Are you looking for an easy way to stay in front of your customers online? Do you enjoy talking more than writing? Would you like to really take advantage of your website and social media but you haven’t figured out how? And do you dread creating those email newsletters, wondering what it is you’re going to say this week? Or this month?
Creating and building online visibility is about a lot more that just a website. Your website is the beginning of putting together a network of places your business appears – and together that network contributes to your credibility and connection with your customers.
This is not a whole lot different than advertising in newspapers and local bulletin boards used to be. You would choose a variety of publications or venues to put the word out about your business and then stick to that for some time. Generally, more than one place is required to actually generate credibility – people need to experience something several times in different ways before they register it as real (lots of research done on this with varying estimates on the number of times: anywhere from 3 to 7 to 12).
Building Visibility Online
Today’s version of that is to have a website and a blog, and then put the content from your blog out on your choice of social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, LinkedIn, etc. Hopefully you haven’t chosen ALL of them – if you have, stop now and chose 3 to focus on, no more. Choose them based on where your ideal customer is likely to be hanging out.
Not all of us love to write. And those of us that do, sometimes we get tired of it. So, there’s another approach. I know it’s not new to you, it’s pretty obvious, but most of us have some reluctance to jumping into it. That’s video.
Unless you’re already doing a lot of video, you probably have some trepidation about seeing yourself talking away on a video. You may think you have to memorize it all! Or that you need to be perfect. Or that you don’t look good enough to be on video.
That’s all just a bunch of useless excuses.
I understand that’s maybe how you feel, but if you start looking around at who is using video to get their name out there AND doing it successfully, you’ll find that most of those people don’t look or act ANYTHING like actors.
Shooting Your Video Content
Video can be formal where you do memorize something and then look directly into the camera and repeat it. Video can also be very informal – like you’re just talking to a friend sitting at your desk or table in your office or your kitchen. Or even out on a bench in your local park.
You can have someone take the video of you, or you can set it up yourself and take it. Editing the beginning and end to get rid of you turning the video on and off is easy – you can even do that AFTER you upload the video to YouTube. And iMovie isn’t that hard to learn. Plus there are other video editing tools you can find.
I found myself a very inexpensive lighting setup on Amazon – with umbrellas, nice stands, and a bag to carry it with me. All for around $140. I also have a tripod with an adapter that holds my iphone. I basically can video myself and have it look pretty good anywhere and anytime I want. I recently took my portable video setup to a planning session and we shot video during the break – with lighting. Setup and tear down took 2 minutes.
Social Media Loves Video Content
One of the very cool things about video content marketing is that you can get great results using YouTube as well as putting it natively on Facebook. Social sites are optimized for video content – because it keeps users on the site longer. It also keeps people on YOUR site longer – that makes for good SEO. You can grab the embed code from YouTube once you upload your video and edit it, then put that on your site. Here’s a nice trick: put one on your home page, just at the ‘fold’ (where the page ends on the screen and you have to scroll up to see the rest). The video should be half visible without scrolling. People find video almost irresistible – so they’re likely to take just a little extra time on your home page to see what that video is all about.
Use Video Content in Your Email Newsletters
Another cool thing is that email service providers, like Constant Contact, make it easy to embed video links with generated images right into your newsletter. So then, all you have to do is make the video, cut the beginning and end off, then embed it in your newsletter with a little bit of writing saying what the gist of it is, and your done!
Here’s what you need to do:
- Identify your style: formal, informal, chatty, indoors, outdoors, etc.
- Find a good place to video where the background is not moving and there’s enough diffuse light.
- Choose something people ask you about all the time – in fact choose about 50 of these, one for every week.
- Introduce the topic and then give your answer or demonstration in less than 2 minutes or so.
- Upload the video to YouTube, cut the lead in and trailing parts.
- Embed on your site in a blog post.
- Embed in your email newsletter.
- Download the cut version from YouTube and upload it directly to your Facebook page as a post.
- That’s video content marketing in a nutshell!
Now you’re a pro!
Once you do this 4 times, you’ll realize how easy this is and wonder why you ever had all those objections before. Let me know how it goes.
