Episode 051:
Be a Video Boss

Dom Goucher:    Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s PreneurCast with me, Dom Goucher, and him, Pete Williams.

Pete Williams:    Hey, Hey!

Dom:                   Another exciting week for me, topic-wise, after my own rants and soapbox—I thought about your rants and soapbox, it’s now my expert subject this week.

Pete:                   Absolutely. Video.

Dom:                   Video, indeed. We’ll get into that in a second. So how are things?

Pete:                   Things are good. Another busy week in the Pete Williams world, which is nice. Sort of put a bit of focus back on the blog, which has been nice. There’s that interview that we spoke about last week with Tony, the author of Creating Innovators, which is available on the blog. I actually have a few more blog posts that are scheduled, one’s to go out tomorrow and the next few days.

A bit more attention back there at PreneurMarketing.com, so go and check that out. Listeners, go and check that out. There’s plenty of back-catalogued articles, thoughts, case studies, and things like that that are valuable to read and share. My audio, actually—let’s mention that. The audiobook from my very first book that I had published, How to Turn Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality, it’s actually going to be on Audible really soon.

But—but, there is a bit of a ‘but.’ The downside is that I’m going to have to pull the book from being free. Right now, if you head over to PreneurMarketing.com, you can actually subscribe and you get a free audio version of the book. It will no longer be free very shortly because Audible are making me pull it down because they don’t want to compete with free, which is sort of understandable.

So if you want to get a copy of that before it disappears, make sure you go and grab that shortly now. In terms of when it’s going down, I don’t know. It might be down by the time you listen to this, it might not be. Go and check it out. We’re still finalizing that, I’m guessing, two weeks. But I could be out by a day, or a week, or whatever, so it is coming down at some stage as we get and finalize this Audible deal around the first audiobook.

Dom:                   That’s very exciting, listed on Audible. But for those action-takers out there, definitely get over to PreneurMarketing.com and pop your e-mail in the sign-up box that’s all over that site. Not only will you get Pete’s audiobook for free (if you do it quickly), but there’s a lot of other cool stuff that you’ll get signed up to if you’re on Pete’s mailing list. I’m on it because I get to—I like giving people these sort of…

Pete:                   Nose Reduction.

Dom:                   Yeah, like for example: Nose Reduction, which still saves me hours and hours and hours of trolling around every week. So that’s great. Moving on. Talking about sponsors, we briefly mentioned Audible there. But linking together our show topic this week of video and our other sponsor, ReadItFor.Me; just wanted to flag this, again, don’t want to go big, official message-stuff on the sponsorship.

But, a big part of the ReadItFor.Me book-review service—and one of the reasons we really like it—is the multimedia nature of the book reviews, and a big, big part of that is a video that they produce for every book that they review. I think that is a great example of the power of video and where video is really, really, useful for conveying information if you’re the person producing it, and for consuming it, if you’re the person consuming it.

Those are topics that we’re going to pick up in this show. So if you’re interested in the book-review service ReadItFor.Me, pop over to ReadItFor.Me/PreneurCast, and you’ll get a discount off your membership. You’ll also see a little video in there of me and Pete going through the membership area so you can get an example of how Read It For Me use videos in their reviews.

Pete:                   Sorry, I’m going to jump in there—I think a very good point to talk about is that they’ve got two different types of videos that you can see. You can always have the ScreenFlow-type video, which is that over-the-shoulder-type look inside the membership area, which is a very easy and quick way to create video. But they’ve also gone to the path of actually creating some high-quality content in there, too. So they use video very, very well. And there’s two examples of how you can use it.

Dom:                   Cool, very good point. Again, points I’m going to pick up on, in a little bit, as we go on and talk. Just one thing I think I’ve wanted to point out, actually. I’ve just recently noticed a change with our sponsor, ReadItFor.Me on their site. Their slogan used to be ‘Learn Faster, Go Further,’ didn’t it?

Pete:                   I do believe so, and it has changed recently.

Dom:                   It has, it has. And to something that sounded awfully familiar, it’s now ‘Effective & Engaging Book Summaries.’ I’m sure I’ve heard that before.

Pete:                   I’ve heard that somewhere before, yeah. I’m sure some other really intelligent people used that as the description of their service on numerous written and verbal internet platform show things.

Dom:                   Yeah, yeah. And do you know what? I’d go so far as to say that we’re becoming thought leaders…

Pete:                   …in many places. There’ll be no one to talk about stuff after we’ve talked about it on the show, ReadItFor.Me is now utilizing—we should start charging people to listen to this show, because they’re taking action and making money off of it, and using stuff.

Dom:                   Well, I don’t think we’re going to charge for the show. But I do think, in all seriousness though, it’s great to see people taking action on what we do talk about; and a little bit of a poke and a prod there to ReadItFor.Me because we lost Steve and the guys over there. But it is great to see people take action on the stuff and get feedback, as we always ask people to do.

Let us know how you’re getting on. And again, some great e-mails this week from people. Thank you to everybody who’s got in touch and had a chat. So let’s get into the show. Let’s get on to video. Because there’s just—everybody, everybody, I say ‘everybody’ in inverted commas—the people who market via the internet and market information products are, have been slowly swinging around to video for the last couple of years.

2012 seems to be the year where everybody is telling everybody else, they should be doing video. Now this is, harks back to last week’s show, about internet and marketing and marketing myths, “You should be doing this,” we talked about last week.

Pete:                   We did, we did.

Dom:                   Now, as we’ve talked about, on and off in this show, one of my main businesses is media production; and a very big part of that is producing video for my clients, lots of different kinds of video. So, it seems like a good opportunity for me to address the myth of “you should be doing video,” and what’s it all about. Now, I’m a big fan of video, I was always a big fan of video even before I was producing it for myself, and for other people. But you do have to evaluate, is it right for you? Why are you doing it? Just like we said in the podcast.

And one of the reasons why video is very, very powerful, is that communication, as we talked about with ReadItFor.Me, it’s a fantastic medium for communicating an awful lot of information in one go. You can compress what would be a multiple-page-long sales letter into a video that people won’t have to scroll through. They progress through it in the order you want them to go through, to see the message and the order that you want them to experience it, and you can convey a lot of information in that video.

It’ll probably take them less time to sit and watch the video than it would to sit and read through that sales letter, which, by the way, they may not read all of. Very few people ever do. So that’s one really good reason to use video versus text. Another one is that it gives you the opportunity to put across more of your personality. You don’t actually have to be ‘on-camera.’ Although, if you’re so inclined, it’s a great way to get people to identify with you.

But just having your voice there; just like you’ve got our voices on the podcast right now, it’s a great way to get across your personality. One other reason is that it’s very, very engaging. Video is a very engaging medium. And it doesn’t have to just be for sales, it can be for anything. You can be communicating with people and just lots and lots and lots of statistics—I won’t go over the statistics. I’m not a big statistics person, but there are lots of statistics out there that will tell you how much time we spend watching television, how much time we spend watching online video now.

YouTube is the big reference for this; we spend an awful lot of time watching video. So if you’re producing the video, people will spend time engaged with your material. It’s far more engaging, far easier to consume material by video. Obviously, it’s not as flexible as audio; and we talk about Audible as one of our other sponsors, but if people are going to engage with something, it’s easier for them to engage with video. So, for those reasons, video is very powerful as a medium…

Pete:                   Absolutely, I would…sorry, go ahead, I interrupted. Dom, you’re on a flow, keep going.

Dom:                   No, please do; please do, because your interruptions are always valuable.

Pete:                   Well, I was actually just going to sort of ask the question or also just talk about some different ways you can use video. To give some examples—obviously, it’s engaging and it’s powerful; and actually discuss some different types of videos you can be doing and see how they can apply in different scenarios. Let’s sort of jump forward from where your thought pattern was going, and we’ll continue with where you are and we’ll touch on that in a moment or we can jump straightforward to that now.

Dom:                   Well, let’s take your point. It was pretty much what I was going to talk about next, is, what can you use video for? It’s pretty much what you were just talking about, so yeah, let’s talk about that. Have you got something you want to put in there?

Pete:                   Oh, I was just taking some notes, just a whole bunch of different types of videos and some examples of where they’re being used on the web. So being able to sort of remember they’ve seen it before, and go and check it out, and hopefully spark some ideas with people of how video can apply to them. Information market, they’ve been exposed to that sort of stuff and that’s part of the world. But we’ve got a big listener base, real-world people with real-world businesses selling real-world stuff to other real-world people.

There’s the dentist, there’s the retailer. You’ve got the masseuse, you’ve got the consultant. You’ve got real-world people thinking, “Well, hang on, I’ve got an e-commerce site. How can video apply to me?” I think giving some real-world examples of effective ways to use video across these different platforms and places could really help spark some people thinking about, “Ah, that’s how I can apply it in my business and in my world.”

Dom:                   Absolutely, and let’s go with some. I’m going to start real, real-world, OK? Now, before I go into this, I am going to come back afterwards. I’m going to give everyone some examples of where it can work. But I’m aware of something that there’s an elephant in the room with video—for those quiet few, and I’m going to come back and talk about these.

Pete:                   What sort of videos are you shooting with elephants?

Dom:                   Aha, hahaha, aha.

Pete:                   Bad joke of the week got in there!

Dom:                   Yeah, there’s a couple of elephants in the room. One of them is that it’s expensive to produce video. Another one is that it’s difficult to produce video. The last one, it’s getting pretty crowded in here, so I’ll stop here—is that the quality of the video has to be television-standard. These are things that hopefully resonate with the people that are listening, that are maybe hesitating about making video. I’m going to come back and I’m going to talk about these.

I’m going to give you some tips, give you some feedback from my experiences as a professional in the industry, and also give you some tips about how to overcome those issues. But let’s go back and carry on, kind of bringing up video for a little bit. I’m all about just making things easy doing, as we talk about, minimum viable product. What do you need to do to get the message across? You talk about real world.

A great, great thing to do in the real world, video is a great way of helping people experience something. So, for example, you are a dentist’s surgery, and you want to promote you’re a dentist’s surgery. If nobody’s ever been there before, well, why not do a video tour? Why not walk around your new surgery, saying, “This is the waiting area, this is the receptionist, this is the room where the actual things are taking place, this is the dental hygienist’s room.”

Pete:                   “This is the drill, this is the happy gas!”

Dom:                   Yeah, I’d focus on the happy gas versus the drill; but yeah, “This is the recovery room,” things like that, just so people get a feeling. And it’s amazing, I mean, I did this on a grander scale, a much grander scale with a local company here, a dive center. They produced like mini TV series. Now, that was quite involved. I’m not suggesting anybody get that involved.

But they have. Ever since they produced that series of videos about their dive center and the boats and the staff, the increase in people I think in inquiries, was massive. But more importantly, what was when people physically arrived, these people are coming from the far side of the country to dive in this dive center, and when they arrive, they already know everybody.

They go, “Hey, you’re Serge, and you’re Andre, and you’re Andy,” and so on, because they’ve seen them on the video. They know the set-up; they know where all the equipment is and everything. They know everything that a prospective customer would ever want to know about the organization and they’ve come from the other side of the country and it’s the first time they got there. That is one of the most powerful uses of video for a bricks-and-mortar business, yeah?

Pete:                   Absolutely. It’s that sort of pre-sell, almost. It’s using it as a pre-sale tool.

Dom:                   Yeah, it’s a pre-sale tool. It’s great. Talk about an e-commerce business, or somebody who sells products. Well, again, and you may have come across this idea on YouTube; but doing this in a more professional way, the un-boxing. What’s in the box? What do you get?

Because very few people tell you actually what’s in the box, what you get. So it doesn’t matter what it is, it very literally doesn’t matter what it is. You can show people on a video an object that’s for sale, even if it’s just that you put it on a turntable and you spin it ’round so that they can see all ’round that object. Again, it’s experiential. It’s pre-selling the object and it’s answering questions…

Pete:                   Sorry, I was going to say, Zappos does something very, very similar. It’s not the unboxing per se, it’s a high-definition video. But it’s very raw in the way it’s edited and cut and scripted that they have a staff member there on the screen picking up a shoe and talking about the shoe in the same sort of tonality, manner, descriptive words and flow that they would if they’re in a retail store.

They sort of, “This Nike structure’s got medial density posting on the left-hand side of the shoe here. It’s got a four-foot air pocket, blah, blah, blah.” It sort of explains all the functions and features and benefits of the shoe in a very natural way as well, so it’s not too scary. It’s very—as we say again—engaging.

Dom:                   Yeah. And you pulled up another great example there, which is that if you already have staff who are trained to follow a sales script—something that we’ve talked about in the past, then they’re great people. They don’t have to actually physically appear, their face doesn’t have to appear on the camera if they’re not comfortable with that—and I’ll talk about that in a minute. But following that script, doing the sales pitch as if a customer is really there, as if they were in a physical store, is a great use of video.

Another little side effect of that, by the way, depending on what it is that you’re dealing with, is that if you have two things side by side; if you have, all things being equal, you have a flat page where there are some photographs that require scrolling and reading and all that; and you have a video, as a group experience, you’re more likely to get people to sit together and experience the video together at the same time and share their emotion and share their feedback and engage with that video than you are for them to read the same page.

If anybody’s ever tried to show somebody else on the web, the easiest thing it is to do to show somebody, whether it’s on a screen, or again, another plus for video, whether it’s on a mobile device, a video is one of those really shareable experiences.

Pete:                   Yeah. Another example that I was going to mention is the Tim Ferriss book trailer. That when his The 4-Hour Body book came out, one of the key drivers that he feels that caused that book to get it into The New York Times’ Best-seller List, was the book trailer. From there, attention-to-detail and analysis of the numbers and the data, that the biggest spark in book sales came directly after that book trailer was released, because it was very, very engaging .

It was an expensive video. It was a very, very high-quality, highly produced trailer, but the share-ability of that was ridiculous! People shared the share out of it. I’m trying not to swear on the show, and you’re right, it’s the share-ability of that. People can easily tweet it, Facebook it, whatever it might be. They’re going to be more likely to do that than they are at a big block of text.

Dom:                   Yeah, that is again a good point. And something that the people talk about when they talk about videos, this concept of viral video—a video that you’ve sent the link onto your friend and have got them to watch. I’m actually talking about something slightly more low-tech, which is literally two people sat together in the same physical space, one person showing the other person so that they can maybe evaluate a product, or evaluate service or evaluate a location, a hotel, a spa, you know, these real-world businesses.

Two people sat together can literally look at the same thing. But then we go onto this idea of a viral video, and where that comes from is literally that idea of Tim Ferriss’ is a good example, another good example of that, just getting away from what you can do. But speaking a little to some of those elephants in the room is Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave Club, I loved that video for the simple reason that it’s crap.

It’s awful. I mean, it’s not, it’s intentionally awful. Yeah, they’ve intentionally hammed it up and intentionally made a bad video, but it proves the point that you don’t have to go to the extent that Tim Ferriss went to. That was movie-production quality, the editing and the different scenes and all the different parts in that The 4-Hour Body video.

It deserved to be shared just as a piece of video, let alone that it talks about the product and things like that. Dollar Shave Club, awful video, absolutely awful. Basically doesn’t even show the product. In fact, if I remember, it doesn’t show the product.

Pete:                   He holds a razor in his hand in one section of the video.

Dom:                   Yeah. But amazing, because it, as a piece of media, has become shareable. They are two very good examples of the fact that you don’t—even though your product may not lend itself to video, or you don’t think it does, there’s still a way to use video to promote it, to support it, to inform people about it.

Pete:                   I get the difference. And I want to make that very clear is, Tim Ferriss’ book trailer was a promotion video. So, we’ve got the descriptive overview video that Zappos shoes and their shoes and things like that. We’ve got the promotional video which is designed to drive traffic somewhere, which is the Tim Ferriss’ approach with his book trailer. And then if you look at the third option we’ve discussed so far, so if you haven’t seen it go to DollarShaveClub.com, it’s really, really cool.

And that video is an engagement tool, but it’s also a sales tool. It’s a very funny sales video, which is one of the things to do. It’s not meant necessarily to promote the brand because it’s only a page where you purchase a product. It’s designed to actually get someone to actually make a purchase, and it’s done in a very humorous and also viral way.

Think about the same sort of TV commercials and obviously web-based campaigning commercial. What was the cologne with—oh, I’ve gone completely blank. I was going to say Brut. It’s not Brut, it was, I’m looking a complete fool right now, what was it?

Dom:                   What’s awful is I know exactly what he’s talking about as well and I’ve forgotten as well.

Pete:                   See, this is a big lesson right now, too, guys, which is just advertising and marketing in general. Something going viral…

Dom:                   Old Spice.

Pete:                   Old Spice, thank you very much. But this is a good point and it’s worth illustrating here. I’d love to say we just sort of hammed it up to make the point, but unfortunately we didn’t. The real thing here is thinking about this huge viral campaign, but then in the form of Old Spice didn’t make a huge dent to the actual bottom line of the business from the early research and reports that came out. Six months on, 12 months on, we can’t recall what the actual ad was for.

We recall the ad, but we don’t recall what it was for. And this is again that same mentality and question we were asking in last week’s episode of what’s the purpose. If the purpose is to actually just get a bit of brand awareness, great, because when someone says ‘Old Spice’ I remember the video.

But when I remember the video, I don’t think Old Spice, so it’s not necessarily going to help the hip pocket of the advertiser if I didn’t get the right context or outcome clearly defined when they started that campaign. It’s a perfect example of, not video gone wrong, but the video lesson in that.

Dom:                   Yeah. And that also speaks to the Preneur Hierarchy and this idea, that’s what we would call spray-and-pray advertising…

Pete:                   Yeah, absolutely. You’re exactly right.

Dom:                   Because you’re just trying to get brand exposure. It’s how when we talked about brand, it’s not about the brand in a previous episode as well.

Pete:                   And that’s the thing. If you’re trying to create a video just to be viral for the sake of being viral, that’s where you’re at. You’re spot on, there, Dom. You’re at the top of the pyramid. It’s all about getting people who wouldn’t have thought about searching for you or weren’t actively searching for you, or didn’t realize they had a problem to solve. It’s really about that screaming and that banner and billboard-style advertising which, yeah, you’re going to hit some eyeballs. But if doesn’t quote to dollars in the bank, is it really an effective advertising campaign?

Dom:                   Yeah. And so let’s flip that. Let’s go to the other end of the pyramid. Because so far, what we’ve talked about is promoting your business. I’ve also subliminally been talking about a very specific style of video. When I talk to people about video who haven’t really been involved in production, they have a very clear vision. They have a very clear idea in their mind what video means. And what it means is what they’re used to experiencing on a television, which is usually an image which moves, with people, and scenery, and sets, and normal everyday objects all moving around and interacting and things like that.

It’s what we call full-motion video. It will sound like I’m overdoing this, but the reason why I’m doing this is because people only have this one idea. To produce video—and I’m talking about the elephants in the room, to produce video, it costs a lot of money. You need big shiny, lots of equipment. It takes a long time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But if we focus on the other end of the pyramid for a second and we talk about our existing customers, supporting existing customers, helping them, informing thing them, there’s a completely different type of video that you can use.

You mentioned it briefly at the beginning, it’s something that we call ‘screencasting.’ A lot of people don’t know you can do this, it seems like voodoo when you show them. But I can record, using a special program on my computer, I can record the whole of my computer screen. Everything that I do, everything that I can see on the screen is recorded in a video file. Now, the use for that are phenomenal. Every time I get a client inquiry about how I do something, how do I upload the video you’ve given me to my WordPress site, how do I do this if one of my relatives or friends asked me a technical question.

Trying to explain that over the telephone is virtually impossible, especially to a non-technical person. But if I record a video of me doing that process, step by step, save it, send it to them, they can watch it as many times as they want. They can follow it, step by step. They can pause it, rewind it, watch it again. And it’s just one of the most valuable ways of helping, assisting and communicating with people that I’ve ever come across in those circumstances. It’s so, so simple. You start the recorder, you do what it is you want to show people, you can talk and it records your voice, you press stop and you send them the file.

Pete:                   It’s brilliant, and that’s the thing. There are so many ways you can apply that to your business. For example, ReadItFor.Me/PreneurCast, we’ve got a screen-capture video of inside the membership area, so listeners and other people can get a good feel of what they’re going to experience when they actually get into that online digital membership area.

Dom:                   Exactly.

Pete:                   You can use it. We’re going to test this very shortly with one of our websites which is going to have quite a complex interactive mode or area of the site for a particular business that we’re involved with, and we’re actually going to test creating almost like a how-to walkthrough video to explain, “…and this is actually how you’re going to need to do the next few things on this particular process of the website,” and actually use that as an educational walk-through sales conversion, hold-your-hand virtual salesperson-type solution.

We’re going to use the video of walking through the process and talking through it so someone gets a feel for what they’re about to do. You can also do it for content. For those of you who’ve been on various webinars that we’ve done or any sort of the coaching programs, membership sites that we have, a lot of the content in there is screen-captured video, whether it be us walking through a website or using a particular piece of software or tool.

But even to the extent of just pre-doing a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation and then recording that with audio, which is obviously one of the big things, big focuses of what you do, Dom. So you’re probably best to explain and talk about that particular use of screen capture.

Dom:                   Absolutely. The uses of screen capture as a video-production model are endless. And we’re still talking about addressing, talking to clients and things like that. Yeah, a very big use of video, which I alluded to at the beginning, is communication, is information. A very big and powerful product that you can produce and sell is an information product. And one of the easiest ways of producing, engaging compelling highly effective information product is to produce video.

Now, a lot of people panic at that point. A lot of people panic, and I’m going to come back to this whole panicking about the complexity, difficulty, cost, et cetera, of video. But one of the easiest ways to produce an information product is to produce a regular PowerPoint presentation. And then you use screencasting, screen-recording software to record you stepping through that presentation.

Pete:                   Absolutely.

Dom:                   Now, I’m going to break out of I call the ‘arm-waving’ crowd. Because video attracts the arm-waving crowd. And the arm-waving crowd are the people who stand at the front or produce content that says, “You can just do this. It’s easy. Off you go, just do this.” Now with video, that’s probably one of the biggest attractors of people that wave their arm at the front in a grand gesture and then wander off because they could do it, so it must be easy. They tell you it’s easy and you believe them. Now, it isn’t easy, it isn’t totally fantastically simple across the board.

There are technical things that it helps if you know. That’s why I have a business producing media for people, because even with the best workflow in the world, it still takes time—and I’ll come back to work flows and things like that—but in terms of complexity, difficulty versus things that people can do, most people can use PowerPoint, and most people can talk their way through a PowerPoint presentation, so it’s a great quick way to get an information product together. So that, as either creating a product or creating communication is a great tip.

But I think one of the things that I began to talk about and I want to come back to, over the last few weeks we’ve talked a lot about sales. We’ve talked a lot about marketing. But this podcast isn’t just about that. It’s about being in business, it’s about being an entrepreneur. And one of the big things that we have talked about in the past is building a team, having staff, maybe outsourcing some of the work. We’ve talked about that in specific episodes in the past.

Screen-recording, screencasting and producing step-by-step video instruction is one of the quickest and easiest and most efficient ways of educating a team. If you have a business that relies on any kind of computer-based process, rather than having to sit next to people and manually stepping them through step-by-step, or coaching them through the things, or having to have them on the telephone and saying, “Can you see this,” and them saying “No, I can’t see that,” and so on and so on.

Or you end up trying to write these instructions out. All of those things take a lot of time, and I’m not really repeatable. The last one, writing the instructions down, is repeatable, but it can be quite long-winded and difficult to do. Whereas, if it’s a process that you pretty much do every day yourself anyway, turn on the screen-recorder, record yourself doing it, talk out loud about what you’re doing, and send them the file.

Pete:                   And we do this—sorry, I’m going to give some real-world examples of this. Maybe you have an accounting software package that you need to be inputting invoices in, AP invoices, AR invoices. Maybe there’s some other sort of software that you have to do when you need to do a dispatch and you need to organize a courier. Any of those little tasks like that, they should all be recorded and made in some sort of Wiki or some sort of system that you can keep.

So that if your staff move on, if someone’s sick, they can jump in and do that role in the business. Whether it might be booking something, filling something out—anything that is computer-based that your staff is doing. That is relevant to almost every business these days. On some level, every single company is using computer software to do some key element or elements and processes in the business.

This should be prerecorded and screen-captured so they’re on file for emergencies and use and training in the future as you grow. As staff come and go, it’s a very applicable internal tool which is what I know Dom’s touching on. But this is something that’s really, really important. So many people, when they think of video, just have those blinders on and think about it purely as a sales tool. Well, we’re talking about it as just a process-enhancement and system tool to get more efficient internally in your processes.

Dom:                   Absolutely. And that’s to me, looking as it as a business, whatever your business is, these days, I guarantee you; if Pete gave some examples there, there are some elements of your business that are done on a computer or online or both. Some people have business and that’s all they do. Even a person. Let’s say you have an outsourcer or you want to bring an outsourcer on because you are maintaining a blog, or you’re producing a podcast like we do.

There’s a lot of repetitive highly, highly, highly repetitive steps involved in producing any kind of digital media. The highly repetitive steps, the standard, same box has to be filled out with the same kind of information. And if you can produce that to a video that says take the information that I’ve told you is this title and put it in this box. Take the information that I’ve told you is the description and put it in this box. Click this button and check, look at the preview, test the links by clicking them, this should happen.

When it’s all done, press save, press publish. Done. It literally takes you that long to create the training. That’s it. in terms of leverage, which is a word that we use a lot in terms of effective use of your time and the results that you get from the use of that time, it has to be one of the highest-leverage media there is internally within your business. It’s certainly one of the things I use video for most, is for that reason, outside of the production that I do for my clients. My personal usage of it is more oriented to improving and enhancing and automating my businesses, than it is advertising and promoting them.

Pete:                   Yeah, that’s what we’re doing; we’re doing a lot of that WorkWiki stuff. I’m not sure if we’ve spoken about WorkWikis on the actual PreneurCast before, so we might have to put that down as a future episode. But we do a lot of that WorkWiki stuff, which is all about our internal processes and documentation using videos. It’s really cool. I thought I’d just mention to some people that I haven’t really promoted as much for quite a while, if at all really, to be honest.

If you head over to YouTube.com/PreneurVideos, that’s YouTube.com/PreneurVideos, you’ll actually see a whole bunch of videos that we’ve been quietly putting together in the background for some really cool stuff, which we’ll reveal later down the track. But you can get a bit of a preview of a whole bunch of stuff there that gives you a taste of these different types of videos. We’ve got a whole bunch of PowerPoint, Keynote-style presentations actually matched with your audio from our podcasts. So you actually get some visual version of previous episodes of the podcast in a couple of different formats there which are really, really cool.

You actually see a step-by-step sales video of AudioBook Stitch, which is one of the new Mac OSX apps that we’ve released. You’ve got some really basic book trailer videos in there. You’ve got a presentation or a webinar that I do that was recorded and uploaded. There’s a bunch of other full-motion videos. So, if you want to get a feel for different types of videos, definitely check out YouTube.com/preneurvideos because you’ll see a great range of different ways you can use video in different ways and different elements and different processes to market your business.

Dom:                   That is really a good example. Thank you, Pete, for pointing that out. Yeah, your channel on YouTube is fantastic as an example of different kinds of video that you can produce. There’s a lot of stuff—just to be clear, there’s a lot of stuff on there. Not only stuff that I’ve produced for Pete, but also that Pete’s produced himself.

Pete:                   You’ll see the quality difference.

Dom:                   Yeah, you’ll see the—sorry about that. Also, that we’ve also had an outsource team produce, as well. There’s different examples of the different levels of complexity and involvement in the process. So, time’s ticking on. I want to get to those elephants in the room, Pete. I think people are pretty much convinced that there’s a YouTube video for pretty much anybody that’s listening. But the big things that stop people—I want to get these out of the way, OK? Without arm-waving. The first one is cost.

And cost is slightly related to something else that I call ‘shiny-kit syndrome.’ Because if you go and you look; first of all, let’s take a common misconception: video means you’ve got to be in front of the camera. As we’ve said and shown, you don’t have to be on the camera. You could be recording the screen, so you don’t have to be on the camera. But shiny-kit syndrome, attached to the idea that you have to be on camera, means that you go looking in the electronic stores for a camera.

And if you walk into one or (heaven offend) someone will sell you one that costs a lot of money – $500, $1,000 dollars, keep going. The big boys use $15,000 cameras and plus. Television-production companies, well, they really use expensive gear But, if you’re recording the screen, you don’t need a camera. If you have a Mac, which if you’re getting into media production, not to sound like a fan boy; but if you’re into media production, a Mac is the tool for the job.

I’m not going to go onto that any more on this particular episode, but it is. If you have Mac, they actually have screen-recording built-in (not a lot of people know that) as part of the standard software. It’s not very powerful with its extra features, but it will record your screen and it will do the job. And that’s free that came with the machine, there you go.

Pete:                   And also, they have the built-in cameras as well, with video-recording software again, out of the box. If you want to sit in front of your camera and just talk to your Mac, you can have full-motion video captured as well, out of the box.

Dom:                   Absolutely. Every Mac for the last quite a few years has had a very high-quality webcam. The latest ones have actually got high-definition webcams. These things are ridiculous. The quality of video they produce, and yeah, you can record straight from that. So out of the box, on a Mac, you can press Record and record your screen or record camera so you can get your face in front of your audience if you want to do that.

And there’s free iMovie editing software on the Mac, so you can edit it, produce it, publish it, ship it, all in one box. Ostensibly, if you invest in the machine, after you’ve invested in the editing machine—which you would have to do anyway—the production video cost is zero. So, there you go with your ‘it costs a lot of money.’ If you want to do live action, you want to move the camera around, you want to do product demos and things like that, I will be absolutely honest with the audience.

I have been working with video for a great number of years now in various capacities, filming live events, filming sporting events, doing all kinds of different video-recording and production. My last—as I inverted commas call it ‘real camera’ was about, cost me about I think $100. It was a great camera, fantastic camera, high-definition, whiz bang, really comes under the heading of shiny kit. I don’t believe that it’s actually been out of the bag for over two years now. All of the live action work that I do is done on a $100 camera. It’s fit for purpose.

Pete:                   Creative Vado?

Dom:                   No, actually; it’s not a Creative Vado. It is a Kodak Zi8, sadly out of production, now. Kodak now do a Zi10 or something else. I’m not going to go into the technical side of it. If anyone’s really interested in technical stuff, drop us a line and maybe we’ll do a more technical show. But trust me, it’s not expensive. The only thing I will say—and I will get slightly technical about this, is that if you’re looking at buying a camera, it should always, the only feature that’s important after the fact that it records video, is that you can plug in an external microphone.

Because while the image on the screen is compelling, if the sound isn’t up to scratch and isn’t of high quality, then people will stop watching. Trust me. The entire YouTube infrastructure was built on awful quality, visually, awful quality video. But if the sound was awful at all, they wouldn’t have gotten very far. So, if you’re looking for a camera, look for one with an external microphone socket—but that’s it.

Yes, I will again, be open; you can hire me. I am for hire. My services are available and no one has ever called me ‘cheap’ or ‘inexpensive.’ But the people that hire me hire me to create information products and do things that are representative of their business, and they want a high-quality, professional, production quality.

Pete:                   Hey, I’m going to interrupt you there for two seconds. You were saying, you keep referring to information products. I want to make it clear that I’ve used you to do some video stuff for our real-world telco company. So it’s not just about information marketers do information products or anything like that, you can do some very, very powerful marketing videos. Think about some of the commercials you see on TV these days, they don’t actually have any live-action stuff. It’s just text, imagery, photos flying across the screen with a great soundtrack and movement. That’s the sort of stuff that you can do.

Dom:                   Absolutely.

Pete:                   You want to keep your mind open that if you’re a dentist in Melbourne, you’ve got a rock-climbing studio in San Francisco, or you’re a roof tiler in South America, there is some validity in using this sort of video that Dom can do for you.

Dom:                   Yeah. Yes, I could do it; although, other video professionals can do it. And at the end of the day, we’ve talked about this briefly before, you can do things yourself. This brings me onto the other two, the other two points. One of them is quality. You have to decide what quality you want and what is fit for purpose. DollarShaveClub, classic example. In terms of scripting, acting, et cetera, et cetera, rubbish. Absolutely rubbish. Intentionally rubibish, though.

The recording and the camera work and et cetera, is actually very good. It’s disguised as being rubbish, but it’s very good. But you don’t even have to go to that level. If you are doing a walkthrough of a dentist’s surgery, it’s a walkthrough of a dentist’s surgery. If you’re the dentist doing it, that adds more value than a professional cameraman with a trolley that keeps his camera stable, and the lighting crew, and the guy with the big pole with the microphone on it and all that malarkey.

It doesn’t get the message across any better, and in fact, is slightly less engaging. There’s a lot of value in the personality aspect of video production. So, always look for the quality that’s appropriate. By comparison, by the way, if somebody is paying you a few thousand dollars for an information product, you should really put a bit of effort into the production.

Pete:                   Absolutely.

Dom:                   Which brings us to my last point, which is, how hard is it? And that, to me, is all about choosing the appropriate type of video and then the appropriate workflow. In a previous episode, Pete and I have talked about our Content Leverage System, the system that we have that means that Pete’s involvement in creating most of the videos for his information products is that he sits down with his iPad and creates a mind map and then records an audio track.

That’s his involvement. It gets the critical information from Pete’s mind into a format that can be enhanced and produced as a final product, and myself and my team, parts of Pete’s team are involved in that process. We have a workflow. That means that if Pete wants to create information product for values of, it’s easy. If you were to try to replicate one of those products yourself, you would find it took you a lot of time because you’re probably not an expert in the different pieces that need to be done.

But that is about choosing the right team, hiring the right people for the right jobs, about asking the right parts. It’s about the workflow. But at the other end of the scale, Pete’s example of a rock-climbing club or a dentist, or a restaurant, all of those things, we’ve talked about live-action video. We’ve talked about screencasting video. But you can also make video just from photographs, using various tools and pieces of software. You don’t even need to invest in high-powered equipment or even a new piece of equipment.

Most people have a digital camera. Go out, snap some photographs of you climbing walls, your safety-harness equipment, your changing rooms, and pop-them together and make a video. It’s a video, it’s still a video. Don’t worry about that. And it is, it’s all about the workflow. It’s about choosing the right kind of video, choosing what’s appropriate for the audience, choosing the technology that’s appropriate. Don’t get caught up in this thing, that I have this phrase. It comes from a different world but it applies here. It’s, ‘All the gear and no idea.’

Pete:                   Oh, yeah.

Dom:                   A guy with a $15,000 camera can’t necessarily produce any better video than me with my $100 camera. If you’ve got $15,000, if I were you, I wouldn’t spend it on a camera, necessarily. You might want to spend it on using somebody like me to produce an awful lot of high-quality content for you because I’ve already made the investment and the training and whatever else. Or, you might just want to pay $100, get yourself a little portable HD camera, and go whiz out a couple of quick videos. Give it a try. Low investment, but there’s this huge mystique about the whole idea of video.

From everything that we’ve talked about this week, from everything from why should I use it, what use is it to me? Oh, I have no use for that, I don’t want to be on camera, or it must be expensive, or it sounds really complicated—all these things. It’s hopefully, in a slightly rambling way, we’ve addressed some of that this week. Pete, any such thing that you think people might have an issue with that I might not have covered there, before I take a bit of a breather and talk about our last sponsor?

Pete:                   No. Look, I think you’ve done a brilliant job. Taking the reigns and running with the episode today, because this is definitely your domain. You are far more of an expert that I am when it comes to video. The really cool thing, is we were talking before the show and the product that I named, I think, the Best Marketing Product of 2010, I think it was—from memory—is being re-released. I don’t really promote a lot of information marketing products these days and haven’t done so really heavily for at least a year.

A lot of them are just sub-par in my opinion, that aren’t worth a full get-behind, really endorsed promotion. But Video Boss by Andy Jenkins, unquestionably, is one of the better value, fully developed, high-quality, high-content, high-supported courses that have been released recently, and easing the process of re-releasing that at the moment as we record the show, and will be available for a little bit after the show, goes to air in it’s very first incarnation.

Dom’s got a fantastic supporting offer that if you’re just interested in grabbing a copy of Video Boss and taking video serious in your business, this is a fantastic course. It goes in-depth in all the type of video that we spoke about. But Dom’s going to help support that with you to make sure you get the most of it in a fantastic type package, aren’t you, Dom?

Dom:                   Yeah. I just want to clarify, I am a media-production professional. It’s one of the main business that I’ve been running for the last few years. Not only that, but theoretically, I could go into the business of training people to do what I do. But when I came across Video Boss, I just don’t see the need for me to sit down and go through all of the topics that we’ve talked about in the show because Video Boss, as a product, is phenomenal. It has my whole-hearted support; and this is a big thing for me because I’m not involved in the information marketing business.

As a producer, it’s not in my interest to be big pals with all these guys, really. I produce things for the people. My clients produce information products varying across scales. But for me, I just work with those people. I’m a supplier to them in that business. But Video Boss is amazing. It really does address all of the issues that we’ve talked about and goes into depth about some things even we haven’t talked about. Things like scriptwriting. There’s an awesome module on scriptwriting, about focusing your message, which is a valuable part.

It’s basically copywriting. It’s a valuable part of any business communication. There’s some great information in that, so I’m 100% behind Video Boss as a product for somebody who wants to get involved in video production; not necessarily, actually physically doing it themselves but wants to understand what it can do for them, wants to understand how to do it, the decisions that need to be made, and really just to be more informed about it. And Pete, you came and let the cat out of the bag. But, I support it that much that I’ve got a deal for you, PreneurCast listeners, fans of the show, as I say.

You know we’ve had a couple of e-mails over time, people who want to work with me, people want me to supply services in a done-for-you kind of way. I’m happy to do that, but if you think you want to do it yourself, and you want to purchase the Video Boss product, if you purchase it through our link that we’ll provide in the show notes, I’m going to support you. I will be on hand (and the details of this we’re going to hammer out). But it’s basically going to be some one-to-one strategy consulting and technical consulting with me.

You’ll be able to go through the Video Boss product and I will also give you some of my time in a one-to-one call to support you as well as all the great support that goes on in Video Boss. If it’s something about your business, something a bit more Preneur-related to do with video, I’m happy to get on a call with you one-to-one. As I say, we’re going to iron out the details, they’ll be on the other end of the link that’s in the show notes.

But I also want to setup a little kind of mastermind group for our Video Boss people as well, so there will be regular mastermind calls involved in it as well. So, follow the link that’s in the show notes. This is one of those take-action things, because I don’t know how long he’s going to have the cart open for, this time. He normally opens it for a while then closes it because they have a limit to the number of people they want to support in one go. But if you go through our link, as I say, I will be there and I will be supporting the PreneurCast listeners who decide to sign up for Video Boss.

Pete:                   Cool. Since our PreneurMedia.tv is where the show notes are, and we do really highly recommend you check out the blog post for this particular episode, check out the link to what Dom’s referring to. It’s very rare that he gives up his time in a way like this, so I highly recommend the course and I’ve invested in it myself, and have differently used it quite a bit. I highly recommend Dom, obviously, and highly recommend Video Boss. But more importantly, I highly recommend you consider and start using video in one element, in one area of your business and your marketing.

Dom:                   Definitely. And that’s really the takeaway for this show. Before we wrap up, lets’ have a quick chat because we like to talk about useful things that we’ve come across. Pete, what have you been consuming via Audible books this week?

Pete:                   This week, I’ve been playing around and listening to The Facebook Effect, which is a book recommended to me by Rob Somerville, who’s a good friend, a fantastic marketer, and the real brains behind The Challenge. Let’s be honest about it. And it’s sort of like In the Plex, which is obviously the book about Google. There’s also the new Inside Apple book which talks about (and obviously, the Steve Jobs autobiography that talks about Apple). The third one of the big three is Facebook. The Facebook Effect really talks about how Facebook started out as the Facebook, and how it grew, and decisions it made, and the role it plays in society these days.

It’s kind of cool, so I highly recommend people checking it out. The Facebook Effect in audio format. I was thinking a little bit during the show that as we have helped brand and name ReadItForMe, we should probably do the same for Audible. So I was thinking of something along the lines of Audible.com, ‘The Way Authors Wanted You to Read Their Books,’ or, ‘The Way Books Should Be Consumed.’ I’m still trying to flesh that out, it’s not quite as catchy as ‘Effective and Engaging Book Summaries,’ but we’ll get one for Audible in the next couple of weeks. We’ll have to play around with that, and we’ll do a slogan segment every show.

Dom:                   Yeah, yeah. We’ll work on that one offline. But folks, if you want to try out Audible, Audible books, we have a deal for you at AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast. If you go to that link, you can sign up and get a free-trial. So AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast. Just to wrap up this week’s show, if you go to Pete’s YouTube channel, YouTube.com/PreneurVideos, you’ll see how much video plays a part in which Pete does in just communicating with our audience. As Pete said, we’re now video-ifying the podcast, as one example.

But Pete uses video in all his businesses, both internally and externally. If you come across any of Pete’s information products, you’ll be aware of how much video is involved in those, and just look around. The action point for the week, I guess, is look around, and look and think how video could be used in your organization either internally or externally. Look at the ideas that we gave you for ways that regular bricks-and-mortar business, e-commerce business and all kinds of business can use a different live-action photo based or screencast video production to enhance either your external marketing, your existing customer support and communication or your internal team communication.

And if you are interested in taking video to the next level, obviously, as always, I’m available for hire. Drop us a line. But if you’re thinking of doing it yourself, taking it on in your company, you want to know more about video, the best course we can recommend, the best information source we’ve got is the Video Boss course, which is coming out soon, being re-released by Andy Jenkins. If you take advantage of buying that, signing up for that through our link (which will be in the show notes) as I said, I’m going to put together a special package for PreneurCast listeners, where I’m going to be there to support you and give you some one-one-one coaching and consulting.

Pete:                   I know I cut you off there, mate; but I’m just going—I can’t recommend that highly enough. Because you could be listening to this show for a while. You definitely know how intelligent—and you might now know how handsome he is—you definitely know how intelligent Dom is. So, getting that ‘strategery’ applied to your business, particularly in the form of video which is his absolute specialty, it’s an amazing opportunity to get Dom focused and spending some time on your particular business and your particular projects on your video marketing.

Because some of the big names in information marketing and some of the bigger businesses around, a brand you probably know, has used Dom in this sort of area. Your access to him is very, very effective at the moment. Definitely, if you can, even if you don’t want the product, buy it just so you have access to Dom.

Dom:                   Oddly enough, yeah. I would say that the package that I’m planning to put together, you’re either getting me for free or you’re getting Video Boss for free, with the price of Video Boss is going at the moment. So I’d like to think I’m offering a good deal. But thanks you for you kind words, Pete

Pete:                   Justified words, mate, justified.

Dom:                   Thank you. We’re a little bit overtime. Hopefully, people have found value in this one and we’ve busted a few more mouths without the silly mustache and hat. Please give us some feedback, pop us a review on iTunes, pop over to PreneurMedia.tv and get all the different show notes and information there and drop us some comments. Thanks to everybody who does comment. We do read it. We do take it on board, so thanks for the great few. But you have given us, and keep on giving us feedback and we will see you next week for Episode 52, our one year anniversary.

Pete:                   Woohoo! One year, one year anniversary. Do I have to buy you diamonds or paper or something?

Dom:                   Uh….

Pete:                   Is one anniversary paper?

Dom:                   I don’t know. You’re the married guy, better work it out soon.

Pete:                   Oh, I’ve got 11 months.

Dom:                   See you next week.

Pete:                   Ciao!