People spend a third of their time online watching videos. I mean, it's hard to ignore. And 85 percent of the US internet audience watches videos online. Again, you want to get in front of people, make videos.

I've been making videos for over 10 years. Here's a video I published in 2010. But I was also making videos before that. Probably 2006, I started publishing videos. I'm a huge fan of it. I was originally inspired by Gary Vee, and I could see what he'd done with the Wine Library TV and it made sense. It was much harder to make videos back then. It's so much easier now. That's why the process now is so much simpler. And I'm going to share with you a couple of mistakes I made along the way and what I'm doing now.

Another reason you want to do it is you want to protect yourself from single source dependency. This is a term I learned when I was a general manager running Mercedes-Benz dealerships. Single-source dependency means that if something fails, you're out of business, and that means the number one is very dangerous. So if you're putting all your videos in one place, and it goes down, then that's a problem. So we're going to use multiple platforms. But also if you're only driving traffic with Facebook ads, or you're only driving traffic with affiliates, or you're only driving traffic with insert any particular method and it stops, then you are doomed.

The thing I love about video marketing is you can really protect yourself; you're spreading yourself across a few platforms. I'm going to share with you the platforms I use, what sort of results we've got. And we can especially reflect back on since I really started redoing this in around about April 2018. So we have just a little bit less than two years worth of data to reflect upon.

Short videos are just so easy to make. I mean they are dead simple to make, you'll be able to make your first video straight after watching this training. And that's what happened last time I did a training on this. When I did a training on this, we had 15 pages of discussion. I mean there are multiple posts per page. It's about 20 posts per page. So we had a lot of discussion, we had plenty of people make their very first videos and go on to have huge success with this. Many of the people who went through that training have made sales and strengthened their business because of this. It's just so easy.

Videos up to two minutes long get the most engagement, so they don't have to be long, which is great, because they're also really easy to make. And you can increase your reach and conversions. If you think about it, if you were to bump into someone famous from television, maybe your favorite actor from your favorite TV show, let's say you sit on an airplane next to them or you see them in a restaurant sitting at the table next to you, you feel like you know them. You've seen them on TV. Think about Harry and Megan, if you saw them in public, you feel like you know them, you've just seen so many images of them, you've heard them speak, you've seen them talking, you've watched their wedding, like when you get on the camera, and in front of people, they start to know you. This really reduces fear of purchasing, because they know, like, and trust you more.

You're also getting in front of people where they are, where they're consuming, which is predominantly the social platforms. And that's one of the most fundamental changes I had from when I first published Own The Racecourse, which really focused on building an asset you can sell. And it's still the fundamental core to that principle. But what we do is we use the social media platforms as tentacles.

The major fundamental difference is now, instead of putting all that content only on our site and then linking back to our site, we now put the native content on the social sites. They love that. I'll show you some examples.

Since April 2018 to February 2020, this is what we've seen in terms of subscriber growth. So this is what I'm talking about capturing people on multiple platforms.

Think about your email list. Now my email list sits at around 7,000 contacts. Think about how big your email list is and then add up the subscribers to your various channels. So my SuperFastBusiness Facebook page, we have 11,149 people who we can reach with a post. On our Twitter, it's not such a big platform for us - 497. In fact, my personal Twitter is the only platform where we decreased but I think they had an algorithm scrub. And to be fair, I got most of my subscribers in the early hay days of Twitter and probably a lot of them went inactive. With LinkedIn, we saw significant growth. We went from 1,335 connections to 7,094. On Instagram, we increased from two and a half thousand to nearly 3,000 subscribers. YouTube, we went from 2,890 to 4,108. And Facebook, just people following my personal profile, we went from four and a half thousand to 5,181. And for Instagram, my personal Instagram, which I really only started driving from about December, it went from 1,729 to 3,026. So almost doubled that.

And this is a big change from when I did the training, July 2018. Same with this brand new Facebook page. In December 2019, I started it from scratch, and I've got 345 people who I can reach now. That seems like a super, super tiny number. But I'm going to show you why that doesn't matter. So the good news is, if you've got no following right now, and you've never made a video in your life, you can very quickly and easily start reaching new consumers and making sales. This training is going to show you how that happens.

So just to reiterate, LinkedIn is where we saw massive growth. And I was ignoring LinkedIn until we started doing the videos. And the videos are amazing on LinkedIn.Why? I think it's because you've got a very qualified business target. And also, it's a super boring, dry platform. So videos stand out. Videos stand out on LinkedIn compared to the usual content. It's people who are in business.

And my personal Instagram, it really had great growth and that was when I decided to start branding myself. I think we are in the age where your brand is absolutely essential. Whether it's Kylie Jenner, or any celebrity, Hollywood actors get hired for roles based on how many people they can reach with their followers. I'm way too late to this party, but I'm still going to join the party. And even in just the last three months, we've had significant growth.

So I think it's time to start putting your face out there if you possibly can. Regardless, if you're building a business brand. Now I still operate under SuperFastBusiness. We get a lot of search traffic for that. It ranks well. That's our predominant brand. However, James Schramko, the brand, is starting to get stronger, and it means something.

Now Facebook page is evidence of that. It's only early days, but I'm going to keep building this Facebook page and I'll be able to make sales from this page. But all up, we had 322,727 views in less than two years since I've been doing these
videos most days. And these views came easy. This is eight minutes a week. So we're talking about 100 weeks, that's 800 minutes of my life to create 322,727 views, but you may be wondering, so what, are these just people watching? You know, some people get more than a million views on a single YouTube video. But the difference comes down to the type of videos you're making, who you're making them for, where you're putting them. And my story here is, you do not need a lot of views if you have the right content. Okay, it's more about doing the right things than a lot of things.

We had most of our views on YouTube. We had quite a few on LinkedIn, and Facebook. These are our stronger platforms. I could care less about Twitter. And Instagram is definitely coming up there for us. For the page on Facebook, just as sort of a comparison, we gained 477 net followers, we had 51,700 minutes viewed. I mean, think about that, it's quite a lot of views. It takes a long time to view 51,700 minutes.

Even on my personal page, which I only started very, very recently, we've had 3,100 minutes viewed. So that is, when you lay them together, you start to get a footprint, and the people who are watching this tend to be my best customers. When we look at LinkedIn compared to June 2018, what do all those extra connections mean? Going up to 7,000 connections. It means we get now more than 300 percent increase or 300 percent roughly. 622 profile views in the last 90 days. Profile view is the one we want. That's when people click on your profile to see who you are and they click through to your website and get on your waiting list and they end up buying stuff. But do they buy stuff?

Yes. Between April and March from my organic, my social media campaigns, my non-paid campaigns have generated $354,702.60. Now this does include all of our Facebook posts, not just the videos, but most of it is videos. I'm not doing much other than videos and a few place cards which are usually sourced from the videos as a leverage point there.

I've got 270 customers who have been buying repeat things, and it came from 26,000 clicks. This is a really interesting stat, 26,000 clicks from those videos and social posts. 10 percent of them turn into leads and 10 percent of those leads turn into customers, so that's my metrics. If I got 100,000 clicks, I would expect to get 10,000 leads and 1,000 customers. And I would probably make a million dollars from that. In fact, it will snowball over time; this is just getting better and better and better.

My earnings per lead is $135. The lifetime value of my clients so far is $1,366 and my cost is pretty much nothing. It's only the cost of my team to get the content out there. And my team does not cost 354,000 over two years, okay? And they do other things as well.

Module two, I'm going to show you some effective video examples.

First, I want to show you a bad example. When I first started doing these videos, you know, well the second time I did it actually, the first time they're not even on YouTube, I think I have to go way back to another platform, they were on Viddler, because that's what Gary Vee used. And that was about nine years ago, or 10 years ago. But let's say about seven years ago, what I was doing was making videos. They were good-quality DSLR videos. They were pretty ordinary graphics. I used to script. I used to research, script, film, edit, upload, and publish these all myself. There was no help from anyone else. There was not much competition. But the equipment I was using was difficult, the DSLR camera had a very fine focus on it. I had to use a remote to set up the tripod and the lighting and the boom mic and separate audio tracks. And it was quite difficult, and I used to film them myself. They were pretty short and I got quite a few views on each, often 400 or 500 views.

But one of the mistakes I made was I used to make news videos that had three or four or five topics. This is not good content to make. It's okay instantly, but it is not useful down the track. These days, of course, we've now got Instagram stories. And that's a good place to put that kind of content. It's better to put a longer sort of evergreen content. So I would say the biggest thing I learned from this was to have single topic content, single topic content. Make your video about one thing. Your video should be about one thing, every video, one thing. I'll tell you what different types of things you might consider making for your videos.

The other thing to consider is different platforms like different content. So I will show you some examples of what kind of content I'm putting on the platforms.

For LinkedIn, we've been finding they really like How-To tips.

Like any kind of businessy content, SEO stuff are very good. And I've been sharing when I do interviews. I now hit the video record as well. So when I do podcasts these days, I still record the video, and we're stripping out some of that, and we were able to repurpose that. But I also make content just for video syndication that is not a podcast. Why? I've found that Apple did not seem to appreciate my short videos. I had a channel called SuperFastBusiness TV, and they switched it off. I don't know why, but I suspect they weren't vibing with the content.

So these days, I sit down with experts and we just hop on Skype with call recorder. And we use a camera and a mic and we record the content, and I'd give it to my team. And this content is about five minutes long, roughly five minutes, and we're having a chat. Again, it's a single topic, and we have a chat about it. So you don't have to make the videos yourself. That's the big point.

And what I have found is these little video chats work really, really well. And I've been doing them with my revenue share partners. And a really important point one that I've just figured out is my revenue number there that I'm pulling from Wicked Reports, does not include my revenue share income. So if we would add that in, we would see a substantially better number, but I don't track sales in Wicked Reports for revenue shares. I would estimate that the number that I've made from social media videos is probably double, because a good chunk of my income these days comes from revenue share deals. So that's important and I've found this is the best platform to showcase my revenue share partners.

Twitter, we don't do too much with that. We use the same stuff that we put on our Instagram, which is usually the square type of videos with captions. And we just talk about what it is and link.

Now in this case, the type of content that I've published here is a preview or an awareness post pointing people to a recent episode. So when I had Rhonda Britten on my podcast, we podcasted that. I did capture video, but then I make a separate video talking about the podcast, and this is a new innovation for us. And it's been working really well and it's driving people to our podcasts and I've had an increase in podcast listeners. I think we're up probably over 20 percent more listens on our podcast, because we're driving people to it with short videos. So a good type of video to make is a video that drives people to your other content.

Facebook. On Facebook, this is a really, really good platform for us again to put these partnership things where we put a dedicated video that is either just for video syndication, or if it's a little bit longer, and you know, for podcasts, you really need longer content, at least 10 minutes but probably 20 or more, because the average podcast length of my very best top 10 podcasts was 25 minutes. So you want to have longer content.

Short content on Facebook, great. That's where people go to be distracted, to be engaged, muck around with their friends, you never go on Facebook and get the thing that you went there to get done, done. You always end up getting distracted and into a loop. The great thing is when they start watching these little videos and snacking on them, they can daisy chain to the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one. You can create playlists and so forth.

Instagram Stories, this has been really handy for us to highlight content. So again, we put snippets of the other content we've already put, especially promoting our podcast. I've also used it on my personal Instagram to promote things that are happening that are newsworthy. So that's where I put news now, things that will expire are good to put in stories.

Also, people love behind the scenes. I did a behind the scenes when I went to the wave pool in Melbourne the other week. And you can see that in this case, we're using a 16 x 9 video that's got a top and a tail. But often for the stories, I'll use an app called Spark, not the Adobe Spark but its Spark video for iPhone. And I'll use it in the portrait style, not landscape. And I will create little videos that have super easy to edit and I'll load them up after you finish exporting it, it asks you whether you like to split it for story. And I do.

So if something's going to expire or it's not evergreen content, I will use Spark and I'll make a little story and I will export it and then upload it to Instagram and that gets a lot of stickiness. People love that, hundreds of people view them.

For Instagram TV, that's where I'm going to break it down into categories.

I've got categories like podcasts, announcements, I've got business tips, I've got book reviews, and they're going really, really well. I'm getting 300 views. Again, I've only got a tiny little following, but the people watching it are the right people and it's the right content for them.

You can see I've got a seven and a half minute monologue there, the top right, where I talk about why I support this software. That video drove lots of sales when I put it across the different platforms. It's seven and a half minutes long and almost eight minutes. I came up with the idea for the video a week beforehand, I thought about what I wanted to say. And when I was ready, I just recorded it in one take and loaded it up.

And these days, I load the video first to my personal Instagram and my personal Facebook page. And then my team gets the Drive version if I think it's evergreen, and they will then go back into my personal Facebook page and put the captions. So the first cut of it doesn't even have the captions. If you want the first of my content, you go to my personal Instagram and that's where you'll see it first before anywhere else. Now I'll talk later about staggering.

Another example how we're using Instagram is we're putting - you can see where there's little video symbols and Instagram TV symbols, where we're loading up videos in the wall itself. When you put an Instagram TV, you get the option to preview it on the wall. And sometimes you just have a short video, it's not going to be on Instagram TV, and then other times you just have a quote card. And often the quote card is extracted from the content. So most of our content surrounding the videos is extracted from the video itself. And that's working well.

For YouTube, the sort of content that people like there that I've had more success with are single-topic videos.

Generally, longer-form content is better on YouTube, I think I've got a couple of examples.

One of the most popular ones was an intro module, when you upload an overview or an introduction model. So in 2012, I uploaded the Own The Racecourse introduction module. It had quite a few views, people watched that.

And then of course, your blog.

We still take the video and we put it on our blog. Now we used to use the Apple SuperFastBusiness TV channel, but since they stopped that, they didn't like it, we now embed a YouTube video instead. And we're still getting organic traffic to our website. And it's still high value for us. We have 20,000 index pages on our blog. So Own The Racecourse is still well and truly alive.

And of course in our member's area of SuperFastBusiness, I still put the videos that go on our blog.

They auto post to the member's area so that members can get more discussion and there's lots of discussion on these videos. And work hard on your titles, the title will encourage someone to click through. And I actually keep a little register in my life sheet. It's a spreadsheet of the videos I've made, I've made like 400 of them now, so that I can keep sort of track of the topics that I've covered in case I start forgetting.

But I do have a little bit of a rule and that is, if I do make the same video twice, then it's okay. Because if I forget I've already made it, the customer almost certainly has, or they probably didn't even watch the first one. And if they have seen it again, that's okay, reinforcement is fine. So, these videos often get comments and it's an opportunity for my members to discuss them in more depth. So don't waste that resource.

Module three is how to make the videos.

The first step is market research

The first step, and there's seven steps, the first step is market research, you really have to know your audience.
So list your ideas from calls. I would say the vast majority of videos I make are inspired by phone calls or Skype calls, Zoom calls that I have with my clients, where they're asking me questions and I'm answering them. I usually put a line down the middle of the paper, and I write the question on the left and the answer on the right.

I can also generate a couple of dozen videos from any FAQ live call. So if you were to do live streams, or ask me any things, whether it's Instagram story or Facebook Live, or for your private members, you will generate so many ideas. It's ridiculous. And the best thing is, these ideas are completely relevant for your audience because it is your audience asking the question in the first place. And the theory is, if one person is asking you that, then there's probably plenty of other people thinking it who haven't asked yet. This has never failed me.

Also, you can work on popular topics, you can use news jacking, whatever's going on in the marketplace, is getting a lot of press so you can tag onto those topics. So there's plenty of examples of that right now, across the world. There's a little bit of doom and gloom about viruses and financial turmoil and we've just come off the back of bushfires and climate change. So I think it's actually a really good time to be in an online business with a high-profit margin. And making short videos from the safety and comfort of your own home that sells digitally transferred information products is probably the safest occupation on the planet right now.

And so I could make a topic about that and I could make a video about it. Just don't overstep the mark and become an IP tabloid. Some people get a little bit carried away with this. So when you are news jacking, be considerate that you are going to possibly offend or upset some people.

Also, when it comes to embedding videos on your site, you can also embed the Facebook version of the video if you want to create an audience. So it depends what your goal is, whether you're trying to get more view time on a particular channel or to build your remarketing list on a particular channel.

Now existing popular content, there's already high-ranking articles. There's tools out there like BuzzSumo. Ahrefs that will find you the most popular content already. What are the most popular YouTube videos? What LinkedIn videos have you commented on recently? What's on your Facebook feed? These popular content that are already out there indicate to you what you can make more of, even your own content. What content did you make in the past people love? For example, this particular training on short videos is an updated 2020 version of a training I did in 2018. That was absolutely by far and away the most popular training we did around that period. So it makes sense to do it again and to improve and enhance, okay?

Communities and live events, absolutely fertile content fields. Write down notes about your conversations. I always pull up my iPad, and I write down my notes when someone asks me a great question, or I'm hearing the same thing over and over again, I'll make a note about it. And then I'll get out to the market. That's how you stay connected. It's keeping your finger on the pulse.

And check your help desk for frequently asked questions. What do people ask you that you can get out there with some content? Sometimes people ask you, what's

the difference between your gold or your platinum package? Make a video about it. What's the difference between the gold and the platinum package? And you can now use that content. Even in your support desk, your team can send them to that video. But even someone who wasn't considering your program might be drawn into that type of content and think, 'Oh, I think I really like the sound of that platinum program. I'm going to join up.' By the way, that's called a precious metal pricing strategy.

Step two, choose a type of video you want to make.

There's the talking head video. That is you on camera. That is probably the very easiest video to make because there's no preparation required. You point your camera at you and record. It's also going to give you the most branding of your personal character. They hear you, they see you, they can decide if you're telling the truth or not. They get a vibe for your scenery, your background, the way you live, where you are, what you're interested in. There's so much information conveyed in a talking head video that I would recommend that unless you're a super introvert. If you are a super introvert or you want to leverage stuff, you can still use slideshows.

For example, this particular training, I'm not putting my face on it, but there is a slideshow. So we could take an extract of it and make a little video teaser about this particular product. We could say, ‚Hey, would you like to know how you can earn $1 for every minute of video you record? That's right, we've made over $300,000 from over 300,000 views of our videos over the last less than two years.‛ That could be our little sneak teaser topic that brings people into be interested in the product itself.

Audiograms, this is a style of video where you put an image and then you overlay the audio. So if you had an audio-only podcast, you could put images for that. Now you can rotate the images or you can just have a feed. There are apps that do this. There's apps like Headliner that will make them for you and let you leverage existing content and spread them out across different networks. I'll talk to you about distribution in a separate module.

Repurposed event footage. We found lately, when we were selling SuperFastBusiness Live, the video recordings from our previous events were very powerful videos to show our audience. It gives people the demonstration of what they're going to be seeing. We use a high-quality two camera setup with great audio and we mix in the slides and speaker. But taking that existing asset, I mean, I have 10 years' worth of event recordings and some of the materials are still extremely relevant, because we were super bleeding edge back then. And we dropped that content now and it demonstrates how being at that event made such a difference for the attendees.

In fact, you'll see Gary Vee do this a lot. He'll put his old version of him and then his new version of him. Sometimes part of it on the left and part of it on the right. Sometimes it's just an old one with a date stamp but it's proof that he is some kind of oracle. Of course you can edit it up. You don't have to mention that Snapchat is going to be the biggest thing if you also said that LinkedIn or Instagram is going to be the biggest thing, like you can retrospectively make it look pretty good. Just like any documentary maker can flavor up the marketing. I mean, we're marketing at the end of the day, you tell the story you want to tell.

Transcript:

Step three is the framework.

So how do we actually get this video from us or from the slides into an acceptable format?

So what works well for how-to, review, and rants is Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. They're good platforms. They like how-tos, reviews, and rants.

I use the T.E.A formula for this. This formula is for those platforms when you have a single topic.

So T for Topic. Identify the topic, and now it's set early on. That could be, 'Today I'm going to share with you how to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, using just a few minutes of your week to create videos.'

Then Explain it. 'So what do I mean by that? I mean, you can just sit down for just a few minutes each week, make a specific type of video that you publish on the Internet and generate sales for your business.'

And then A, Answer it, tell them how it's done. This is where you deliver the tip. 'So what we do is we gather information from our existing customers of what their pain points are. And then we create a single topic video where we explain the problem and then we answer it with the solution. And then we publish it right where they love to view videos across various social media platforms.'

Now, feel free to add a call to action. It could be to subscribe to the channel. It could be to join your email list. So you could say, ‚We've created a guide on how to actually do this providing you the exact framework we've used to successfully generate hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last two years. Right beside this video, there's a link where you can grab it for free.‛ Or on one of the Facebook posts, you might say, ‚If you're interested in it, just type a comment below this post.‛ Now, I think there's rules against that, so be careful. And then there's other things you could, say, ‚We've put it on our website called easyvideoprofits.com,‛ or whatever, I don't own that domain. I just made that up. Then there's other things you could do like if you've enjoyed this video and you want more tips, be sure to subscribe to our channel or to our page or wherever you see this video.

So there's different calls to action you can have, but ultimately, this strategy really relies on repeated exposure and over the long haul, building massive value. Don't be too worried about the call to action. I didn't bother about it for quite some time. I'm going to show you some examples of the calls to action we've used in the past.

So what works well for selling.

The 16-Word Sales Letter template works well. Now we've created a 16-word- sales-letter composer on SuperFastBusiness.com. Just go to superfastbusiness.com/tools, and you'll be able to see the 16-word-sales-letter composer. That is based on the book, The 16-Word Sales Letter by Evaldo Albuquerque, and it will take you through some of the questions that you need to be able to answer for a sale to be made if someone's a bit skeptical. It'll force you to identify what's special about your product, and how it actually works and why someone should do something about it now, so it's a great framework for selling. I've used this framework to sell live event tickets.

The other framework that I absolutely adore, and I've used since about 1993 is S.P.I.N. And it's super, super simple. And it works for any situation but it's especially good for bigger ticket sales.

S stands for Situation. That's just meeting people where they're at. I'll give you an example. Have you ever sat down in front of your video camera and wondered what to actually say that would compel someone to buy? Okay. So that's the situation they're facing.

Now the Problem. Of course, it can be very stressful and difficult because you don't really know what to say, you're probably aware that there are things that could be said that would have a great result. And then there's things that are pretty ordinary, and you just don't know what to do. You lock up, you freeze, you waste all this valuable time, and then you put the camera away, and you just get really frustrated, and you know that the elusive riches that you could be earning are still out there somewhere. Okay. That's the problem.

The Implication, now what does this mean? Ultimately, this could be the crossroads of your success in the future or not. Not having that framework of how to make a properly formatted video that could sell for you is the make-or-break situation.

And then there's the Need. What you really need is a framework, and I'm going to suggest a great framework called S.P.I.N. S.P.I.N selling - stands for Situation, Problem, Implications, Need. Use that framework all the time If you have nothing else. That will help you sell like crazy. Whatever you sell, doesn't matter. Meet people where they're at, help them understand their problem, explain what happens if that problem is not fixed, and then tell them the solution.

Now in terms of technically filming it, you might be able to just address the camera like I can. I can just look at the camera and talk because I've been doing it for a while. And I can tell you it wasn't always like that. Sometimes if I've got a more technical video to make, or there's a few bullet points I'm trying to remember, I might jot them onto a post-it note, and I'll stick the post-it note right next to the camera lens or on the tripod, or just behind the camera on a mirror of something so that I can see the bullets and I'll look directly at the camera as I'm reading the points.

There are teleprompter apps you can put onto your iPad or your phone or your computer. Or if you really want a basic one, create a keynote or a PowerPoint and stick your laptop on a stool 10 feet behind the camera and use a clicker in your pocket to scroll through. That's how I did a whole video sales letter for an event that I was selling once. I just put my sales script on words on a slide deck just like the one you're looking at now, clicked through the slides and I just read it seamlessly to the camera.

A whiteboard. For most of the time when I had news videos to make, I had this portable whiteboard. It was made out of cardboard, so it was very light. And I'd write down my bullet points on my living room floor. And then I would go out and film the videos, I put the whiteboard behind the camera, and I would just either read from the whiteboard, but you don't want your eyes going left or right. Or I would just look at a bullet point and then look at the camera and record and then stop the camera and then look at the bullet point. And then look at the camera and then record, whatever works for you.

And of course you can rehearse. You don't have to publish your first take. I really want to say that again. You don't have to publish your first take. That's the beauty of video. You could make six videos and choose the best one. And it's just so simple. And delete the other ones. The public will only see the ones you decide are good enough. So if that's your fear, just make several and pick one.

Step four is equipment.

What are we using to make these videos? You might be surprised.

iPhone. Chances are you've already got an iPhone or an Android. That's enough. You don't need anything other than that. These days, they come in 4k resolution. They have bazillion cameras. They're super high quality. They even do slow mo. They do time-lapse, they do portraits, super focuses, all sorts of things. And there's lots of apps you can use to treat the videos after. The one that I like is called Tilt Shift. It lets you adjust the lighting, but I don't even use an app most of the time.

I would suggest that you focus on your lighting because you don't want skeletor eyes, those shadows under your eyes. It's easy to get reasonable lighting for a few hundred dollars. This one I've got is an LED light. I've got one in Australia, I've got one in the Philippines, and I just stick it on my tripod right next to a Manfrotto iPhone mount. And you can put it white or yellowish light and you can adjust the brightness but that will knock the edges out of a dark room.

If you don't have lighting and you can't get good lighting, go outside and film outside. You'll get nice, good lighting. You have to face the sun or where the sun is. And if it's not too bright or glary, you'll get beautiful, even lighting. Most of my videos in the early days seven years ago were shot outside of my front lawn. And it was about the size of a golf course mind you, but it was beautiful scenery. I had lovely tees and stuff. And the lighting was always quite good. It was easy to cheat.

Get a tripod, whatever it is. I've got all sorts of little gorilla grips, I've got a standard sort of mini tripod that does most of the grunt work. And I just clip my phone and turn the light on and I'm away. There's not even any line, no wires or anything. And the other one that I have been using as a switch pod, I bought one on Kickstarter when Pat Flynn launched it. It's been quite handy. That's the one I use at one of my places. I just stick the phone on that and I hand hold it sometimes and that's okay. Organic videos are real, and people love them.

Now pay attention to your backdrop. I've seen some videos with some super shady backdrops like the background Is letting the video down. Like it or not, people are making a judgment. They're looking behind you and they're saying, what's going on? I've seen some people with like, really sh*tty, old furniture and clothes strewn on the floor and crappy, dark shadows and it just looks cheap and nasty, and it's going to drag you down. I mean, have a look at this picture. That is a beautiful scenario. Like that picture says, 'Hey, I've got a vibrant color-coded library. I've read lots of books and I'm super focused on my laptop.' That's a good set. That's in my house. And it's a little bit echoey there. That's only one of the downsides, but you can get good lighting and you can get reasonable sound with other devices. I'll share with you some of those things.

But often, you'll see in my backdrops, you'll see a surfboard - that's part of my brand. I surf every day. My presentation that I'm working on at the moment is lifestyle design secrets of a seven-day-a-week surfer. I mean that's my brand. I can have surfboards. I coach business people. I need to be well read. Books are a good backdrop. It doesn't have to be Pina Coladas and resorts, everyone's been to a resort. It's not tricky to pay hundreds of dollars to be in a resort and pretend that it's your New Yorker mansion, right?

So be real but also consider that your backdrop is going to leave an impression. And I have a pretty plain backdrop. In one place, I've got just a black foam wall. You've all seen that. I'm sure if you're watching this, you've seen one of those videos. Another place I've got a few surfboards and just a plain white wall, and table and chairs and some couches. And that's just a nice casual place. I happen to make quite a lot of videos there because I have fast internet and I can upload it instantly.

In the Philippines, I've got some curtains and lights and some different textured walls that I can use around the house. And of course I make a lot of videos out and about when I'm outside or outdoors because that's taking people where you are especially when I do the little documentary style ones. When you're on a journey, people want to be on the journey with you.

A Lav mic can be handy and you can also get a wind, a fixture for this, a little Dead Cat they're called. It's a pretty crazy name but a little fluffy thing. If you are outside, you will need one because wind will destroy your videos. I've lost a lot of videos to wind. I do use the Lav mic some of the time. If I'm in the place I'm recording now, which is a bit echoey, I'll tend to use this Lav mic to get it softening the voice on my t-shirt instead of bouncing around the room. But in my other place with the insulated walls, I don't use the Lav mic very often because it's just not echoey in the first place. And the iPhone has a perfectly good microphone.

The podcaster mic - that's exactly what I'm recording this training on. It's a USB mic. You plug it into your laptop. It's great when I'm doing all my Skype calls with call recorder. I will use the podcaster mic, and I'll use a camera that goes with it, which I'll show in a sec.

And where possible, use a bit of sound insulation. Right now, I'm using some sound insulation around my microphone, it's still very echoey, but it's less echoey than if I didn't have it. You can buy a little portable booth, you can even make one. You can buy these foam tiles very, very cheaply. And you can install them into a cardboard box if you want. Like you could make one of these for probably $20 or you can go all out, spend a few hundred dollars and get one that's already made like brands like Auralex. And I've stuck them on an entire room, like I've got them on four walls of my room. And it just soaks a lot of the noise out, which is great.

The Logitech camera, you can get a C930, I think it is, or a Brio 4K, or whatever. They're way better than the one that's sitting in your laptop generally. And if you have a good camera and a good mic, then you can do really good interview videos. And the goal is to make it an easy setup, you have to be able to repeat the setup over and over and over again so that you can rapidly create content. For me that's the difference. The fact is, if I have my iPhone, I'm in business. I can make a video on my iPhone and 90 percent of my content will be with my iPhone and the rest is with the camera setup that you're looking at here.

A good camera that my client Scott Devine uses is a G7X. He put me on to this. James Eagar also talks about it. This is what a lot of bloggers are using for their YouTube channels. It is a billion times easier than a DSLR. It's got a flip out lens so you can see yourself. The sound is perfectly fine without an external mic and the camera is like state-of-the-art, out-of-this world quality, and it's got a great battery life. And I have made quite a lot of content on this. If I was making a course, I probably would use this camera, I've got one and I could use it more. And it works off an SD card. So it's very easy to move files around and you can also use a Wi-Fi with it. I would get that.

I'll tell you what I wouldn't do again, I wouldn't go and get a DSLR, it's just way too complicated, too difficult. If you're going to do DSLR-quality videos, I would say go and hire a studio or get a professional to come and film you and get all the stuff you want done. And they will come and do it with all the good gear and you'll get a great output. I've got all this equipment - I've got a DSLR, I've got the 50mm 1.2 lens. I spent thousands on this stuff. I ended up selling my Boom mics and mixers and amps and wireless mics. Just too much stuff. I got too complicated. I made it too difficult. It's never been easier now with just an iPhone.

And these portable audio recorders are good. You're going to need one if you're going to use a DSLR because the microphone and the camera are not great. I use this for my backups for podcasts, probably a third of the podcasts that you listen to that I've done. I've used my Zoom backup. It's very good if you travel a lot. And it's a good way to record audio if you're going to use an iPhone or something and you're not in an ideal scenario and you want to join the tracks later.

Step five, editing your videos.

Consider a service. There's plenty of services out there who edit your videos, you just want a service where you give them your raw video and they do it. I've got a team that does this. That's the other option is my team.

By the way, my team often uses Auphonic. If you get an audio and it's not quite well balanced, or you've got two people and they're not leveled, Auphonic can do a lot to fix it.

But my team does my editing. I won't get bogged down into how they do it and what they do it. I'm going to share the SOP, and we have more detailed SOPs and I can provide that more detailed editing SOP wherever you see this training as a PDF, but the bottom line is, you should not do this yourself. If you're going to be editing and uploading and stuff, you're going to chew hours and hours and hours of your life and you probably have something better to do.

Some of the services out there. They've got the teams who are really pro at editing and they'll turn around quickly. Couple that come to mind, Valher Media. Charley Valher's team, very good with these podcasts and videos. I think Splasheo does this as well. They'll take the material that you've already got and turn it into useful stuff. They were the people who gave me the idea to do the captions and the transcripts properly. There's a bit of mucking around with SRT files and all this sort of stuff. It is essentially, if you can get the captions into your videos, they will be watched by people who do not play the sound and they will read every word. So almost all of our content has captions. The only one that doesn't, is my personal Instagram stories and TV where I didn't put them in before I uploaded it. But I'm working on a staggering situation there. The team will still do it for the rest of the videos and upload them later and people see it again, which is great.

Step six, sharing your videos.

Where do you put them? Firstly, how do you put them?

By hand is going to be any other machine or robot. There's lots of tools that will auto post stuff. But I would tell you, I don't think the platforms like them very much. And if you have a great team or a service who will syndicate for you, take advantage of that. My team hand uploads most of our stuff. And the reason we do that is different content for different platforms, different strategy with the way we describe them and tag them and different timing. So we're not going to be penalized for using a machine. The platforms know when you're using a machine. When you upload by hand, it's just hard to beat. It's organic.

There are scheduling tools. You can use some of them. Some of the common names you'll hear will be Buffer. There's a couple we used to use, like Meet Edgar but we switched to a different tool, but we use them very sparingly. I've encouraged my team just to go organic, we manually upload to LinkedIn, I manually upload to Instagram and my Facebook page, my team do the same for the other properties as well and for YouTube. Just go by hand if you possibly can.

And stagger them. Don't upload them all, the same video to all platforms on the same day, same time, okay? There are different times that work better for different platforms, if you want me to share them with you, I can, of the ones we've figured out so far. It's good that your customers are going to see stuff at different times. I'm sure people see my stuff on my personal Instagram. And then a week later, they'll see something on my Facebook channel, or they'll get a subscriber alert on YouTube and see the same piece of content but it will be edited and captioned by then and it may be a great reminder. And keep in mind often that content is one to two minutes long. And some of them bear a re-watch.

Best day to post that we've found for Facebook are Wednesday to Friday, noon to 5 p.m. Pacific time, that'll be Pacific US time. For Instagram, we found Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 6 a.m. to noon are good times for our content, in terms of where we get the most reactions. That's all we've discovered so far.

Now the SOP that we're using, I'll give you the brief overview.

Stands for Standard Operating Procedures. So it's the same way we do things every single time and everyone who does it is copied in on this.

So when I make a video, I put it into the Google Drive folder, that's where it starts. And the Google Drive folder is called Needs Editing. Very simple. After they've edited, they'll move it off to editing and then they'll move it off to archive I think. They edit the part where I'm turning the camera on and off, and they add a swoosh animation. If you're going to use an animation, make it short. People will not sit through a long animation.

And usually when I'm making the video, I provide for where they're going to put the animation. I introduce the topic and I might have a micro pause. So I might say,Hey, today I'm going to share with you the one thing we change with our website that doubled conversions.‛ And then I pause, and then I go into explaining it. And they'll put the swoosh right there. So it's kind of like we're a team and we're working together.

Three is they natively upload the video to the social media property. So they've edited by now. Now we have a separate editing procedure, which I can provide as a PDF. But frankly, I don't even know what tools they're using for a lot of this, I don't care. As long as they're happy with it. They want a tool, they can have it. They should know how to use it. And whatever they're producing is great. I've shown them videos I like, and I say, ‚Can we make this?‛ And they say, ‚Yes, we can,‛ and they make it. That's the extent of my involvement as the business owner. And I encourage you, please don't get bogged down in the minutia.

So they natively upload to social media properties, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And they make sure that they have a good title, that the tags are hashtags are always included, and there's a description and a call to action and a caption and thumbnail for YouTube. And you want your captions and thumbnails to be messy. This is another thing we learned. I showed my stuff to a social media expert. Her name was Rachel Miller. And she said, ‚Your thumbnails look boring and robotic. You need to make them messy.‛ Since then, we've made them messy. They're all different, crazy, different fonts. Basically, we flipped our rule book. We used to have a standard guideline for how they should look and we realized we were just boring people off the face of the earth. So you want really catchy, messy thumbnails. I'll show you some examples in a sec.

For Instagram, we upload the edited video to Instagram TV with the same requirement that should be with a thumbnail. It's 1080 x 1920. So they've changed the format size for Instagram. Pin the video post of the day to the top of the feed for Facebook and Twitter, add video to Quick Tips playlist to Facebook and #SFBTV for SuperFastBusiness TV on YouTube. After the video has been uploaded to all the properties, move it to the archive folder. So that's our storage system. And stats will be checked after a month to see if they've improved.

No point doing this in a vacuum. You've got to know if it's actually working or not, which is why this training came about.

Now for the call to action, you can put a call to action in the link.

When we've used a tracking link like this, this is how we know from Wicked Reports this video generated sales. That's where we're tracking it.

And underneath your Facebook page profile, you can put a longer form thing because it's going to show up as beside your videos.

Again, LinkedIn, put your call to action.

And for YouTube, you get lots of calls to action. We use our own link tracker, so no one else is interfering with our link reputation. And it's tracking all those leads. And you could see that we've pinned that tail on the donkey quite well.

You can see a couple of hashtags there and the call to action.

Same with the profile for Instagram, that's where you get to make the sales is just that bio.

Now it made no difference if we posted the call to action in the post or in the comments. Some people said, ‚Oh, don't put it in the post, put in the comments after because the platform doesn't like it.‛ It didn't make any difference for us. So you might as well put it wherever you want.

Step seven, magnify your video reach.

Buy traffic. What we've been doing is finding the videos that work well, because a percentage of your videos will take off. And they're the ones you magnify, especially if you're tracking for conversions, and you can see which ones make sales, then boost them, get some more traffic campaigns running to them. We had a lot of success with that for our event.

The most viewed videos per platform in the lifetime for us were Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. So we've actually bought traffic on Facebook, and I'll show you the traffic we bought and how that turned into sales in a minute. We also bought traffic on YouTube with Ilana's help from TeachTraffic.com. We purchased some traffic for my book, Work Less, Make More, which seems to have coincided with it ranking better on Amazon and driving more sales. YouTube is a great advertising platform to make videos. Instagram and Facebook are easy to run ads to videos. So that's what's been working well for us and especially for our event campaign.

So for organic traffic, you recall we've made $354,702.60 in sales, but what about for our paid traffic?

Turns out, we've made $353,779.60 in that same period from our Facebook ad costs, $18,145 in spend boosting that content to make the extra sales, I'd say that was a good spend.

So just in summary, for the videos that I've made since April 2018 to the end of February 2020, we've made probably over a million dollars if you take into account the sales that are not tracked in Wicked Reports, which are rev shares and affiliate income for about $18,000 spend and about eight minutes per week of videos and for my team wages, which is the only cost I have with my content marketing, other than that. So it's a really good deal.

And of course, send emails. Send emails out to the people who are subscribing to you because you've got them at the top of the funnel with the videos. Now send them emails with offers, and also occasionally recycle them back into videos. So lately I've sent a couple of emails back to Facebook videos. I'm making sure that I'm recycling my email back onto social media and building my social media audiences for us to run ads. It's a very powerful, positive cycle.

And use pre-marketing, make videos to let people know about stuff that's coming. I picked this one up from Charley Valher. He's been succeeding with podcasts announcing what's coming, my team caught on to that idea really well. And we often talk about a podcast that's coming up because they've got access to the recording before we publish it. They've been making little teaser snippets. And I think that's been making our podcasts more successful as well.

And then, of course, review. Make your videos, like don't do it after the first day or week, you're not going to get much results in the first week. I think it took me a few months to start seeing an impact. But then now I can see this snowball is really quite serious. This is a multi-million dollar activity. And it's also super, super easy. And I enjoy it. So I can do this for a long time. I can make videos for a long, long time because I got an iPhone. And I speak to my customers. It's as simple as that. And I've got a team who can do something with the video.

And then repeat. So that's what we've been doing since the first time we did this training July 2018 to now, we've continued to innovate, and update, and see what's working and tuned and put our focus where it's working the best. Probably the biggest change is launching into that personal brand, my personal Instagram, and I invite you to join me @JamesSchramko. And my personal Facebook page, that's where I'm seeing very, very good interactions because it's super personal branded.

So now that all remains is for you to start, get out there. If you haven't already, make a video, publish it. Wherever you see this particular training, you can post a link to it or share it so we can see what you're up to and give you some advice or comments on it if you want feedback, and you will see the impact of short videos for profit.

I hope you've enjoyed this training. And remember, every popular video marketer started from scratch. I mean, they had nothing. Before I had videos, I had no videos. I secretly knew that one day I would have to put myself out there, and it's scary and frightening and difficult. But then after you do it, it's easy. And I think I started, probably in 2006. We're here in 2020. Honestly, I can't remember how hard or difficult it might have been back then. It was too long ago. What I do know is it's just so easy to make a video and upload it now and the sales keep coming. So get into it.

Hopefully, you've been inspired and encouraged to get down the path. Thank you very much for being a part of this training.