Getting Started With Web Videos For Business

www.theSEOmethod2.com 1

WEB VIDEO

A picture is worth a thousand words.

We’ve all heard the saying that a picture is

worth a thousand words. So my question to

you guys is what if a picture is worth $1000

or more? And what if you have twenty-five

pictures every second? What is that worth

to you? Now you may wonder what I’m

talking about. Am I asking you to become a

photographer or an artist or something? What I’m really talking about is video. The fact is

that video is a really powerful medium and some of you may have already experienced

using it in a number of ways with your own businesses or in your life of course. We come

across it all the time.

Contents

So that is what I’m going to run through –

the specifics of how we use video at

Melbourne SEO Services to help promote

the company and our clients. Also I’ll touch

a lot on how Dave has used it in his own

businesses as well. Just before we go on, I’ll

say just a little about me. I have an

advertising background. I used to work at an advertising agency in Sydney. My main role

was a brand strategist. So I spent time doing a lot of market research, qualitative research,

running focus groups, finding insights from people about why they connect to a brand,

why they believe in a certain product. A lot of them don’t even know until you dig a little

bit deeper.

So that’s why Dave’s mentioned a few times that I’m very into branding and things like

that. I think it’s a really powerful tool to connect with your audience which ultimately is

what we need to do. Then I started to get into film and TV and I’m also an actor and so I

was in front of the camera and then I got behind the camera and liked that a lot more. So

I’ve really gained a passion for telling stories which is what I want to discuss a lot here and

in the medium of video.


So what I’m going to run through is some stats, talk about content, the kind of content you

may be thinking about creating, and I’ll recommend the best type. I’ll talk about the gear

you need or don’t need as well because it can become very addictive as my bank balance

has told me. I’ll talk about editing, actually how to go about editing a piece of footage and

then how to get it out there, which Dave has touched upon as well. Then I’ll talk about

specific SEO that we use for video. If there is time, I will take you through a case study of

something we have done and just show you the process that I went through.

Finally I will give you just a few links to things that I will be talking about so you can follow

up with that yourself.

Statistics

So everyone has heard of YouTube? Yes?

Once in a while? Just have a quick look at

these dazzling statistics. This is the

interesting thing. How many of you have

been on YouTube in the last month? In the

last week? In the last three days? Last night?

Ok. How many of you jumped on YouTube

and you’ve gone from looking at a tutorial on something and now you’re fishing on the

Atlantic Ocean? It just happens, right? The thing is, everyone seems to do that. That kind of

thing is here to stay. That’s why making video is a way to capitalize on that kind of

phenomenon that is happening now.

I was at a dinner party recently and I said, you’ve got to see this. There was this new Old

Spice commercial. You’ve got to watch this. Everyone watched it and they loved it and they

said, is there another one? I said, yes, there is another one. So we watched that one.

Someone recommended something else and the dinner party turned into us crowded

around a computer.

So we’ve got this phenomenon called YouTube which everyone is drawn to. It is the largest

video site on the planet and it’s also one of the busiest search engines. It is number two,

only behind Google, which it is why it was bought by Google.


Statistics – part 2

A lot of people out there are using it. I

looked up this statistic: twenty hours of

video is uploaded every minute. If

Hollywood were releasing films to match

that volume, they’d be releasing 86,000 new

films every week. So that gives you some

indication of the kind of proliferation of

what is out there.

The question begs, if I’m just one person making one video, how is it going to get seen?

Isn’t it just going to disappear in the sea of content? This is why we’re going into the

specifics of how to use the SEO part. You make a piece of content and find a niche within it

and people will find you.

Video content

What is the purpose of making videos? It’s

what we’ve been talking a lot about today.

The human element is the part that you can

really use by making video. There is an

example of Dave on our website. He’s the

first person you meet, telling you about

what you’re going to find out about, what

we do and what is contained within the website. Instantly, you say, oh, there are people in

that company. The funny thing is, you think about McDonald's, you think about Coke, you

think Microsoft, that is just a name, just a banner. People run those companies. People

make the decisions.

That’s a great area where you can actually use your skills, your expertise to pass it on and

to build trust. As Dave mentioned earlier, authenticity and transparency is important. Just

saying, hey, this is us, this is how we do it so you’re not hiding behind your website, not

hiding behind some flashy content, which you may still have, but having a face to put to

this company is a really effective thing you can do.


Portraying yourself as an expert is something really helpful, especially if you’re in internet

marketing, if you’ve got a small business as well. Being an expert, that is what people seek

out. They seek out people who have the knowledge that they need. If you’re someone who

has that, especially if you have a small niche, then a great way to get it out is through

video. You say, hey, this is me and this what I know.

The thing is, and I was discussing this with Roger during lunch, we’re all storytellers. That’s

all we do throughout our whole life. The first things you learn when you’re a kid is you

learn nursery rhymes and things like that, they’re stories. Then when you’re out there

having lunch, you sit there and say, what do you do? I do this, and oh, that’s interesting.

Here’s an experience I had, and we share these things back and forth. This is just a way to

commercialize it and still be authentic. You’re not dressing up like an admiral and you’re

not really an admiral. You can still be yourself.

I think that’s something that Dave does really well, just presents himself and the content

still speaks for itself.

Video content – part 2

The million dollar question is how many

videos should you make? We’ve got three

YouTube accounts, Dave has three YouTube

channels and we’ve made over three

hundred videos in the last three years, which

is a hundred every year, which is about two

every week. Now you may be thinking, I don’t have time to do two videos every week,

what am I going to say, my business is small, I’ve only got this bit of information.

Rest easy, take a deep breath for a moment. A lot of the content may be made up of a lot

of videos that were all made at the same moment. Dave was speaking before about

Ryan making these videos, these audio interviews that he’s done and then Ryan makes that

into a power point presentation on Keynote which seems to work better. I’m not

advocating it, but it is really good. Then I cut that into smaller videos, so out of an hour’s

worth of an interview, we get seven videos. Each one of those we push out onto the web

and optimize them specifically. But they all come back to one URL as well.

So for you, if you’re just starting, make one. Just stand in front of a video camera and make

a video just introducing your company, introducing something that you’ve learnt, some

new content or a new product. There are a number of things you can do.


One issue that we’ve watched evolve is the idea of quantity versus quality. If you’re in a

competitive area and you need to really push out content quickly then you’re going to

make a lot of quantity. That is going to be at the expense of quality. I have a production

company and I make low end videos up to higher end, like corporate videos and corporate

documentaries. That will take a week of full time editing and then you put in a soundtrack

and then you put in special effects and the list goes on. I’m a perfectionist, so I want the

best thing to go out there.

That’s usually for one video that is going to appear. In Dave’s situation, he’s interviewing

people all the time, so he just wants to get that content up and then he’s on to something

else and gets that content up. He and I have been working to find a balance between

pushing things out as quickly as we need to but also developing this brand. In this case it is

Melbourne SEO and developing that brand. It could be more of an entrepreneurial thing

like DJenyns and his blog, pushing that idea.

It’s simple things. It is about getting a logo at the start and end of the video. Or it is about

how you dress sometimes or where it is located. I’ll talk a little bit more about that when I

start talking about equipment and all the gear that you can have.

Video content – part 3

I’m just going to show you three examples of

the evolution of the David Jenyns look. These

are just little snippets. I just want to show you

how things have progressed. You sit here and

think, three hundred videos, that is so many,

how could I ever do that and where do I start?

Well, you start here.

Dave I don’t know if you even had a Mac then. Was it just a little camera? So this is a video

that started, so I’ll just play it for you. I just found enough of each one. This was one of the

first ones when Dave started making videos and it’s about three years old.

[Video excerpt]


Here’s the next one. This is when I started to

get into the mix a little bit more. In our office

we’ve set up a little studio space which is just

basically a room with a backdrop and we set

up a camera there and a few lights. So you do

get a different look to it. This is an intro we

started to create. I just wanted to show you

the evolution of the brand.

[Video excerpt]

So that is another level. Because we’ve got a lot of things out there, we’re starting to make

some bigger fish. We did the Google versus the Yellow Pages. We spent a bit more time on

that, put a bit more production value, as you would have heard that term production

values, into it. What I’m about to show you is another level. It’s not vastly different to this

but you’ll see the intro to it and I’ll talk to you about it after.

[Video excerpt]

So again, we’ve got this look of Dave in

front of the camera in his Wiggle shirt, but

again we just put in a bit more mystique

and interest at the beginning. So now, that

has developed over a three year period. The

good thing to know is, basically we’re using

all the similar materials that we had before that Dave’s had. We haven’t gone and used all

this amazing expensive equipment, we’ve just changed the way we present the content.

The interesting thing to note though is, I don’t know if anyone noticed the views of each

one. Which one had the highest? The first one was 36,000, something like that. So don’t

worry, if you’ve got good content, that’s going to sell first and foremost. If you can add a

certain level of polish to it, then that’s going to give you a certain credibility. Granted that

this only came out a month ago. So give it time. In three years it will be through the roof.


Equipment

Equipment, what kind of things do you

need? A show of hands, who owns a video

camera? Pretty much everyone these days.

Have you made videos for your business?

No? Do you know what is holding you back?

Some people are afraid of public speaking

and being in front of a camera can be quite

daunting. I used to be scared of it but then I just stared it down one day. I said, alright,

buddy, I just checked it out for a while and I realized it’s just a machine that’s recording

something. It’s actually not as bad as you think it is. It doesn’t judge you. Other people

judge you when they watch you.

I’m going to talk through the equipment you might need and then what to do with that

equipment. The great thing now is cameras these days give a really good image. I had one

of those little Flip cameras that shoots in HD. Your hand gets a little bit shaky so the image

can be a bit shaky but these days there is really no excuse not to get a decent image.

Cameras are small, they’re versatile and you get a good image.

One thing I’m a bit of a stickler about is your audio. We’ve all watched a YouTube video,

something you click on and say, that was amazing, I want to go watch that. I was really into

a guy Tom, an adventure capitalist, who built the biggest clipper ship, private yacht in the

world. He had this beautiful yacht and I said I want to check this out. I click on YouTube

and someone has taken their phone out and recorded it out on a windy day in the ocean

and it’s going urghhhh the whole time. It can be really grating.

If you’re going to record a video, your audio has got to be decent, so the way to do it is

with something like this. This is just a little Bluetooth microphone that Sony make, you can

get them on eBay. They’re about $100. If you have something like a regular type of

Handycam it will bring your production value up inexorably. It’s amazing.

The image you get from most cameras these days is good. The audio isn’t necessarily

because you’ve got this tiny little microphone. But something like that where the top of it

just goes onto the top of the camera and then that’s your little microphone. They often

come with a lanyard so you can just put it around your neck, or an arm band and you just

put it there and it picks up the audio really well. When you get to making a video it will

really be of benefit for you.


One thing is lights as well. This is something that again, you can spend thousands,

hundreds of thousands or $10 on. It’s like with anything, like with cars. We’ve started using

lights, we’ve just got three lights set up in the studio and I’ve showed Dave a way to light

yourself so it gives maximum impact. Again you don’t need them. Don’t use that as a

barrier, saying, well, I don’t have my green screen set up and I don’t have the proper set

up. It doesn’t matter, it’s more about getting something out there.

So you can use natural light. Natural light is a really good thing to use, or a flood light or a

down light or something, but you need people to see you, that’s all that really matters.

For those people who are shy and don’t want to be in front of a camera, the advent of

screen capture software is probably a life saver for you. Has anyone used it, Camtasia or

ScreenFlow? Now just a quick show of hands, I don’t want to offend anyone. Who is a PC

user? Who is a Mac user? It’s split 50/50. Here are two great programs that are fabulous for

either Mac or PC. ScreenFlow is a Mac product but Camtasia now is made for Mac and PC.

For those of you who have never used it before, it records whatever is on your screen. So

you press Play and it starts recording.

You would have seen at the end of the Google versus Yellow Pages video that came out,

we had Google come up and say if it’s human nature to look up at the top, where do you

want to be? I recorded that through ScreenFlow. I just typed in the words which took me

quite a while with my spelling mistakes, I kept going back. I recorded that and made a little

movie of it and put it into my editing timeline and then I just sped it up and that’s how I

made it happen.

So that is a really effective thing, especially if you want to make something like a tutorial

which is a really effective way to get people interested in your business and your content.

That is to say, here is what I know and here is how we can help you. I look at YouTube

tutorials all the time. In making films and so on, you’re always coming up with the next

challenge. So I’m going to go on YouTube and find fifty people who solved this problem.

They often use screen capture software to do it, learning how to use a certain function in

an editing program or Photoshop or something like that. I highly recommend checking it

out and just having a play around with it. They’re not expensive either. I just bought

ScreenFlow, it was $100 and what it will pay me back is worth far more than that.


Editing

Editing, where to start? Editing is something

that can take a long time or it can take a

short time, usually a long time. It is a very

precise medium or way to present

information. So I’m just going to take you

through equipment that you can use and

then I’ll walk you through how to actually edit. Again this is going to have to be something

that you do yourself because it is going to take quite a while just to get used to it and also

to have a program that suits you.

Editing software

Now there are a bunch of different types of

editing software from your basic to

advanced. So if you have a Mac, then there

is iMovie. Has anyone played around with

iMovie? It’s pretty good. It’s actually, now

that I’m use to it, it’s quite good. Everything

has its drawbacks but it’s actually a good piece of editing software. I think Windows PCs

come with Windows Movie Maker which I think is quite a simple version as well. Probably

for what you guys are going to be doing, these are enough. As long as you can record

something, get it in there, make it into something worthwhile and then get it out onto the

internet.

Then you go to your more intermediate and advanced. I use Final Cut Studio. I’m still

learning about it. I’m self taught and I just keep coming up with things and finding out

more and more. It’s like how long is a piece of string, you never reach the end of it. But for

you guys iMovie and Windows Movie Maker would be more than enough.


Editing steps

Because I’m running out of time, I’m just

going to go through these fairly quickly. I’m

also comfortable if you guys ever need to

contact me through Melbourne SEO, I can

talk you through it a bit more. Obviously the

first thing you need to do is record your

content. Have a go. Get something that is

two minutes, three minutes, a minute, just record something of you either speaking to the

camera or using your screen capture software to be like, here’s the latest on this, here’s a

new product I’m making, whatever it is, here’s a tutorial.

Then you’ve got to import it which means getting it off the camera into the actual editing

software which is very straightforward these days. You take your camera, you plug it into

your computer and mostly the editing program will pick it up and open up and say do you

want to import this? You just click on what you want to import and bring it in.

Then divide your content. I was talking to Roger before. He’s interested in interviewing

people, like photographers about what they do or what Dave does a lot. Just say you

interview someone for an hour and you’ve got an hour long thing but YouTube has a ten

minute maximum so you need six ten minute videos. Once you get that content in, you

just want to look for points where, between questions or where there is a lull in

conversation, then you start to break it up and that’s how you make the separate videos.

All of a sudden you’ve got six videos that are ready to get out there. The way to do that

again is through the editing program, just a point where you can split it up and then you

take one chunk and put it into a new project and then just make a series of those.

So when I’m editing something, I might have twelve different separate projects come out

of one thing, just break them up. Then I go through a process of doing the same thing for

each and it becomes a bit of a conveyor belt.

Then you want to add transitions. Now you know when you’re watching a show and it

fades to black or cross dissolves into the next thing. All those little bits and pieces will be

contained within the editing software. You just want to put those into each to separate an

intro to the main body of the content and then to the outro. That’s really all you need it for.

So there is just really two points.


Then you want to refine it. This is the thing. Even as I’m doing it now, people say um and

they stop and they’re in the middle speaking and then they change direction really quickly

and you’ve got to try and cut that up. The good thing about editing software is that you

can get really specific and make it very clean. You want the content to come in and flow

smoothly and then go out. It is much like the Google versus Yellow Pages video, it flows

along to the next thing.

I was telling Roger as well, that was seven minutes long. It was an hour and a half and I

trimmed that down to seven minutes and then got it down to three and a half minutes and

just kept what was necessary. That’s really important. You don’t need to repeat yourself,

you don’t need to gild the lily, you just need to get the material out there.

Finally you want to add your lower thirds. You know when you see on the news and it will

come up and there will be a little thing at the bottom Ben McEwing from StoryLab, or the

Melbourne SEO Services and what they do. That tells people who you are and gives

credibility as well. So if you guys are all the director of your company, you want to bring it

up there and say Ian, Director, etc. Again, those things will be contained within the editing

software.

Editing steps – part 2

That wasn’t the final point, there is just one

more thing to go. Then you want to create

your intros and outros which is what I showed

you with those earlier pieces. So it can be a

simple as saying, David Jenyns interviews Yaro

Starak, part one of three. That’s it and then you

transition into it, just to show people exactly

what they’re seeing.

As you get more evolved with it, then you might look at putting your logo up there and a

bit of branding. The most important thing is your outro though, because as Dave

mentioned before, it is about a call to action. People have taken the time to watch your

content, so now you want them to do something about it. So it might be as simple as if

they’ve been watching an interview that is in a few parts, you say, you want to see the next

part, go this URL. You should put your URL at the end.


Or we do a lot for the dentists that we’ve been working with. We say, you want to have the

brightest smile in the world? Come to The Dentists. Again, you give people a reason to go

to the website, which is ultimately what the video is doing, bringing people back to your

money site.

Then you want to put in a sound track. iMovie has a whole bunch of jingles that we use

that are free, that are royalty free. You don’t want to mess around with using music that

you’re going to come into some kind of copyright issue.

At this stage it might not matter because you might just be starting out with this form of

communication. But who knows, if your company takes off and it is huge and all of a

sudden someone starts digging around and they say, you made money off that so now we

want a piece of it, it’s going to be counterproductive. There is enough free material out

there that you can use.

Then you want to get it out of the editing thing, you want to export it and save it in a

certain file format which is what the editing software will do for you. Then you go and buy

a suit, you walk the red carpet and you collect your Oscar. So start working on your

acceptance speech as of today.

Distribution

Once you’ve made your video, you need to get

it out there. It’s well and good to have it sitting

on your desktop but you want to get it out

there. We’ve talked about YouTube. That is the

main form we use because it is huge and it is

easy. What we do, I’m just going to take you

through a case study of what we did with a

series of interviews. I’ll just show you the start

of this.

[Video excerpt]


Just quickly, this was just shot on Handycam in

the foyer of a building in the city. Dave’s

wearing one of these little microphones on his

arm there and you’ve got a great picture and

good audio. It’s really simple. But here’s the

thing, you’ve got the content. You’ve got an

expert that Dave is interviewing up there.

So what I’m going to do is jump onto the internet.

Here’s the same video. Now as you’ll see here, I

typed in the word trading tools. That’s the

keyword that we optimized this video for and

trading tools is a very generic term in the trading

niche. We found a way to get the video right to

the top with that. So I’ll just take you through that.

If you notice his name is Guppy so we went for a

water theme. You can do little things like that.

What you want to do, much like if you’re doing SEO for articles and things like that, you

want to get a good strong keyword in your title, so we’ve got Daryl Guppy Talks Trading

Tools because that is the one we chose because that’s the content of this video, mainly

about trading tools. So we get there up at the top there in the title. Then you want to put it

into the body of your text.

With a show of hands, how many people actually read

the descriptions in YouTube? – No one. You can be safe

in knowing that this becomes an SEO tool more than

I’ve got to write a Pulitzer prize winning piece of

description that is beautifully grammatically correct. It’s

more about a great place to slot in some keywords. I

think I’ve got trading tools in here about three times.

It’s in the call to action. You’ve put a call to action in your video and then in your

description on YouTube as well. A rule of thumb that we use is, at the bottom you have

your URL and at the top as well. That’s the first thing that is visible to them as well.


So again down in your tags you’ve got trading tools, that’s our main keyword. Then we

usually choose two or three other keywords that relate to it and it might be a bit longer tail

as well, a little less competitive. Daryl Guppy because he is an authority in the trading

world. If I type in Daryl Guppy, I’ll do that in a second, you’ll see how many of the videos

we’ve done appear in the listings as well. Something long tail like stock trading systems as

well. Again I’ve peppered that into the description.

When I first started doing this, I wasn’t very good at it. I spent hours looking up keywords

and trying to find the right thing. But now I get a feel for what you need to put in there.

The content does not have to be amazing in the descriptions because no one really reads

it.

I’ll just quickly type in Daryl Guppy. The point is, if we go to Google now and go here to

where the videos are and see, we appear at the top of that as well, in Google search. Dave

mentioned before that video is still in its infancy in terms of the sophistication of the SEO

with it. So just placing some keywords in your body, in your descriptor at the top, your title,

can get you to the top of a Google search really quickly, especially in the video area.

So it’s a really good thing to learn. It takes a little bit of practice.

Question: How do you get videos to actually stick on Google page one? They hang around for a couple of weeks and then they disappear. Have you got any tips at all, maybe at the end of your presentation on how to get them to actually stick on page one. Some videos

stick around for six months and I’ve noticed some stick around for years, but generally a couple of weeks.

Answer: Are these highly competitive areas?

Question: In search terms.

Answer: Build links to those videos. Traffic Geyser deals with the front end of a lot of these

web video websites so they will try and have their submissions tools submitted from the

front end of the site. Something like TubeMogul has access to the API, the back end access

to the website. So when they get submitted through to these other video sites, there’s a

much higher success rate of them sticking. Depending on how things are, I seem to have

more success with TubeMogul.


As far as making sure that the videos stick around, just start building links. How many

people do you think are out there building links to videos? Zero. I think hardly anybody out

there is actually building links back to their videos. We can rank for very competitive terms

by not doing any link building. So if you just send links to the videos that you want to rank

for with the right phrases, they will start to pop up.

As far as making sure that the videos come into Google, there is universal search and

sometimes for more competitive phrases you’ll type a keyword in and you’ll see video

appear within the Google search and also images sometimes as well. There is no real hard

and fast way to make that happen. It will happen on more competitive phrases it’ll seem to

pull it. Also if you build authority to those videos through building links then they’ve got a

higher chance of building up. But there is no hard and fast easy way to make sure that it

appears in universal search. But you can get them to pop up in the top of video search just

quite easily.

Resources

Finally I just want to give you the URLs of

some of the resources. We’ve talked about

TubeMogul and Traffic Geyser. Is everyone

aware of those channels? Quick show of

hands. Just for those who don’t know, it’s a

distribution platform and YouTube is one

example. You can take that one video and

you upload it to either TubeMogul or Traffic Geyser and they will distribute it to a whole

bunch of other video sites. So again it’s a very similar thing to network building where you

just need to create a profile on each of those sites, have log in details. You put them in

once in TubeMogul or Traffic Geyser and you upload the video, click launch, send and it

will send them out.

They have their merits. TubeMogul is free. There is also a pro account which will give you a

few more analytical capabilities but generally you can get some really good analytics off it

as well. They’re a bit wary of commercial content, which is why instead of, here is my great

product, buy this, it should be more about, here is a tutorial and if you want to find out

more, come to our website. Video in this scenario acts as a really good call to action to

come back to your site.


Then Traffic Geyser is not free but they have a greater distribution. Not only do they go to

video sites, they also go to social book marking sites and status sites and podcast sites and

things like that and you can put commercial content up through them as well.

Dave spoke about this briefly, Animoto. Has everyone heard of Animoto? It’s a way to make

videos through images, their tagline is The End of Slide Shows. You upload a bunch of

images. It’s a very easy, intuitive interface.

You put images up there with a little bit of text. It has very limited text, like Twitter where

you can only put in a certain amount of characters. What it does is basically puts them all

together with a sound track and makes a very sexy little video for you. You can have free

ones or you can pay $3 per one if you want to do a longer one as well, its animoto.com. Go

and check it out and just have a play around and watch their sample video because some

of the things you can do on there is really quite dazzling and it can be very effective.

The last two are Camtasia and ScreenFlow if you want to go and check those out. They

really are amazing. The first time I got an opportunity to use ScreenFlow was with Dave

and now I take any opportunity to use it because I just think they are incredible. The

others, if you want to go and actually look on the channels that we post the videos to, you

can see the evolution of the videos we make and also get ideas of how to write tags,

keywords, content and things like that. Are there any more questions?

Question: With the making of the videos, and you said the evolution, I hear people say the more raw the video is, the more connection you’re going to get with your audience

because if you make it too slick it’s gone in the corporate brand world again. Where do you draw the line now that you’re making all the videos more slick?

Answer: It depends on the actual context. This last one, Podcast Interviews, Dave’s

interviewing the genius minds of internet marketing and web 2.0 and things like that and

then putting it onto this website and it’s free, it’s for anyone to subscribe to and watch.

You’re basically just watching these interviews with these people. We made the

introductory video to that rather slick because we wanted people to understand how

much gravity we put behind it, that we take this material seriously but it’s still free so it

balances out. We’re not trying to present something and then make you opt in and buy

something.


David: Just when you think of, from a production point of view, think about those Apple

videos. Have you seen those Apple videos where they look really simple? I tried to ask Ben

if he could try and make something simple like that because I thought it was simple but

Ben, knowing what he was talking about said, oh, that’s probably a little harder than you

think.

These guys are sitting there talking about the launch of their new laptop and they’re sitting

in these really white rooms. The cutting and the music and the editing and all that, even

though it seems quite simple and you might think there is not much production value, it’s

just a guy sitting in front of a camera, I think the art or the skill is to make it look as simple

as possible and so all of that is hidden.

So that is what Apple does really well. So much goes into it and you don’t really appreciate

how much value it is. You just say, oh, they made that look easy. That’s really where things

are heading as far as our videos are going.

Ben: Yes, but also, to your point as well, if you’ve just got some good content and you want

to sit in front of a camera and tell someone, that’s fine, it really is. Going back to those

three examples, there is that one that has got 36,000 views, Dave’s just sitting in front of a

camera talking to it. What he said in it is really what is the most important thing.

People don’t expect so much if you’re looking up on YouTube. If I look up a tutorial on

YouTube I don’t care how it’s lit, I just want to know how to do that thing. So I wouldn’t

worry too much. Necessity is the mother of invention. If you get in a position where you

want to do something that is a little more involved, then you can, but get your content out

first.

Question: I think just to comment on your question, and Dave’s touched on it a number of times, you’re not making the video for yourself, you’re making it for the viewer. So in the post production you need to be discussing who’s the viewer and what is their conversation

and what are they looking for? So you’re matching with Dave’s band merchandise, it’s going to be raw. If you’re going into the corporate board, it’s going to be crispy clean.

So that’s all worked out prior to pressing the Play button.

Answer: It’s true, often when I’m editing, I’ll say to Dave, what is the outcome you want

from this. So from his response I will mix it up.

Question: This is a question for you because you’re in the video. How do you make sure you keep on track and hit all the points that you want to hit?

Have you got any techniques you for that?


Answer: I think for that Podcasting Interviews video, Ben just stood there and watched me

try for half an hour, forty-five minutes, just trying it over and over. What I’ll do is have a big

white board just behind the video and I’ll write down my bullet points and I’ll also try and

think about the way that I edit it as well or get Ben to edit it.

Ben’s been teaching me about where I should be stopping and at what points so it makes

it easier and when I do stop to make sure that I try and make a conscious note of where I

left off so I can get back to that same position, have my hands where they were and that

sort of thing. That makes the editing a lot easier to just snip it together.

You can do different things like when we change camera angles and you might see a video

zoom in on my head, sometimes that might be a new take. You might think, oh, they’re

just zooming in so you can see more of me, but really, that’s ok, that’s where I’ve cut it.

There are a few different ways and I think it’s just the practice that you need to get stuck

into.

Ben: The other thing too is, you can get some teleprompting, like teleprompters, autocue

systems. You can get free software on the internet, it’s online that will scroll the text for

you. So if you write a basic script and I did it the other day for a corporate video, I’ve got an

iMac, I shoved it under the camera and just scrolled up and the person just read from it

and then looked at the camera and that’s what they did. There are a lot of solutions.

You’ve got to get a little bit MacGyver about it. It looks great the finished product but it’s

dirty and all over the place things are being held up with gaffer tape and someone’s got a

torch. As long as you can get that material out there then it’s ok. Thanks guys. Good luck

with making videos. Just get started.

Marketing

Getting Started With Web Videos For Business