If you’ve ever had to upload a file that was too large or had to convert a file from one type to another but could never find a really great app to do it with, today’s episode will give you the answer. Not only is this tool the best I’ve found for compressing, converting, etc., it’s free!
Welcome to Coffee Powered Systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome, overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host, Miranda Merten. Welcome back to Coffee Powered Systems, today is Tip Tuesday, where I give you the skinny on an app or a tool that could be useful for your personal productivity. Before we get started today, I wanted to invite you to take the 10 day operations challenge.
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Currently, it is live and ready to go. We're actually in the beta stage right now. So if you sign up right now at the low entry level beta price, it's only seven dollars for the entire challenge. You will get the full ten days with all of the prompts and the tips and the workbook. Everything's included, except I will be adding videos to kind of walk you through each stage and each day. Those will come in a couple of weeks.
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But while it's still in beta, you can snag it for this low price. Once you get in at the seven dollars, you have access to all of the upgrades and you can continue to retake it and retake it as many times as you would like for free. If you're in a position where you think you need to upgrade your backend or get your systems in order, definitely you want to go through this 10 day operations challenge. You can find the link for that down in the show notes, or you can just go right to Mirandamerten.com/10days.
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That's forward slash the number 10, days. I'm kicking off after a brief hiatus with a tip that anyone can use no matter what stage of business you are in. So a few weeks ago, I found myself trying to upload a video file to a particular platform. And of course, the file was too big.
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Actually, I've had to do this more than once. And there are a couple of reasons that having a file that is too big can be a problem. First of all, if you have large files, they can take up a lot of space, obviously, and suck up your content limits. For instance, if you have a Vimeo account and you wanted to upload some video files to that account, your Vimeo service gives you usually a certain number of gigs per month that you can upload into your account.
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And it depends on the size of your account or the size of your plan. And you say you have 20 gigs per month that you can upload. Each file that you upload goes against the number of gigs per month in your account. So the larger the file, the less amount of videos that you can upload. So you don't want to upload too many large files to your account. You want to compress them first or reduce the size. And I have had such a hard time finding really good programs that can do this.
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Number one, quickly, because some of these large files take forever to compress and number two, consistently so. And secondly, another reason why having large files can be kind of a pain in the butt is that some sites won't even let you upload a file that's over a certain size. For instance, we've been using a new platform called FG Funnels, Funnel, Gorgeous Funnels, and there's a section on there.
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When we're uploading files to the membership area, you can only upload files that are like 50 megabytes. And some of these files, some of our files are like one hundred two hundred megabytes. I have to compress those before I can even get them into the platform. So that's another problem. If you've been there or if you've had these issues, then you know what I'm talking about. So after searching and using so many different tools over the years, I thought I had a really good one that would convert files for me, but it didn't compress files for me.
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And I really just wanted something that I can go to all the time knowing that if I needed something compressed or converted or whatever, I can just go to that specific website and get it all done rather than bouncing around. Of all the tools that I have used, this one is the best. And and I'm going to tell you go through some of the reasons why I think it's the best one and why you should definitely give it a try.
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First of all, it's free. So, yeah, that's one of the best reasons. Right. Free is always a great reason. Of course, there is an upgrade. I will tell you about that a little bit later after I go through all the features. But I think you can get away with using the free version. And that, of course, depends on what kind of files you have to convert, compress, etc.. There is a limit on the file size that you can upload, but this is the most generous one that I've seen of all of them.
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You can upload files up to one gigabyte for free. That is a large file, those are large audio files, large video files, most of the files that I've dealt with are under one gig. I have one client that does create highly produced videos, and sometimes those files will go over the one gig. So if I wanted to compress her files, I would have to upgrade to a higher plan for that. But most of the other tools that I have used for compressing, which is why I haven't stuck with them, is because they only you can only load files that are 100 megabytes or three hundred megabytes or less for free before you have to start paying for them.
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And I don't want to pay for something that I'm only using every once in a while. Let's be honest. If you're paying twelve dollars a month and you're only going in there once a month or once every couple of months, it's kind of silly. So the tool that I am talking about today, I just realized I haven't even told you which one it is yet is free convert, free convert dotcom. I will drop the link down in the show notes for you and let's go through some of their features.
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So first of all, you can compress files, which means you want to make them smaller. If you have large audio or video or PDF or whatever files that you need to be smaller, you can compress them on the site. And the cool thing about this is it gives you an option to either do a percentage. So say you have a file that's a hundred megabytes and you want to get it down to 50, you can say, I want to cut it by 50 percent, which obviously would take it down to 50 or you can say the target size.
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So you can actually put in 50 megabytes. And to get it down to that target, I recommend doing a few below. So maybe you put like forty seven or forty six just so that it does get it under, because sometimes, you know, they compress them and the file still a little too big and then you have to go back in and compress it again and make sure you check the quality after you compress files, make sure the quality is still good because if you have a large one gig file, then you're trying to get it down to 50 megs, you might lose some quality.
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So definitely check that before. And if that's the case, you might just want to link out to your file in Dropbox or Vimeo instead of uploading it into whatever program you're trying to use. Secondly, you can convert files with freeconvert, which means that if you have an MP4 and you want to change it to an MP3, if you have ebooks that you want to change to the correct e-book format, if you have images like JPEG, you want to switch them to PNGs, videos, documents, PowerPoint PDF, you can also crop videos or trim videos.
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They do have those two tools as well. I have not used those to. I actually use my built in quick time player right now that's built into the MacBook to trim videos. It's super easy the price of this tool. If you wanted to upgrade, if you needed more than the one gig you can upgrade to convert larger files, multiple files at once or unlimited files per month. So I will tell you that I converted like 15 files one day and it still didn't tell me that I hit the limit.
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So I don't actually know what the free limit is. It seems to be a pretty generous plan. The pricing starts at nine ninety nine per month. Up to twenty five, ninety nine per month, and those will give you like you can go up to one point five or two gigs, you know, you can do multiple files at once. You can do unlimited files. And if you know that you're just going to use at one time and you have a lot of files that you want to do all at once or in one day, then they do have a one time, twelve ninety nine, 24 hour pass.
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So you can just go ahead, pay the one fee, paying all of your videos and get your production done in one day and that will take care of that.
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I will say though, if you never have to use more than the free version, but you do find yourself using it quite a bit, think about giving them a donation. They do have a donation button. And since there are people behind this website, behind this tool, updating it and keeping it safe and secure, then, you know, it gives them a little bit more incentive to keep going. And and, you know, I'm all about thanking the people behind these apps.
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Again, the website for that is free convert dot com. I will drop that in the show notes. You can just click right on that link and go check out their website to see all of the different files that you can use for compression or conversion. Or you can find this episode at Mirandamerten.com/57. And that is my tip for today.
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I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to Coffee Powered Systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode. Down in the show. Notes are on the website at mirandamerten.com. If you enjoyed this episode and would love to continue mastering your work flows and processes, subscribe on your favorite podcast player and join me here next time.
