In this episode of the podcast, I’m joined by video marketing expert, Dave Kaminski to discuss how to use video to build authority and dramatically increase your traffic and conversions with video.
Are you confused, frustrated or even intimidated by the idea of including video in your online marketing mix? In this podcast, we are going to discuss how to get past this and go on to create compelling video content that will help you to increase engagement with your audience, which will ultimately lead to increasing traffic and sales.
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About David
Dave Kaminski is a professional copywriter, videographer, photographer and 10-year veteran of direct response marketing whose work in multimedia advertising has resulted in millions of dollars worth of sales. A former U.S. Marine, Dave specializes in teaching entrepreneurs how to effectively use web video in their marketing efforts.
In This Episode, David and I Discuss
New media marketing and how you can use video to supercharge your efforts
The different types of video, and when to use each one
How video should play a role in your direct sales efforts
The biggest mistake most rookies make when creating video and how to avoid it
The 3 key pieces of equipment that you need and how much you should spend
How putting your videos on Youtube may not be good for your business
How to shoot, edit, and host your videos
and so much more…
Links
Web Video University (affiliate link to Dave’s paid training product)
Transcript
Click Here to Read the Transcript
OIL 028: An Interview with Dave Kaminski
Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! It’s Trent here with session no. 28 on the Online Income Lab podcast. On the show today we’re gonna be talking about all things video marketing. You wanna build the site. You wanna become an authority. You wanna generate a following? You better be using video. Join me as I welcome a fellow by the name of Dave Kaminski who is probably one of the best known and smartest video marketers that I’ve run across so far. And when I saw the type of people that Dave worked with and the type of information that he was putting on I realized I had to have him on the show. So with that said let’s jump right into it and welcome Dave to the show.
Hey everybody on the show with me today I have Dave Kaminski who is the guy behind webvideouniversity.com. And I stumbled across Dave last week actually. I was out looking for new ideas in the area of video marketing and somehow I stumbled across the site and once I took a look at it I thought “man this guy is just a video guru.” So I really want to get him on the show coz I wanted to talk about how video can really help you to differentiate yourself and how you can use it to build authority. So we’re gonna get into a whole bunch of questions all around that topic.
Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave Kaminski: Hey thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.
T: So before we go into all these wonderful things about video can you just, for my audience, just tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into web video marketing.
D: Sure. My background is actually in direct response marketing where I was a direct response copy writer. I was the guy who was hired to write sales pitches for people. This is back before a lot of things were being done on the internet. This is in the late 90′s, mid to late 90′s. And what I started to do with some of my clients we’re sending out direct mail packages is they wanted to do something to make themselves stand out to get their letters read, their packages opened. So we started doing video and I actually had a photography and video background as well so I started producing videos for my clients that would go out with their mail packages. So I was writing the sales pitches and doing the actual sales videos. Then when we got to the early part of the decade, early 2000′s, actually putting video on the web was something was becoming doable. You know, in 2005 that’s when Youtube hit the scene. And basically when all of that exploded at that point I was pretty much burned out. I’m writing the sales copy for people but I was very interested in videos still. So what I did is I just took what I have been doing for several years for my clients offline and I packaged my knowledge and my skills into a train package and I put it online so people could learn the techniques and tricks that I knew.
T: Terrific. And so let’s talk about then for someone who is interested in creating authority site on any topic at the high level how is video going to help them to do a better of building authority and how’s it gonna help them to do their job of getting traffic?
D: As far as building authority video is absolutely fantastic for that. And that’s because with video you pretty much can’t fake it. I can go out and start a text base website right now. I can give myself any name, any made up name. I can pretend any person I want. I do with video and when you do video you can’t just do one video. You gotta do a video consistently. And it’s constantly my face on camera. I can’t fake that. I can’t fake who I am. So you’re gonna build authority that way. People are gonna know that you’re the real deal. You’re not faking it. You’re on video. As far as building traffic there’s several different ways. A lot of people look to Youtube exclusively as a traffic source and that’s fine. The one big catch that you need to know with Youtube is that basically when you upload a video to Youtube you’re giving away most of your rights on your video. Youtube users and Youtube can pretty much do it with your video whatever they want. The other drawback with Youtube specifically is that anyone and everyone is going to probably rip you off if you’ve got a great idea where you’re a great series of videos. They’re gonna get lots of copycats. People might even take your videos and use it to promote their own products, things like that. Youtube is a fantastic source but it has some drawbacks.
The other way to generate traffic which is exactly what I do is I take videos and I publish them. I set posts that I’ve published them on my own webiste so instead of all the traffic going to, say for example, Youtube for people to watch the videos, all of the traffic is going to my own website where I can monetize everything and basically in a nutshell if you do it right when you put videos in your own website versus putting them on Youtube is pretty much evens out, one as far as Google goes, it’s not gonna favor Youtube over your own sites as long as you do things well. So in other words it’s another way of saying if I took one video and put it on Youtube and put the identical video on my own website and then I type in my search term on Google 9 out of 10 my site, the video on my own site is going to appear at the same spot, maybe one spot above or below that same video on Youtube.
T: So I make sure that I understand what you just said. So let’s say I’m gonna make a video on how to peel a banana. So I wanna put it coz from what I understand now I’m gonna put that Youtube and I want to find the right keywords and I want to do the best of optimization I might even wanna drive some social bookmarks on Youtube ideally to get some people to click the thumbs up and so forth. And then in the description of the Youtube videos I’m gonna put some text that’s gonna be maybe what’s in my post and obviously I wanna put a link back to my site so that I can capture those people who are searching for how to peel a banana on Youtube and bring them back to my site and have the opportunity to have them join my list. What I’ve just heard from you if I understood it correctly is that back on your site so you would still use Youtube in that regard or you would you use a self hosted video instead of Youtube or you would do both? I’m not sure I understand you yet.
D: Yeah. Let’s go back to the Youtube part where you just described pretty much what every one does. Put your video up there, target your keywords in the tags, you got your descriptions, you’re gonna have a link back to your mailing list or whatever, link back to your site. The one thing I wanna add to that which no one does but is going to dramatically boost the number of people who actually leave Youtube and go to your own website is within your video you wanna put what’s called a lower third graphic which is a graphic that appears on the bottom of the video appears like in the TV news you’ll have the news reporter’s name. It’s the little graphic in the bottom of the screen. What you wanna do in the Youtube video is put a lower third graphic in there but you want that graphic to list some type of offer. Hey, go to this website and get free 47 free training videos or free report or whatever. You want that appear in your video the whole time and that’s gonna actually dramatically increase the number of people who jump off Youtube on your own website which is a big problem.
With that out of the way, to address your question, what I’m saying is whether you put a video on Youtube or whether you put a video on your website if you do things correctly you can get as much traffic not using Youtube. So that makes sense? You got your banana peeling video. Let’s say I don’t wanna put it on Youtube. I put it on my own website on a wordpress blog. I use a video site map, things like that. That video will rank often times rank just as well as if that video was placed on Youtube and you’ll get just as much traffic. This is the technique that I actually use. I don’t put my videos on Youtube coz so many people would rip me off. I only do it for a little test here and there where I wanna test things head to head. Hey I wanna put the same video on Youtube that I have on my site. I’m gonna see which one gets rank where and each and every single time the video on my own website gets ranked either equal to or higher than the video on Youtube. The advantage to that again is that people are not going to Youtube to watch the video. They’re going to my own website. As soon as their own website I can monetize them however I want. If there were going to Youtube the big issue is getting them off of Youtube and on to my own website. That’s a tough thing to do. You’re gonna lose, a ton of viewers aren’t gonna do that.
T: I get it.
D: So that makes sense?
T: Yeah I understand what you’re explaining but a couple of things are propping up. So you’re saying this probably is an old and has a lot of domain authority, I’m assuming?
D: Correct.
T: So what about someone who’s got a new site, they’re PR 0 and hasn’t been around long. They don’t have a lot of links. If they put a video up on their site versus putting a video up on Youtube are they gonna get the same traffic, benefit? Are they gonna rank just as well?
D: It’s going to depend entirely on the keywords that they’re targeting.
T: Sure.
D: What I would do if I was starting out and I had a brand new website, brand new domain and I’m doing videos I would put videos on both Youtube and my own website. In other words I’m gonna shoot a video on how to peel bananas. That one video I’m going to stick it on Youtube and take the same video and I’m gonna stick it on my own website. I will continue that process and over time I’m going to build up authority for my domain and at that point you can probably just drop Youtube and have all the traffic go to your own website.
T: Okay. So you mentioned a couple of details there. Use a proper video site map. How does somebody do that?
D: Unfortunately there is not a plugin say for example for wordpress that you can go out to the wordpress directory and just download and have a video site map. For my students as part of the training packages I offer, I do have a wordpress video site map plugin that I give them. It’s a bit technical. Google has specific criteria on how a video site map must be laid out. But if you’re familiar with RSS Feeds for blogs it’s kinda like that. The video site map just has some specific information that helps Google know that hey you’ve got video content on your site. The ones that knows it that you have video content that further helps them to further index that content.
T: So would this work? Let’s say that I’ve got my blog onlineincomelab.com and then I created a say a directory in that and I put in a second instance of wordpress in that directory and I wanted that instance of wordpress to be specifically for my video podcast for example and then I set up a used feed burner and I set up a feed for that second instance of wordpress. Would that then create the video site map that I needed or is that not gonna do it?
D: No a video site map is gonna be a completely different feed file, say for example if you’re talking of a feed burner feed, video site map is something that’s completely different. It has a different formatting that’s just specific for videos so you can’t just use your feed burner feed.
T: Okay so that’s a little bit of a technical challenge that people are gonna have to either become a member of your site to get the thing that you created or look around in the wordpress plugin directory see if they can find anything. I’m assuming something like Google xml site map which is a plugin that I use is not gonna do the trick for them?
D: Correct that will not do the trick.
T: Okay. Alright so now we’ve talked a little bit about and emphasis on little bit on how to use video to get traffic, I really kind of want to get into some best practices for people that haven’t created video before. So again if someone’s gonna start an authority site in whatever niche they want what are some of the things in terms of let’s talk about content, let’s use an example let’s say that I wanted to create a site that’s about highschool football just for lack of a better term or lack of a better topic. What type of video or you can use an example of your own if my example is not a good one, what type of video should someone be creating in order to help them to become an authority in that site? How do you come up with topics?
D: The best I’ll give you a little secret here, the best topics to come up with are anything on your subject that you can put the word how to in front of and then you know whatever. How to become a better attack or how to become a better wide receiver as an example. Any topics that you can stick how to infront of for some mysterious reason they tend to rank better in Google. When I said this is a little secret that i’m sharing with people I’ve looked through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of video posts that I’ve done on various sites and sure enough anything where I stuck the word how to in the front of those pages or those videos rank better and get more traffic than anything else. So again you’re starting your authority site and you can’t come up with an idea “hey what video should I do for this?” Anything you can stick the words how to infront of make a video about that and it’s gonna be your best bet.
T: Interesting okay. I mean you can use common sense but you can also use the Google keyword tool and actually if you use Google instant so you could just go into Google.com and type how to and then put in other letters for the next word that would in some way, shape or form will be related to the niche that you’re going after and you’re gonna be presented with all sorts of ideas. You could then take those phrases that you get and plug those into the Google adwords keyword tool. You’re gonna get all sorts of additional phrases. If you’re using SECockpit which is a tool that I really like because it also shows you the strengths of the SEO competition it would also make it much easier for you to sort those in the order of coming up with the phrases that are gonna be the longest tail and the easiest to rank for.
Okay so in reviewing your material data I saw several different topics and I gotta tell you folks who are listening to this Dave was kind enough to give me access to his video training site and there is a lot of content in there. I expected to get just a little bit of stuff and I mean he goes into some pretty far reaching topic with respect to not just video marketing but online marketing and copy writing and so forth in general. So you talked about this topic called new media marketing and then you talked about another topic called direct response marketing. For folks who are listening who don’t understand the difference, can you talk about those 2 and what are they used for?
D: Sure. New media marketing is a tool that you would use to perfect example to gain authority. Direct response marketing is what you use when you are trying to sell a product. So direct response marketing the only purpose is to get someone to open their wallet and take out their credit card. With new media marketing the purpose is to establish yourself as an authority and build an audience hopefully virally where people are just going to pass your name to someone so on and so on down the line. It’s kinda how you found me to be honest. So with direct response marketing an example would be basically any commercial that you see on TV. The little 2 minute commercial for some miracle gadget, the miracle food chopper or the snuggy outfits that everyone wears. That’s a direct response video. They want you to give them money. With new media that’s something that you’re only going to see online and perfect example of a new media style videos would be my own video podcast where every week or every 2 weeks I put out a video, I’m not selilng anything. It’s 100% pure content. It’s going to be hopefully on us topic that is interest to people or a hot button topic. I like to do a lot of stuff with iphones or ipads. I write devices on things like that. Those are popular. Put it out pure content and then people like it and they’re gonna come back and consume more and more of it and as they consume more of it I’m obviously being established as an authority and at some point in the process they’re gonna end up actually buying my paid training courses. So that’s the idea or basically the person is a consumer before they become a customer. They’re going to consume my content before they actually buy anything from me.
T: And I have to say this is exactly what I do with the Online Income Lab blog and it works really well because people want the video. The sale, getting someone to purchase one of your products becomes so much easier when they already know you like they trust you. And that is what the new media is for and that’s what I use it for is to be able to build credibility, to be able to build authority. And ulitimately and folks that have been following my stuff for a while that since the penguin update all of my advice and my teaching is around trying to figure out or get traffic to your website from something other than relying on Google like people used to do with micro niche sites. And in the case of my blog 50% of my traffic comes from referral sites and that is a direct by product of a year, 18 months now of my creating all these blog posts and creating all these videos and doing the podcasts and all of these things that it’s just free content, free content so that your audience warms up to you so that when you do have something that you wanna sell they’re gonna be far, far more interested and far more likely to buy whatever that product is.
Now I’ve so many questions it’s hard to figure out which way I wanna go with this but we’re gonna keep on this vane for a minute. So now you’re using video, you’re getting some traffic and you’re getting some authority, and now you wanna create a product. And in your site I noticed you have very specific strategy about what not to do when creating an information product. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that?
D: Yeah I mean I have several strategies I’m not sure about what specific one you’re referring to.
T: I’ll give you a hint. Don’t make it all first.
D: I was gonna hear that.
T: Don’t make it all first. Don’t build the whole product first. That’s the one I’m referring to. And I just did this myself and it worked very, very well. But you’re the guest I’m gonna let you talk about it.
D: Yeah. One of the mistakes that people especially when they’re starting out that they make over and over again is they’re gonna come up with an idea and they think it’s the greatest idea in the world and they tell all this different people and everyone says “hey man that’s a great idea too. You’re gonna be a millionaire for that.” So they spend a bunch of time or a bunch of money or both creating a product and polishing it and getting the sales page out there and all that good stuff. Now they’ve got all this time and money invested in it. They put it out and give it to the public and no one buys it. And they think “oh what’s going on? Maybe my marketing is wrong.”
So they change their marketing and they do this and they do that. And it turns out still no one buys their product. So the lesson with that is you never know what product is going to sell until you put it out to the public and ask them to vote on it. And they’re gonna vote with their money. So instead of taking all your time and money in creating this complete product and the sales pitch and all that what you do instead is you basically put your idea out there on a very roughly laid out website, okay. You don’t actually have the entire product created.
An example of this would be when I started web video university. When I said launched the site we’re talking about the reason you know me is because of this site. When I launched that site I started with the product that didn’t even exist. It was just an idea. Hey will people wanna pay for the knowledge I have about producing videos? That was the idea. Instead of creating all these training courses I just put the idea out there and it turned out that people wanted it. So then when people started buying it then I had a hustle and create the product. That’s the idea you don’t create the product. You start with the idea and maybe you can have a little bit of the product. You put a rough sales site out there. If people want it, if they like it they’re gonna buy no matter what. Then you can polish things and increase your conversion rate but if people don’t want it then they’re not gonna buy and you haven’t wasted any time or money investing in things. Whereas I like to say that the greatest sales pitch in the world will not sell a product that no one wants to buy but the worst sales pitch in the world will still sell a product that people wanna buy.
T: Yes absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I made the newbie mistake, oh I don’t know, a year ago when I created Niche Site Mastery I spent 6 weeks and I record 30 some videos and figured out how to do the membership site and the whole thing and luckily for me it was successful. But in hindsight it was a really stupid way to do it because for that entire 6 weeks that I was putting all that effort and I had no idea if I was ever gonna make a dime. And that’s not a strategy I buy. As where as most recently I launched a mastermind group and because I’d spent all this time building authority and video obviously has played a big role in that when I decided that I thought coz I’m launching this new site and it’s not in the internet marketing space I think “you know I bet there’s some people who would like to be a part of a group of people that would like to see what I’m doing. That would have the opportunity to see exactly what I’m doing week after week after week and then work with other people who would want to do the same thing.” So I put up the video. I put the sales page. I hadn’t created any of the product yet. And people voted with their money. And so now when you’re creating a product that you are already been paid a meaningful amount of money for you’re stress level of are you doing the right thing or not goes way way way down because you didn’t do a survey, you didn’t ask people would you buy this product, do you think it’s a good product coz the survey doesn’t matter. The survey that you want is the survey from their dollars. That’s the only survey that really really counts.
Okay so let’s get into some more kind of tools specifics. We wanna make some videos so someone coz there’s some people who are listening to this and think I don’t want to be on screen, I don’t want to talk in front of the camera. There’s different types of video that people can make. With respect to building authority is there one type of video that works better than another type of video?
D: Yes having your face on camera will build more authority than not having your face on camera. But like you said not everyone’s comfortable with that okay. Basically the two types of video that you see online are going to be screencast videos where someone is recording their screen, their face may or may not be in the video, usually they’re just doing like a powerpoint slide or maybe demonstrating software, things like that. The other type of video is what I call live camera video where what’s obviously your face being recorded with the video camera. And again out of those two having your face on the screen is gonna provide more authority again because people it’s just a trust issue. Peope are going to trust you. They’re gonna see that you’re a real person so on and so forth. That doesn’t mean that you cannot build authority just by doing a screen capture or by recording your screen it just means that it’s gonna be easier for you if you do put your face on camera.
T: Absolutely. Now with respect for the building authority it is, with respect to a video for sales a direct response video, Ryan Dice talks about just black text on a white background and all his split tests converts the best. Do you have an opinion? Do you agree / disagree?
D: That is a little bit more tricky because as far as a sales video the script which is basically your sales pitch that’s gonna be the no. 1 critical piece. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a horrible sales pitch whether it’s screen capture or on camera but if it’s a horrible sales pitch it’s a horrible sales pitch. So no. 1 is gonna be your script. No. 2 is going to be your skill or your talent in producing videos. I can tell you if you wanna go ahead and put black text on a white screen and you wanna put that up against someone who knows what they’re doing when it comes to producing live on camera video. You’re gonna get clapboarded by the people who know what they’re doing when it comes to producing on camera video. As an example let’s say again what I like to go is this little 2 minute commercials on TV selling a product okay? Imagine someone’s trying to sell you that product on TV on a 2 minute commercial where it’s black text on a white screen versus some of the commercials you see where before Billy Mays passed away “hey Billy Mays for whatever miracle product.” Side by side Billy Mays is gonna kill you because those guys knew what they were doing when it comes to producing videos that get results.
T: I would agree. There’s a lot of enthusiasm with Billy Mays in particular. Okay so for people who’ve never made a video before let’s just talk about some of the tools and strategies we’re using. What do I need for a camera?
D: Happily technology is so good these days that they can pretty much use any camera that they want. Basically there are certain levels of cameras obviously you’ve got like your iphone, mobile phone cameras those are going to produce acceptable video quality for the web particularly if you’re using natural daylight if you have a well lit indoor room if you’re outside the camera is gonna be completely fine. Where those cameras fall apart is if you move indoors using artificial light or with lower light that’s where those cameras really aren’t that good. Then you move into what I call traditional video cameras and those are the ones when you go to let’s say a best buy or circus city all the rows of cameras sitting there that cost anywhere from $300 to a $1,000. Those are the traditional video cameras and that’s probably what most are gonna settle into. They’re gonna use those cameras and they’re gonna give you absolutely fine video for the web indoors, outdoors, low light, no light good stuff. And then once you go above maybe $1500 that’s the prosumer professional cameras and yeah they’re gonna give you better video quality but what those cameras really do is they allow you to do your work faster. When you do video a lot it really becomes an issue where time is money. How quickly can you produce these videos. And that’s what the more expensive cameras give you.
For someone just starting out I would recommend that you start with the cheapest camera you can get your hands on whether it be the phone, the camera on your phone, or whatever. The reason for that is because experience is far more important than equipment. The analogy that I like to use all the time is that it’s not the arrow it’s the archer. So gaining experience and knowing what to do with that equipment is the most critical thing so start with what you can afford and then as your skills increase you can move up to the higher end stuff which is ultimately just gonna save you time and money.
T: So how does, I shoot on a canon T3 and it makes great video and I will not call myself a video expert by any stretch of the imagine but I get nice clear video. I’ve got an office here it’s really well lit but I’ve got a bunch of lighting and we’ll talk about lighting in a minute. But you said something that caught my interest I’m gonna side bar for a moment. The more expensive cameras will save you time. How is that possible?
D: How is it possible that they save you time?
T: Yeah.
D: Because you don’t need to spend any time color correcting footage. I’m gonna assume that people color correct footage. What that means is when you shoot your video what the camera records majority of time isn’t the ideal look. What you need to do in your video editing software is color correct where you’re gonna make the whites look white and you’re gonna adjust the brightness in contrast and sharpness. And that’s one of the things that you can do to make your videos look a lot better. With the more expensive cameras that allow the quicker work flow they’re going to do these things better out of the gate so you don’t use a lot of time fiddling with your footage to correct it. The other way that they’re gonna make things go a lot faster is their gonna use analog buttons on the cameras for everything versus the cheaper cameras where almost everything these days is a touch screen where you gonna sit there and go through all these menus on the touch screen just to set up a simple shot. It might take you a couple of minutes to go to the touch screen when the more expensive cameras you can have the thing done in 10 seconds.
T: Yeah coz all the buttons are right there for you. Okay. So what about lighting? Obviously natural lighting is the best way to go but not everybody has the place that’s condusive. So what kind of light should they buy? How do they position them? And what do they spend? Assuming they wanna be on camera anyway.
D: Well yeah like I said natural light is my favorite. Natural light is gonna be the favorite of anyone an amateur or professional. The reason for that is you have like I like to shoot videos a lot and a room that just has big windows and a ton of natural light coming in. And that natural light in that situation is very soft and flattering light and it’s gonna make everything look really really good. Now if you want to duplicate that with lights you wanna go out and buy set of lights the first thing you need to know is light color okay. Outdoor sunshine that’s light that is actually blue in color and indoor light that’s the light like incandescent light like your light bulb that’s the light that’s actually orange in color. And usually especially with the cheaper cameras they work a lot better with the blue style light versus the orange style light. Okay so when you go out and buy your lights you wanna get what’s lights that are called daylight. They’ll be in the daylight color range and really the best type of lights to get that are gonna simulate this indoor room of lots of windows and lots of daylight coming in are called soft box light. And you can go out to ebay or go out to amazon and usually for about $2-300 you can get a kit of 3 soft box lights and it’s basically light with like a big white tan in front of it. You really only wanna need 1 or 2 of these lights. You can set it up put the light directly behind your camera have it pointing at you and for most people that’s all they’ll ever need to get very good lighting in their videos.
T: And that’s exactly what I use so for folks who’ve seen my videos, if you’ve seen me shooting video on a white background I’m using 3 soft box lights. I put 2 of them behind me to illuminate the wall and then I put 1 of them in front of me to illuminate my face. My camera’s sitting on a tripod and then I’ve got a lapel mic stuck on my shirt and all of the video and the sound is being captured all on the one device and then I go in and edit that. We’ll talk about editing here a little bit more.
So for sound what I’m using is a lapel mic and I think it’s like $22 or something like that. I’ve seen other people use the mics that can get mounted on the top of the camera so it’s like a not really a boom mic but it’s maybe it’s 4-5 inches long. And they’re more expensive obviously. Is there an advantage to that kind of microphone versus a lapel mic or a wireless lapel mic?
D: It all depends upon what you wanna do. I use a lapel mic or a lav mic. You can get the wired ones for like $25 or $30. I use a wireless system where a receiver goes on top of the camera and then a transmitter attaches to my belt and then the mic attaches to the shirt and that allows me to move up to 300 feet away from the camera. Wireless systems are gonna cost you $6-700. Yeah it’s an expensive up front but I’ve been using the same wireless sytem for the past 7 years so I’ve more than gotten my money out of it. Basically the lav systems I think give you the best audio quality because the mic is just right there on you. The drawback is the lav mic isn’t only going to record you. If you have multiple people obviously it’s not gonna record them that’s when you need to move to a shotgun or a boom mic. A shotgun mic is gonna be the mic that sits on top of the camera and they cost maybe $2-300. And basically with the shotgun mic you can record multiple talking at once. The drawback is both of you need to be probably within 8 feet of the camera. Once you’ve moved past roughly that 8 foot mark the audio really starts to suffer. And then finally we have a boom mic which is basically a shotgun mic gotta go on a pole and then it goes over your head. That’s what they use in Hollywood to record the audio. It’s basically again a shotgun mic that goes on a pole, goes over your head and then there’s a long cord going back to the audio recorder or the video camera. So that’s more of a professional style. For most people starting out if they’re just gonna be doing talking head videos recording themselves they can get a little $25 or $30 wired lav mic.
T: Okay. Now speaking of equipment I notice that in your ear you have a little earphone and I’m wearing a headset and the reason I wear the headset is coz I need to be able to hear you and the sound goes into my mixing board and then it goes into my external recording device so that I can give bass treble adjustments on my guests’ soundtrack. Is that or you’re basically doing the same thing with me it’s just that you’re not wearing headphones?
D: Exactly instead of wearing a headphone these are actually just normal ear buds like you use with an ipod and then I have some molded for my ear. You can go to any ear doctor and for like $75 they’ll mold inserts for your ears like you see musicians on stage they have the little ear inserts so they can hear the music. You can get that done and these are made specifically so I can plug ear buds like for an iphone and do it.
T: Okay.
D: And that’s just how I get around wearing the big headphones.
T: Okay. So now in the equipment side is there anything that someone would neeed when they’re getting started that I haven’t asked you about? I can’t think of it.
D: Oh no we’ve covered the basics of lighting, mics, video camera. That’s basically all you’ll need to get started.
T: Okay and in the terms of it the actual environment that someone’s in. I see you’re in your office I’m in my office. As long as it’s well lit does it really matter what’s behind you. I mean you probably don’t want it to be too distracting that’s why apple has made this kind of model shooting on a white background kind of things. But not everybody’s maybe gonna have that many lights or a place where they can do that. Is there any best practices that they should adhere to?
D: Not really. The one thing I would stress to people is a lot of people wanna do green screen where they have a green background behind them and then in the video editing software they replace that background with whatever they want. And people will do this and they’ll try to basically a plan they’re getting at is they make themselves look fake okay. The key with web videos especially with trying to become an authority is you need to be authentic. People wanna see you as you really are so I don’t have a green screen behind me. This is my office. You don’t have a green screen behind you. I’m real you’re real. If you put that green screen behind you and replace that with some high rise building or whatever people are gonna know that you’re not being honest and it’s gonna hurt you when it comes to building authority. So I would recommend just be natural. If you’re gonna do a background do an infinity background which is the background that a solid white like apple uses or just use a solid black one.
T: Okay and speaking of background so you didn’t know it earlier but your cat was starring in your video as well when we were interviewing your cat was running around on your desk.
D: Yeah I can’t fake that. That’s real.
T: Not at all. And being a cat owner of course I thought it was pretty cool. I thought maybe I should bring my cat to the office too. Editing. So what again anyone can shoot a video off their iphone and throw it up on Youtube but there are definitely things that you can do in the editing process to make your video stand out, to make you look more professional, to help your brand build authority. So what are some of the things that people should be trying to accomplish with the editing?
D: Well first of all let’s talk about what software to use. And again we have 2 different types of software to use. If we’re doing screen recording software that’s gonna be different than the editing software that we’ll use for working with live video even though that’s kind of getting blurry these days. Basically with screen recording software if you’re a windows user what I recommend is a product called camtasia from textmyth.com. If you’re a mac user you can record your screen even though there is a camtasia for mac version I recommend a product called screenflow. It’s just a more mature and more stable product. Okay so that’s for recording your screen – camtasia on windows and screenflow on a mac. If you’re working with footage from a video camera if you’re a windows user I recommend you use a video editing called sony vegas. And if you’re a mac user it gets a little bit sketchy because the video editing software that everyone used to use was from apple it was called final cut. About a year or so ago apple updated the software and they really made a lot of people mad coz they completely changed it and introduced a lot of bugs and all that stuff. So it’s kind of hard for me to give a recommendation for video editing software on a mac. Most people are gonna go out and they’re gonna look and they’re gonna get the new final cut pro x and they’re probably gonna have some headaches. So what I tell my students is to go out on ebay or go on amazon or wherever you can and try to pick up a copy of the older final cut express because you’re gonna run into the less headache. It’s older software but it’s definitely more stable and people tend to find it a little more intuitive to use. Whatever software you’re using …
T: I was just gonna interject I do a lot of my face on camera editing in screenflow. The thing works just fine. I have final cut x and you can do a lot more but it’s a lot more complicated to learn. I can output a video from screenflow really quick and I can put text on it, I can put color, zoom in, zoom out. I can do all those things. So that’s my preference.
D: Yeah and that’s what I was gonna get into when I alluded to at the beginning when I said you’ve got screen recording software and you’ve got video recording software but I said it’s getting kinda fuzzy between the two. And I’m glad you pointed out screenflow because a lot of mac users do exactly what you do. I do it myself. Screenflow is so easy to use and it’s so fast to work in versus something like final cut. But the thing that you can’t do with the product like screenflow is things like the basic color correction that I talked about. Sharpening footage things like that. With screenflow you can adjust I think the tint and the brightness and the contrast but you can’t go crazy with it. Same thing on the windows side of things. Last week I think it was last week or 2 weeks ago camtasia introduced camtasia 8 and when they did that they did away with a lot of things that were troublesome when it came to editing live video and the screen recording software camtasia. What they’ve done is they’ve added multiple track in the timelines in other words it works a lot like screenflow now so camtasia I’m actually gonna put out a course on it in a few weeks but for a lot of people they may be able to use this new camtasia 8 for recording their videos as well but in any case whatever product you’re using when you edit your video obviously you’re gonna cut out your mistakes and things like that.
But the 2 big things or the 3 big things that I recommend to people are no. 1 do spend a little bit of time correcting the quality of your footage. Adjusting brightness, contrast things like that what I call color correction. It can make your video look dramatically better. The second thing you wanna do specific to web video is it’s best to edit it in such a way where you don’t have say for example if you have a 2 minute video it’s not just your face on camera for 2 solid minutes people have a real short attention span with web videos so what you can do is a technique called fast cutting. Basically instead of 2 minutes of your face on camera you’re going to chop things up maybe every 10 seconds while you’re talking about something you throw an image on the screen or you maybe throw text on the screen. You put something on the screen so in people’s brains it registers that “hey this video is moving” coz whether you realize it or not if you watch a TV show The Night Watch, any TV show and you’ll see if you pay attention every 3 or 4 seconds whatever you see on the screen changes. They change the camera angle or put something on the screen, it’s always moving so our brains are conditioned like that. So when you do your web videos you wanna try and emulate that as well. Maybe every 10 or 15 seconds put something different on the screen. And then the final thing you wanna do with your editing is a lot of people they can cut out. They don’t realize it but they can cut out a lot of their videos and they can still have the same impact. With web video the magic number is 2 minutes. I have tried to keep all of my authority type free videos at around 2 minutes because after the 2 minute mark your viewership will drop off dramatically. So if you really want people to watch your videos from beginning to end keep that about 2 minutes length.
T: Okay. And a tip by the way for no. 2 that I definitely didn’t invent but I used when I remembered to I’m not too lazy in the editing process and there’s a name for it but basically it’s when you zoom in and zoom out on the person’s face so at some times in my video I’ll cover it up close to the camera when I want to make emphasize a point then I move myself back maybe an image will pop up. What do you call that when you’re just moving in and out?
D: I’ve called it zooming.
T: Zooming right.
D: People think that you can do that with the video editing software. A lot of people think that you need to do that by your shooting a video and you can shoot 2 different takes to your video, one wide one close but you can actually do the same thing in your video editing software.
T: Yeah if you’re using screenflow it’s really easy to do. You could just take the track at the bottom that’s your footage and there’s a zoom flyer and you just zoom in and out. That’s a piece of cake. Okay so obviously there’s a lot more to editing but we only have an hour or less here on the podcast so we’re not gonna be able to go to too much deeper into that but we’re gonna have some tools and resources here at the end so fear not. But I wanna talk about hosting. You gotta put these things somewhere. You’re saying maybe you wanna put them on Youtube maybe you don’t. But if you’re not gonna put them on Youtube where are you gonna put them and how am I gonna get them to play on my website coz you know I’m not technical. I don’t wanna write any code. I don’t wanna be having just turn into this nightmare. How am I gonna solve that problem?
D: If you’re not gonna use Youtube basically you have 2 solutions. No. 1 you can pay a commercial service to host your videos for example bitsontherun.com or vidlerbusiness or vimeopro. Out of all those vimeopro is probably the best deal. I think it’s $200 a year and they give you enough video storage and band width where most people they never need to worry about it. It will work a lot like Youtube where you just simply upload your video they do everything for you. They’re gonna give you embed code to embed your videos in your website. If you don’t wanna do that and one of the reasons why you would not want to do that is again whether you’re uploading the videos to Youtube or using a commercial service to self host your own video you still need to abide by the terms of service or terms of use of those services which means at any point they can say “you know what? we’re gonna kick you out.” We’re gonna take down all of your videos and you’re gun. You lost all that traffic.
The way around that is to self host your own videos and do everything yourself and that’s what I do. And what you’ll need to do is step one you prepare your video in a format that is playable on the web. Step 2 is you need to put that video some place where people all over the world are gonna be able to download or stream that video without any problems. You can have thousands of people all do this at once. You know all watching your videos at once. You do that you can use a service like Amazon as tree they will host your videos. And step 3 is you need to come up with a video player and embed code. The video player obviously is gonna be the thing. Every video you see you click the play button. It’s 2 separate things you have the video and the video player. The video player is the thing with the button that you push and then embed code is the code that makes both the video and the video player work together on your webpage. When you go to Youtube and you want to embed a video and you copy the code that’s the embed code. You just need to do these things yourself you know preparing for the web, putting it up on something like amazon as tree for hosting and coming up with a player and embed code. Those are 3 things you need to figure out how to do yourself so to speak.
T: So I use S3 and I use easy video player too I believe it’s what the name it’s called. And I’ll put a link down in the show notes. Is there a player that you particularly like?
D: For a lot of my videos I use the jw player. Jw player I think you said you use easy video player I think they use the flowplayer. Basically there’s 2 or 3 different open source video players out there that people can use. When I say open source that means you can go out there and you can use these players for free but there’s probably gonna be a little bit of branding on the player from maybe the first few seconds of the video. Or for $70 or $80 you can buy a license to use the player. One is that probably the most popular is the jw player. It’s available from longtailvideo.com. It’s probably the most used video player on the web. With the video player again you can use it for free or you can pay a license to remove the branding from it. There’s all sorts of different skins available meaning you can change the look of the player. There’s all sorts of plugins available meaning you could add things like Google analytics to the player things like that.
A competing player is called the flowplayer available from flowplayer.org I believe that’s the player used with easy video software that you have Trent. And then another player is one from adobe that I use on some of my videos as well. It’s called the strobe media playback player. I don’t have a URL for this. It’s kind of a funny URL it’s best to Google strobe media playback and it’s basically a complete open source player that adobe has put out there that people can use.
T: And if you’re gonna use these open source players I know when I looked at them coz I’ve used jw player and I’ve used flow player and I found a little bit tricky to use. This was going back probably over a year ago. They had a point now where there’s wordpress plugins for them and they give you a nice interface and you can just put your amazon hosted URL in there and say I want the video to be this and this size with this and it puts it on your post or is it not that easy yet?
D: Yes and no. What you hit on is probably the biggest headache for people is that these things aren’t exactly easy to use. Like the software you’re using you said your using the easy video player.
T: Yeah that’s easy to use. That’s really easy to use.
D: Yeah okay. What if I’m thinking of the same product if I have this right that software actually has a license for the flowplayer and what they’ve done is take in your frustration of trying to use the flowplayer and they build a user friendly interface for you. So for people who aren’t technically inclined they’re best bet if they wanna use an open source player like this is to get software like you’re using where an intelligent marketer saw a problem and created a solution using these open source players.
T: Yeah okay. Alright we’re rapidly closing in on our hour and I always try to keep this to an hour so people can listen to the podcast hopefully in their commute for the day. So at this point I want to give you an opportunity to talk about tools and resources and talk about web video university. So if you wanna tell people why they might want. Where they can get more info about you. Why they mgiht want to be in there and what’s involved, what the benefits are, etc. Coz I’m sure there’s some folks listening to this who are thinking “hey I really wanna get into video marketing but man oh man there’s a lot of details that’s obviously we havent’ covered.”
D: Yeah I’ll give you my site. It’s the perfect example of the authority site model that we’ve talked about today. It’s the model that I use. And basically what you can do is you can go to webvideouniversity.com and when you do you’re gonna get hit with a pop up that says “give me your name and email address and I’ll give 47 free video lessons”. All you have to do is obviously give me your name and email address and you’re gonna get 47 video lessons that I put out there. You’re also gonna get added to my mailing list for every week or every 2 weeks I do a video podcast where I put out free videos, pure content. I think I have over 150 videos available right now. Assuming you join my list you can access those as well for free. And you’ll get to see what I’m all about. You get to see my teaching style. All that good stuff.
If you wanna go a little bit further you think “hey I need some training on this” I have all sorts of different training courses available. I have training courses where for a one time fee you get lifetime access. I have a recurring model type of training system where you know you get charged automatically every month and for that a benefit is that you get access directly to me. So when you join my membership style training you can go ahead on any question you run into. You can go ahead and send me personally in email and I’ll get back to you definitely the same day usually within a couple of hours or so. And this is popular for people who like to have questions answered. They’re glad to pay for that. Some people want to do everything by themselves. If that’s you then go ahead and sign up for my lifetime access courses where there’s no contact with me. If you’re someone who likes to have fast answers to your questions then you know I provide that option as well.
T: Okay and how much do each one of those cost?
D: It varies. The month to month training it’s $99 a month. My individual courses range anywhere from $79 up to $199.
T: Okay. And I’ll make sure that I put links to all of those below where this episode will be posted. And if you’re listening on iTunes you can get to this episode by going to onlineincomelab.com/session028. Again it’s onlineincomelab.com/session028. Okay so we’ve talked about a lot of stuff and Dave I really wanna thank you for making the time. Dave and I had never spoke prior to this podcast other than the about 3 minutes before we started recording so I think he really did myself and my audience a big favor in coming and sharing some of these information. If you have questions for Dave obviously you can either comment on the post that this podcast is gonna be hosted on and I’m sure that Dave will pay attention to that post when I publish it and answer those questions. Of course you can always reach him at webvideouniversity.com.
Dave is there any other parting thoughts that you have for people who’ve never done a video before but they’re thinking “man maybe I need to try that.”
D: Everyone starts out the same with no experience, they’re intimidated, they’re afraid. I can tell you I’ve seen it time and time again. The people there are 2 groups, those who are not successful with video and those who are. And those who are have done the same thing over and over again and that is they’re terrified they go ahead and they do it and they keep making videos. They don’t make a couple videos and stop. They keep at it week after week after week and that’s gonna add up. Where now a lot of these people, my students, have actually quit their jobs and they’re doing web video full time versus the people who started or just thought about it and then quit. They’re still out there probably buying every get rich thing that comes their way.
T: Without disclosing a student’s actual site is there somebody that you can briefly talk about? You don’t have to give their name just kinda what they did and how they got full time at this?
D: Yeah you know I have lots of students the one example I’ll use is someone who is producing web videos I’ll say for the manufacturing industry. We’ll live it at that. And what this person did he had a high paying job making 6 figures a year. The problem was he’s travelling constantly all the time, couldn’t see his family and that’s when he had decided to get into web video. This was a few years ago. He ended up firing his boss so to speak quitting his day job. Now he produces videos for the manufacturing industry. And it’s what he does full time.
T: Really? And so these videos highlight their various products? How to use them?
D: Yeah he actually does a more training style videos but he started out using I think his wife’s cellphone as the camera and he went to home depot and bought some shop lights as a light he was using for his videos and that’s how he started out and a couple of years later he’s got this beautiful HD videos, training videos and things like that and the site looks fantastic and he has just grown by the leaps and bounds and it’s all because during that first few weeks when things are frustrating, it’ll be frustrating for everyone, he didn’t quit. He continued on and again I’ve seen this pattern again and again and again with people who end up being successful with web video.
T: Couldn’t agree more. Anybody who’s, not even with web video, anyone who’s successful in creating any type of online business are successful for the gsd formula. They get stuff done and they don’t give up.
So Dave thank you very much for being on the show. It has been a pleasure to have you on.
Folks who are listening again I love it that you listen to the podcast. If you’re listening and I wanna thank you for listening to the podcast. If you’re listening on iTunes and could take a moment and go and give the show a rating, an honest rating if you thought this was a 3 star episode or a 5 star episode and you wanna leave a comment that really helps the show to rise in the iTunes store and it gets more audience and helps me get the word out. If you wanna tweet this or share it on Facebook or anything like that I would be really grateful if you would do so. And again if you have any questions about the episode make sure that you leave a comment down in the comments field and either myself or Dave is gonna give you an answer to it.
And we got lots more really good cut podcasts. I think I’m recording 4 or 5 this week alone so stay tuned coz the more really smart people the more interesting topics are coming on the Online Income Lab podcast. We’ll talk to you soon.
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