. But if you can avoid the mistakes and do things right the first time, your job will be that much easier, and customers will stick with you through thick and thin.

Here’s how to hook those customers you’ve worked so hard to win over, so they become loyal ...

I was reading a classic the other day – The One Minute Entrepreneur.

This is a distillation of the first couple of chapters, including the very same notebook idea that so many self-made people have used to build their fortunes.

There once was a young man in high school who found himself in jail, accused of having illegal drugs. This student wasn’t a bad person by any means. He had friends, decent grades, a girlfriend who loved him and a place on the football team.

But he was caught hangin...

Vimeo is YouTube’s closest competitor, but it’s not a YouTube clone. Because there are genuine differences between the two, you might find that Vimeo is sometimes the better choice for your videos.

Prestige – When someone says, “YouTube video,” what do you think of?

And when someone else says, “Vimeo video,” what do you think of now?

Anything and everything is on YouTube. There are no quality filters to speak of, which is why anything and everything is uploaded there, including junk.

But ...

This will work for most any information product that you deliver over time.

For example, if you’re having a course with weekly classes, a training program in which you release one video every so often, or anything that is not released all at once, here is how to double your sign-ups.

Let’s say you’re offering a course with weekly live training for $97. You promote your course and get as many paid sign-ups as you can. You might give this option a Sunday night deadline.

If you want, you can ext...

We’re living in one of those movies where a virus threatens humanity; some of the leaders don’t pay attention to the scientists, and everything looks hopeless while the protagonists' race to save lives and find a cure despite the politicians best efforts to be total idiots.

Then the heroes save the day, all is well, and we can leave the movie theater relieved it was ‘just a movie.’

Except that now we are trapped on the movie screen, the director is gone, and there is no one to yell, “CUT!”

Th...