In my last video, I showed you my new office. Back then, it was in a very different shape as it is now. Since then I’ve given the place a paint job and moved things around a little bit to be a lot more optimal.

Inside this video I want to show you the layout and why I’ve got certain things in certain places; and how this is allowing me to pop out videos and content and be super productive much much more than I ever was before.

I’ll be taking the camera next and show you around the room, the whole layout and why I’ve got everything in certain spaces.

Alright, talk to you soon!

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Here is the outside door of my office. I’m just going to walk in and take you through a quick journey or tour of the office. I’m standing right at the door. This is kind of what it looks like as you come. To my right, I’ve got my workstation. My work table, as you could see, is a standing desk. So there’s no chair there for me to sit on or be lazy.

Over here, I’ve got a nice little couch if I want to get lazy or take a nap … I currently have the old Aeron chair on there but frankly, I don’t actually use it that much. I might take it back home again.

Got my bookcase over here where I have all my business books stacked up. That’s not even all of them. But I’m still filling them up as I go.

Just having a quick look here at my whiteboard. That’s very important. This is a tremendous tool in my business. It’s about 3.6 meters long… Let me just see if I stand back so you can get a bit of perspective here. Yeah, it’s pretty big.

It’s right next to my little standing desk here so if I move back a bit, that’s where I’ll be standing and doing my work during the day. It’s pretty effective. I’ve got my computer here with my microphone that’s handy there to do webinars and talk on Skype, etc.

From time to time, I’ll grab my little Air laptop and do some stuff on the couch or go to the coffee shop and do some work there.

But this is sort of my work area where I spend quite a bit of time to get stuff done. Something really important that I want to show you here
(I’m just going to focus for a second. Let me just move back)… Here’s my planner.

I’m not sure what it’s going to look like over here. It might look a bit funny, cause it’s basically a bunch of squares and lines on a whiteboard type of surface. It’s just a laminated area.

This is where I plan out all my projects. It’s still at the beginning of the year so I still need to plan out a few things.

Okay, so this is where I get stuff done. This is how I try and be as effective as I can be.

Let’s have a look at the second part of my office now which is the Studio part.

If we walk in here… I’ll give you a bit of a pan of the area. This is where I record most of my videos. As you can see over here, there are two lights here. These lights are used for lighting up the background.

And what I’ve got here is pretty much just a white wall. I used to have a white sheet that I used but I’ve found that just a non-reflective paint works quite well for getting those nice white wall effect that I have on my videos.

Now, let’s move into the studio a little bit closer. Let’s get into if I stand in position. So this is where I’ll normally be standing when I’m recording. What you see there in front of you are two lights for lighting up the subject, which in this case will be me.

There’s also a teleprompter there that you see. Behind that would normally be the camera that I’m holding right now. The camera that I’m holding right now is a Canon 60D and I’m recording on a lapel mic, a Sony lapel mic which is the URX-P2 system, I believe. So that gives me a nice sound and really clear picture quality.

Over there is a little printer which is nicely out of the way. It is a wireless printer, that means I don’t have to have it on my desk to save some space.

To my left, just slightly behind me, is the one light that lights up the background. If I go back to my right is the other light lighting up the background.

So I’m kind of just standing in front of it… If I were to look at the white wall that’s right behind me. There’s the one light. There’s my feet. I’ll probably stand about in that position. There, you see the other light. I’ll just turn around again. Perhaps, I’ll have a plan view of this so you can see what I mean with my layout.

There’s one recording place or option. This is the way I’ve set this up so that I can have multiple recording options.

Another option is, I guess, for me to stand at my desk and kind of look back, maybe in an angle like this and look towards the camera. Do some sort of a recording show that I’m working on the computer.

Another one is where basically I’ll place the camera in pretty much this kind of position, maybe zoomed in more. Something like this. So that I’ll be sitting on the chair or a couch and have the nice bookcase as the background.

So there are now three different recording scenarios that I can have here. And a fourth one… This is something that I still need to build in. It’s once again on the couch (let’s just zoom out a bit), but this time have a nice background.

I’m looking for a nice background that I can put here, maybe like a brick background or some sort of nature scene, or something that will look nice while I’m sitting on the couch as a background.

That’s it! Back to me sitting on this chair, recording in the third position.

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So, what did you think? Do you think this is something that you can implement in your own home? Perhaps at your own office, perhaps you could set aside an area in your home or at your office where you can dedicate it to content creation; whether it’s content for YouTube, content for products, content for marketing.

Think about it. If you have a dedicated space like this, how much easier it will be for you to just dominate.

Tell me what you thought about this video. Leave your comment below. I’d love to hear from you. Share this with your friends on Twitter, on Facebook. And remember to subscribe, here’s the link right here, boom!

Talk to you soon!

Hi! I’m inside my brand new office. I’ll show it to you while I’m chatting to you on this video. It’s been a while since I’ve had another video. So thank you for your patience if you’ve been waiting for it.

Basically inside this video, I want to talk about the importance of your environment for your productivity as a video blogger or as a marketer or as a business owner. Whatever you’re doing for your business, your environment is absolutely critical for helping you become successful.

There’s at least two levels of environment here that I’m talking about. The first one is your immediate environment where you spend most of your time for your business. For example, I’ve just moved out to this new office. I’ve just moved into an office for the first time in five years.

The first five years of my online business, I worked from home. Things have grown a little bit now and it has got a little bit more busy. Especially at home with a little baby girl. So I have required a bit more space and a bit more quiet, I suppose.

Now that I’ve got my own office set up, it allows me to work very effectively and it reduced the clutter for me. It allows me to create videos a lot faster. You’ll see the setup with my new studio. Forgive me, it’s a little bit messy still. I just moved a couple of days ago. So I still need to set it up. Probably going to buy a nice couch or some nice things to make it a little bit more homely.

That’s one level of your environment. So if you can arrange your office and your workspace in such a way that it is optimal for you to perform. I really great book that I read on it once was “How To Get Things Done”. That was just an amazing book to help me get more organized. Part of it talks about your optimal setup for your actual desk space as well.

Think about your desk space. If you’re recording videos, think about having your own setup for your video recording, maybe having your own studio. Back at home, I just used one of our bedrooms; and that worked really well. But get clear on creating your environment that will encourage you to be productive.

So that’s the one thing.

The second level that is also very critical is your more extended environment — the environment of people that you hang out with. This is also part of what I’ve just done now in my business. This new office that I’m in is part of a bigger building. This building is called the Innovation Centre here on the Sunshine Coast of Australia.

Basically, inside this building there are about thirty other companies - entrepreneurial companies, new startup companies, new businesses, tech businesses, internet businesses. All of them are like-minded. We’re all entrepreneurs, we all want to change the world to make the world a better place.

We’re all here working in our own offices together. But the point is that we can hang out with each other; we can brainstorm things together. There’s an amazing energy in this place to help lift all of us and keep all of us engaged, encouraged and up-to-date with the latest developments in the different areas of business. This is just a wonderful environment!

Now for you, it may not be possible to move into a business incubator like this one. But if you’re working from home, or even part time from home or somewhere in another place where you don’t have an environment like this, think about how you can create an environment of people that you can hang out with on a regular basis to help you share ideas or bounce ideas from with each other.

This is one of the most powerful things that I’ve been able to do for my business. It is to surround myself with like-minded people, people who understand what I’m trying to do; other entrepreneurs, other mentors who’ve been through what I’m trying to go though. It’s just absolutely critical.

This comes across like common sense things. But if you don’t have this, it can really keep you back. I’ve experienced this in many different degrees throughout the years. Whenever my environment was not comfortable for performance, my performance would suffer as well.

Keep this in mind or write it down: Your environment rubs off on you - whether it’s your immediate environment where you’re working at your desk with your computer, or if it’s your environment that’s more to do with people that you hang out with.

I think there’s a saying (maybe it was Tony Robbins) that talks about that. If you look at the ten people that you hang out most often and you average their salaries or their income for the year, you will probably be around that average for your own income. That’s something to keep in mind.

I’ve been able to surround myself with some pretty significant individuals that has allowed me to think at a very different level.

So that’s the take home message. Fix your environment if it’s not fixed yet. And think about how you can optimize it to help you get optimal performance.

I’m going to be creating a bunch more really cool videos coming up. If you’ve got any ideas of videos that you like me to create, please leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’m here to serve you and to create wonderful information for you to help you grow your business using online video.

Thank you so much for watching. I really look forward to creating some awesome videos for you in my new studio here in my new office, listening to what you’ve got to say in the comments here.

So please don’t forget to leave a comment. Share this with your friends in Twitter and Facebook. Hope to talk to you real soon again! Bye!

Hi! Guess what? I’m running a very special competition inside this video where you can get access to one of my courses worth $247 absolutely free. All you’ve got to do is follow some very easy steps and you’ll get access to this really special course.

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Hi there! Welcome to this video. My name is Gideon Shalwick. I want to give you access to one of my courses worth $247, absolutely free! All you’ve got to do is follow some really easy steps and I’ll explain to you in a second what those steps are so that you can get access. Everyone who follows these steps will get access to this course. So make sure you do follow the steps.

Let me tell you about the course a bit. It is called “Easy Video Product Sites“. It shows you how to set up your own membership sites, your own video membership sites, following a step by step process. A very valuable course and it takes you by the hand and shows you how to do it.

Before I share with you the steps of how you can get access to this course totally free, I’d like to tell you about a very cool report that I read today. It’s called “the iEffect” and it’s written by Greg Habstritt from the United States (of course, I’m in Australia).

It’s a really cool report. It’s about 20 pages long, 23 pages. It’s all about why most entrepreneurs are overwhelmed and struggling, and how the iEffect can simplify and transform your business and life. Very cool little report.

It’s accompanied by a video as well, some video training that Greg has released. Inside the video he talks a bit more about this report and some of the surrounding ideas for this.

One of the key concepts he talks about is that the Information Age is over. And in other words, it’s becoming harder and harder to make money from selling information. I mean today, it’s so easy to just go to Google or YouTube and type something in the search engine and you find your result really quickly and you get it for free.

This is one of the points that Greg is making which I agree with. And he talks about how we don’t need Information Age anymore. We’re now in a Transformational Age.

This is something that Steve Jobs did really well (very sad that he passed away); but it is something that we look at his life and the achievements that he had. He transformed people’s lives through his products. He didn’t just create products that provide information or data, or even games or music, there’s more than that. It was about creating a transformation, creating an experience for people.

Greg talks about how Steve has done that inside this report. And how Greg has also been able to accomplish this in his business. He has made a ton of money using this sort of thinking.

Now let’s get to this competition. I really want you to read this report and what I’d like you to do is download this report. Get a copy of this report. Basically what I want to do is I want to create an incentive for you to read this report and to watch Greg’s video because I think it’s so powerful and really useful.

So what I’m going do is on page 11, there is a headline there where he talks about three things that both him and Steve Jobs have been able to use to really run a very mega successful businesses. We’re talking about millions of dollars here.

There’s a headline here that says on page 11, “In The Transformation Age, What People Want Is Trust, Simplicity and __________” — the third word.

What I’d like you to do is figure out what that word is. And here are the requirements. Here are the things you’ve got to do to be able to enter this competition, very very important.

Please do not leave the word as your answer below on the comments. Do not do that because that will obviously reveal it to everyone else.

What I’d like you to do is send the one-word answer to support@rapidvideoblogging.com in the subject line. And then either me or my assistant will get back to you with access details to my $247 Easy Video Product Sites course.

That’s step one. Step 1 is to send me an email with the third word on page 11 that I’m leaving out here. “In The Transformation Age, What People Want Is Trust Simplicity and _______” - what?

It’s listed here on page 11. So that’s 3 things; you’ve got to figure out the third thing. Send me an email with that word in the subject line to support@rapidvideoblogging.com. That’s the first thing you’ve got to do.

Second thing (because I really want you to get what’s inside this report and the video from Greg) is once you’ve downloaded and read this report and watched Greg’s video, come back to this video and leave your comment below this video about what you thought about this report.

That’s all you’ve got to do. Send me an email with that one word in the subject line to support@rapidvideoblogging.com. Come back to this video and leave your comment about what you thought about this report and the video that Greg did. Because I really liked it.

I think there’s some really cool information in this that I think will give you some nice A-ha moments for your business, for your online business in particular and to help you be more successful.

I want you to get access to this. So this is an optin process. You’ve got to go to the site and optin for it. By the way, the link for this is below this video. You have to get there. But I really encourage you to do that.

I don’t want to create this little competition to push you over the edge. That’s what it’s about. Yes, it is an optin, you’ve got to put in your email to be able to get access but it is totally worth it. If you ever want to unsubscribe, that’s fine too, I don’t care.

But I want you to get access. Give it a shot, download this report and join this competition. It’s going to be really worth it. Even if you don’t like Greg’s stuff, I’m going to give you access to a really cool course that would normally sell for $247.

I haven’t even released this course. So I’m really giving something of value away here and it’s to anybody who follows these two steps. Send the email with your answer and leave your comment about what you thought about this report below this video. I’ll give you access. You’ve got to do those two things, those are the two requirements to be able to get access to my course as well.

That, my dear friends, is all I’ve got to say inside this video, make sure you follow those two steps that I talked about. Get yourself a copy of this report and I look forward to seeing your responses below this video.

I can’t wait. Thank you so much for watching, I look forward to seeing you inside the next video.

Oh wait a minute, this is very important. There’s a deadline to this. It’s October 19 which I believe is a Wednesday. So I’m going to shut the doors to this little competition on October 19 at midnight, Eastern Standard Time, New York. So make sure you follow the steps before then. So October 19 which I think is a Wednesday midnight Eastern Standard Time, New York.

I think that’s it. I look forward to see you in the next video. Thanks for watching.

Hi, I’d like to invite you to come and join me in Los Angeles for a dinner on the house. I’ll pay for it. Come and join me in Los Angeles and I’ll explain to you very soon how you can do that.

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Hi! Thank you for joining me for another really powerful video. I’d like to share with you how you can join me for a dinner in Los Angeles very soon. I’ll pay for it. All you’ve got to do is turn up. In fact there’s another condition… I’ll share with you at the end of this video how you can join me for a dinner in Los Angeles and I’ll pay for the bill.

Breakthrough Advertising

Before I do that though, I want to share with you something really cool that I’ve just read in the past week. A friend of mine Derek Halpern just recommended a book to me called “Breakthrough Advertising” by Eugene Schwartz.

I’ve heard about this guy for many many years, this is the first time that I actually got his book and decided to read it. There’s some really interesting stuff in it. One thing that I just want to share with you is this whole concept of “Identifying Mass Desire”. And in channeling that mass desire, into your product or into your business.

Now, this is what Eugene talks about. He talks about identifying this mass desire in the world, and then basically creating an advertisement that forms the place between people’s mass desire and channeling that mass desire to your product. The advertisement, as he talks about, is sort of the middle man between the world and your product that you’re selling.

It got me thinking about this whole YouTube thing and YouTube marketing. I was thinking, there are 3 billion views a day on YouTube. Now back on the day with Eugene Schwartz while he was around and when he wrote that book, of course YouTube wasn’t around, the internet wasn’t even around. So they relied on any other different ways of getting traffic, in getting exposure.

But what we have today is YouTube. It’s tremendous; it’s just incredible! Three billion views a day! It’s a huge number of people watching videos every single day. So the challenge for us then, if we think in the same terms as Eugene did, is to think about: What are the mass desires of these people who watch videos on YouTube. And then, to create our videos and our channels and set them up in such a way, so they really appeal to these mass desires.

What he recommends is you pick one mass desire that you want to target. And then you do everything that you can to channel that desire through your advertisement into your product. In our case, you pick that one desire on YouTube, you use your YouTube channel to concentrate that mass desire into your channel.

And of course when you use my Rapid Video Blogging strategies, you’d know what to do with those views once they come into your channel. How to turn them into traffic, how to turn them to leads and sales for your business.

That’s a really powerful idea, and thought. In the previous company where I worked, we created this really wiz bank solution technology platform. The challenge was that there was no problem that this thing was solving at that time so we had to really go and find problems that this thing could solve because there weren’t any problems that it was solving; it was just a really cool technology.

I think often it happens in businesses too. We create this really cool thing or solution, but there is no problem to solve. And so I think the way to think about this mass desire thing is that you really identify this huge mass trending desires or problems. And when you create videos that solve these things so that you fulfill these desires, your chance of success in a place like YouTube is just through the roof! Your chances are just so much higher.

I just wanted to share that with you because I think it’s really important to think carefully about the kind of content you create. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’ll create something that you think looks cool or is cool.

I still do that, I still get caught out. And I learn from the comments from you guys. When you leave a comment saying this is not the sort of stuff that you’re interested, it teaches me once again. I need to think about what it is that you want. What is the mass desire that I can fulfill for you guys?

That is really important. I think that’s just a critical lesson that I’ve had to learn over and over and it seems like I still haven’t learned it properly yet. But I just wanted to share that with you so that you too can start implementing this for your videos on YouTube and for your bigger and wider online video strategy.

Dinner in Los Angeles

Let’s talk about this dinner thing in Los Angeles. Well, I’ve been invited to BlogWorld Expo to come and speak at the event. BlogWorld Expo is the single biggest blogging event in the world. And they’d love for me to go and speak there in Los Angeles. I’m very very excited!

But to make this really cool, I’d love for you to join me. There’s a link below this video. If you click on it, you will be able to join, to buy a ticket to go to BlogWorld Expo. Yes, it does cost money but it’s apparently a really tremendous event to be at.

I haven’t been there before, but I’ve heard a ton of people say, that it’s a really an amazing event to be at. A ton of speakers, a ton of people, really great networking opportunity to help you lift your game and really build your networks.

So I’d love for you to join me there! The encouragement I’d like to give you is if you purchase through this link below this video (yes, it’s an affiliate link), I’m going to use some of the money that I’ll be getting, I don’t even know how much it is. But there’s a certain portion I’ll be getting, I’ll be using that to pay for your dinner. Is that fair enough?

Because I really want you to be there. And at the same time, we can hang out, whatever… Chat over a nice meal, have a coffee together, whatever. So please if you want to come, I’m going to be in Los Angeles, and I’m only going to be there for a few days.

If you wanted to meet me, if you haven’t met me yet, and you want to meet me face to face in person, this is your opportunity. Come along to BlogWorld Expo. I’ll be speaking there and so will a ton of other people. I’d love to meet you, I love hanging out with you and the people who watch this video. I can’t wait to see you in Los Angeles.

The link is below this video and also the link for the book I think. I’ll transfer that down there as well from Amazon. And I hope to see you in Los Angeles.

Oh yes, very important, please leave your comment below. I’d love to hear comment about what you thought about this mass desire thing from Eugene Schwartz and how can you apply that to YouTube. What do you think about it?

What are other mass desires on YouTube? Do you think it’s a good idea? Do you think it’s silly? I’d love to hear your thoughts. And while you’re at it - thumb’s up, thumb’s down if you don’t like this video, just whatever you felt this video provided. If you did a thumb’s up, I’ll appreciate that. Share that with your friends.

Once again, I’d love to see you at BlogWorld Expo. I’d rambled on long enough. Hope to see you soon. Thanks for watching. Bye.

Hi!

Are you thinking about web video production, but you’re thinking it’s too hard, too expensive and it takes too long? Well, I’ve got some really cool options for you that’s going to really make your day!

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Welcome! My name is Gideon Shalwick. Inside this video, I’m going to show you four ways that you can create videos online to really make your life a lot easier.

By the end of this video, you’ll have a really good idea of all the different methods you can use for creating your own videos and you’ll realize that it’s actually quite straightforward. And it doesn’t have to be very expensive to do it at all.

Option 1: Do It Yourself

The first method that I want to share with you is the DIY method (Do It Yourself). This is how I’ve started doing it and this is how many other people online do it as well.

Basically, what you need is a little camera that’s optimized for the internet. One that I recommend is the Kodak Zi8. The camera that I record with right now is Canon 60D. But there’s a bunch of other video cameras you can record with as well.

Look for cameras that can record in .mov or .mp4 format and watch for an external microphone jack. You should be getting a pretty good camera for that purpose.

Now, if you want to do the editing for that as well. A great PC software that I recommend for that is Sony Vegas Studio HD; great piece of software. And if you own a Mac, a really great piece of software that I recommend for that is Screenflow. It does both screen capture and videos like this.

That’s the do-it-yourself method; but of course if you don’t want to learn it all yourself, it may be not a great option for you.

Option 2: Hire A Pro

The next option is to hire a professional. Now, this is what a lot of more successful companies do, companies with more deep pockets, companies who can afford a professional video production crew.

For this, you’ll need someone local where you live or run your business. You’ll need to find someone in your local area that can come and record the videos for you, do the editing and interface with you to get the final product.

Of course, it’s going to be a lot more expensive but hey, if you’ve got the money, then it can be very fast and a great option for you to get those great results.

Option 3: Hire A Film Student

But if you’re on a budget and you still want to have a semi professional result. The third option is to hire a film student. What you do is you go around to film schools and those kinds of places where there are film students. And you advertise for a position in your company or for some casual work in your company to do some online or web video production for them.

Doing it this way, you can get away with much more affordable rates and you get someone who knows the game when it comes to web video production. And they’ll be able to get the work done for you at fairly affordable rates.

Of course, the trade off with this system or this method is that the video result may not be as great as you would expect. That’s the third option.

Option 4: Outsource It

The fourth option, which is a good one too, is to outsource your video production to other countries. This can be very affordable but it comes with its own challenges. Basically, this is where you find a video editor in another country like the Philippines, Thailand, Ukraine or many other different countries, or India for example.

You can get some really good results here. One of the main challenges with this is that the file sizes that you have to deal with are crazy. So if you are recording your own videos like this, or someone comes into your business to do the video recording, it can be difficult to get those files over to these other countries.

One way is just to simply send it overseas on an SD card or a DVD. Another way is to upload it to a server, but of course that can kill your internet broadband and also the person whose going to do the editing for you.

Summary:

So those are four options. Either you do it yourself. It’s got a bit of a learning curve and it can take you well. Can be a little frustrating but can be very affordable. Second option is a professional one. Much more expensive but you can get stuff done a lot quicker and get a really professional result.

The next option from that is getting film students which they can still get you pretty professional results but much more affordable. And the fourth option - with outsourcing, it’s very affordable; you can get really good results. But it comes with its own challenges.

So, that’s the web video production side of it. Of course, there’s more to web video production than just that. If you’re getting into video, you might want to think about promoting your business using online video as well.

For that, what I recommend you do is download my free Rapid Video Blogging Report where I show you how I use video to help promote my business, how to get a ton of leads into my business every single day. I’m sure you’re going to love it. It’s 92 pages, packed full of really powerful information.

All you’ve got to do to get a copy of this Report is to click on the link below this video. That’ll take you to the page where you can optin to download the Report.

It also comes with seven extra video lessons, part of a Mini Course that shows you how I use video to promote my business and you can do it too.

Thank you so much for watching. I really hope you enjoyed this video. I look forward to interacting with you inside my other products and videos.

Talk to you soon!

Welcome to another video in my Insights Into Freedom video series! My name is Gideon Shalwick.

Inside this series, I want to share with you some of the key insights I’ve had to help me get more freedom in my life.

This next one is still related to my work life, while i was working. It is a very, very powerful insight that has helped me tremendously in my business today and in the last few years. It’s all about the Theory of Constraints.

In the previous video, I talked about how this applies to task management, in getting projects done really quickly. But it also applies to many many other things.

A really amazing book that I recommend you read on this is from Eliyahu Goldratt. He wrote a book called “The Goal.” This is where he introduced this concept of the Theory of Constraints.

Now, that sounds like a mouthful. But really all it means is the management of your business (or anything for that matter) by looking at the bottlenecks within your business.

The idea here is that you look at your business as a system. You have something in front of the system that goes through your business and then something that comes out at the other end.

Throughout that process - it is called the throughput of your business… So you put money on the inside, at the front of your business. Whatever your business does through that money - it creates products or customers, or whatever else on the other end - that’s throughput for your business.

Perhaps, I’m not explaining myself very clear here. But any business has a throughput. And the key thing with your business is to try to increase that throughput. The only way you can do that is to systemize your business, look at how your business works as a system.

And then the next thing is absolutely key. It is to find the biggest bottleneck within that system. Why?… Well, the throughput of your business is limited to the speed of that bottleneck.

Say for example you’ve got three stages in a factory line: A, B and C. For example, this factory line is making a widget (whatever widget it is). Say the person working on Stage A can do 50 bits of the work that they have to do to make the widget. Stage B can only make 10. And Stage C can make a hundred; all during the same day.

Now the overall throughput of that system will only be as fast as the biggest bottleneck, which in this case is B, which will be 10. So it doesn’t matter how efficient and fast the other two stages are, the throughput of the business for that process is going to be limited to the biggest bottleneck in that process.

It is exactly the same for your business. You need to figure out what is biggest bottleneck in your business. Focus all your attention on that bottleneck; remove it; and then move on to the next biggest bottleneck.

As you do that, your business’ throughput increases and you make more money, get more customers, get more traffic or whatever it is.

Once again, the summary is that:

Create a system for your business. Analyze your business and draw it out in terms of a system. How does your system look from a system’s point of view?

Then look at what is the biggest bottleneck. Find ways to try to solve that bottleneck.

In my own personal business… I’m jumping the gun here a little bit, but I’ve been the bottleneck ’cause all the information had to flow through me. So the day that I changed that, the day that I hired a manager, I removed that bottleneck. Or at least, I eased that bottleneck. And the throughput of my business was able to increase a lot more.

I hope all that makes sense to you. It’s one of the most powerful insights that I’ve had. The credit is for Eliyahu Goldratt who’ve explained that so well to me in his book, “The Goal.” I really recommend you go ahead and read that.

Inside the next video, I’m going to share with you the financial freedom model, the professional model, so to speak. This is the model that I was pursuing at a time. It didn’t work out particularly well for me. A lot of people follow it, that’s fine. But as you’ll see, it is quite limited for the long term, in terms of your ultimate freedom.

Thank you so much for watching. I look forward to seeing you inside the next video.

Welcome back to the Insights Into Freedom video series! My name is Gideon Shalwick.

Inside this video, I want to continue with the insights that I’ve learned during my work days in pursuing what I call the Professional Model of Freedom.

As you’ll see, it’s actually flawed. You can get some measure of freedom, but it’s not that great.

Let’s just go through the steps here…

When you start getting a job. Say you’ve got the qualification; you’ve got the job, this can be any job for that matter. You start getting money, which is great… At the beginning, you spend all of it on things that you couldn’t buy when you didn’t have any money. And it’s quite liberating in a way.

So you start getting income and it slowly grows and grows. There’s probably going to be some sort of a threshold that you can reach as a professional because essentially, you’re charging out your time if you’re getting paid by the hour.

You only have a limited number of hours within a week. So even if you’re really a big hotshot CEO, or whatever, your income is still going to be quite limited. It might have an increased curve, but then there’s going to be some sort of a threshold that it’s going to reach.

Some people’s thresholds will be higher than others, but there will still be a threshold.

Now, let’s look at the freedom curve… As you start earning more money, you start getting more freedom because you can do more things. However, you’re still stuck in a place where you have to turn up everyday. So your freedom is a little bit limited. Even though you’re getting more freedom, it is limited.

The next thing that happens is, once again, not intuitively obvious. Your freedom starts decreasing. This is the weird thing that you don’t expect when you’re starting out in your career.

The harder you work at your career, the more experienced you become and the more able you become, the more you get advanced into higher levels of your career.

Perhaps, you start off as an apprentice or as a beginner. You progress into a more advanced type of person, maybe you get advanced into management and maybe into other managerial roles. Perhaps into project management; and maybe build it up even to CEO level.

What happens is that you start working longer hours because you start getting paid more, so you feel you’ve got to work more.

What happens then?… If you start working longer hours and you are getting paid more, essentially your freedom decreases. That’s not good.

I worked for five years. When I was working, the more I progressed in my career, I thought, “Great, I’m getting paid more.” But I felt that my freedom was getting less and less.

I think I quited at just the right time. Because my freedom was just dropping and dropping, even though my income was increasing. I was becoming more and more unhappy.

I think that’s something to keep in mind. It’s fine having that as a business or freedom model. But you’ve got to realize that your freedom is going to be limited. The more advanced and the better you become at your job, the chance of your freedom becoming less increases as well.

Basically, your freedom reduces as you become more advanced in your business levels and as you grow in the management levels of your business.

That’s it for my working life, the three insights that I had and the freedom model that goes along with it. That’s the third freedom model that I pursued that didn’t quite suit what I wanted to do.

Perhaps you could look at this now and learn from my experience and see for yourself whether that is a freedom model that you want to pursue. Or if you’re looking for something better.

And inside the next videos, I’m going to share with you how I started my own business, the early days of the business and some of the key insights I’ve learned there, and the different freedom models that I pursued as I was starting my business.

I’m very excited to share that with you because they’ve been very valuable in my life and business career. I know that they’re going to be worthwhile for you as well.

Thank you so much for watching once again. I’ll see you inside the next video!

Hi, welcome back! My name is Gideon Shalwick. This is the Insights Into Freedom video series.

I want to share with you some of the key things that I’ve learned about getting more freedom in my life.

Inside this video I’m going to continue the insights that I had during my working career. I worked for about five years after I studied for about five years. During this time I learned a bunch of really cool insights.

The second key insight that I learned is the insight that multitasking really sucks and can be very damaging to your progress.

This may be counter-intuitive because a lot of you maybe thinking that the better you can multitask, the better you can run multiple projects at the same time and the better you can show progress.

Well, I think it’s one of those things that are counter-intuitive.

Through Eben Pagan and Rich Schefren, two of my key mentors, I’ve learned that success is not intuitively obvious and this is one of those things.

When you look at the way that tasks work. Say you have three tasks to complete. Say for example you want to break each of these tasks into smaller chunks. So you do a little bit of Task A; you don’t finish it. And then you do a little bit of Task B and you don’t finish it. And then you do a little bit of Task C and you don’t finish it.

And you go through that cycle again — a little bit of A, a little bit of B, a little bit of C and still don’t finish it. And you do it again — a little bit of A, a little bit of B, a little bit of C.

Then finally after those three cycles perhaps you will have finished all of those three tasks.

Now, look at how long it takes you just to finish one task. It takes forever. And look how long it takes you to finish all three projects.

Those are two important things to look at.

Compare this to scenario 2 where you take the same three tasks and you start one and you finish it.

So you do task A; work at it until completion and you will move on to task B. You work on it until completion and then work on task C until completion.

Now look at how quickly you can get one of the tasks done. You can get some progress already much much quicker than the scenario one. And also look at how much quicker you can get all three tasks done.

What’s the reason for this?

Well when you multitask, every time you start and stop a task, there’s a bit of start and stop time. You get to warm up your thoughts and get yourself into gear again for that new task. There’s a starting up time and shutting down time for each, each time you start and stop a task.

When you’re just focusing on one task at a time and finishing it, you cut down on those multiple starts and stops. That’s why you can get the work done much faster.

If that makes sense to you, plot that out. I mean, think about it for yourself. Think it through.

Get rid of multitasking in your life. Unless you’re in the kitchen and cooking a meal, then multitasking is useful. But in business multitasking is evil. It is bad for progress.

That’s one of the key things that I learned while I was working.

I read an amazing book called “The Goal” by  Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Well, actually this is another one by  Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s critical chain which is all about project management and time management.  That’s where he shared with me with this whole evil thing about multitasking, very very powerful stuff.

If you can get rid of multitasking in your life, you can get projects done faster; which means you can get money coming in sooner; which means you can build those assets, that income that you need and whatever else you need for leverage to help you get more freedom in your life and in your business.

There’s lots more coming inside this particular section for my work days. There’s one more insight that I want to share with you and then I will get into the freedom and financial models for this work life or this professional model that I want to share with you.

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

Welcome back to my Insights Into Freedom video series! I’m Gideon Shalwick.

Inside this video series I’ll share with you some of the key things that I’ve learned in my career about getting ultimate freedom. Being able to do what I love doing, when I want to do it, and where I want to do it.

Inside today’s video, I want to share with you the first insight that I learned about during my work days.

In previous video set of videos I talked about my days at university and the insights that I learned from that. There weren’t all that many, to be honest. But during my work years I did learn three key insights that I want to share with you.

The first one inside this video is all about LEVERAGE and the fact that if you don’t have any leverage in your life, it kind of sucks.

Leverage is one of the key things in life and in getting freedom for your life, in getting freedom for your lifestyle. Without leverage, life is so much more difficult.

Leverage comes in many many different forms.

Leverage comes in terms of money. If you do have money it means you can get more leverage. You can pay people to do stuff, you can buy assets and get more leverage and you can buy time, essentially.

The second area of leverage is through people. If you get people on board to help you to do things, that can give you tremendous leverage.

I guess another one is assets. If you have other assets like real estate or that sort of thing, that gives you a sense of leverage specially if you want to go and get a loan at the bank. If they noticed that you’ve got real estate then it’s much easier to get a loan.

While I was working, I realized this thing. I realized that I had absolutely zero leverage. Zero leverage in terms of finances, people or assets and that made life quite difficult for me.

It meant that my progress was very slow as a result I didn’t have much freedom in what I could do. I had to do what I was forced to do through my employment. While it was okay, I still felt a little bit caged in.

That is LEVERAGE. Throughout this series I’m going to share with you how you can build that leverage and perhaps you can already start thinking about getting leverage through money, through other people, and through your own assets or other people’s assets.

I’m sure it will open up some great ideas for you and insights to help you get more freedom in your life.

I’ll be sharing with you two more insights in the next two videos about my work days and how that has helped me to get more freedom in my life.

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

Welcome back to the Insights Into Freedom video series! My name is Gideon Shalwick.

Inside this video, I want to continue the series on the insights that I’ve had to become more free and get more freedom in my life so that I can do what I want and when I want to do it. I want to share with you these insights so that you can learn from it and perhaps do something similar in your life.

This video is about the model that I was pursuing while I was at university. If you’ve watched the previous video, you’ll see that I was at the university for five years and some of the lessons that I learned there. But this model to me was flawed in terms of ultimate freedom.

Basically, the model is that when you go to university, you spend a bunch of cash upfront and while you’re studying, so your income is actually negative. In terms of the financial model, your income is going below the curve and it’s kind of negative.

And then, as you start getting a job after your degree or your education, your income slowly starts increasing.

The few problems with this model is that your income can increase, yes… And it can perhaps increase more than other jobs where you don’t have the qualification. But at some point you are going to hit some sort of a ceiling. That’s the problem — there is an upper limit to having a good salary unless you become a super-duper CEO of a big company. But that’s very challenging!

What you’ve got to realize is that if you have a degree and if you’re going along that path, it’s a valid model for income and for making a living out of it, but it is limited.

In terms of freedom while you are studying, if you look at the curve your freedom is pretty much zero because you’re stuck with having to study and having to be committed to the courses that you’re doing at college or university. You don’t have any money. Your freedom is very much limited.

As you start earning some more money then your freedom slowly increases a little bit. But once again because your income is limited, your freedom is limited as well.

This was the second model that I pursued after my shooting star model and perhaps a link to the video somewhere here so that you can watch that previous model. That was also not a great model for ultimate freedom.

This was the academic model. If you want to become an academic or pursue a professional career, that’s the sort of freedom prospects that you have, income prospects that you have.

Throughout this video course, I’m going to share with you some more insights and how I came close and closer to the ultimate freedom model that I’m working on now, that I’m busy with right now which allows me to do these kind of things and do these kind of videos, to work from home, to have comfortable income, spend time with my family, and be able to do what I love doing.

I think that’s one of the key things about freedom for me. It is to be able to do what I love doing and to be passionate about that.

I sincerely hope that these lessons will help you in being able to achieve something similar inside your life or inside your business.

Thanks for watching and I look forward to sharing with you some really cool stuff about the next stage of my development. What happened after my university degree, what did I do, and what insights I learned. I’ll be sharing those with you inside the next video.

Talk to you soon!

Hi, welcome back!

My name is Gideon Shalwick. Welcome again to another video for my Key Insights Into Freedom video series.

Inside this video, I want to talk a bit about my university days and some of the lessons I learned there to help me become more free and get more freedom as I have today in my life.

I did five years of study at the university. Five years is too long in my opinion. But I did learn some things, at least. Perhaps not from the textbooks or from the lectures, but I learned some other things that was more of a “behind-the-scenes” kind of learning.

The key lesson that I learned from this was that persistence is a good thing, except when it’s in a wrong direction.

We’ve been taught that persistence is a good thing — when you get started with something you might as well finish it. It is a good habit to have; and yes in general, it is.

It’s only not a good habit if that thing that you’re working on is the wrong thing. There is not much point in working on something that is taking you down on the wrong path.

Here comes the big challenge: How do you know what is the right thing to work on? And how do you know when it is the right time to give up?

That is the big challenge; sometimes it’s a bit like the chicken and egg situation. You can only sort of see with retrospect which was the right path to take and which was the wrong things to take.

A lot of it is trial and error. But I think sometimes you can assess whether you’re going on the right direction or on the wrong direction; and perhaps this only comes with time.

Some tips that you can use for this is to ask people around you; to get to know yourself more; and to read books. See what other people have done.

A key thing that has really helped me is to get to know myself very well. I’m going to talk about some extra models in the rest of this video series that talks about how I’ve been able to find out the right path for me; and now I know that that is the path that I need to persist on.

It encompasses a number of different things playing together. Hopefully, I can clarify how that works for you so that you can apply it to your life and to your business as well.

But really, I just wanted to wake you up to the idea inside this video that yes, persistence is a good thing but only if it’s in a right direction.

When I did currency trading (that is something I did a while ago as well), we learned that you cut your losers and let your winners run. That’s very much the same principle here. If you are on to a loser, cut your loses. And when you cut your loses, you focus on your winners.

That’s all I wanted to say inside this video.

Look out for the next videos coming up and a few more videos to come. I’ll be sharing with you how I found my own path to success and the path I’m now persisting in.

Once you have that clear path, things just start falling into place. I’m going to share it with you how all that works in the coming videos.

Thank you for watching and I look forward to seeing you inside the next video.

Welcome back to another video into my key Insights for Freedom!

I’ve learned a number of lessons throughout my life and I want to share with you how you can apply those lessons and get ultimate freedom in your life.

Inside the previous videos, I’ve talked about the Power of Repetition and the Need to be Number One, and making sure that you don’t get arrogant.

Inside this video, I want to share with you a financial model or this freedom model that I was following while I was a teenager.

The model was really what I call the “shooting star model” where you do everything to become famous and successful. It looks something like this: it has a curve that goes up and as you gain exposure and become more famous, things just start growing and growing and you get pretty successful and get to the top. So much like a shooting star.

Then you get an injury or something happens or you become unpopular or whatever it is; and your popularity goes down. Exactly like a shooting star — it goes up and it goes down.

Your financial situation will follow a similar path. It will have a bit of a lagging effect, but it’ll also go up and up and then go down and down again.

What I’m trying to say here is that, yes, the shooting star model is okay for the short term, but really if you’re thinking about long term freedom, the shooting star model is not exactly a great model. It’s not a great way for long term freedom.

As I go through this series, I’ll share with you some more financial models that I pursued as a youngster or as a younger person, at least, (I’m still young…) that I thought was good at that time; now looking back, I can truly say that they were not the best sort of models for the long term freedom.

That’s it for this one… Think about your own situation. Are you involved in a shooting star type of business model? You need to think about how you can change that so that it becomes more of a long term success model. Throughout this video series, all of this will become a lot more clearer.

Thanks for watching. I look forward to seeing you inside the next video where I’ll talk about my university days and some of the key insights that I learned during those days.

Talk to you soon!

Welcome to my next video in the Insights Into Freedom video series!

Inside this video I want to share with you the next key insight that I learned as a teenager while I was doing my athletics. In the previous one I talked about the Power of Repetition and how that helped me become very successful.

In fact, I became so successful that I became the number one best athlete in the country for my event. In fact, some of the meetings and events I went to, I was the “Athlete of the Event”.

That brought me on to the next insight. That was the NEED TO BE NUMBER ONE. At the back of all these stuff, everything that was driving me — I had this key need or want, or whatever you may want to call it, the desire to be number one.

Number two wasn’t good enough for me. I’m not sure what made me do that, but that was something that developed intrinsically inside of me — I wanted to be number one!

I think if you have number one as your driving force, it doesn’t mean you have to push other people down. You can pick, for example, a very specialized niche where you’re the number one in your niche. But you also compliment other people in whatever you’re doing.

There’s one key downfall with being number one. I’ve been able to get to the number one spot now with a number of different things in my life. The first thing was in academics to some degree. Then it was in the athletics field, I became number one there.

The trouble with becoming number one is that it’s extremely easy to get arrogant and to think that you’re God’s gift to the world. That becomes troublesome. Confidence is good but false confidence is not a good thing; it’s arrogance!

You need to be very careful when you become very good at something. In fact, when you become the number one person or company or organization in doing something, it’s very easy to become complacent and arrogant in thinking that you’re invincible.

That’s something to keep in mind. It’s great to have that desire to be number one, but as you become more popular and more successful or whatever else, keep in mind that arrogance can make you fall. It can be very dangerous. In fact, nobody likes arrogant people anyway!

If you stay humble, stick to your roots, keep your feet on the ground, then your success will be a lot more long term.

That’s the second key insight that I wanted to share with you.

Inside the next video. I’ll share a little bit about the financial model that I was using during my teenage years — sort of the shooting star model. I’ll share with you inside the next video what that looked like and why that was not a great model for having ultimate freedom in your life.

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

Hi! Welcome to my Insights Into Freedom video series!

Inside this series, I’m going to go through a bunch of different insights that I’ve had throughout my life and my career to help me get more freedom in my life.

It hasn’t been always easy for me. In fact, it’s been a long time in the making to be able to get the sort of freedom that I have today. But I want to share with you some of the lessons that I’ve learned throughout my life.

Without wasting any time, we’re going to kickstart it straight away. I am going to take you right back to when I was a teenager.

The first insight today is the INSIGHT OF THE POWER OF REPETITION.

This is one of the basic things in learning. But it’s so hard because it’s sometimes so difficult. I think Bruce Lee also talks about the power of repetition. It’s doing those basic things over and over and over that turns you into a master.

I learned this when I was about fifteen or sixteen years old. I was heavily into athletics. For that, I had to exercise every single day.

I had a really good coach and she made us exercise every single day. The key thing she always stressed with us was that you have to exercise every single day. We had one day off; but for all the other days, she said, “You can’t miss a day. You have to keep on doing it every single day.”

That was an amazing key insight for me. I just want to share that with you.

Just to give you the result — when I applied that when I was fifteen to sixteen years old, I quickly became one of the best athletes in South Africa and also in New Zealand (because we emigrated to New Zealand later on).

I believe it was because of that repetition thing. I kept on repeating and repeating my technique, exercising every single day. And that’s what allowed me to become successful later on.

Now, I’ve applied it to my business as well. Whenever I want to learn a new skill or a new business or whatever it is, I remember this lesson — the power of repetition.

Even though you might know this. This is the first one. It is one of the cornerstone ideas that has allowed me to be successful.

Inside the next one, I’m going to talk about the next key insight. There’s a bunch coming. I’ll explain to you how all this works with these different models of freedom to help you get more freedom in your life.

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

Something interesting has happened over the last couple of weeks. I’m not sure if you’ve seen, but Google plus has just been released and it looks like Google’s answer to Social Media.

A big question that I have for you: Do you think Google plus is a potential Facebook, maybe even Twitter, killer? If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure you research it; but once, you’ve seen it, let me know.

Do you think it has the potential to kill something like Facebook and Twitter?

I have some insights that I want to share with you that may influence your decision or the comment that I’d like you to make. I’m going to share it with you inside my screen capture software. I’d love for you to watch this. And as you watch it, think about how this relates to Google plus.

I’m also going to share with you how this may relate to you personally and to your own business. This is very important, not just for Google plus, Facebook and Social Media, but also for you and your business and the future success for you online.

Make sure you watch this video and leave your comment below.

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The big question is: Will Google plus kill Facebook?

If you haven’t seen Google plus, go ahead and google it. You’ll learn more about it. Basically, it is something that looks a lot like Facebook, maybe a combination of Facebook and Twitter, but it’s Google’s answer to Social Media.

Inside this video, I just want to explore a bit whether Google plus has the potential to kill something like Facebook and Twitter. Well, let’s see…

Way back, when I was still in my technology jobs, I learned from my manager something very, very interesting. He talked about the Product Adoption Lifecycle and how different products have different lifecycles. And how it’s really important as a business to keep on creating new products.

Why? You may ask why it’s important to have new products. Well, this is what happens.

The Product Adoption Lifecycle looks something like this; it is like a bell curve. At the beginning, the early adopters and early innovators start adopting your product; then you get into the early majority, etc.

But then you start reaching saturation. What happens then is your market share starts going down. And you start reaching the late majority and it just keeps going down and down and down until you hit the laggards right at the end.

This is very important. This seems to happen for all or most products. And sometimes these curves are more stretched out, sometimes they go higher, etc.

But this is very important to realize because what you need to do is be aware of this and have a product strategy so that if your products are getting old, you need to have new products that can take over from your existing products.

In this particular case, what you need to do is, once you get to a point like this over here, this is often called an observation point, you need to be kickstarting a new project where it will do this sort of thing. And you create a new curve for your new product.

I learned this from my manager, Greg Wayne. If you’re watching this - thank you so much for this idea. It is awesome!

The idea is that you keep on creating new products. As soon as you get to these observation points, you need to make sure that you are on top of it. And you keep on creating new products. This represents your market share - this area below the curve here. This is very important.

Why am I showing you this?

If you look at what’s happening here with Google plus and Facebook. In terms of Social Media sites, we’ve seen Facebook doing this, exactly this sort of same thing - very, very steep growth; bell curve sort of thing.

We don’t show where exactly we are in this curve. Perhaps we are at this observation point now. Is it possible that this could be Facebook’s fate - that they could be seen just as another one of these bell curves where they could eventually die out. This kind of happened to MySpace and a bunch of other sites.

The question is: Are we at this observation point now for Facebook? And is this now where Google plus will have its own little curve and kind of take over from a site like Facebook? Who knows the next thing?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this because I’m not even sure if Google plus is really a contender to wipe something like Facebook out. I mean, Facebook is just huge! The last time I checked the thing, they had something like 700 million users, which is just humongous!

Think about this and how it applies to your own business as well. This is the first thing that I wanted to ask you. What do you think? Google plus - do you think it will follow this sort of thing and could it be a Facebook killer? This is the big question that I have for you.

Please leave your comment below. What you think about this whole Google plus thing. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please google it and see how it may be affecting you because it definitely will.

Now, something else that I want to share with you is how this concept could also apply to your own life and to what you’re doing in your business. Very similar kind of thing.

When you look at your business or in your life, you have this curve happening as well when you take on a new business or a new skill or whatever. You have this same kind of curve happening.

At the beginning you’ll have trial and error where you work your butt off to try and figure what’s going on. Then you’ll get to a stage where you build a bit of confidence, this is sort of a growth stage.

Eventually, you’ll get to this stage of mastery. And what happens then?

Someone else talks about this in his book, The Paradox Of Success, John R. O’Neil. This is observation point, once again, where entropy kicks in. If you don’t keep on updating and learning, this kind of downwards trend will start happening to you.

We see this in products. We see this in businesses. And we see this in people’s personal lives too. So you need to ask yourself a question. Where are you on this curve in terms of your career; in terms of your entrepreneurship career, or whatever it is?

What John O’Neil recommends or talks about is to think about this observation point here. Be on the look out for it. Maybe that observation point is here, a bit earlier.

Think about what is your next learning curve so that you can keep on growing as a person, growing as a business and growing as an entrepreneur.

I just wanted to throw that in as an extra bit of an insight because I’m seeing this thing happening now with Google plus, with Facebook. That’s exactly what happened to MySpace. MySpace is now forgotten.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on both those things — the whole Google plus versus Facebook. Plus this insight here, how this applies to your own life and to your own business.

Leave your thoughts below. I’d love to hear from you.

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Okay, now you’ve seen my little graphics explanation of what’s happening with Google plus and Facebook and how the same kind of idea may affect you.

Where are you on the curve? Are you currently on that observation point? Or are you at the entropy point? Where are you? Do you need to start thinking about what’s next for you in your business?

Really, I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’d love to hear your comments on what you think about this Google plus thing and how it will affect Facebook and our use of Social Media.

Please leave your comment below. This is a huge trend, a huge discussion and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Also, if you haven’t downloaded my Rapid Video Blogging Report yet, it’s totally free. It’s 92 pages and shows you my whole strategy and system that I use in getting a bunch of views on YouTube, a ton of traffic and building that traffic into leads in my business.

If you haven’t seen it yet, go to www.RapidVideoBlogging.com or just click on the link below this video if you’re watching on YouTube, and you’ll be able to get a free copy of that.

Thanks for watching. Please don’t forget to leave your comment. I’d love to  hear from you. This is a very, very interesting topic.

A couple of weeks, I got a phone call from a good friend of mine, David Jenyns. It was on a Sunday morning. He said, “Gideon, YouTube has terminated my YouTube channel.”

He was very shocked. Of course, he had a bunch of videos on his channel. Really useful videos; he was helping his followers in a particular niche.

David was not the only person who got his account terminated. Another really successful blogger (you may know him), Darren Rowse, also got his account — can’t remember if it was terminated or suspended. In other words, he can’t use his account for six months.

This was a big deal! This was a very big deal because both of these people are very trustworthy and the kind of people that you would really take to war with you. It’s just so incredible that they lost their YouTube accounts. It was kind of unbelievable!

So what happened next was that Darren decided to create an open letter to YouTube. He wrote this wonderful letter to YouTube and posted it on his blog at ProBlogger.net. Within twelve hours, he got his YouTube account back together again.

David wasn’t so lucky. He had to do quite a bit more work. Eventually, he also did get his account back. It took him about 48 hours or maybe three days to get his account back.

For both of these accounts, as I said before, they are incredibly trustworthy people. They had really valuable content. They were definitely not breaking any community guidelines on YouTube.

So, why did their accounts get terminated? And do you have the risk of getting your account or your YouTube channel terminated as well?

This is a real risk. Unfortunately, with YouTube and other video sharing sites and things like Facebook — because you don’t own it, it can be taken away from you without notice.

That’s the other thing — both David and Darren’s accounts got terminated without much notice at all. Apparently, there was a message sent to them but very soon after, it was terminated. They didn’t even have the time or chance to correct anything that they might have done wrong.

As I said, this could happen to you as well. Inside this video, I want to share with you some things you can do to help you prevent that from happening. But if it does happen, I want to give you some tips for making sure that you’re going to be okay in the unlikely event that your YouTube account will get suspended.

The bottom line for me is that, on YouTube you need to make sure that you play YouTube’s game.

YouTube’s game is to provide valuable content to the people who come and visit the YouTube community. So that’s really important. You need to make sure that you provide high value content to the YouTube community.

This is little bit of a gray area because sometimes you might think you’re providing valuable content to the YouTube community but YouTube may not think that it’s above board.

There are some topics that YouTube and Google don’t particularly like. One that is a huge one that they don’t seem to like much is the whole “make money online” niche. There are other ones too but it’s really hard to get data on this or to get a real picture on this because YouTube and Google are not really forthcoming with this information.

If you’re watching this, YouTube, it would be wonderful to get feedback from you and to know exactly what it is that you want, or at least what you don’t want.

Inside YouTube’s guidelines, they do have some information on the kind of content that’s not allowed. But in both Darren and David’s cases, their accounts got terminated for reasons that seemed a little bit strange. For both of them, they had the keywords “how to make money online” or “make money online” in the title of their videos.

We can’t tell for sure, but those keyword phrases seem to be the thing that both those two accounts have in common why they got terminated. So I’m not sure; nobody, other than YouTube and Google, will be able to say why their accounts got terminated — whether it was the “make money online” keyword phrase that triggered something and got their accounts terminated.

This is a great thing that YouTube is doing. People are losing their accounts, sometimes unfairly. But in general, I think what YouTube is trying to do is do a bit of a cleanup process. There’s just so much junk on YouTube and Google so I think they’re actually doing a good thing here to try to clean up a bit.

And yes, there are “make money online” videos on YouTube that are actually scams. But both Darren and David are certainly not in that category.

It brings a question here: What do you need to do to make sure that your account does not get terminated?

I mentioned creating high value content.

I’ve mentioned the keyword phrase “make money online.” Stay away from that. Please do not use that in your title. We can’t tell a hundred percent for sure that that is the thing that got it triggered because when you do a search for “make money online” on YouTube, there are still a bunch of videos that are coming up.

Chances are that YouTube has gone through the process to get rid of those ones. So stay away from those keywords.

This almost goes without saying, but don’t upload dodgy stuff onto YouTube. Upload things that the YouTube community would want to watch. That’s why it’s important for you to get involved and to get to know the YouTube community.

Anything that is of some black hat strategies; dodgy scammy sort of stuff; and spammy sort of things . Just uploading a bunch of videos and putting links on your description just so that you can get a link back to your website like spamming kind of way — not the way we normally provide a really great content and then have a link back to your site, that’s fine.

Doing dodgy stuff on YouTube, keyword stuffing your tags, getting fake views, using software to automate friend-adding — all these sort of automatic things - stay away from them. I’ve made it a point to stay away from those things on my channel. I’ve done my best to keep it as clean as I can and to always provide value.

So, provide value, watch your titles, don’t use spammy things, don’t use any automated software to try to beat the system. Play by the rules of YouTube. That is really the bottom line - play by the rules of YouTube.

There are some things you can do. There’s probably a few other things you need to watch out for. I recommend you Google a little bit and research for yourself. It’s hard to find clear answers because as I say YouTube and Google are unfortunately not forthcoming with that information. So do a bit of your own research, do your own due diligence.

The other thing I want to quickly mention is, what do you do in the case that you do get terminated? What should you do now to help you make sure that you’re prepared for something, in case it does happen?

Something that I recommend and I’ve been recommending for a couple of years is to always back up your videos on a service like Amazon S3. There are other services as well. I’ll reveal something to you within the next few months that I’m working on, I can’t say too much more. But Amazon S3 is currently what I’m using for backing up all my videos.

If in the case that my account might get terminated or suspended, I can go back to those videos and quickly get them back onto my site again without too much hassle. So have a back up strategy.

The other thing you can do is to always, when you upload your video to YouTube, to also upload that same video to another video sharing sites like Viddler, Vimeo, Daily Motion; there’s a whole bunch. So that if your YouTube account goes down, you could quickly grab the embed code from these other video sharing sites and just get the onto your own site without any hassle.

In saying that though, once again, even for the other video sharing sites, most of them will have the same standards as YouTube, maybe even tighter. For example, site like blip.tv, they’re incredibly tight. You can’t upload any kind of commercial content, anything that is promoting anything. As soon as you do that, they’ll just delete your account without notice. And really, there’s no way of getting it back.

This happened to me. I accidentally uploaded what i thought was a good high quality, good value video but I had a little bit of a pitch at the end and they deemed that as a commercial video. My whole account got deleted; my account of three to four years I think it was.

So watch out even for the other channels. Once again, it just comes back to making sure that you provide value and that you stick to the guidelines for this video-sharing sites.

Let’s face it, they’re giving it to us for free. It’s a privilege to be able to use it. We can’t complain so we need to really stick to the rules of these services that we use. Don’t try to beat the system.

I still think the best marketing approach is just to play the game and play by the rules. Provide massive value and then value will be returned to you in some way or form.

There you go… I’ve also had an interview with Dave Jenyns to sort of run over what actually happened and to go in bit more detail what you can do to stay safe on YouTube. It’s almost like a bit of a survival guide on YouTube.

I’ll list that interview below the video in my blog at GideonShalwick.com. If you’re watching this from YouTube, just go to my blog, there’ll be a link to that interview below this video. Go and watch it; listen to it; it’s about an hour long.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’d love to hear a little bit of a discussion about this because obviously it’s going to affect you likely. It may not, but it could. I’d love to hear your thoughts about using YouTube and about using other services; about the future of using YouTube and what we should do to make sure we stay within the guidelines of YouTube.

Please leave your comment below, whether on YouTube, on my blog or on Facebook, it doesn’t matter. Spread this video. I’d love to open this up for more discussion… Get the discussion going so that we can all learn from this experience.

That’s all I wanted to say. Go ahead and leave your comment. I’d love to hear from you. Talk to you soon. Bye.

Hi! Welcome to another video… I’ve got something very special to invite you to inside this video. It’s a FREE Webinar that I’m having with someone very very special.

Before I tell you more about that though, let’s get into today’s video because the content of today’s video relates very much to this FREE Webinar that I like to invite you to.

This video is about personal branding and the importance of personal branding — what it can do for you, for your online business or offline business; it doesn’t really matter.

I’ve been doing personal branding now for quite sometime and I’ve been able to build up a following of between 50 and 60 thousand people online. Not all of it has  been through my personal brand but a big chunk of it has been.

It’s been tremendous! I’ve been able to build up very very successful business based on my personal brand. I like to share with you inside this video some of the benefits of building up your personal brand. And also some drawbacks because it’s not all a bed of roses. But I also want to talk about how to overcome some of those drawbacks.

Personal brand; what is it? What is it exactly?

In my case it’s a way that I’ve been able to brand myself and to use that as a leverage for promoting my business and what I do online.

For example I’ve setup a website at my blog at GideonShalwick.com and that’s considered personal branding as far as you can go.That’s where I’ve been branding myself. I’ve been using that as a place to voice my opinion about various kind of things.

In fact that’s where this video is going to go once I’ve got it edited. So you’re watching this probably from my blog at GideonShalwick.com or from my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/GideonShalwick, once again a personal branding exercise.

As I said before it’s been tremendous! It’s been really a key thing to help me distinguish myself from other people, other businesses, other brands and it has helped me to become very very successful online.

For example, when you have your own personal brand, you can really do magic. Just think about this for a second: Why do people want to do business with you? Or who do people like doing business with?

I’m sure you’ll get to the answer eventually if you think about it long enough. People want to do business with other people that they like, know and trust. I don’t know where I saw that or or learned that or read that from, but people like to do business with other people they like, know and trust… Maybe it was Ziggler? I don’t know; maybe you know, you can leave a comment.

When you setup a personal brand that’s exactly what you’re setting yourself up to achieve. Just think about it… If someone wants to buy a product, through whom will they likely buy - someone that they know and trust, or buy it through an unknown brand or business or corporate thing that’s very impersonal?

My guess is that nine times out of ten go for the person that they know, like and trust. When you setup your own personal brand that’s the kind of effect that you can build.

I really attribute a lot of my success because of the personal brand I am able to build; because when people get in touch with me they feel like they know and trust me. And because of the way that I present myself and being able to connect with me. I don’t have a big corporate brand; people can connect directly with me and my brand. There’s a lot of value in that.

Whenever I want to promote something or get my audience (for example, you) to do a certain type of action, I get very very high conversion rates. I truly believe it is because of the strong bond I’ve been able to build with my followers.

Obviously, all these are great benefits about having your own personal brand. You can build a significant following with a personal brand but there are also some drawbacks. Having a personal brand is not the be-all-and-end-all. It’s a great way of doing it but there are some drawbacks.

One major drawback of having a personal brand is that you can’t sell it… Maybe you can, but it’s a lot more challenging. That’s something you want to think about specially for the long term.

I would love for you to leave your thoughts about that below this video as well. I love to hear your comments whether it’s a good idea to brand yourself.

But you can’t sell it, it’s very difficult. I won’t be able to sell GideonShalwick.com. Not unless I do some special things.

Actually I had a really good chat with  one of my friends where I asked him ,”What if I want to sell this, how do I do that?” And he talked about transitioning your personal brand to another brand. So there is that way out — you can build up your own brand, get a significant following and then transfer your brand to a new brand. Then sell that brand.

That’s one thing you can do. The other thing that I’ve done very successfully is to spin off other brands based on my own personal brand.

For example, recently I launched Rapid Video Blogging and that was a very very successful launch, in fact my most successful ever. That is a new brand that I’ve used leveraging off from my own personal brand.

But that’s now its own brand in itself and that’s something that does become saleable specially if I structure it in a right way. Building your own personal brand is great but you got to keep in mind that you may not able to sell it. But then again you don’t want to sell your own personal brand. Why would you want to sell your own personal brand?

Let’s look at some examples of people who have done extremely well.

Oprah Winfrey, that’s probably the most prominent personal branding exercises I’ve ever seen. Certainly she wouldn’t want to sell that. Why would she want to sell something like the Oprah Winfrey brand. She probably couldn’t even if she wanted to. But it’s an extremely valuable brand and it serves her extremely well, and has been years and years, and it will for years and years to come.

Another really good example is that of Tony Robbins who has setup an amazing personal brand around the personal development industry. That’s another really good example of setting up a a personal brand and it’s serving you really well.

In Tony’s case, he’s been able to get amazing leverage by teaching others to replicate his message, to become little Tony Robbins’. And they go into the courses for Tony. That’s where he found his leverage; it’s not always Tony teaching.

With Oprah, she’s been able to find leverage through mass media, being able to do these talk shows and having this one to many conversation. So there is leverage to be found, it’s not always something that you want to sell specially if it’s serving you really well.

Amazing benefits!… There are some drawbacks but you can overcome these drawbacks of the personal brand as well.

I want to share with you this Webinar that I mentioned at the beginning of this video and how you can join me.

This webinar is with Katie Freiling. She’s just in the process of launching something really special. It’s a program called Cash In On You and she’s released a number of pre-videos, you might seen them already. She’s talked about building your own personal brand and leveraging from that.

I’ve asked Katie to join me on this very special and exclusive Webinar where I’m going to be asking her questions and she will be responding back. She will have a bit of a presentation too but I’ll be there being able to ask her questions.

I’d love for you to join me on this really exciting Webinar. Only going to run at once and I would love you to join us. It’s going to be on, get your paper and pen ready because I am going to say this once: Wednesday, June 15, 8pm EDT in the USA.

There’s a link below this video where you can join for FREE. Just enter your details to be able to register for the Webinar and you’ll get notified again of reminders of when the Webinar is. At the time of this recording, it’s next week for me. But please make sure you sign up for that — it’s totally FREE.

The other thing I’d love for you to do is to leave your question below this video or any comments that you have. Leave your questions of what you’d like me to ask Katie. If you got any questions about personal branding.

Katie is just a master of this, by the way. She’s been able to build a personal brand of her own that is extremely valuable. She’s been able to leverage half a million dollars from that in a year just by building her own personal brand, and being able to leverage that into other products and services that she has online. She really knows what she’s talking about.

I’d love for you to join us. It will be me and Katie on the call and you will have the opportunity, I’m sure, to ask questions as well. But leave your questions below this video already so that I can be prepared and know the kind of issues that you are having so that I’ll go in prepared and knowing what you want.

This is your opportunity to get your questions answered straight from Katie about branding yourself and building a very successful business based on that.
Make sure you click on that video, make sure you leave your comments.

I’d love to hear from you and I look forward to seeing you on this very amazing and exclusive Webinar with Katie.

Talk to you soon!

Gideon: Hi! Welcome to my next video. Today as you can see, I’ve got a very special guest with me. If you’ve been following my stuff, you’ll know JayJay. Say “hi”, JayJay…

JayJay: Hey, what’s going on?

Gideon: So JayJay is someone that I’ve been working with in the past. We worked together on the FreeMagicLive project. We did a pretty good job on that. Is that right, JayJay?

JayJay: Yeah, right!

Gideon: How many views have we got on that channel right now?

JayJay: Ah… close to ten million.

Gideon: Close to ten million views… So at the moment, JayJay is running that all by himself. I’ve removed my involvement a little bit from that. I still help JayJay out there with a few things…

JayJay: Yeah.

Gideon: But he’s really taking it to the next level.

JayJay: It was your baby also.

Gideon: (Laughs) My baby… that’s where I tried out all my YouTube strategies.

JayJay: Yeah.

Gideon: There’s one thing that JayJay is particularly good at. And I wanted him to give you that bit of information. A couple of weeks ago, I had a video that talked about “How To Overcome The Fear Of Being In Front Of The Camera“. I’ve got a few tips but really the master is this guy here. So I want JayJay to give you one really good tip for how you can become really nice and confident in front of the camera… JayJay…

JayJay: Take it away… Thank you, Gideon. I love your stuff.

Gideon: Thank you.

JayJay: One of the biggest tips I believe that you will learn from getting comfortable in front of the camera is understanding you. What I mean by that is knowing your weaknesses, knowing what you’re good at, knowing what you’re not good at; and understanding that you’re not perfect; and understanding that really just owning who you are in front of the camera… You should have understood what I mean by that, don’t you?

Gideon: I think so. You’re saying you’re getting to the core of who you are, realizing that you’re not perfect; and that’s cool. There’s actually a lot of other people out there who are also not perfect, and they’re still confident.

JayJay: Yeah. We’re not meant to be news reporters. I think that’s what a lot of people think - you have to have every word clear… Just like before, I sort of mixed up a couple of my words, but I’m not really worried about it. I’m just talking with passion because I know what I’m saying. I know that I might not speak the clearest. I know that I might not be the smoothest sounding talker on my video. But I know what I’m talking about, and I know who I am and what my weaknesses are. I know how I can sort of convey that. And it gives me more confidence of who I am and something really important is knowing what you’re talking about; it’ll help you in front of the video.

Gideon: Okay, so two things - knowing yourself and knowing the stuff you’re talking about.

JayJay: Yeah.

Gideon: That takes time, right?

JayJay: Yeah, yeah.

Gideon: Not something that comes overnight?

JayJay: And probably I’ll throw in a little strategy tip?

Gideon: Yeah, definitely!

JayJay: A really good strategy tip that I’ve helped a lot of people out with - myself and Gideon will agree with this - is that people make the camera, they make this like this big shiny object… and you freak out. You think that if you stumble with some words, something is going to happen. Something that really got me comfortable in front of the camera, you know the big people say, how do you become good at something?… You practice. So , you know what? Do a video everyday! You can record it. Talk about something you know… talk about a story of your childhood. You want to get comfortable talking in front of the camera because when you start looking at the camera like it’s just another person, like you’re telling someone a story like I’m telling you now, you’ll forget that it’s a camera. I don’t know if that sort of makes sense.

Gideon: It does… Two things - it’s really just getting used to speaking in front of the camera. Just acting like it’s you talking to a friend… The other thing that I’ve found that works really well, and I notice you do really well, we look into the camera like we’re looking now, we’re really acting like we’re talking to you listening to this right now.

JayJay: Yeah.

Gideon: So, we’re acting like we’re talking to the real person. We’re imagining you’re sitting on the other side of the lens. And another tip to make that even better that I got from one of my followers - actually, I can’t remember his name - is to act like you’re in love with the person on the other side.

JayJay: Yes, that’s a really big strategy tip. And I think if you could do that once a day or even better, once in the morning and once in the evening. It will start to change your perception of it and realize it’s really not a hard thing. You’re just telling a story to someone. But I think people get so worried about every word has to be so clear. As I said, we’re not news reporters. News reporters tried numerous amounts of years to get every word so clear. But I think if you know what you’re talking about and if you’re passionate then it shouldn’t be an issue.

Gideon: That’s right. So, know yourself; know your content and topic really well; practice really good.

JayJay: Yeah. Like what they say, if no one is perfect, why practice?… Does that make sense?

Gideon: Not sure.

JayJay: Oh sorry (laughs)… If practice makes perfect; but nobody’s perfect, why practice?

Gideon: Yeah, I’ll think about that. I have to watch this video again. (Laughs)

JayJay: Practice… Practice will not… Anyway…

Gideon: I got it…

Hey, if you want to check out JayJay and see how he performs in the streets with his magic and how his confidence just shines through and to learn a few performance tips from JayJay, check out his channel. We’ll put the link right there…

Click on it and go to JayJay’s YouTube channel and you can watch some of the videos that he is doing right now. Very cool, very exciting! If you’re interested in magic, subscribe. Check it out.

But if nothing else, see how JayJay performs right in front of the camera and how he’s just himself. He’s just natural and hopefully, confident, I must say.

JayJay: Thank you very much…. Let’s recap. What were they again?

Gideon: Knowledge of yourself.

JayJay: Believing in yourself and realizing that you’re not a news reporter; you’re not supposed to be perfect; you’re allowed to make mistake.

Gideon: Knowledge of your topic area.

JayJay: Know what you’re talking about.

Gideon: And practice. So you can build up that skill.

JayJay: That’s it.

Gideon: Too easy… Actually, while we’re on this video, we’d love to hear from you. We want to know what is your main frustration and pain and issue with being in front of the camera. What is it that prevents you getting in front of the camera and being confident?… Leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you so that we can help you get better. Perhaps we can create some more content that will help you overcome that fear of being in front of the camera. So, please leave a comment… Thanks for watching!

JayJay: Ciao!