This is one of those rare small business tool finds that’s jam-packed with so many features it’s REALLY hard to believe it’s free. Have you ever wanted to visually show your customers step-by-step “how-to” instructions on your website, blog or in an email?

Think about how many frequently asked questions can easily be solved if you could just show them how to do it?

Problem solved with the Jing project.

What is Jing?

Jing let’s you capture a screen shot of anything on your computer and best of all you can record straight from your computer too. If you have a microphone, you can even narrate your videos with audio.

Use this tool to make short videos of less than 5 minutes with a PC or a MAC. You can easily add colored text boxes, comments and yes even active links.

Once you have created your video or screen capture you can send a tweet with a built in Twitter button. Easy, easy, easy!  No uploading or anything complicated. Get this, Jing does all the work!  The tool will save the image, create a shortened url (web address), launch Twitter so all you do is type your 140 character tweet. You never have to leave Jing. All this for the low, low price of FREE.

The Jing Project does offer a paid version for an unheard-of low price, basically a steal…$14.95 a year. At that price they are practically giving it away software that adds visuals to your online conversations.

What’s the difference?

The free features include Jing’s branding on your videos, saved in the flash format only with 2GB of free monthly bandwidth.

The paid (pro) features include a button to allow quick and easy uploading to YouTube and you get a small video files in a premium video (MPEG-4 ) format. In addition, you can use a webcam to add a personal touch then seamlessly transition from the webcam to your screen.

Both free and paid accounts are hosted with Jing’s service screencast.com partner that comes with 2GB of storage space. If you want to hold on to your space for special videos and images Jing offers 3 other option to save your videos and images; save to your computer to your desktop, create an ftp or save to Flickr Yahoo’s free image and video hosting website and online community platform.

Convinced!

Ready to install Jing?

Before you do…Check out my top 5 ideas on how you can use Jing in your small business:

1. Record a slideshow presentation with a strong call to action
2. Provide daily, weekly or monthly tips
3. Create a video tutorial to answer frequently asked questions
4. Narrate a document pointing out key information
5. Integrate video in your social media marketing on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook

These are just a few ideas I can think of for adding video to your small business using Jing. Tell me yours in the comments below.

photo courtesy microsoft.com

If you liked today's article check out these related articles:

1. Grow your business on YouTube, Facebook & Twitter
2. 3 tools to turbo charge your social media marketing
3. 4 Ways To Master Multi-Media For Promotion and Profit