Alastair McDermott 0:00
I want to make a case to you for recording video.
Alastair McDermott 0:04
I think that video is hugely powerful and I think that it’s a great way to stand out, and I think that it’s great way to create content. But I also know that there’s a huge amount of resistance to doing video, both because the tools are complex, there’s a lot of things to do, in terms of setting up. And also, there’s a lot of fears that people can have around video, but appearance by background, by content about the actual delivery. There’s a lot, there’s a lot of things going on. But I think that it’s so crucial that I want to talk to you a little bit about it and kind of lay out why I think it’s important, and an approach that I think that you could take towards it. And maybe this will be helpful for you in thinking about video. So the background this is, I think that this is important for people who want to have a business which is inbound. So you want to generate leads from social media, from your website, from your content, where people discover you online, and then reach out and want to work with you after seeing your content.
Alastair McDermott 1:15
And the other options that you could choose are outbound, which is where you reach out to people. And I’ve talked a bit about this before, that’s not my, that’s not for me. But that would be you know, cold emails, cold calls, things like that. Or a referral based business, which is kind of like default mode. That’s what most people do is have a referral based business. And referral based is, is very, very effective, obviously. But it does have some downsides compared to inbound. With inbound, you spend most of your time creating content, not with networking. And so you can scale it more. And typically, you can command premium fees in a way with inbound that you can’t wait referrals. And there are some other benefits and things that I’ve I’ve talked about before on this podcast, and I’ve written about, so I’ll link to those in the show notes. But this is really for people who already know that they want to do inbound, and they’re just thinking about doing it and just thinking about how do I do that with video. So the reason that you might want to do this is to stand out more in social media, because video stands out in a way that text does not. So text posts are good, and they have their place. But so does video. And when we look at the kind of the growth of particularly Instagram and Tiktok video, although YouTube is still the behemoth is still dwarfing the size of Instagram and Tiktok online, but even even networks as small as LinkedIn, which are small in the grand scheme of things, but there are a lot of people out there who are in a very niche b2b audience.
Alastair McDermott 3:05
All of those places video is growing all the time. And as more and more people start to go online and start to do more video, which more and more people are doing it all the time. I think that it’s important to think about creating video and and, and doing that on a regular basis. Because the only way to stand out in this hugely overcrowded space is to produce content consistently and frequently. And your competitors are probably thinking about it right now, if they haven’t done it already. And also, there’s people out there probably in your niche who are looking at using chat GBT and other types of AI to produce content. And so this is a way to stand out. And it’s also a way to make a connection, because Chachi PT can write a LinkedIn text post, but it certainly can’t record a video that is authentically you. And it’s it’s a great way to build that rapport and that personal brand. Now, obviously, I’m a huge fan of podcasting, given that I host for podcasts, and I’ve written a book about podcasting. So I really do believe in podcasting. And a big part of that is the regularity and the frequency that it enforces. But I strongly encourage everybody to record the video of the podcasts.
Alastair McDermott 4:26
So I’m recording this I’m going to use the audio of this for my podcast, but also I’m going to be taking the video and putting this up on YouTube. Normally, I would actually go live, which is adding an additional step. And the benefit of going live is it puts pressure on you not to hit stop and go back and rerecord this video which I’ve actually done twice already. But this time I’m going to go through it because I made a mistake because it was a loud plane going by these kinds of things like interrupting my flow. When you go I’ve, it forced me to just push through that, and publish anyway. And there’s a great benefit to doing that. There’s also additional benefits when you go live, have a lot of the social networks will actually bump, live video live streams in a way and boost them in a way that they don’t with regularly uploaded videos. So that’s another benefit as well. So, going live is a great way to avoid procrastination, and you end up with video. So that’s why I particularly like going live. And even if you don’t go live and you pre record, you still will end up with video, assuming that you record it. And you can also take the video and take the audio from that and put that up as a podcast, depending on how you record it.
Alastair McDermott 5:44
But typically, you’ll be able to do that. And so I think if you’re going to make a podcast, you might as well record the video. In fact, Jonathan Stark posted something recently on Twitter, he said, you know, what, what do I do with 1000 episodes of podcasts. And I said to him, hit record, hit video, record video for the next 1000 Now, I’m recording this live, and I’m gonna act like it was live. But I just stumbled over my words right now. And this is where I live, you just push through anyway. So you can see obviously, the benefit to going live is you’re alive and you just go anyway. But with the negative part of that is, if I was editing this, I would quit that edit, I would cut out that stumble and I would just go and rerecord that piece. So that’s where video, there’s a lot more friction with video, because it’s harder to go and make that edit. If this was audio only, I could probably edit that in and fix that much easier. What I’m doing is I’m lowering my standards a little bit in order to push through and actually produce more content. So that’s just kind of a little meta comment about that. But anyway, so Jonathan said, I’ve got 1000 audio, podcast episodes and wonder about what to do with them. And obviously, there’s a lot of stuff that you can do with those in terms of chat GPT. And, you know, he could turn that into not just one book, he could turn that into a whole series of books. But what I suggested was, you know, hit turn on the video camera for the next 1000 episodes, because when you have all of that video, you can do a lot more with it. So it definitely makes things more complicated.
Alastair McDermott 7:30
But here’s an example of what you can do with video, just just just to give you an idea. So the first thing is you can record it live. And that gives you your live broadcast, you can also take the recording of that live, and you can split off the audio, and you can publish that audio as a podcast episode, like I’m doing with this, you can also take that, that original video, and you can edit it, let’s say it’s 1520 minutes, even 30 minutes, you can edit that down into a highlights reel to put up on YouTube. And that could be something like three to five minutes highlights of the main points from that video. And you can you can put the original video, and you can put the highlights reel on YouTube. And the reason why you might want to do that is some people will want the long version and some people will want the shorter version. Now some people might actually do that on two different channels, they’d have one channel for the for the shorter version, when one channel for the full episodes. You could also do those in different playlists, there’s different ways to approach that. And you can listen to some of the previous episodes about video and I’ll put some links in the show notes for that.
Alastair McDermott 8:48
The other thing that you can do is you could take the videos, and you could cut them down even shorter than that into these short videos, which are less than 60 seconds. And you can make those vertical videos and put those up on social media as well. And so this is an approach that I’m going to taking to everything. So what we’re doing is we’re going to take the full length video, and we’re going to take the audio off of that. And that’s going to be the podcast episode, it’s also going to go on to YouTube. And then we’re also going to take our highlights reel, or you might want to call out a bite sized version. And then we’re also going to take the shorts. And so we have a process where we were able to identify what are the specific areas. I’m going to tell you a little bit about how that works, because I think it might be interesting for you in thinking about how you approach it. So let me just pull up my notes here.
Alastair McDermott 9:45
The process that we have in house and this is actually something I’m doing for some of my clients now is we will identify clips. So we have a three stage process. We have a project manager, and then we have a QA Didn’t manager. And then we have a video editor. And those are sometimes three separate people or sometimes two people depending the project manager manages the whole, the whole production of a particular episode. The Content Manager is somebody who will actually go through, we use the transcript. So, we’ll go through the transcripts of a video of an audio something like this episode here. And what we will look for is we’ll try and identify where the key moments are that we might want to turn into a short video clip.
Alastair McDermott 10:32
And you’ll see this an example of this I recently put on my LinkedIn, you’ll see a short clip from Chris Do from one of our episodes. And that’s just one example. And Chris Do was talking about what it means to be a key person of influence. And that was a perfect example of him giving some actionable advice, and talking about a really important concept. So we look for actionable advice. We look for repeated key phrases or important ideas, we look for surprising answers. We look for personal experiences when people to tell stories, because those make for great clips. And then we look for interesting or impactful answers. So those are the kind of the things that we look for in terms of identifying a clip. And then what we’ll do is we’ll we’ll pull out the timestamp and and then we’ll We’ll edit that up as a as a vertical video, we’ll put Bernie in the captions and things like that. And what that does is that gives us a piece of content that we can put up on social media that day, now we have the transcript from that, obviously, we’ve got some text that we can write, we can write some kind of promotional text around that to support it. That will go you know, if we post that up on we can put that on YouTube.
Alastair McDermott 11:50
So we can put that short that short video, we can put that on YouTube as a short, it can also go into LinkedIn, it can also go on to Tik Tok Instagram, as a real, then what we can do is we can have one of those each day. So if we’ve got this episode, for example, will turn this particular episode will turn into five shorts, and also the highlights video and then the full length video and then the audio. So what that means is that around, I don’t know what the running time was going to be on this. I didn’t watch the clock when I hit record here. But the running time. What that means is that something like this episode will end up being a week’s worth of content. And that’s the key thing, you’re going to appear on your social media, you’re going to have a short video appearing once every day. And it’ll only be 60 seconds. But it will be something that you’ll have to post up every single day. That’s the benefit of that. So and it’s promoting the original episode or the original full content.
Alastair McDermott 13:00
So if I’m recording an episode with somebody like John Lee Dumas or Christo, then what I’ll be doing is I’ll be looking for those segments within within his answer. And taking the clip. And I’ll be using that to promote that particular episode. And so what that means is that we’re now not just getting one thing to promote for that episode. So now we’ve got something that’s much more, we’re getting much more value. we’re repurposing that in so many different ways. And we’re also getting content that is now suitable for, for example, for Instagram, it’s not suitable for me to take an audio episode of 45 minutes and put that on Instagram. But it is suitable for me to take a 62nd vertical video and use that men to promote the podcast. So that’s how we’re that’s how we’re splitting up the content. That’s what we’re doing with it. Now, what I think is important here is to think about, okay, because I know that people are going to feel the resistance to doing that. It’s a lot of work it is. But you can actually make this easier for yourself. So you can find people who will will do this editing for you. What you need to do is you need to record four episodes a month. So you need to record I think that you can do this in in half a day. I think that you can do this in two or three hours on a Monday, first Monday of the month. You can record all those and pass it off to somebody you can find people online who will do it for you. Like I said, we’re starting to do it with some of our clients. There are lots of people who can do this for you.
Alastair McDermott 14:47
And don’t try and do the editing yourself. I think that’s the really key thing. Because if you try and do the editing yourself, it’s a lot of work just to get on video and to Do all that part. And then to have to go and look at yourself and listen to yourself and most people find a particularly for the first bit, they will find it hard to listen to themselves. So I would encourage you outsource the video editing, even if you don’t outsource anything else. The video editing part, I think is is hard. The other thing that you can do is if you find it hard to you’re procrastinating around the recording part, see it by getting on a zoom call with somebody and give them the questions and get them to ask you questions. It’s much easier to have that in a conversational way, you can edit them out of the video, if you don’t want them on the video, or they don’t want to be in the video, you can edit them afterwards.
Alastair McDermott 15:40
But having somebody get on that call with you is makes it much easier what I’m doing now I’m recording straight to camera, there’s nobody in the room, I’m not in a zoom call, it’s much harder to do this. And I’m only able to do this because I’ve been doing this for years, I’ve recorded 150 200 podcast episodes, it’s still hard for me to do this, I hit record three times and stopped it earlier on because of various different things. And so it does, it is hard to do that it’s hard to do those solo, particularly in one take. If I was if I was going to edit this would be a bit easier. My intention here with this one was to do it in one take, I’m probably going to cut out the time it took me to find the notes document, probably going to clip that out because it took me about 30 seconds on I don’t have 30 seconds of dead air for you. But yeah, so I know that there’s a lot of resistance to doing this. So that’s why I want you to make it easier for yourself to actually do it. So here’s what I suggest that you do. Think of what are even if you don’t plan this as a podcast, and I suggest that you do plan it as a podcast. And I recommend that you check out my book 33 ways not to screw up your business podcast, it’s on Amazon, you can buy the hardcopy like this one. Or you can buy the Kindle version. If you can’t afford it, I’ll send you a free copy, email me.
Alastair McDermott 17:06
But the I think that it’s important that you start to create this content. And so I like the idea of planning through a podcast, but you can start this without a podcast, you can just decide, okay, I’m gonna go to create some informational videos. So think about what are the questions that you get all the time from your clients. So you can look at your email, what are the the questions that you answer in your email? Or in chat? Or what messages people have asked you on LinkedIn? Or what would you what advice would you give somebody who comes to you who has the problem that you solve? Let’s say your cousin asked you, and you want to just give them a give them the quick answer. Here’s, here’s the top three things you need to do. Take those ideas, and record a video on those. So just put some notes in put some bullet points. And either get somebody to ask you the questions, or get get some practice and just start. And you don’t even need a webcam you can do on your phone if you want to.
Alastair McDermott 18:05
But just start recording, give the give the the and by the way, those first ones are not going to be perfect. And if you want an example of not perfect, go check out Gary Vaynerchuk his video stuff from when he started Wine Library TV, his first videos, they were pretty bad. The guy’s a billionaire now. It you know, you have to put in a bit of time and learning about this stuff. And that’s absolutely okay. That’s quite normal. I do have some, I have a free ebook on video and audio technology equipment. I’ll put the link in the show notes. I just want to encourage you, if you are fearful of starting out with this stuff, just start recording video, and then send it to somebody else to edit it. And you don’t actually have to do it as a podcast, or as a as a regular show, you can just put these up as as as video clips, without them being attached to kind of any, you know, any any kind of show or anything like that. But I think having that really also helps because that then gives somebody who’s interested in listening, it gives them somewhere to go that gives them a platform or kind of a central point for them to find you. So that’s what I encourage you to do is if you’re thinking about creating content, seriously consider video. I know it’s not easy. I know that it’s not going to be
Alastair McDermott 19:30
straightforward. The first time you do it, there is a learning curve. But if you start to do it, I think that the benefits that you will get from doing video are so huge that I think it’s definitely worthwhile doing. So that’s my, my message. And that’s hopefully a little bit of helpful advice around this. I have a bunch of resources that I’m going to link in the show notes. So check this out. If you’re listening to the audio of this, the video of it will be on YouTube so you can go and check that out as well. And Like I said, I’m gonna edit one section in the middle of this, but the rest of this was actually recorded in one take. That’s not easy. What I found is that when I’m recording in one take, it’s 60 seconds to two minutes to three minutes, maybe. And then I like to cut an edit. But doing it without editing is actually much easier. And that’s why I’m forcing myself to go live. Because it stops me it was kind of something freeing in having it live, because you’re just forced to just go with the flow. So that’s it. Thanks for watching, or thanks for listening. And please let me know if you decide to do video. And I’d love to help in any way that I can. Cheers
Are you thinking about creating video content, but feeling hesitant?