Strategy

How To Get Started in Videoblogging

chrisbrogan · March 13, 2017 ·

People aren’t reading as much as they were, as it turns out. According to a study from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans are only reading 19 minutes a day. Contrast this with a recent report showing that people are watching over 1 BILLION hours of YouTube video per day. (I know this isn’t apples to apples, but those numbers are both staggering in their own right.) This is one of two reasons why you should consider adding videoblogging to your content marketing plans.

How to Get Started With Videoblogging: The Strategy

Strategically, this is a marketing effort and should be treated as such. The goal of video blogging is to create media that is more personable and that helps your buyers and prospects connect more with you and your company. In a big company, this means the marketing department owns the creation of these kinds of video assets, but if you don’t create video with the employees that people want to actually learn more from, this won’t go far. If you’re a small or solo business, you’re all the departments anyway.
At Owner Media Group, we categorize videoblogging as “connective media,” meaning it’s media you create to better connect your company and brand to the buyer and prospective buyers. You could make the case that some video blogging efforts would be “solution media,” which is where you offer a solution to a challenge a prospective buyer might face. (Hint: this piece of content you’re reading right now is solution media.)
This is “wide end of the sales funnel” activity. You’re not going for a conversion here. You’re building video assets that earn some attention. That attention earns you the right to sell and serve. Make sense? That’s why you’re doing this strategically.

Get Started with Video Blogging: The Tech

I know. This is what you’re most nervous about. It’s actually the easiest part. And I’ll tell you a secret: Most people start small and cheap, get REALLY expensive at some point, and then retreat to kinda cheap midway through realizing that they over-bought. If you save yourself that middle step, it’ll save you a lot of money and a lot of sadness after the fact.
Start: You can start with your smartphone. There’s a video creation button right there. On an iPhone, it’s inside the Photos app. In your Android phone, it’s in the camera. In both cases, you can find the video button reasonably easy. There you have it. Your first videoblogging tool.
The Camera: When you want to step up even just a notch, you might look for a point and shoot camera that has decent video. My fiance Jacq told me to get the Canon G7X Mark II because it’s what Casey Neistat uses (famous videoblogger). She used it for her VeggieMighty videos and I loved the quality so I got one. (Hers isn’t the Mark II, but she got hers right before the new one came out.)
You can buy something bigger or fancier, but what I like about the G7X is that it’s still small enough to stuff in my pocket, and yet powerful enough to shoot really decent high definition footage. Here’s my first videoblog from my project to show you an example:

Can’t see the video? Click HERE
Pretty good quality, right?
Lights: You will want to consider lighting options. Naturally lighting is best. Because of all my work with webinars and digital courses, I had two of these lights. If I didn’t (and maybe I’ll get one of these later), I’d buy one of these Diva Ring lights. It seems to be what all the cool kids are using.
Sound: For now, I’m using the built in camera’s microphone. If you want to get REALLY clever with sound, you can always get something like a Zoom recorder and then edit in the audio to your video. (I do NOT do this but only because it’s a lot of work and I edit my own stuff. Pros often DO do this. Up to you.)
Editing: I’m on a Mac for right now so I use iMovie, which is easy. I’ll say that Final Cut Pro X is easy enough, too, but costs a bit more. When I bought Final Cut Pro X, I ended up thinking that iMovie did all the stuff I needed and that maybe I over-purchased.
If you’re on a PC, there are lots of choices. I can’t seem to get someone to point to what is the closest to iMovie. They mention Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere Elements, and a few other options.
For mobile video editing, check out We Video. This works really well.
Whatever the case, pick and learn the basics of something. It’s not as hard as you think.
Hosting: I have been experimenting with WHERE to put my video. I can tell you that I shared links to my YouTube video on Twitter and LinkedIn, and got only a few hundred views. I uploaded and posted a new copy of the video directly to Facebook, and it already has over 600 views and counting. You can also choose to host it via some private platform with built-in software on your website (I don’t recommend this, but you CAN), or on another platform like Vimeo and the like.
My experience so far is that two uploads – one to YouTube and one to Facebook, and then sharing links to that video wherever else you want to promote it, is probably good enough.
NOTE: It depends on your strategy and on your prospective buyer and on the subject matter. We’ll cover this a bit more in the content segment coming up.
Storage: A quick note about storage. Video can take up a lot of space on your hard drive. For the 7 minutes of produced video I made above, it took around 4 gigabytes of space for all the related files. I have two recommendations:
1.) Use a file storage and backup solution like Dropbox.
2.) Buy an external hard drive like this one and store your video files there after you do your editing and upload the final product to YouTube and Facebook. ( This is a 2 terabyte hard drive and it’s only $70 USD!)
Okay, so that’s the basics of the tech. REMEMBER: you can really just do this with your phone, WeVideo, and YouTube. Super easy. Don’t get worried about the tech. Use what works best for you.
Let’s go into the content creation tasks.

Get Started With Videoblogging: Content Creation

What should you create? Remember up at the top of this post when I mentioned that the majority of your videoblog efforts should be what we call “connective media?” That means your goal is to connect with the people you’re hoping will buy what you sell. By connect, give people a sense of who you are and how you are, and what you do when you’re not working with them.
If you’re not even a little bit scared of this whole concept, I think you’re not listening. I’m saying, Be YOU on camera!
If you’re in a big company and the marketing department owns videoblogging, I’m not recommending that you shoot lots of videoblogs from the marketers. We all know those aren’t real people. (I’m kidding! No, I’m not.)
Go find the people doing the work. Sit the boss down for some interviews. Get as much footage of the “behind the scenes” as you possibly can. (But always have a process in place to ensure you’re not accidentally videoblogging company secrets or any other materials that might put you in some kind of legal jeopardy. For Buddha’s sake, don’t just run around and shoot video willy nilly in a big place.)
If you’re in a small or solo company? Shoot whatever you think will endear you to people while still being true to your brand and your business. I included all kinds of shots of my messy desks and work tables. Holy cats, with unfolded laundry on them and everything. Was that smart? I don’t know. Except people wrote back and said, “Wow, I’m messy like you!” See? CONNECTIVE. I connected. (Maybe not for the best reasons, but hey!)
But let’s get into it a bit more.
Narrative Matters!
You can start out by hitting record and rambling. It’s okay. It’s pretty much the starting point of every videoblog (including mine). But eventually, story rules. People don’t want to watch you just for the novelty of watching you.
This post by Susan Moeller over at the Content Marketing Institute has some good insights. For instance, she mentions that a post should have the 5 P’s:

Personal
Professional
Practical
Portray a path for change
Point towards peak experiences

My take is that if you want to create connective media and solutions media, you want to cover a mix of the following:

Random behind the scenes daily moments
Interviews with experts (but very off the cuff and informal interviews)
Process videos showing how something is made or executed
Outside-of-work views of professionals people interact with, like showing off hobbies and such
How-to videos of any kind
Help that guides your potential buyer to success in any form or fashion
“Recipes” that involve not just your product but ideas related to the space you serve.
Origin stories. Everyone loves a “how it came to be” or “the old days” look at a product or service
Thoughts on the future
Conversations and round tables with people inside and outside the organization
“Our Great Customer” interviews where you talk to people about what they’re doing (without pushing too hard about your product)

You could pick any five TYPES of content above and have plenty to cover. Don’t go crazy trying to invent new content ideas. Just work to deliver as much value as you can by creating stories in the spaces covered above.
A Little Secret: One way to get better at videoblogging is to watch more video blogs and see what others are doing and how they’re doing it. Jot down the flow of things. Look at documentaries. Look at interview shows. Start taking notes for how a story is created.
Here’s something to think about when it comes to editing, for instance. Watch how other shows are put together. Pay attention to some of the technical details such as “how often does the video cut from one image to another? In the 1980s, the average number of cuts per minute (switches between images on a screen) was around 30. On average today, it can be as high as 60 cuts a minute (or yes, one per second). And by the way, our eyes and brains have adapted to look for and anticipate (and want) this faster style of video cutting in our viewing. (That’s why you’ll see lots of cuts in the “better” videobloggers’ work.)

Is Videoblogging Just for Business to Consumer Marketing?

No. Business to business is a powerful setting for videoblogs and this kind of content marketing. Look: a white paper can be very helpful and videoblogging isn’t made to REPLACE something like stats sheets and all that. It’s two different things.
Use video blogs to reach and connect with people on a more conversational level, to give people a sense of who you (and the company are) behind the scenes – and with the top button unbuttoned to boot. You know? Not so stuffy.
You can do great work in B2B and B2C and in super small and giant mega companies. The actual value in a videoblog is in reaching and connecting with people that you hope to serve, and giving them a bigger sense of who you are and what you’re about in and around those things that you create for them.

Where Should I Start?

This is the easiest part. Just hit record. Practice being in front of the camera. Practice making little stories. Even if you don’t PUBLISH them until you feel more and more confident.
Take your smartphone out, find the video setting inside the photos/camera app, and hit record. Look at your weird head for a while. Push stop. Push play. Delete it. Do it again.
That’s what we all do. That’s how we all start.
(Until you get ready to be more strategic about it.)
And then, if you want more help? I’m here for you.
Chris Brogan is a business advisor, author, and CEO of Owner Media Group. He’s only recently started building a regular video blog but has been blogging since 1998, podcasting since 2005, and making video of one sort or another since 2006. Learn more at chrisbrogan.com

Nobody Reads Your Corporate Blog Because It's Boring

chrisbrogan · March 10, 2017 ·

In learning how to build my own news platform, I’ve taken a renewed interest in reading through lots and lots of blog posts every day, searching for trends and interesting perspectives different than mine. In that process, I’ve come to realize something.

Nobody Reads Your Corporate Blog Because It’s Boring

I’m not the first to say this. It’s been said for years. Really smart people have written books around it.
But there’s a NEW challenge afoot. The attempt at a solution for most companies was to either outsource their content creation or to assign the task to someone internally. In both cases, the person usually tasked with creating the material just isn’t all that into the company, the customers, and the space that they’re covering. Meaning, they don’t really talk about anything useful or interesting to the person hoping to learn more and get involved in some way with what the company does or sells.
Plus, they’re writing “me too” and boring content. But let’s just assume that.

Problem One: Junk Content Doesn’t Yield You New Prospects

I went to a company site today. Their business is in the machine learning and big data space. Being somewhat interested in how this will be used by companies while still encouraging improved human interaction, I thought maybe this company’s blog would have some great articles or thought pieces. Maybe they’d give me some material to study, some ideas and serving suggestions for the future.
No.
They had a press release about some funding. The next post was something about why companies need to hire the right kind of people. Then, well, I forget what the next one was because it was boring, too.
I’m their prospective buyer/user. What did *I* want when I showed up? Something that got me even more excited about the world around their product. I wanted something to bite into. I wanted a peek inside their minds.
This problem doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It starts at the roots of it all.

Problem Two: There’s Absolutely No Content Strategy

Someone said “Hey, you need a blog” and someone else said, “Okay, well here you go.” Or maybe the strategy was handed to you by some “guru” who told you that if you write enough posts, people will show up.
Blogs and any kind of content are “attention assets” (we cover that in Earn More Customers). Strategically, you use them for wide funnel lead generation. You’re looking to get someone interested enough to determine if they’re the right buyer for your product or service. (Same in B2B – only usually you’ll need more to convert the sale.)
As such, there are a handful of goals each time you generate a post:

Earn traffic from Google Search efforts on problems you solve for buyers.
Provide “next step” areas in your posts and material so that people who determine they ARE interested know what they might do next.
Create instruction and recipe posts to give existing customers (and some potential new ones) ideas on how better to apply your products and services to their own business or lives.
Help customers compare and differentiate between other solutions without sounding like a sales letter. This helps in the often overlooked area of DISQUALIFYING potential buyers.
Warm potential customers up to the rest of your sales cycle, if what you offer solves their problem.
Engage connectivity of any kind between the potential buyer and the person who can best help them decide what’s next. (And I mean human connectivity of some kind like an email exchange, phone call, etc.)

Look at your last five posts and ask whether what was posted advances any of these strategic goals. If no, you already know why your efforts with content marketing aren’t paying off.
Match every piece of content to a strategic outcome or it’s not content marketing – it’s typing.

Problem Three: There’s No Spice or Individuality

This one is huge. Content marketers who write me-too content often look around and pick me-too graphics from huge banks of boring photo sites, and write articles using the same language and same approach as everyone else.
Lots of people tend to write as if they’re doing a book report, or will later be presenting this information to a really smart friend that they don’t want to let down. To that end, they create material with lots of big words, complicated sentence structures, and if you’re really unlucky, a bunch of horrendous analogies and metaphors that don’t really help. Oh, and cliches – tons of cliches.
I learned early on that humans are great at pattern recognition, and that this particular excellence makes us MISS things all the time.
If I say “Let’s all try to think ____” , a lot of people will want to fill that blank with “outside of the box.” Some, attempting to be clever will write “Let’s think INSIDE of the box” and they’ll pat themselves on the back for it.
The name of the game is a blend of two approaches:

Create new or different or somewhat jarring language to express yourself.
Sprinkle in enough familiarity and resonance that the person sees herself or himself in what you’ve written.

Holy cats, Chris. You’ve just told us to do two conflicting things.
Yes. Yes I have.
This is how comedy works on some levels. You tell a story that sounds familiar and then you JAR the person with an unexpected turn. Our brains LOVE what happens during comedy. (If you’re sciency, here’s a journal report.)
Our content marketing, our blogging, our media has to do the same: people have to be shaken out of their blah mindset and yet reassured that we know what they’re struggling with.
As it relates to spice and individuality, you have to speak to a really specific person and type of person (David Meerman Scott’s “buyer persona” strategy). If you try to write for “everyone,” you write for no one.
Are you targeting younger people? Are you targeting highly educated people? Are you hoping to connect with decision makers? They all have a perspective and that changes the approach and also what a person goes out searching for on your site.
Write for the person you want reading your stuff. If you’re talking to executives, write about the higher view and the integration of multiple teams and departments. If you’re talking to the front line users of what you sell, talk from their view. You can sprinkle in both for sure, but write to them.

Shake it up. (What do you mean, Chris?)
You’re not writing a book report. You’re sharing a point of view plus information. It must be entertaining. So don’t write sleepy sentences. Just don’t.
Conversational tone like what I use throughout this post is useful in this regard. Pretend you’re going to actually say these words out loud to a real human. That’ll help you improve your tone.

Bonus Advice

Consider getting more visual, but with fewer boring “stock” photos.

You weren’t expecting that. (And some of you are now singing a song – others are wondering what the heck I just did.)
Look at other ways to deliver your material. Video? Audio? A mix? A slide show? You’re not tied to JUST blogging, even if you run a corporate blog platform.
Avoid “hip and cool” chat if you yourself aren’t really all that hip and cool. (I put this in because my 11 year old son loathes anyone who uses emoji in marketing.)
And get damned strategic about creating what you create. Do NOT give this job to your random nephew or some person with really bright socks just because you don’t understand the value. Learn the value because you’re paying for it one way or another. This is losing you sales.
There. Oh wait. Did you JUST NOW wake up on this one?
My last point, way down here, is that if you keep giving content marketing the “someone else has to worry about it” treatment, don’t bother doing it. Because once you rope someone’s attention in, but then deliver them junk, they’re off to find something else that better matches their interests and needs. This isn’t kid stuff. It’s revenue.

Want More Help?

I sell a Content Marketing Plan Builder that can deliver a step by step walkthrough of the path to delivering better content marketing and earning more customers. It’s delivered in video format with downloadable materials and you can pick it all up at your own pace.
Oh, and it’s designed for a busy professional, not someone who is going off on an island for a retreat somewhere. Check it out.
And please make your corporate blog less boring. Please?
Chris Brogan is a business advisor, keynote speaker, and the New York Times bestselling author of 9 books and counting. Learn more about him here.

Why Should I Have a Website

chrisbrogan · January 1, 2017 ·

The biggest change in business over the last fifteen years is our ability (in most countries) to create and launch our own business without anyone’s permission. We have also been granted (via the Internet) the tools to reach our prospective buyers without anyone else’s help. If you WANT to do more business, the first step (after having something to offer others) is to create a home base on the web.

The Idea of a Home Base

I started blogging in 1998, when they called it journaling. I did it for a really simple reason: I wanted to have a voice that was heard beyond my few friends. I wanted to share my ideas with others. That’s it, nothing fancy.

In 2006, I came up with a strategy called “home base and outposts” to better explain how we might use the social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The idea was that you build a home base (your primary website) where your most valuable contributions were, and you built and tended outposts (social media platforms) to interact with others and earn potential visitors to your home base. The idea’s still accurate, though lots of people have abandoned their home bases to simply create on other people’s territory like Facebook and Medium and LinkedIn. I want to explain/re-establish why a home base is important.

The business reasons for having a home base are as follows:

Create a “store front” where people can learn about your offerings.
Generate attention via the web from search traffic.
Express yourself and earn potential customers.

This works for all and any business. You could run an airline or you could run a pet grooming service. You could be in the database administration team of a big company. It works the same. People need to know how you help them. They need to find you through search (it’s how we do it these days). They need to know a bit about who you are beyond the service.

What Does It Take to Create a Home Base

A home base is basically a website. You can make something super simple and fast with a site maker like Weebly. Not bad. It’s actually a way to get launched a few hours after you have the idea. You might also buy a domain to go with the site, but maybe note. It depends how developed the idea is.

I prefer something a bit more robust. WordPress runs on a vast number of all websites on the Internet. I love using Rainmaker because it allows me to have a LOT of tools at my fingertips. I can make an absolutely basic website with any platform, which is what you need for a home base. The reason I love Rainmaker is that it allows me all this, also:

Sales/landing page creation
High SEO blog software
Merchant technology
Membership site management
Podcast technology (yep, you can start one!)

And a lot of other stuff.

What Goes On Your Home Base?

So you’ve picked a technology to make a website of some kind. Now what? What do you DO with it?

The goals are what I stated at the beginning:

Create a site that helps others know that you serve them and HOW you serve them.
Help people understand their challenges and how you solve them.
Make it easy to reach you so they can take next steps.

The primary pages you create are simple:

Home Page – make your offer clear and obvious. Make how you serve people clear and obvious. Look at chrisbrogan.com and Owner.Media for examples. Have an actual NEXT STEP in mind for when they’ve read the home page. Maybe that’s “contact me” or “request a demo” or “choose your best solution.”

About Page – People want to know who they’re doing business with, and they also want to know whether you can help them. It’s SO important that you realize this isn’t the same as justifying why you’re worth it. People turn their about pages into dense experiences in defensiveness. If I want a problem solved, I don’t want to know about your 8th grade dance recital. I want to know that you’ll do what you say. If you’re lucky, people will be excited and want to contact you. Make that easy.

Product/Offering Page – Be clear on what you sell. I sell a handful of things and I’m fairly clear about them. I sell books, webinars, courses, professional speaking, and business advisory services. If you look at that, there’s a simple progression: free/inexpensive/value-added/customized. That way, people know what I sell, how it’s delivered, and can choose whatever fits their needs and level of commitment. End your offering page with next steps. Make sure people can contact you.

Contact Page – You might have guessed by now that I find this page important. People need to be able to reach you to ask questions, clarify anything they might not understand, and generally know that there are humans behind the website.

Content/Blog – If you’ve done the other four pages, then I’d strongly recommend creating content in the form of a blog. For your home base, this is the most punch for your money. You can create posts that explain better what you sell in different words. You can build in ways to reach you. You can make it easier to understand how to connect after the content.

And you can must add value. Your blog or podcast or newsletter isn’t worth anything if it’s just a bunch of junk collected up and shoveled together into a “post.”

The goal with content is to help people whether or not they buy what you sell. It’s a challenge, especially when you’re hungry. But let me give you a really quick analogy: You can eat the seeds or you can plant the seeds. If you eat them, you’re fed today. If you plant them, you’re going to eat a while longer. When you write good content, it’s planting seeds. When you sell, it’s eating seeds. You need to sell to eat. You need to plant seeds to eat for longer. Make your blog posts about planting and earn the right to sell and serve. Make your sales letters about eating. Make sense?

What’s Next?

If you’re into all this, it’s fairly straightforward: pick a domain, pick a place to host a website ( Rainmaker has that built into its price, too), set it up to match the above information, and get out there and make business happen. Should you have a website? Yes. Hell yes. Should it match who you are? Absolutely!

And then, if you want to get MORE from how to use it, check out these ideas, or at least sign up to my free newsletter. Either way, it’s time to make it all work for you.

Any Path Gets You There

chrisbrogan · November 30, 2016 ·

What’s the best diet? The one you’ll follow. What’s the best exercise program? The one that gets you the results that YOU want. What’s the best business strategy? The one you’ll actually implement to get where you want to go.

I was wishing a happy birthday to Scott Sigler, and realized that he’s a great example for my upcoming book, Make Your Own Game. Scott was an aspiring fiction author who couldn’t really get the attention of anyone to publish his works. So he decided to do a podcast in serial form (yes, LONG before that serial showed up and acted like it was a novel idea).
Scott was able to show just how active his fan base was around his books and he landed himself a modest book deal. BECAUSE he had cultivated a very strong community around his project, the book sold extremely well, and that got the attention of the mainstream. Suffice to say that Scott’s a very successful and established author and creator now.

Any Path Gets You There

My story’s living proof. I was just another employee, doing my job (kinda) and dreaming endlessly about the possibilities for the company. Nobody I worked with cared all that much for my endless ideas and rantings. They ignored me for the most part. So I blogged. I blogged and I made media and I podcasted and I started going to events that had nothing to do with work. And then I ran my own event with Christopher S Penn.

And then I became a New York Times bestselling author, an international keynote speaker, and a business advisor to some of the biggest brands in the world. In just a couple of engagements a year, I get paid more than my entire salary at the place that mostly ignored me or just wanted me to do my job. I took my own path (make media that informs and entertains and CONNECTS) and got where I wanted to go.

But You Have to Take It And Walk It

First, walking someone else’s path probably won’t ever feel as fun as finding your own way there. That’s why the new book is “Make Your Own Game” and not “Hey, someone else has this game and it’s cool and you should do that.”

And the other warning? You have to walk ONE path for a while before deciding to try another. Don’t get this twisted. You can get off a path. But you can’t walk two or three at once (at least not for too long).

Also, you have to actually move forward. You can fall back sometimes. You can retrace your steps. By standing still on a path doesn’t count for much.

Remember This

No one is waiting to give you permission. The permission fairy isn’t coming. Pick a destination. Pick a path. And get walking. Don’t let the ways other people did it get you messed up. Your way is the right way. Unless it’s not. And then do something else.

Strategy

Nobody Reads Your Corporate Blog Because It's Boring

Nobody Reads Your Corporate Blog Because It’s Boring

Problem One: Junk Content Doesn’t Yield You New Prospects

Problem Two: There’s Absolutely No Content Strategy