Choosing an internet marketing mentor isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. You’re going to be working with your chosen mentor for quite a few months, maybe even years. So you shouldn’t make a snap decision but equally you shouldn’t use choosing as an excuse to procrastinate and never take the leap forward to using a mentor.
It pays to be prepared whatever you’re doing for your business. That includes producing videos – they’re not as easy to correct afterwards as something like an article and – as a number of celebrities have found – they’re not as easy to recall as you might like.
Video presentations are important to get right. Your aim should be to keep your viewers watching your video rather than clicking away part way through. Whilst there will always be people who don’t watch the entire video, you’ll be able to tell from your stats how long people watch for and can tweak your newer videos to help reduce the number of people who click away.
Grab attention fast
Like most software, video creation software has got easier to use. But it can still be daunting as there are lots of things you can control or tweak with it. Not to mention terms like white balance and bit rates and video codecs and all sorts of other weird and wonderful terms.
Fortunately, for everyday use the out-of-the-box settings are fine. Mainly because software producers realise that we never read the manual or do anything much with the numerous settings they give us.
In my view, slideshow videos are one of the easiest formats to create for YouTube. They’re also useful for people to follow along – you can usually switch to a screen shot if you need to show how to do something on a web page. And they allow you to gather your thoughts before you take the plunge and create a video.
Video creation doesn’t have to be complicated. With today’s technology, you can shoot videos on your phone that would have taken a full studio’s worth of equipment to create a decade or two ago.
Even if you upload your videos elsewhere, YouTube is the place that everyone seems to expect them to be placed. Many sites make it very easy to add your video and will take care of all the behind the scenes technical stuff, leaving you free to get on with your life.
Which means that it makes sense to create your videos with YouTube in mind.
Fortunately, that’s reasonably easy. Part of the reason they’ve become as successful as they have is that everything has been made as easy as possible.
Giving things away for free on the internet almost seems like a way of life. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself why or even if you should join the crowd?
There is a school of thought that following the crowd is a recipe for disaster and that giving things away free only conditions people to expect everything to be offered at zero cost.
Others will counsel you to give things away in order to build up your business.
There’s logic in both arguments but you need to take a step back and decide which option – or a mixture of both – is the best for your business.
The internet is a fantastic medium to use and it lends itself to the idea of giving things away. To an extent, that’s the expectation of your potential customers. But there’s also several other reasons that you should consider.
Who should give things away for free?
In a nutshell, anyone who wants more business.
We’re often told to give people a free gift to help persuade them to give us money longer term. But is that a sensible idea or is it just a dumb move that’s costing us money?
A lot depends on what it is you’ve giving away free.
And what your business model is as well.
A lot of internet companies – Google, Facebook and many others – have started by offering everything for free and working out how to make money from it longer term.
But you need very deep pockets for that kind of approach.