Hi, Gideon Shalwick here. Let me guess. You want to get some more views to your videos, right? We all do. So, inside this video, I’m going to talk about how you can actually do that—very straightforward. Actually, I want to give you some simple tips that you can follow.

First of all, you need to think about creating something of value. You really need to create your videos so that they are valuable and so that they are spreadworthy. That’s one of the most important things for making sure that your videos can spread. If you don’t have a great video, then no one is going to spread it for you. It won’t go viral. Bad videos don’t go viral.

You need to think about how you can make your video as good as possible so that other people will spread it for you. There are a couple of things to keep in mind.

First of all, you need to think about the production quality of your videos. Now, it doesn’t have to be Hollywood standard but if you can make it pretty professional, that also helps.

Image quality is one thing. The other thing is the actual sound. You want to make sure that your video actually sounds good. And it’s not just the sound, you want to maybe add some sound effects, maybe a little bit of video. Just spice it up a little bit more.

The key thing here is to think about how you can create value… How you can create more value for your viewers so that they would want to spread the word about your video. It’s really as simple as that.

Create a little mnemonic that you can use to think about how you can make your videos more valuable. And the mnemonic is DEFICE. It’s almost like device, but it’s DEFICE with an F.

The D stands for “different”. Make your videos different. Look at what’s out there already on the internet. Look at what’s actually working and you’ll find that a lot of videos are actually a little bit different, actually make the cut. A lot of people like to spread something that’s different.

The E is for “exciting”. Make your video exciting. So think about how you can make your video more exciting to your viewers. Not so much to yourself. Think about your viewers. What do they want? Make it exciting for them.

The F stands for “funny”. Think about how you can make your videos funny. Now, this is a hard one because not all of us are comedians so maybe you want to try the other ones if you’re not naturally funny, if you don’t have a gift for being funny or creating funny videos.

The I stands for “interesting”. Interesting videos like How-To videos are always very popular. In fact, How-To videos are some of the most popular videos watched on YouTube.

C is for “controversial”…interesting one. Quite a little bit controversial, actually. (Well, not actually) But think about how you can create your videos that’s controversial. Now be careful here. You don’t want to put other people down or anything silly like that. You want to stay with the YouTube guidelines. But think about how you can be a little bit controversial. Often, that spreads like wildfire as well.

And the final E stands for “excellent”. Think about how you can make your videos excellent. Once again, not excellent to yourself; but it helps. Make it excellent from the viewpoint of your viewers — very, very important.

So that’s DEFICE. Easy, pretty simple. Keep that in mind everytime you create a new video.

Now of course, there are other things you can do as well to get more views for your videos. I’ve actually created another video previously that talks about the basics like How-To get your title right, your description, your tags; How-To run competitions; and also How-To do collaborations or just mention it. For that video, I’ll put it up here. You can click on it and check it out.

Now, if you want to find out more information on how to get even more views and how to actually use your video views and turn that into a business-not just getting more views. Views are cool but you really want to use your views to maybe make some money from it, right? That’s kind of cool.

So if you’re interested in that kind of thing, please click on the link below this video. There’s a link there that will take you to a page where you can opt in for my free report. It’s a 92-page report, packed with more information. It actually goes to my 7-step process for showing you how to turn your video views into cash.

I hope you’ll enjoy that and go ahead, go to the link. It’s right below this video.

I’ll see you on the other side.

So the other day, I sent an email add to my newsletter list and I got an email back from an old friend. It was my old professor from my University days. He’s always very direct and he says a thing how it is and he doesn’t mince with words.

Basically what he sent to me was saying that, “What’s in it for me?” So he responded to the email that I sent to my newsletter—because he’s on my newsletter as well and because he’s probably trying to see my progress and see how I’m doing. But he said, “What’s in it for me?” He read my message and he got the impression that there was nothing in it for him as he read the message.

And you know, that got me thinking because I’ve been doing marketing now for many, many years and yet as I send that message, that didn’t cross my mind that I should be thinking about what was in it for the person reading that message.

I think that’s one of the easiest things to forget in marketing. And that is to think about what’s in it for your audience. And I wanted to create this video and tell you about it because when you create your video, you really need to think about that too and you need to totally kind of forget about yourself and your own desires and interests and think about what’s in it for your viewer-for the person watching your video. How can you create your video, so that when people watch it, they think that is what I want to watch and that is what I associate with and that information is really useful to me or that information is really entertaining to me?

Whatever it is, put yourself in the shoes of your audience, of your viewer and think about what’s in it for them. What can you create so that when they watch your video they’ll think you’ve created it specifically for them?

When you think about this sort of thing, when you think about creating your video, think about creating it for one specific person-one specific type of person. And when you do go hit and create your video speak to that one person—like I’m speaking to you now.

Speak to that one person only because when you think about, when people watch your videos online, it’s not like the big movies or big opera or a big show. There’s only one person watching your video at a time so they sit in front of the computer. There’s only one person watching the video at a time. So for all intents and purposes, you’re only speaking to one person. That’s why you need to think what’s in it for that one specific person and then talk to the person on the other side of the screen.

So I just wanted to share that with you. That was from my old professor. He’s name is Pete Bergman. Pete, if you’re watching this, thank you so much. It was really a good tip and it just really got me thinking again to think about the basics. You know, this is really the basics and it’s so easy to forget about what’s in it for your audience and to just focus on yourself.

So forget about yourself and think about what’s in it for your audience.

That’s my tip for today. I hope you enjoyed that and I hope you can use that for your online videos. If you want to see more videos like this, go to my blog at Gideonshalwick.com. And if you want to get a copy of my latest report, Rapid Video Blogging, that shows you how I make a 6-figure income with online video you can just go to Rapidvideoblogging.com

Thank you for watching and I’ll see you inside the next video.

Hi and welcome to this video. Inside this video I’d like to talk about how you can record, edit, export, and upload your video to YouTube and get it onto your website.

If you’ve been following the previous videos inside this series, you’ll know all the equipment you’ll need to be able to record your online video, and you’ll also know how to go through the proper presentation if you’re creating a sales video.

So inside this video I’m going to go into a little bit more detail and talk about:

• How to record your video
• How to edit your video
• How to export it to the right format
• How to get it onto YouTube
• Aand then get it onto your website so that other people can watch your video

Let’s get into the first point…

How To Record Your Video

The first tip is to think about how to set up your camera. One thing that I always talk about is that it’s important to think about your background.

In this case I’m using a fairly simple and clear background, because I don’t want to distract people with a bunch of other things. It also allows me to put images or text up on this side to help prove my point or to support whatever I’m talking about.

Now it may be different for your situation, and you may want to have other things there, like nature scenes or whatever. It’s up to you, but think about your background. That’s the point I’m trying to make here. Make sure it’s appropriate for your video.

The other thing to think about in terms of set-up is your lighting. In this particular case I’m recording inside a studio and I’m actually using two lights. There’s a light over there and there’s another light over there, and they’re both at about 45 degree angles from where the camera is. The camera’s over there, of course, where you are. So in my case I’m using two lights to help me light up my face and to make sure that the video quality is good enough.

You may be recording during daytime or in a room where there’s lots of natural light, or you may not and need lights, or you may be recording outside, in which case you probably also don’t need any lights.

In any of these cases, just make sure that whatever you’re recording is getting enough light, because that can help you get the quality of your recording much, much better.

Another little tip for when you’re recording is to leave pauses right before you start talking and also right at the end. What this does is it helps you during the editing phase to easily fade in and fade out, or cuts when you’re moving clips around.

It just helps you in the editing phase to make sure that you don’t cut your voice off at the beginning or at the end, so leave pauses before you start talking and also at the end. Just keep looking at the camera, pause for a couple of seconds, and it just helps a lot during the editing phase – trust me.

Editing Your Recordings On Your Computer

If you’re using any of the cameras I recommended inside one of the previous videos, it’ll be pretty straightforward because all of them require a USB connection to your computer.

All you do is plug the camera into the USB port of your computer and transfer those files onto your computer. The next stage is to get those files into your editing program, and you simply open them up inside your editing program and then you’re ready to start editing.

For editing, here are a few little tips that will help your video come across a lot more professional. The first thing is the use of titles. This is not critical, but it can help you come across a little bit more professional, so look for the titles function inside the software that you’re using, the software that I recommended previously.

Just add one at the beginning of your video and throughout your video if you want to make certain points, and maybe at the end as well when you call people to action and you tell them where to go, to a certain website for example.

The other thing you can use is fade-ins and fade-outs. This is just a really nice easy way to make your video come across a little bit more professional. It’s very, very simple to add a little one- or two-second fade-in at the beginning and a fade-out at the end.

I often do this with my YouTube videos, where I’m a little bit lazy and I don’t want to do any fancy editing, and often that’s all I need to make my video look really, really good.

Another thing you can do is to add cuts inside your video to have those instant zoom-ins and zoom-outs. This can create the perception that you’re using more than one camera. It will also make your videos come across a lot more professional.

All you’ve got to do here is inside the track for your video, to make a cut you zoom in for however long you want to, you make another cut and zoom back out again. It’s really as simple as that. A lot of people often thought that I was using more than one camera, but it’s really just me zooming in and out during the editing phase.

Finally, if you want to add a little bit of extra pizzazz to your video, you can add a music track at the beginning and at the end. This is really easy to do. All you’ve got to do is add it and add a fade-out at the beginning, and at the end you add it again with a fade-in and louder music towards the end. Often using a bit of music can make your videos come across a little bit more professional as well.

Once again, it’s not essential. At the minimum all you really need is a fade-in and fade-out and that already will make your videos look a lot more professional.

Once you’ve edited your video, the next step is to…

Export Your Video To The Right Format

This is very, very important to export it to the right format. Otherwise, the quality of your videos won’t be all that good if you get it wrong.

It’s a little bit technical to show you on here, so I’ve created a special page that shows you all the different settings that I used for the different pieces of software, and you can get this for free. You don’t even have to opt in for it. I’ve created this special page at www.RapidVideoBlogging.com/exportsettings. There’s a page there with all the different settings for all the different software that I recommend.

Upload Your Video To YouTube

Once you’ve exported your video to the right format with the optimum settings, you’re ready to upload it to the internet. For this I recommend you use YouTube. If you haven’t got an account yet, just go here and create one. It’s 100% free and that will allow you to upload your exported video file to your YouTube account, which then will allow other people to watch your video.

The next thing is to…

Embed Your Video On Your Website Or Sales Page

So the final stage is to embed your YouTube video on your website or your sales page, depending on how you’re using it.

This is really straightforward. All you’ve got to do is go to the YouTube page for your video, and right below your video on YouTube look for the embed code. It can be a little button or maybe a link, depending on when you’re watching this video.

YouTube often changes the interface, but look for the embed code right below your video or on the same page where your video is. You can basically copy and paste that code into your website or your sales page.

There are just a couple settings you can use to optimize your embed code for your YouTube video. The first one I recommend you do is to uncheck the box that says ‘Related videos.’

This will remove the related videos at the end of your video once it’s finished playing, so that when people are finished watching your video they won’t click on it and go away, leaving your website or your sales page. This is pretty important. If you uncheck that box, all it will do is have a link there that says ‘Replay video.’ It’s very, very cool.

Of course the other setting you can change there is the size of your video. Think about your website and how big that is, and select the optimum size. Normally I try to select the biggest possible size, because you might as well go as big as you can. Of course make sure it still fits into the normal web browser and that it looks good for your website.

That’s really it. That’s all you need to know for creating your own online video and getting it onto your website. I hope you’ve enjoyed this short video series and that you’re able to use it. My recommendation is to really just get started.

At the beginning it might be a little bit tough to go through the process and you might think it’s difficult, but trust me, the second, third, and fourth time it’ll be a lot easier, and after awhile you’ll wonder why you ever thought it was difficult. It’s very, very straightforward.

If you’d like to find out how I make a six-figure income with online video, I’ve created a special free report that you can download at www.RapidVideoBlogging.com. Inside the report I talk about how I create massive amounts of traffic back to my site, how I build my email list, and how I monetize my online videos as well. Just go to www.RapidVideoBlogging.com to get access to my free report.

Thank you for watching and I’ll see you inside my next video.

Inside this video I’d like to talk about preparing properly for creating your own sales video for your product or service that you want to sell online.

This is absolutely critical information to help you increase the chances of selling as many products as possible. So inside this video I’m going to talk about a few tips that will definitely help you do that.

Be Clear On The Specific Problem That Your Product Or Service Is Solving

The first thing you need to think about is becoming very clear on the specific problem that your product or service is solving. Hopefully by now, if you’ve already created your product or service, you know what that is. But if you haven’t clearly defined that, this is the time to become very clear – in fact, crystal clear – on what the exact problem is that you’re solving with your product or service.

Even if your product or service solves a number of different problems, you need to think about one main thing that your product or service is selling. The reason for this is because when you create the content for your sales video, the clearer you can be on this, the better it is, and probably the more products you’ll end up selling as well.

So that’s the first thing – become very clear on the specific problem that your product or service is selling.

Who Are You Talking To?

The second thing you need to think about is who you’re actually talking to when you’re creating your sales video. In other words, who are you solving this problem for? This is just as important as the first point – exactly what your product is solving – so therefore you need to think about very clearly who exactly you’re talking to.

Eben Pagan talks about creating an avatar. It’s like a profile of a typical person that is in your target market, and then when you create your sales video or your sales content, you talk to that specific person, just like you’re talking to one person. It’s almost like me talking to you right now. I’m talking to just one person at a time.

In the same way, you need to become very clear on who is that person that you’re talking to? Who is that exact person? Who is that avatar? What is the profile of that person?

• How old are they?
• What kind of programs do they watch?
• What sort of money do they make?
• Are they male or female?

These are all the sort of things you need to think about when you create your sales video.

The Structure Of Your Sales Video

Once you have those first two things out of the way, the next thing is to think about the structure of your sales video. This is just as important, because with a specific structure like this you lead people along a certain path to the end to get them to take a certain action like buying your product, for example.

I’m going to explain one of many different structures to you that you can use. It’s a very simple and easy structure that you can use and that will definitely get you some results, and pretty good results at that as well.

The structure that I’m talking about is based on a formula that I’ve developed. The formula is SSBGA. Each of these letters stands for something to remind you of the structure for your sales video.

S – the first S is for Story

The first part of your video can be a story, introducing your video with a story. What’s good about the story is that people love drama, so the more drama you can have in the story and the more that you can identify your story with the problem that people are having, the better.

Think about how you can create a story as the beginning of your video. People love stories and they love listening to stories.

S – the second S stands for Solution

Once you’ve told your story and you’ve developed the problem, you introduce the solution, which is your product. You don’t have to be very long-winded here. You can simply introduce your product or service and talk about how it actually solves the problem that you identified in your story before. It’s very, very simple and straightforward.

B – the B is for Benefits

The next thing is to talk about the benefits that your product or service provides to your audience. It’s very, very straightforward but very, very important. What I recommend you do here is to think about three really key benefits that your product or service provides, and then really elaborate on those benefits. The more emotional you can make these emotional benefits to your audience, the better.

Let’s look at an example. The voice recorder that I’m using for this particular recording has a little menu button on here. That’s a feature, so someone could list that as, “It has a really cool-looking menu button.”

Now, I can ask the question, “So what?” With any feature, you can ask the question, “So what?” What does it mean? What is the benefit? It’s not a benefit when it’s just a feature like that.

The way to turn it into a benefit is to think about, “What does this feature do for the person who uses it?” In this case, the menu button helps me easily access the menu inside and the files and folders inside this device, so it saves me time and reduces frustration. Those are the benefits.

When you think about the benefits for your product or service, can you ask the question, “So what?” and if you can, you need to work a little bit harder to turn that into an emotional benefit. That’s very, very important, so that’s the next thing. Talk about the benefits of your product or service to your audience.

G – the G is for Guarantee

I use this to mean a number of different things. The first and obvious one is to always provide a guarantee or a money-back guarantee for your product. If you’re using a service like ClickBank for example, they have a generous 60-day money-back guarantee, which is really, really good. What’s important is to actually mention that in your video.

If you really believe in your product and that it does what it says, you need to have a money-back guarantee like this. It just convinces people that you’re really serious about your product and that you really believe in the quality of your product and that it actually does what you say it does.

The other thing to add here is testimonials from people who have actually used your product. Once again it’s just proof that your product does what you say that it does.

Something else you can do here is to provide case studies or even endorsements from other famous people inside your niche. So that’s G for Guarantee.

A – the A is for Action

This is where you call people to action. This is where you actually ask them to do something. In this case, if it’s a sales video it’s important to ask people to click on the Buy Now button. That’s normally what happens to sales videos. You get people to click on a button.

It’s really straightforward. All you’ve got to do here is to actually just ask people to do it. Just ask them to click on the button.

The other thing you can do to help increase the number of people clicking on it – believe me – is to just point towards the button. If the button is below the video, point below the video. See how I’m pointing sort of over the edge? It’s just a simple little trick to make it look more real.

If the button is below the video, point below it. If it’s to the left, or the right in your case, look to the left or right and point towards it as well. Act like you’re looking at the button, and that just helps people direct their eyes to the button and actually go ahead and click on that.

So if you did a good job with your story and with providing a solution, the benefits, and the guarantee, then getting towards the end stage where you ask people to take action should be pretty straightforward.

That’s the formula –

S – tell a Story
S – provide a Solution
B – talk about the Benefits of your product or service
G – provide a Guarantee
A – then call people to Action

It’s really as simple as that! If you apply that simple formula, you’ll be able to get people to go along in a certain path and at the end take action to buy your product or service.

That’s it from me inside this video. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you want to find out how I made a six-figure income from online video, you’re welcome to go to my website at www.RapidVideoBlogging.com.

There you’ll find a free report about 80 pages long that explains in quite a lot of detail what I actually do to help me make a six-figure income. I talk about things like how to use online video to get a lot of traffic to your site, to use that to build your email list, and then eventually to use that to monetize your online videos.

There’s some very, very cool stuff there, so if you want a copy of that report, it’s free at www.RapidVideoBlogging.com.

Thank you for watching and I’ll see you inside the next video.

Hi there, my name is Gideon Shalwick and inside this video I want to talk about something that I get asked a lot, “What kind of equipment do you need for creating your own online videos?”

I’m going to talk about the solutions that I’ve discovered over the last four years. They are what I think are the best possible solutions to help you create online videos fast, but still at very, very high quality. I’m going to make sure they are affordable solutions for you as well, because that’s always an issue, too.

I’ll talk about:

• What kind of camera you’ll need
• What kind of computer
• What kind of software
• and any sort of extra equipment that you’ll need

to be able to create your very own professional-looking online video.

Let’s Talk About The Camera

There are a number of options that you can use for creating your own online videos when it comes to cameras. Unfortunately, there are so many to choose from that it often becomes a difficult choice. Luckily, today there are a few cameras that stand out that I believe are the best possible solutions for online video, so let’s look at a few of them.

At the top of the list is the Flip Ultra HD camera – that’s the top of my list at least. What’s great about this camera is that it’s very affordable. It allows you to record really nice high-quality videos, and the file formats are such that you can easily use them on your computer.

The second little camera that I want to recommend is the one from Kodak Zi8. That’s another great little camera. The only thing I don’t like about this camera is that it has a rechargeable battery, which is kind of cool, but you can’t replace it, whereas with the Flip camera you can actually replace the battery for that if you’re in the field.

The next camera I want to recommend is the Creative Vado. It’s kind of similar to the Flip or the Kodak Zi8, but is has a few other nice little features. The recording quality is not as good, but it’s still a great little camera.

The next camera is if you’re a little bit more concerned about the quality of the video and you want to make it look really, really professional. Of course, this camera is a little bit more expensive too. It’s the exact same camera that I’m using for recording this very video that you’re watching right now. It’s the Canon T2i Rebel or the Canon T2i 550D in non-US countries. As you can see, the quality of this video is just outstanding, but it comes at a bit of a price tag compared to the other three cameras.

So those are the four different cameras that you can use. They’re very, very cool little cameras and they all do a fantastic job at recording your videos for the internet.

What About The Computer?

Do you need a fancy kind of computer to be able to do the editing of your videos or to be able to process the videos? Well, if you’ve got a computer that’s about two to three years old, that should do the job.

Obviously, the faster and newer your computer is, the better. These solutions work for both PC and Mac. It doesn’t matter if you’re on PC or Mac. These cameras will work beautifully on both as well.

Let’s Talk About The Software You’ll Need For Editing Your Videos

First I’ll mention the software on a PC and then the software you’ll need for a Mac.

If you’re on Windows, it should come with some free software called Movie Maker. That’s pretty cool software that you can use just like that, and it should work with these cameras, but it’s free so it’s quite limited in its features.

The next bit of software that I recommend is Sony Vegas, the HD version. That’s really beautiful software for editing your videos and exporting it to the right format. It’s just excellent, and it’s affordable too.

If you’re on a Mac, of course it comes with the free software, iMovie, which is great software. You can just use that and it does a wonderful job. If you want to take it a notch up and spend about $100, get yourself a copy of ScreenFlow. That’s wonderful software for recording both your screen and also to be able to import videos from your camera into ScreenFlow and to do the editing inside there. It’s a great piece of software.

So for PC it’s Movie Maker or Sony Vegas, and for Mac it’s either iMovie or ScreenFlow.

What About Some Extras?

There are a couple of other things that you can use, but you don’t have to. It’s up to you.

If you want to increase the sound quality of your videos, I recommend you use an external microphone. Unfortunately with the cheaper cameras, they don’t always have an external microphone jack.

The Kodak Zi8 comes with an external microphone jack that you can plug a microphone into, which is pretty cool. Of course, the Canon camera that I mentioned has an external microphone jack as well which you can use for that purpose.

When you use an external microphone, the sound is a lot better. I’m actually using an external microphone for this particular recording. As you can hear, the sound is pretty good.

The other thing to think about is your lighting. Basically the better your light is, the less high-quality camera you need for getting high-quality video. If you have a really good camera like the one I’m using for example now, the lighting requirements become less.

But for the smaller and cheaper cameras like I mentioned before, you may need some extra lighting, especially if you’re recording indoors, to just light up your object a bit more and help you get a better quality image.

For that you can use any household sort of lamps or lights that you have. Just make sure they don’t shine straight onto your face so it over-exposes your skin. But if you want to take it to the next level you can buy something like cheapo construction lights, which are about $60 from your depot store.

If you want to take it to the next level, I recommend something like fluorescent lights. They’re a bit more expensive, but they can provide you with some really good non-flicker light that doesn’t get hot. The lights from the depot can get pretty hot and be quite sweaty, especially if you’re inside.

But of course if you don’t want to use lights, recording outside is the best. You can get some really good lighting positions outside on a nice sunny day, or even an overcast day as well.

That wraps it up for all the equipment you’ll need for creating high-quality videos at pretty high speeds as well, and at a budget that you can afford.

If you’d like to learn how I make a six-figure income from online video, simply go to www.RapidVideoBlogging.com and you’ll be able to download a free report of about 80 pages that shows you exactly what I do to get lots of traffic to my sites, build my email lists, and eventually to make some pretty good money from that.

Just go to www.RapidVideoBlogging.com and you’ll be able to download your free report from there. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you inside the next video.

WHEN DID YOU START BLOGGING AND HOW DID YOU FIRST GET INTO IT?

I started blogging about 3 years ago just with text blogging and the way I got into it is that someone told me that I can get more traffic from that and it wasn’t until recently that I started (I guess 2 years ago) video blogging and I started seeing the potential for that and I really got into it.

WHEN STARTING YOUR BLOG, DID YOU EVER EXPECT TO GROW TO WHERE IT IS TODAY?

Well, when I started blogging, I guess, seriously blogging with video blogging I already saw some results that other people got with text blogs and I wanted to duplicate that with video blogging. So, I guess I was kind of prepared for the kind of results that you can expect.

But I really didn’t expect how fast things would move and I think that a lot of it had to do with using video as my main medium for communication, and so, that’s, I think made all the difference.

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED ABOUT (AND FROM) HELPING OTHERS CREATE SUCCESS FOR THEMSELVES, AND HOW HAS IT HELPED YOU BECOME A BETTER TEACHER/ENTREPRENEUR?

I think one of the best ways to learn something is to actually teach it to others and it’s kind of a catch to in it to because, obviously, when you’re just new in a field, you’re not really an expert – you’re not that qualified to teach it.

But one thing that I often did was, as soon as I did a new course or read a new book that was useful to me and I wanted to really retain that information, I would immediately go and teach it to someone else like a family member or a friend or to a pet–if you have one. But I think that it’s a really good way of just getting that knowledge clear in your head.

But once you become an expert and start teaching the information to other people, I think it’s really an eye-opening experience because you kind of forget what it was like a few years back when you were just starting out.  And so when you actually teach other people just getting into it new, you kind of have to go through that same thinking processes and really put yourself back a few years ago into the people’s shoes that you are teaching and you know that could be often quite difficult.

But it’s really an eye-opening experience and it helps you to really look at things from a very different angle compared to if you were just doing it yourself.

So it’s very, very valuable. So, not only is it great to see what people are coming from, but it also helps me to look at the topic from a whole bunch of different angles which in the end, helps me to become better at what I do and also to teach in a much better way.

BESIDES LAUNCHING YOUR OWN PRODUCTS AND COURSES, HOW HAVE YOU INCORPORATED AFFILIATE MARKETING INTO YOUR BLOG?

Well, affiliate marketing is just–it’s huge. Just recently, I did a promotion with my business partner, Yaro Starak, and you know we sold close to a $100,000 worth of product for this promotion. Of course we didn’t get all of that $100,000 because we only got a percentage and we have to split the profit (that sort of thing).

It just shows you the power of affiliate marketing and while it was combined list with Yaro, a big push of that list was from my own people that I gained through video marketing and using online video to gain that. And I think because it’s video, the relationship that you build with people is just so much stronger. You can build rapport so much quicker with video compared to just text, so I think that’s one of the key reasons why something like affiliate marketing works really well with video blogging because you have that relationship with someone. You’ve got that trust.

So if the people on your list (if they) trust you and they follow you, and they listen to every word that you’re saying, when it comes to promoting an affiliate product, it becomes a lot easier to convince people to go ahead and purchase.

Now of course, I only recommend that you promote things that you totally believed in and that you would use yourself. I never promote things that I wouldn’t actually use myself. So that’s the key ingredient for the success that I have.

IN YOUR OPINION, WHAT IS THE SINGLE, BEST WAY TO MONETIZE YOUR BLOG?

I think, the single best way of monetizing your blog is really to start creating your own products. Getting money from (say) Adsense or advertising or even affiliate promotions–it’s pretty good. But you need to build up your own brand and your own brand equity and for that you need to create your own products—as simple as that.

So number 1, you need to become an expert on what you’re doing and number 2, you need to start creating your own products. Once you have those 2 things you get instant credibility – people start listening to what you’ve got to say, and more importantly, you make more sales. You make even more sales than just with affiliate promotions and the reason for that is because the trust level is even higher.

If you have your own products, people who follow you tend to be more inclined to buy that from you because they know you and they know that it’s your product and so it often converts a lot better than just affiliate promotions.

Affiliate promotions are great (don’t get me wrong) and it’s a lot less work but the income potential for your own products is just tremendous not to even mention everything else that comes along with it which includes things like credibility and authority and potentially massive exposure worldwide.

WHAT WOULD YOU RECOMMEND FOR A NEW BLOGGER THAT WANTS TO CREATE THEIR OWN BRAND OR PRESENCE IN BLOGGING?

I think the first thing that you’ve got to do is to find what it is that you want to blog about or video blog about and for that I often talk about the hedgehog model or hedgehog concept that Jim Collins talks about in his book Good to Great (fantastic book). I really recommend you read it and it talks about the 5 key things that some of the world’s top businesses did to become great, not just good, great-– and one of those 5 things were the hedgehog concept.

Basically, all it is, is the combination of 3 things–what you’re passionate about, what you can become very skilled at in the world (to become the best out of the world), and what you can make money from at the same time. When you combine those 3 things, when you find something that has all those 3 elements in common, you can do really, really well so that’s your hedgehog concept.

Once you’ve found that, it becomes sort of your niche and that you can create content about and become an authority in, and then the next thing is just to go nuts with creating really, really good content and especially with video, it becomes so much easier than just text to create some really amazing concept.

So those are the first things, find out what you want to blog about, and use the hedgehog model or hedgehog concept for that, then start creating massive amounts of content (really good content) and that will automatically start getting you notice and getting traffic back to your channel and back to your video back as well.

ANY RECOMMENDED BLOGS OR RESOURCES FOR BLOGGERS TO BRING THEIR BLOG TO THE NEXT LEVEL?

If you want to take your blogging to the next level, this course that me and my business partner, Yaro Starak, put together, it’s called Become a Blogger. There are 10 free videos at Becomeablogger.com that shows you exactly how to set up your own blog, your WordPress blog and if you want to take things further, we actually have a course there as well, Become a Blogger Premium, that takes you to the next level. Yaro, my business partner, also has a program that he talks about and we talk about that a little bit more at Become a Blogger as well. So just go to Becomeablogger.com and just check out the videos there and it will help you tremendously if you’re new to blogging.

DO YOU HAVE ANY BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS OR UPCOMING PROJECTS YOU’D LIKE TO TELL US ABOUT?

Currently, I’m working on my ex-project which is Rapid Video Blogging. The idea of that product is to show exactly what I do with my video blogging to get massive exposure. Some people would take 5 years what I did it in about a year’s worth of time and that’s all with using video blogging as the main medium for communication. So I got some pretty good results with that.

As I’ve mentioned before and inside this program, I want to teach you exactly what I did. So it’s going to be a free report that you can get about 80 pages long so packed with content. And then eventually, there will be a course as well that will go into a lot more detail with all those topics.

If you want to get access to the reports, just go to Rapidvideoblogging.com .

So how important is it to create regular videos for your YouTube channel?

I’d say very very important. Especially if you’re interested in dominating your niche. Now there are a number of reasons why this is important.

And I’m going to mention 3 to you why I think it’s really important for you to submit videos regularly to your YouTube channel.

The first reason is because search engines love it, they love it when you submit content regularly. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Youtube all these search engines their job is to serve relevant content and fresh content to their users. And they want to keep their users happy.

If you create really good content on your YouTube channel and you keep on submiting content to that YouTube channel. Google and Youtube and the search engines will love you for it because you’re creating what their audience wants.

So that’s the first thing, make sure you submit your videos regularly to YouTube, the search engines will love it.

The second reason is because when you create regular content on YouTube, what’s really good about that is that you often get ranked right at the top of the YouTube search results.

Now this only occurs for around about the first 24 hours or so. It’s a bit difficult to measure but it is around about that period. So when you create a new video and someone searches for a particular key phrase that relates to your video… If it’s fresh, YouTube’s going to serve it right at the top of the search results.

So that’s really cool. That means that if you can submit videos regularly on a daily basis for example. On a daily basis your video will come up as one of the first results as one of the first fresh results on Youtube. So that way you get a lot more traffic. Very very cool!

Now there’s a third reason also that’s very important for you to create more content or create regular videos for your YouTube channel. Now that’s for your viewers, for your channel viewers, for your audience.

If you have a popular channel or if you’re just starting out, when people watch your videos and they love it they’re going to expect more content from you.

And the more regular you can do this the better it is for managing those expectations of your audience.

So it’s no good just having one video a month or 5 a week and then nothing for a month. It’s much better to have a regular time say twice or three times a week where you submit a new video to your youTube channel.

That way your audience starts to expect a certain level of regularity of videos from you. And it helps them coming back to your channel.

If they know that you only submit a video once or twice a week and then you wait a month or whatever, they may not come back to your channel again to watch your videos for a while because they know that you’re not being persistent and consistent with your videos.

That’s another really cool tip.

So there are 3 things, I just want to summarize it, when you submit your videos regularly:

Firstly you keep the search engines happy

Secondly you get served high up on YouTube search results, which is really cool it can give you a lot of extra traffic.

Thirdly you’ll keep your audience happy, which is just as important

So those are my 3 tips… If you want to see more videos like these or get access to my rapid video blogging report just go to gideonshalwick.com and I’ll see you there.

Hi There! And Welcome To Another Video!

Inside this video, I want to talk about something that happened to me about 2 weeks ago…

And I wanted to share this experience with you because I think it’s very important for helping you deal better with your customers and client especially when your creating your online videos.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the management of expectations. This is something I came across a number of years ago. In fact in my first job, my first manager, he taught me this concept of management of expectations. It’s absolutely critical if you want to really influence people and make sure that they are happy and make sure that they’re getting what they want as a business person.

So about 3 weeks ago, our little girl got born about 6 weeks early. So, talking about management of expectations, we were very surprised. We were totally not prepared for that, but we just have to deal with it. But what I want to talk about there is that inside the hospital, they told us that pre term babies (premature babies) normally needs to stay the full term. They told us that our little girl had to stay for another 6 weeks inside the hospital. For us, that is a long time and of course we were not too happy with that.

To cut the long story short, we ended up staying 2 weeks in the hospital and then she could come home which is just so fantastic. For us parents we are so excited because we don’t have to wait 6 weeks anymore it’s only 2 weeks. I give credit to the hospital staff here because instead of telling us it could be just 2 weeks but it may take 6 weeks. But they just said it normally takes 6 weeks but then they manage to bring it down to 2 weeks. In terms of managing our expectations, we were just so happy with what happened. If they went the other way, where they said you could come out in 2 weeks but we ended up waiting 6 weeks. Imagine what that would have done to our expectations!

Now you need to do the same thing for your videos. When you think about creating your videos you need to think carefully about how can you manage the expectations of your viewers? How can you begin or start your videos so that when people watch it, you set some sort of expectation, so that when they watch the whole video, they come out of it feeling really good about themselves or really good about the information.

One way of doing this is to create what I call a Zeigarnik effect or to throw a Zeigarnik in there. Zeigarnik was a social Psychologist who figured out that people’s minds don’t like open loops. We want to finish stuff, we want to close the loop. And we normally learn better when there is an open loop in a discussion for example.

What you can do , is at the beginning of your videos, create some sort of an open loop, create some sort of mystery or cliffhanger right at the beginning… to create a sort of expectation that your going to fill the gap. That will help people stay more connected to your videos that will help people to watch your whole video if you can create something like that, it’s a very very powerful.

Programs like the tv series Lost, is an excellent example of that because that’s exactly what they do. They create this open loop at the beginning but then at the end they create another cliffhanger so they open up another loop. Which means you have to watch the next episode! They are just so good at it! They are so good at managing expectations!

And that’s what you’ve gotta do as well when you create your videos.

This is just a real quick tip from me for managing the expectations of your video audience.

My name is Gideon Shalwick and I look forward on seeing you inside my next video.

If you want to get access to my latest report, Rapid Video Blogging that shows you how to dominate your niche whith online video, just go to my blog at gideonshalwick.com or simply go to rapidvideoblogging.com and you should be able to get the copy there.

Thank you for watching and I will see you soon!

Ok, that’s my friend that water dragon. I’m in a forest next to where I live and I want to share something with you that I find really good for video blogging in particular (for search engines too).

The big question that people always have with video is, “What about SEO? How do you get Search Engine Optimization when you do just video?” The real quick and easy answer to that is to transcribe your videos.

Whenever you create a video, like this one, you send it off either to your transcriber or you transcribe it yourself if you have the time and you use that exact same text on your blog. You embed your video on your blog and you also put the text of your video on the same blog post. What that does it is creates this easy text for you. It’s one of the easiest ways I think for creating content for your blog because not only do you get really cool video, and potentially also audio because you strip the audio out of it, but you can also get the text and put the text on your blog. That way you keep both your viewer, your reader, and your listener happy and also the search engines.

I’ve been doing that now for my blog for quite a while and that means that I get picked up in the search engines a lot easier. People love it too because they can read through the transcript if they are in a hurry.

So, that’s my tip for the day. Once again if you want to see more videos like this and if you want to read my free report on video blogging just go to GideonShalwick.com.

Thank you for watching and I’ll see you inside the next video.

Gideon: Welcome back. I’ve got Daniel Turner here with me, and next up we’re going to talk about product creation using online video in particular. It’s very powerful stuff.

In a previous video Daniel shared with us a really neat little tip for increasing your conversion rates when you’re selling your products online using online video.

In this one, Daniel will share with us a little bit more on how you can create online videos and how he goes about doing that. He’s got a number of very successful businesses based on online video.

How do you do it, man? Give us the rundown.

Daniel: This video came about because Gideon said it takes a considerable amount of time to put together the quality that he puts together, which I think is really good.

From my perspective, I focus on the quality of information and the speed of implementation, so if I hit a technical barrier it’s going to stop me from doing what I need to do. That’s just me personally.

What I do is this is my journal or my notepad where I take all my notes. We’re in internet marketing and I use pen and paper, go figure – super low-tech stuff here, guys.

Hopefully if you can see this, this bottom is a mind map. What I do is I’ll just sit down and come up with an idea for a product, an hour long or two hour long video or short course.

I take this mind map, and what I’ll do is I will then translate it into a Word doc. I’ll just put bullet points under each of the headings. I’ll then send that to my assistant, she’ll then put it into a nice sexy little PowerPoint presentation, and send me back the PowerPoint.

Then I’m in the archaic age of still using a PC, so I’ll use Camtasia to do my videos.

Gideon: That’s just a screen capture program, right?

Daniel: Correct, like ScreenFlow or whatever. For me, that process then has taken maybe 10-15 minutes, just that process. Then what I do is I’ll take that PowerPoint presentation, I’ll do a screen capture of the information as I’m going through it, and it might take anywhere between 60-120 minutes or two hours or whatever it is, depending on the length.

Depending on how much information there is, I may split it up over one or two or three modules, and that will obviously take the time it takes to do a video, so 60 minutes to two hours.

What I then do is I just go through the conversion process. I then upload that to one of our servers. I send that file to one of my assistants.

She then transcribes it, puts it into a PDF form, creates like a workbook out of it in terms of questions for the customer in terms of how to use it and consume it, etc., and I’ve got a front-end product. I’ve got a product, it’s ready to go, and it’s taken 2-1/2 hours of my time.

Gideon: I think the one keyword that really stood out to me in the discussion that Daniel and I had beforehand was using an assistant to create the slides and to transcribe it, because all that stuff takes time and it’s not creative time.

Daniel: It takes time, and I’m not exactly the most creative, beautiful – “Oh, that’s a nice color blue!” – that’s not me, so I give it to someone else to make it look sexy sort of stuff. That’s not what I’m good at. I’m a talker and I talk.

Gideon: You focus on what you’re good at and source everything else out. Just by the way, who do you use as your assistant? Is it someone local or do you source that out to someone else?

Daniel: It’s a combination of both. It depends on the activity. A lot of what I do now is heavily outsourced, meaning offshore, but there are a few people in-house that I use.

Gideon: Awesome. There’s some really good tips there. I think if you follow them you’ll be able to get stuff out really quick. I think that’s the name of the game.

Even just for getting free videos out on YouTube, if you watched my previous course on Killer YouTube Strategies, you’ll know that I talk about the more videos you can get out sooner, the better. I think this is a brilliant strategy for getting stuff out real quick.

Daniel: One thing I’ll say is this also serves a couple of functions. This will form the basis for a live webinar, so that’s point #1. Point #2 is it forms a basis for a front-end product. And point #3 is each of these sections that I’ve gone through in the mind map translate into like 5- or 10-minute snippets, which we then cut out and have individual sections put onto YouTube.

Gideon: Nice, so you’re using that as both a product, as well as lead generation.

Daniel: Lead gen on the front-end stuff. Again, for someone who’s looking for this information, if they’re looking on YouTube they’re looking for one sub-set of this.

I mean sure they can go get all the information and hunt through and find the videos, but I’m not going to give everything in YouTube. I just give a couple of different snippets, because at the end of the day YouTube is free traffic, so why not.

Gideon: Yeah, so it’s just a way of introducing them to the material. If they want to find out more, they can go to the sales page.

Daniel: Exactly. It’s just making sure you’re doing multiple things with one activity.

Gideon: Daniel Turner, once again some really good tips. Thank you so much. Really awesome talking to you.

Daniel: My pleasure.

Gideon: If you want to check out Daniel’s stuff, he’s got a whole bunch of websites. www.PLRPro.com is one of them. Any other sites people can check out?

Daniel: That’s good. I’m just happy to help out.

Gideon: Awesome. Thanks for watching, guys, and we’ll see you inside the next video.

Gideon: Hi there. Gideon Shalwick here. Next up I’ve got Daniel Turner from www.PLRPro.com. He’s going to tell me a little bit about using video, how he sets up his video, his equipment and stuff that he uses, and also more importantly after that how he used online video to increase his conversion by 108%. That’s pretty amazing, so I’m really keen to find out about that.

Thanks for joining us, Daniel.

Daniel: My pleasure, mate!

Gideon: So give us the rundown. How do you do your online video normally?

Daniel: There’s two things I do. The first thing is that product creation is the primary modality for what I use video for, and the second I think is as a sales tool to hopefully increase conversions.

The thing with video is sometimes it can be tricky in the respect that people will listen or consume the way that they prefer. I’ve had clients who have said, “No, no, no, I don’t like video,” and others who have said, “Please give me more.”

What was interesting – and I’ll use the example of the increase in conversion – is what we did when we launched Outsource Method last February.

Something that was quite interesting was that on the order page I was finding was that people would drop off. There was a large number of people clicking through to the order page, but then there was a large number of people dropping off there.

I thought, “Okay, that’s obviously a point that I need to correct,” so all I did was a basic 60- or 70-second video, which was a recap of the sales page. “Here’s what you get, here’s what it is, and here’s what I want you to do.”

That was probably one of the most important parts, letting them know what the next step is, but it was a video of me talking directly to the person. Literally from day 1 to day 2 – we do a lot of A/B split testing – in that direct test there was a 108% increase in conversion through to sale.

Gideon: Wow, so this is just in going from text to video?

Daniel: No, the sales page remained as text, but on the order page I added a 60-second video going over or clarifying what the sales page said, and also what I wanted the user to do next.

Gideon: Okay, so let me get this straight. You had the sales page…

Daniel: Sales page with standard text – which by the way, I’ll be using video from now on – and then they click through to the order page, and the first thing they’d see at the top would be the video of me sitting there behind a webcam or whatever it is – not professional like this.

I just said, “Hey, my name is Daniel. I just want to let you know what this is all about. Here’s what you’re getting. What I want you to do is fill in the details below,” and blah blah blah. “On the next page, this is what you’re going to see. Just click OK,” and blah blah blah.

Gideon: It was that simple, just telling people what to do, what the page is about.

Daniel: Yeah! Sales is tell people what to do, tell them again, and then tell them again. That theory I guess held true in that respect. Yeah, it was a 108% increase.

And I’ve got to clarify, because I hate hearing stats like that when people don’t back it up. It’s not like it was a 108% increase from like 3 sales to 4. It was over 90 or 100 actions, so it was a statistically accurate test, not a budgie test. I’ve seen those before.

Gideon: I think that’s amazing. The previous video that I just uploaded to YouTube before this recording was telling people that they’ve got to get into online video, and I think this is a really good example of a way that you can use online video. If you’ve got a sales process, just put a sales video on your order page. Awesome stuff!

In terms of psychology and in terms of the content of your videos, is there anything special that you do there to help convert?

Daniel: At the end of the day, we live in a world where as human beings there’s an inherent connection. You and I are sitting next to each other. We’re not sitting behind a computer. We’re talking and conversing here.

We lose that online. There’s that lack of human connection. When someone sees another human being behind the computer, they can relate to that person, for good or bad.

Much like if I sit down with someone and we don’t connect, then there’s no way in hell that they’re going to buy from me, but if I connect with you on some level, there’s that inherent trust that’s already built.

That’s where I think it takes it from, “There’s just text here. Okay, I need to put in my information and buy,” it’s then, “Okay, I’m buying from Daniel or I’m buying from Gideon. I’m buying from someone that I can see, trust, and know is going to do the right thing by me.”

I think that’s probably the biggest reason. I don’t have a script.

Gideon: It’s just you, right? It’s just natural.

Daniel: Yeah, it’s just that I want to help my customers in the best possible way, and this is how I can do that. I hope that answers your question.

Gideon: Do you still have those pages set up so people can check it out for an example?

Daniel: If you go to www.OutsourceMethod.com, I think they probably are still up there. I haven’t been there for awhile. I think they’re doing some split tests on that landing page and stuff at the moment, but yeah, go to www.OutsourceMethod.com. Go through the order page and I think it’s up.

Gideon: Cool. I’ll put the link down here. www.OutsourceMethod.com. Go and check it out if it’s still on there. Even if it’s not, I think use this as a really good case study for using online video to super-boost your business. Think about how much more successful you can be if you can increase your conversion rate by 108%. That’s awesome.

Daniel: The biggest thing is I guess make sure you split test all this, because I have done tests where I was sure something was going to work, “This is guaranteed, it’s going to work,” and it failed. It depends on the market, and this is one point I want to cover real quick.

With product creation, you want to allow your customers to consume the way they want to consume. Some people like to read, some people like to listen, some people like the visual and to see what’s going on.

What I do with respect to my products is I always try to capture all the learning modalities and let then consume the way they want to consume, and it’s no different for the sales process.

There’s the detail-oriented people who are going to say, “I need to read the 400-page sales letter because I want to know every single point.”

Then there’s people who will just go, “Wow, I like this guy. I’m hearing him, I’m listening to him, I think he’s a nice guy, he sounds great, I’m going to buy.”

There’s the other people who go, “Wow, this guy looks really cool. He’s put together a real slick presentation. I like his video. His product’s got to be good.”

It’s giving people the ability to consume the way they want to consume.

Gideon: On the next video Daniel will share with us a little bit more about how he creates his products. I think that’s something that’s really cool about online video too, that you can create products pretty easily and you’ve got that perceived value that’s so much better than just text-based products.

Daniel: That’s right. One thing I will say, and this is something that I’ve learned and has become very apparent to me, is when you’re getting a copywriter to write stuff, it will either cost you a lot of money or it’s going to take you a lot of time to do it.

If you want to do a sales letter video, it’s like three hours work. If you’ve got your product, you can have your sales rocking and rolling in three hours, and it’s easy.

Gideon: That is awesome. Thanks for those tips, Daniel. Inside the next video we’ll delve into the product creation strategies that Daniel uses for creating his products, and that’s a big part of your business right now.

Daniel: Yeah, it is.

Gideon: Cool. Make sure you watch the next video when Daniel shares that with us. See you there.

Part 1

Gideon: Today I’ve got Leslie Rohde with me and he’s going to help me talk about SEO and how it relates to online video specifically. You may not have come across this information. There’s a lot of detailed stuff that Leslie knows about that I’m sure will blow your mind a little bit.

Leslie, thank you very much for joining me.

Leslie: My pleasure.

Gideon:    Why don’t we kick it off by talking about the development of online video and how that relates to SEO and how we can use that to help us gain more exposure for our own websites.

Leslie: First of all, video is huge in terms of traffic. It’s estimated that something like 30% of all online traffic is actually video, and the largest share of that is YouTube, which is truly staggering when you think about the amount of traffic that’s going through video. It’s huge.

A lot of that doesn’t have much commercial appeal. It’s silly home movies and that sort of thing, and that’s fine, but a lot of it does have some real commercial intent. The question is how to actually relate it to your business. What does that actually do for your business?

It’s very clear, and it’s been clear forever, that video is a really good selling platform. People really enjoy video. Still pictures and motion pictures are far more engaging for humans than just text, so that’s the reason the whole multimedia thing is so important in the context of the web, and it’s the perfect platform to do it.

You don’t have to actually send physical media. It’s all bits anyway. From a traffic development strategy, it’s always been a fabulous idea.

Now what is its relationship to SEO? Video occurred late enough in the whole SEO milieu that the people who built the video-sharing sites knew what very dark-minded SEOs would do with it if they could.

This is true of the social communities as well – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and all of those kinds of things – and they also don’t want to be used as a big spam haven for SEO.

With the bookmarking sites like Digg etc, it’s estimated that something like 60-80% of all bookmarking accounts are actually auto-generated spam just for the purpose of driving links to commercial websites, so clearly YouTube doesn’t want to play that kind of game.

They don’t want to be that kind of a platform, particularly since they’re serving up this huge amount of content – that they haven’t figured out how to monetize, by the way – so if you actually want to know what are the top three search engines, two of them are Google. There’s Google and YouTube. It’s a second search engine.

Gideon: It’s quite a wake-up call, isn’t it.

Leslie: Yeah, and they haven’t figured out a way to monetize that, so God knows what the actual loss is they’re suffering on a daily basis in serving all that bandwidth across the web.

But to your point, YouTube and the other video sharing sites don’t want to be that SEO spam farm, so the steps they’ve taken are to no-follow the links, so the links are not sensible to search engines. Search engines won’t actually spider the YouTube links and drive linking reputation and page rank to your domain.

However, there’s a spin-off effect that does occur, and that’s really kind of important where, through RSS feeds and other techniques, things are actually redistributed to other sites where people pick up videos and put them on their own sites or something like that.

You can actually end up getting kind of a secondary or tertiary SEO influence to it, but I don’t consider that a primary SEO strategy, because it is just this kind of spin-off technique, but it’s a fabulous traffic strategy.

Gideon: So when I’m thinking about YouTube, like one example I have is I’ve got a YouTube channel and I’m using that mainly to drive traffic back to my blog or website where I’m building my list, so that I can build an asset just in case YouTube fails or closes my account or whatever.

Do you think it’s a good strategy to think about optimizing say traffic to a specific YouTube channel or even just a YouTube video? Would that be something you’d recommend as a good thing to do to build SEO?

Leslie: No, I would use it the other way around. It really is kind of the pointy end of the spear. Because it is the second most popular search engine, that’s kind of where your searcher starts in a lot of respects.

If I say, “Oh yeah, go find videos of me, they’re all over YouTube,” which they’re really not – there are some, and it’s my own fault; I really ought to get some more, by the way, and you will find a couple I think if you search “Leslie Rohde” on YouTube you’ll find some – so that’s what you would want to expect anyway, particularly given what you’re doing, where it’s all centered around video.

You want to be in the best video search engine, and there are some other video search engines that you should be in as well.

There’s some developing stuff within search, and it’s not just Google that’s doing it, but the other search engines as well – bit players that they are – that involve kind of semantics around video, because here’s the problem.

The first problem is that YouTube doesn’t want to be a spam site. Okay, so they kind of fixed that. The next problem that search has is there’s a video on your page, so what is that video about? They don’t have a clue. They don’t have a way to dig into the video.

So they’re trying to provide ways to add semantics to that with special tagging, in the same way that RSS has special tags in it, MP3 has a header that specifies the artist and title and stuff like that, so there’s this thing called MRSS, which is Media RSS, which is evolving.

Search engines have made a commitment that they’re going to start using it, and they are starting to use it to a certain extent, and we don’t know just how much of an influence it’s going to have within the ranking algorithms yet. That’s still something we’re actively studying.

This is literally brand new stuff. We’re actually researching it now and it should be available within a partner program that we’re working in, and within our own membership site as well.

Gideon: Is it going to be similar to tagging? Will the user be involved?

Leslie: Whoever puts the video on the site, yes. When you put the video on the site, it’s kind of like right now there’s an object tag and all that stuff when you embed the flash. It’s the same kind of thing.

The more that people adopt that sort of thing, the more impetus there will be for the search engines to actually use it, because there is a chicken and egg issue. “Should we use _____?” and fill in the blank.

There’s a whole bunch of different things in terms of semantic methods that just never caught on, so the search engines didn’t have a forcing function to actually use them.

Gideon: Very interesting.

Part 2

Gideon: … Now I’ve noticed that on the political channel on YouTube, they’re doing this web recognition thing where you can actually search for words inside a video. I’m not sure if you’ve seen that.

Leslie: I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t actually used it.

Gideon: Do you think that that could be something for the future that YouTube would want to get into as well, so that the actual words inside your videos would become searchable?

Leslie: Marissa Mayer at Google has actually spoken on this. It’s been a couple of years ago actually I think, that what they want is they want to have essentially automated transcription so that whenever you put video out there, whenever the Google bot finds video on a website it will schedule that for automated transcription, and then they’ll take the transcription and make it fully searchable.

There are obviously some challenges there. Speaker-independent transcription is not really here today, and that was part of her presentation from quite awhile back, so that’s certainly a goal.

If you look at where we are now and where we were five years ago, five years from now could we be doing that? Possibly, I don’t know, but that’s certainly something to consider.

Before that actually happens though there will be an opportunity made available to you to make your transcription searchable. You can sort of backdoor that even now by just making your transcription available on the site.

There are various ways you can arrange to do that. You can take a long transcription like this one’s getting to be and bust it up into multiple pages and each one of them can lead to the video, or the video can be hosted on those pages, so you can break it up into topical areas.

Gideon: If I understand you right you’ll have your YouTube video embedded on your site, but then you’ll have the actual transcript on your site?

Leslie: On your site, right, so now you’re using search the way it currently works.

Gideon: And then inside your post, link back to your actual video on YouTube?

Leslie: I wouldn’t link back to YouTube. I would put the video on YouTube and use that to drive traffic to your site, but once it’s on your site don’t let them go. It’s like Hotel California – they can check out, but they can never leave. [laughing]

What you’d like to do is actually once they get on your site, you can be hosting it from YouTube by just doing the YouTube embed, but then around it what you’re doing is you actually have a transcript, so when I say, “You’re a flibberty-jibbet,” you’re going to rank for that word because of the text on the page.

It happens that the video is also there, and you can do excerpts this way. You can say, “For the full thing, watch the video,” or you can do the entire transcript – whichever way you want to do it. You can do it on a single page or break it up into multiple pages, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

There’s so many services that will transcribe a soundtrack, and for two people it’s probably a couple bucks a minute, something on that order. For a single speaker, a buck a minute, buck and a half a minute will get you very high-quality transcription by English speakers. No Australian speakers that I’m aware of. [laughing]

Gideon: [laughing] Well, I’m South African, Kiwi, and Australian actually, so they’re going to have trouble with mine.

Leslie: Oh, probably so. There’s an extra charge for you, about $4.

Gideon: I guess if you’re not into typing or being an author and stuff, there really is no excuse not to be able to create content that is searchable by the search engines.

Leslie: Exactly, just get it transcribed. In fact, if you have something in written form, then there’s every reason to do a podcast of it as well. That’s something that I haven’t done either, but anyway [laughing]

Yeah, put it in iTunes and downloadable so that people who exercise – not me – will put it on their iPod and listen to it on the treadmill and that sort of thing.

The more different ways you can make that available to people, absolutely. Then more and more, like all the videos that my partner and I are currently doing in SEO Brain Trust are done in iPod format, in that size and aspect ratio, for exactly that reason.

We get direct feedback from folks who say yes, they want to put it on their iPod and take it with them.

Gideon: Awesome. We’re probably getting to the 10-minute limit on YouTube for this channel, so why don’t we just quickly summarize the main points of this discussion.

We talked about YouTube and search engine optimization, and the main thing really is to get people to your site and keep them there.

Leslie: Yes, it’s primarily a traffic strategy, but there’s a little bit of SEO throw-off that happens from it as well.

Gideon: The next big thing I got from this – I mean I knew about it – is transcribing your videos.

Leslie: Huge, absolutely huge.

Gideon: If you don’t, the search engines won’t be able to find your site. And then the next thing is to make it available in as many possible formats as you can.

Leslie: Right, and finally plan for the MRSS capabilities so that you’ll actually be able to tag and provide some details about what’s in the video, even without the transcript, so there will be more information for Google and the other search engines to use to rank the content properly.

Gideon: Cool. Any idea of when that’s coming up, the MRSS?

Leslie: They’re talking about it now. There’s actually some evidence they’re currently using it, and we’re working on testing to see how much influence it actually has.

Gideon: Awesome. Leslie Rohde, thank you very much for the interview and for the really great information. I wish you all the best for you future endeavors, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Leslie: Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.

Inside this video, I would like to bust some myths about online video and why you should really get into it if you’re not into it already. There are basically 3 main myths that I hear people talk about all the time when they think about getting into online video. So I will go through all these 3 myths and then bust it for you as well. You just make sure that you understand that online video is actually a lot easier and a lot simpler than you might think.

First myth is that most people think that it’s too high. It’s too difficult to create your own online videos. Well, let me bust that myth for you. Nowadays with the equipment and technology that you can get accessed to, it’s become a lot easier to create your own online videos.

Way back when I started about 4 years ago with this, it was very difficult and it was very tedious and time-consuming to figure out what equipment to use, what sort of formats to use and export-your-videos to how-to-upload it to your website. All those sort of stuff was actually difficult.

Nowadays, it’s a lot easier. And all the technology, tools, and software you can use is designed to be easy for you to be able to use. So it’s not difficult anymore. That myth is totally busted.

Myth #2 is that it’s very expensive to create online video or at least to create very good looking online videos. That myth is just a myth. Because nowadays, once again, technology has moved on a lot and you can get accessed to really great technology that is very affordable so that you can create very, very good looking and high quality videos online.

For example, at the moment, I’m just using a flip camera to record this video. I’m doing something special with the sounds but I’ll teach you to do that in one of my other courses.

But essentially, all I have is a little flip camera. I do have some lights. But you don’t even need expensive lights. You can just choose any lights that you have at home or make sure that you have enough sunlight coming into the room. And there will be enough free little flip camera to create videos of this same kind of quality.

Flip cameras are only about $250 depending on where you are in the world. I’m in Australia so it’s about 250 Australian dollars—a little bit less if it’s US dollars. You do need a good enough computer to be able to process videos. But if you are using the flip camera, the files are nice and small, so it doesn’t take that much processing power to edit that video. Well you do need some software but you can get it for free on PC and Mac as well.

On PC, you just use Movie Maker and on Mac, you use iMovie. So those are two free programs that come with the operating systems when you buy your computer. It doesn’t cost a cent other than your computer.

And then the next thing is uploading it. You can upload it to YouTube and/or any of the free video sharing websites so it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s definitely not expensive to create your own good looking and high quality online videos.

Myth #3. This is something I get all the time. People tell me that it takes too long to create online videos. Nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, I now prefer creating online videos to creating something like text or even audio. And the reason is that I can create content so much quicker using online video. All I have to do is set-up my camera and my little studio and basically, start talking. Of course before, I think about what I want to say, a little bit maybe create a little mind map or whatever.

But as you can see I’m just talking to you like you’re standing right in front of me. And so I can create this content very, very quickly. And if I compare that to text, writing can be quite tedious and it can take quite awhile to write something that is persuasive and it gives you the sort of effect that you want. Of course with online video, you can get all that sort of persuasiveness just through your video. I mean, you can see my personality coming through. You can see my body language and so I can create a much more compelling message with video whereas with text that’s a lot harder and it takes a lot longer to do.

And of course with video, you can transcribe your videos and so that does give you the text as well. So you don’t have to do it yourself, you can send it to someone else. There are a lot of services online that can transcribe your videos for you. And so that gives you that extra text to post as well that you can use either in your blog or as an extra article anywhere else on the web.

It’s actually really quick, especially, if you use something like the flip camera and just do the processing on your computer. It’s really, really quick. Really easy and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

So those are the 3 myths busted. It’s definitely not difficult anymore. It’s definitely not expensive anymore and definitely doesn’t take as long as it used to.

There are 3 main excuses that people use–those 3 myths. I hope that you understand now that you can’t use those excuses if you want to get into online video. It’s a lot easier, a lot simpler and a lot more affordable than you might think.

If you want to see more videos like this or get accessed to my free report, just go to Gideonshalwick.com.

Thank you for watching and I’ll see you inside the next video.

Inside this video, I want to talk about my 5 biggest tips for getting exposure on YouTube. In one of my other YouTube channels, I’ve been able to build an email list of over 18,000 people now over the last ten months. And currently, we are getting about 4,000 views per day on our YouTube channel and that’s only on the last ten months or so.

The other thing is we are building our email list by about hundred people per day. That’s all just from our YouTube traffic and I want to share with you 5 of the key tips—my top 5 key tips that you can use to help you get the sort of traffic to your site as well.

First tip–are you ready for it? The first tip is to make sure that your title, when you upload your video, is optimized. What do I mean by that? Well basically, you need to make sure that you add the right kind of keywords in your title. Now, it’s really important here that you add the kind of words that people will be searching for when they look for your kind of video on YouTube or on Google.

So an easy way to figure out what that might be is just to think it for yourself, “What would you be searching for when you look for your video?” Often it is something like, “How To” and then topic of your video—How To Do Something, How To Learn Something. Those are really good keywords. Think about, “What are the keywords that people will be using to search for your video?”

My second biggest tip is to make sure that your description area is optimized as well. What do I mean by this? Well first of all, you need to make sure that you have your website address on the first line of your description area. Not just your website address, you need to make sure that it starts off with http:// and then your website address. Basically that just turned your link into a clickable link so that when people click on it, it will take them straight to your website.

I’ve seen many, many videos online–on YouTube in particular and they got like millions of views and they don’t have a link anywhere in the description area. So you can’t even go to their website–probably they don’t have one. But that’s one really cool tip. So if you will get a lot of views, it’s a good idea so that people can just click on your link and go to your website.

The other thing I recommend for description area is to write it almost like a blog post. Don’t be afraid to write a lot of content inside the description area because Google and YouTube will work on that content to try and look at the different keywords that you’re using to find out whether your video is relevant to the searches that are made on either YouTube or Google. So go nuts with that. Write a little story there about your video. Don’t be afraid to add quite a lot of content there. Add your link and also you can write quite a bit of content in the description area.

Tip #3 is to make sure that your tags are optimized as well. These are just the keywords that you need to enter into the tag area when you upload your video. You need to make sure that they’re optimized. In other words, they are keywords that people are searching on YouTube or Google. An easy way to find out the keywords that relate to your video is to go to the search function inside YouTube and to type in one word that relates to your niche—the keyword. And then you’ll see, it will come up a whole bunch of different suggestions that YouTube gives you. That’s really an easy way to find out other keywords that relate to your niche on YouTube and the people are already looking for–and that’s already getting traffic. So that’s a really, really cool tip.

Then my fourth tip is to run competitions. We probably have seen lots of competitions online on YouTube. But this is something that’s really, really cool. There’s a man with a YouTube channel name of Mismag822. Check it out. He runs competitions all the time in the magic industry and he’s got a following of about 30,000 people already on YouTube at the time of this recording. So he’s doing really, really well just with competitions. So check that out and get some ideas.

And then my fifth and final biggest tip for YouTube is to do joint ventures. Look at YouTube as a huge joint venture machine for you to find other people in your niche who already have access to big list of people or big subscriber list either on YouTube or an email list and do something with them.

The best way that is found to build a relationship with these people is to ask them for an interview–through a video interview and upload it to your channel. That’s something really easy that you can do because then they also get exposure from your efforts. Go in with the relationship with what you can give. Don’t go on with what you can get and often that will be a great way to start off your relationship with this person.

So those are my 5 biggest tips: optimize your title area, optimize your description area, optimize your tags, run competitions and do JVs—joint venture partners or JV operations with as many people as you can on YouTube.

That’s it from me. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Please leave a comment and remember to write. If you want to see more videos like this, go to my blog at Gideonshalwick.com. Thank you for watching and I’ll see you inside the next video.

CAN YOU DESCRIBE WHAT YOU DO AND HOW YOU EARN YOUR LIVING?

I get asked all the time and you know it’s interesting because I don’t always don’t know what to say and because in the past I try and explain to people what do I do and  how do I earn a living. I just give up because people don’t get it. So lately, I just say, people ask what do I do, I just go–I mean IT and that normally settles the issue for them.

But really what I do is I create online video products and then I market them using online videos and lots of social media strategies like blogging, YouTube and Twitter, and to help drive traffic to my sites. Then I sell the products from this traffic that I’m getting. So that’s basically in a nutshell–what I’m doing and how I’m earning a living from it.

WHY DO YOU THINK VIDEO MARKETING IS THE FUTURE OF TRAFFIC GENERATION?

Well I think online video has come a long way in the last few years. It’s still really in its infancy. I think there’s still a massive growth for online video. I read a really interesting report that talked about how the mainstream of the US and the UK will only be basically fully on YouTube by the year 2012. That means at the time of this recording. There’s basically two years left until we get to that massive mainstream being fully on YouTube. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity there that you can take advantaged of if you jump on it already now.

My suggestion is, if you have not got a YouTube channel yet, go and create one as soon as possible. I mean, YouTube is just one example of many, many other examples out there of online video sites that is growing significantly. But if you just want to see the power of online video, just go to YouTube and get some amazing stuff there and when you dig into it a little bit deeper, you’ll see that it’s just an amazing platform for helping you get attention online and for helping you generate traffic back to your blog or website or to whatever you’re doing online.

WHAT CAN BUSINESS OWNERS DO TO CASH IN ON THIS GROWING PHENOMENON?

Well I think the first thing you need to do is to figure out which niche do you want to operate in. Once you’ve figured that out, the next stage is to generate loads and loads of really good, really high quality online video content and submit that to your YouTube channel or whatever other online video strategy that you are using.

But just keep on submitting really, really good video quality content and get your name out there. Get your product out there. Get the exposure for your website out there. I think that’s the key thing if you can provide really good quality content and deliver it over a period of time consistently. Over time you start building traffic to your YouTube channel and as a result, you will be able to drive that traffic back to your website.

Once you’ve got traffic, you can do magic. You can really do wonderful things once you have traffic and that’s like the Holy Grail. If you can figure this one out, then you’re in very, very good position to start making some really good money online.

HOW DO YOU MANAGE TO BUILD A LARGE AND LOYAL SUBSCRIBER BASE OF FANS?

Well, I think it really comes back to the whole content thing, once again. Content really is king. It still is king. In my view, it will always be king. If you can provide really quality content, people will want to watch and will want to spread to their friends and family. I think you’re really a winner. I think that’s the key thing.

But the other thing I really recommend you do is to focus on one video sharing website and the one I recommend is YouTube. I’ve been talking about YouTube all the time. Really focus all your efforts there and start making friends with the people in your niche, get involved in the YouTube community and get to know people in the YouTube community who are also interested on the same stuff that you are interested in. Start interacting with them. Start having a conversation with them. And it so easy doing them with YouTube. You can send people emails within YouTube. You can write comments on their channels. You can write comments on their videos. It’s really interactive. I think it’s just an amazing place where you can hang out to build an audience and to eventually build a big subscriber base and a whole lot of raving fans. It’s just awesome.

I mean to give an idea of something that I did recently with one my business partners in the magic industry is that we pretty much just submitted two videos to YouTube per week and we embedded those videos on to our blog as well every week.

But basically in a period of about seven months, we managed to build our list, our email list, our fan list to I think–it runs about 13,000 to 14,000 people. We’re currently sitting on at about 16,000-17,000 people and I think it’s about 8-9 months now. So it’s really rocketing ahead and that’s mainly through the content that we’re submitting to YouTube.

TELL US MORE ABOUT YOUR BECOME A BLOGGER PREMIUM ONLINE TRAINING PROGRAM

Become a Blogger Premium—yes that is my most successful online product so far. Basically, it’s a course where we teach people how to blog. We’ve got a whole lot of free stuff there at Becomeablogger.com. There are ten free videos to show you how to set-up your blog from scratch and these are sort of are really hands-on step-by-step videos that shows you exactly right from the beginning–how to set up your own blog.

So the ten videos—free that you can watch there. And there’s also a report that me and my business partner, Yaro Starak, wrote together that talks about how to make your blog successful.

But then on top of that, we’ve got a course, the Become A Blogger Premium course, that goes into a lot more details for—how to optimize your blog for search engine optimization, how to add images, audio, and video, and how to get into all the social media sort of stuff and record those x-factors for really making your blog stand-out from the crowd.

And then we go into traffic generation strategies which include the social media stuff. Once they get traffic, they will move on to the final module which talks about how to monetize their blog–so that’s with me and Yaro Starak. We both teach inside the course and I teach more the step-by-step how-to stuff whereas Yaro goes into the strategy side of things. So it’s really a good marriage of skills and experience that we combine into this powerful course. s

WHAT’S YOUR ADVICE FOR ASPIRING ENTREPRENEURS LOOKING TO GET THEIR BUSINESS UP AND RUNNING FAST?

Well, I think you just have to take action. I think, first of all, create a vision or a plan for what you want to do and then just take action. Start doing something. And you know, once you start doing something, you’ll very quickly realize whether you are on the right path or whether you are on the wrong path. But if you don’t take action, you’ll never know. The sooner you can take action, it doesn’t matter what kind of action, but as long as it’s sort of within the direction where you want to go–we think you want to go at least, I think that’s the best way for getting a business up and running. So there are also a lot of courses that you can do. But you know really take action.

Second thing that I would say, especially for online business, is to really apply massive focus. You really have to very, very focus if you want to be successful online–so many distractions. And so what you got to do is to cut out and remove all distractions and just focus on one project at a time. Get that done. Show some success on that one thing before you try and do all sorts of other things. That’s my recommendation for getting up and running as fast as possible.

ARE THERE ANY FINAL WORDS OF WISDOM THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH US?

I think it’s important to have fun with this. Obviously, there are two aspects to it. There’s having fun with the process of doing what you’re doing online. But there’s also having fun with the actual result.

So I think you’ve got to enjoy both. You’ve got to enjoy both the process of doing the work. For example in my case, I just love everything about online videos. I love the process of creating video or thinking about the video and putting it all together, interacting with online video communities and getting results from that. And then of course, I love the result, as well, that comes because of that which is a successful business and successful online video products.

I think that would be my last bit of advice if you can really think about something you can do online where you enjoy the process as well as the end result. But I really believe that if you enjoy the process and you apply a bit of clever business—business strategies, you know you’re on a good way towards some good success online.

Discover 37 Killer YouTube Strategies to rapidly grow your email subscriber list.

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