How To Use YouTube To Build A Successful Business Repeatedly with Gideon Shalwick

In the fifth episode of The Multimedia Marketing Show, we speak with Gideon Shalwick, an expert in YouTube video marketing. In the interview we discuss how he’s been able to duplicate numerous times his success on YouTube, the system and processes he uses and the strategies that have helped engage his massive audience. So, sit back, relax and listen to the full episode.

Gideon Shalwick is an online video marketing guru who teaches people how to build a ton of leads using simple tools like YouTube, blogs and clever marketing strategies.

EPISODE SUMMARY:

  • Gideon’s Background – A look back at Gideon’s career.
  • Experimentation – Taking action plus trial and error.
  • Getting it done – How to quickly, easily and affordably dominate.
  • Bottlenecks – Figure out your processes, identify your hurdles and purge them.
  • YouTube and Driving Traffic – It all starts with your content strategy.
  • Owning your own assets – Turn those views into traffic to your own online assets..
  • 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 – Content ,Views, Traffic, Leads to Sales.
  • Video Types -Traffic and relationship building videos versus promotional videos

THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Introduction: Welcome to the brave new world of cost effective communications, tips, trips and tricks, how to’s, why to’s and what not to do’s and using the power of web-based content marketing to easily promote whatever you’d like.

Welcome to the Multimedia Marketing Show with Jake Hower.

Jake: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the multi-media marketing show. I’m your host Jake Hower and I’m so glad that you’ve come back for another episode.

Right here, this one is an absolute cracker. We have got Gideon Shalwick on the show. In his interview, we go through a little bit about his history. We touch on how he’s been able to duplicate numerous times success in YouTube by building an amazing audience. You could almost say that he has systemized the process and we run through some of the ideas, and tips and strategies that he’s used to implement in his own business. It’s a cracking episode.

As you may well be aware, Gideon is almost … I guess you could say he’s the King of YouTube. He’s material is excellent, he puts out not short, punchy, engaging videos but more than that he teaches people like you, people like me how to leverage YouTube in your own business.

It’s a great episode and I encourage you to listen to the entire thing and implement as much as possible. I know I’ve already implemented a heap and I’m most already seeing great returns from it.

Righty-o, before we get stuck in I’ll just like to have a quick shout out to a couple of people who have left reviews in your chain store. The first one goes to Zack Jacobs who writes, “Great podcasts, really useful tips for my business. Looking forward to future episodes.” Here’s another one from Jacob, sorry actually I won’t give you that one because that’s me leading a review. That’s a little bit poor form leading a review for your own show. Hey! I was looking for a little bit of love. Please head across to the store and share some love, I’d be very appreciative.

That’s enough about myself. Thank you again for tuning in, I really appreciate it. Let’s get started with this episode.

Jake: Welcome back listeners. As discussed in the intro, we’ve got Gideon Shalwick on the call today. How are you Gideon?

Gideon: I’m good, thanks Jake. Looking forward to the call.

Jake: Yeah, me too. It certainly, when you’re talking video, when you’re talking YouTube you’re pretty much the ‘go-to’ guy. I appreciate you taking the time today.

Gideon: No problem at all, you’re very welcome.

Jake: Cool, fantastic. Alright Gideon, I think for those in the audience that don’t know who you are, can you give us a little background to who you are, what you were doing prior to, I guess finding the internet and finding YouTube, talk a little bit about the empire you’ve built.

Gideon: Sure. I’ll try to give you the condensed version so that we can get to the meat of this, nice and quick. I just want to give you a bit of background to put things into perspective as well because often people might look at my results and then think it’s an overnight type of success but it’s really not been that way.

It also started for me, in terms of the online game about seven or eight years ago when I was stuck in a job back in New Zealand. It’s a fine job, no problem with the job as such but I had a problem with it from my own situation. I appreciate also that it’s not necessarily the same for everyone else. Everyone has a different approach to business and to jobs.

For me, having that job was not great and it was not great for three reasons. One was that I was bullying for someone else. The other reason was that, the day that I stopped working would be the day that I stopped getting paid. The third thing was that I felt I couldn’t quite live out my full creativity. I wanted to have a change so we decided to, me and my wife … we decided to quit our jobs back in New Zealand and immigrate to Australia, this is about six years ago, and start an online business.

One of my first products was an e-book that I wrote. It’s about 200 pages long. It took me 21 days to write this book and to get the website ready for it. I promoted the book with a joint venture partner. It went really well, got a lot of sales and got distributed to over 177 different countries around the world. After I did that promotion, I thought “Wow, this is fantastic. This must be the best things since sliced bread because I was doing it all from our bedroom, in our little one bedroom apartment in the center of Brisbane in Australia.

Then something happened that really opened my eyes a bit. I got the book done the first six months or so of starting my business. After that we didn’t know really where the next money was going to come from to grow the business or to pay the bills and stuff like that. We went without really going out or buying new clothes or any nice luxuries like that for about a year and a half, after that point – just trying to figure out what we’re suppose to do to get this internet game working for us. We didn’t have a car, we walked everywhere, used public transport.

Then finally, I did start doing this internet series with some of the world’s top internet marketers and I asked them those sort of questions, “How do you become successful?” “How do you drive traffic?” All those main questions to help me succeed. I really wanted … There’s two purposes, one for me and also one to create a product and to sell that product.

The difference with that interviews was that it was all done on video. This was five years ago or so and no one else was doing any video. YouTube is like a year old or something. I had to learn everything from scratch.

That project never really took off but it taught me a ton of things, taught me at least six principles. I figured out how to use online video. Since then, I teamed up with … one my first biggest successful projects I did with Yaro Starak, a local here in Australia. We launched a program called “Become a Blogger.” We went from 0 to about 10,000 followers in about a week and set up around about a $20,000 income a month business within that same launch.

Once I finished with that project, I moved into the magic niche and I teamed up with a local magician in Brisbane. We took that business from the magician not really being known even in Brisbane all that much to a global phenomenon with over ten million views on the YouTube channel and over 50,000 email subscribers. Very, very nice little project. All of that’s done on YouTube and most of the traffic came from YouTube. It was just a fantastic case study for me.

After that I launched a video blogging program that basically taught people what I’ve learned over the years about video and video marketing and similar train steering that went from, I think, about 3,000 followers for that business to about 15 in a week when we launched. I’ve been building that up ever since … about 30,000 followers for that business now. Very successful little business too and mainly based on videos as well.

It’s certainly been a wonderful journey for me and video, especially online videos, served me extremely well and to the effect now that my information publishing business is largely on auto-pilot which buys me a lot of time to focus on my next activity, which I guess we’ll talk a little bit more in the school.

Jake: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much for that brief introduction. I’ll include some links in the show to a couple of interviews which I think also is going to give a little more depth on your background as well because it’s a very interesting story. One of the things that really, I guess makes you the expert in YouTube video is the fact that you’ve repeated … You’ve been able to repeat your success across multiple measures and that’s … It’s not potentially unique but it certainly is very effective. You’ve obviously … you found the steps that you need to take to be able to produce that results.

Gideon: Yeah, that’s right. I think there is … There are probably no big secrets here. I was just thinking before this interview, of all the strategies that I teach or that I follow, what are the key things?

I think it comes down to just taking action in the right direction, obviously. In taking action, a lot of people get the information but don’t do anything with it and it’s a big problem. There’s no results unless you actually take action. That’s certainly been a big key thing that I’ve done in my businesses. Everytime I learn a new strategy, I’ll go out and test it. I will just take massive action on getting a result based on the information that I’ve learned, obviously trying out experiments for myself as well.

Experimentation is really just fancy word for taking action, especially if you don’t know the direction you want to go and just start experimenting and do trial and error and as you go you learn. Through your own lessons that you learn you become very knowledgeable over time. It’s a slower process but definitely very powerful knowledge which you can build up that way. Action has certainly been a key factor in helping me get success.

Jake: Yeah, fantastic. Okay, listen, what we’re going to cover in this interview is speaking about taking action. We’re going to briefly touch on some of Gideon’s top tips for putting a system in place which removes all the barriers, effectively will stop you being able to make excuses for not shooting video.

Then we’re going to have a look at some of the tactics that Gideon uses to draw traffic and make money from YouTube. We’ll then have a look at some of the newer features of YouTube and how you can potentially use these to, I guess, bring across even more traffic to your site.

Gideon, speaking about productivity, I know from my perspective, as you say, taking action is where the money is really made. For me shooting video here in the office, I know that I had to really structure and systemize the shooting of video because as soon as the barrier to entry is increased, I’ll just make an excuse and find any excuse to not get out and shoot video.

Have you found that this has been the case at any time during your career as well?

Gideon: Oh absolutely. In fact, one of the first projects that I mentioned earlier, the one where I interviewed all these big gurus in the internet marketing world, was exactly that. That was one of the reasons why that project never really saw the day of light . I managed to record all the videos but then I didn’t really know how to edit them and how get them online and how to get the right format and how to stream them properly, all this stuff that went along with it – especially back then when it was such a new game still back then.

Definitely through that project I realized that I’ve got to find a way to get these videos done quickly, easily and affordably. There’s no point paying a ton of money for them to get them done. You want to get them done quickly, easily and affordably but also professionally.

So I developed my own little system for getting it done. I talk about the system more on my reports on www.rapidvideoblogging.com. Basically, what you do is you figure out what are all the main components, all the main things you’ve got to do to be able to get your video online. You break it down to little steps or blocks or stages and then you ask yourself a question “Which of these stages or actions do I need to be involved in?” “Is it possible to get someone else to help me get all the stuff done?” It is a bit more involved say than just creating text content. I put it down to a fine art now where it’s much faster for me to create video than it’s text content.

I think getting the process together for your own situation is definitely very worthwhile and asking yourself the question, “Does it really have to be me being part of that particular process?” “Does it even have to be me in front of the camera or can it be someone else?” Ask yourself that question throughout the whole process. That’s very, very important.

The other thing that I found that has been very instrumental is more of the practical side of things in terms of the recording. You can setup a studio or have someone set it up for you, if you don’t have the space, that can save you a ton of time. I just up until recently, I had a really nice big studio in my previous office where I would literally just walk … if I wanted to create a video, I would just walk in there, flick one switch, it would turn on all the lights, turn on the camera, sit on my little chair with the remote control, press record, do my thing, press stop, take the card out and upload the video to my video editors and that would be literally it.

To create a five minute video would literally take me five minutes and everything else including the video editing, the uploading to YouTube or the YouTube content, getting it to iTunes, transcribing the video, creating a battling strategy for it as well, all of that stuff gets taken care of for me and I just review at the end and check it all off.

There’s a ton of things you can do there to speed up that process and like you said, remove those barriers for you to create a video. Absolutely.

Jake: I totally agree. I know that’s certainly something that I did personally, is I’ve systemized the steps it takes me to produce the video. I found that for me, I guess the biggest bottle necks were around the editing process. Luckily, I spent some time … about six months perfecting it and I’m now at the point, very similar to where you are, where I can shoot some video and the next step for me is to simply upload it and soon as it’s uploaded, it’s taken off my hands.

I think the key for our listeners is that there are places on the net where you can get this done for you. I think if you don’t want to build a team or you haven’t got the time to build a team, you can get that part of the system outsourced.

Gideon: Absolutely. With the internet speed’s much better now … still not nearly close to where I’d like to see it in Australia especially but it’s good enough to start definitely uploading some nice, high definition video up to said drop box and sharing those files with your team or an outsourced solution elsewhere. I think you’re working on something, or you …?

Jake: Yeah, I have videoeditz which is essentially that. It’s an editing and syndication service. There’s certainly others out there, I know a mutual friend ours James Schramko has a service www.trafficsure.com, that’s a similar service as well. I don’t say that VideoEditz is the only one, there are a number out there. I think the key is, if that is where your bottleneck is, to just get it outsourced and you’ll instantly remove that bottleneck from your process if you had to shoot more video.

Gideon: I think that is a fantastic way to look at it in terms of bottlenecks. You probably familiar with a theory of constraints Jack from Eli Gold Rat?

Jake: Yes.

Gideon: If you come across that, fantastic information. If you could get your hands in any of that Eli Gold Rat’s books on the theory of constraints, it’s just amazing. It’s basically the management of bottlenecks, that’s what it’s all about.

One of the first stages in helping you identify those bottlenecks is to figure out what is the actual system that you’re using in your business, in this case to create video. You’ll figure out exactly what is the exact process you go through for each video that you create. Then you ask yourself the questions “What is the biggest bottleneck there?” Then once you’ve identified that, in your case it was editing, Jack. In my case it’s been editing too.

Next thing you do is you do everything you can to remove that biggest bottleneck. That’s not the end of it, that’s just the beginning. Once you’ve solved that bottleneck, you move on to your next biggest bottleneck after that first one because you’ve just relieved the first one. Now, there’s another new biggest bottleneck and then you focus your efforts on that to remove that.

For example, your next bottleneck might be you, in the sense that perhaps the content creation part of it could be the … The creative side could be a bottleneck where you might have to come up with all the content yourself or the content ideas and you have to be in front of the camera. That might be a bottleneck for you. Then you ask yourself a question, “Is it really necessary for me to be in front of the camera?” “Can’t it be someone else?” Is there another way of doing this to relieve that bottleneck?”

Perhaps this are the bottleneck that … I transcribe … well not me but my team does, and that’s very time consuming and that’s one of the simplest things to outsource as well. It could also be a bottleneck if you’re doing it yourself.

The big point here is, like you say, you create the system, you figure out the bottlenecks and then you remove them systematically as you go through that. That’s one thing, the actual systemic or bottleneck in your system.

Now, there’s another kind of bottleneck too that I found people struggle with even more. I think if you can remove these bottlenecks in your system, that’s going to help you psychologically look forward to them much better because it’s easy, fast and affordable. You’re going to look forward to creating those videos much more than otherwise.

You may still have a mental block or a mental bottleneck, so to speak, if you’re doing the videos yourself for being in front of a camera. I’m not sure if we’ll talk about that a little bit as well, Jack as that’s often something that my audience struggles with a lot.

Jake: Yeah, it certainly is. I can see where you’re going with this and I will have a little bit to add to it. It’s one of the biggest revelations I had prior to being able to shoot these was letting go and just being able to hit publish. The point where I decided, “That’s it, I don’t care what anybody thinks, I’m just going to hit publish. This isn’t perfect but it’s ready to go out to market.” That was really the turning point for myself about six months ago.

Gideon: Fantastic. I think this is certainly a big emotions that come up with being in front of the camera. Even for extra some people are very good with other people, for example, but when they get in front of the camera they can often freeze and are not sure what to do in front of the camera. I think it stems back to a couple of things.

One is the fear of rejection. That’s a big one. It’s very similar to public speaking. The only difference is that it’s actually a little bit worse than public speaking because in public speaking, in general you don’t have that massive audiences. You might have maybe 200, 500 maybe even a thousand if you’re becoming a good speaker but in general it’s not that many in comparison to how many people could potentially view you online, it could be millions.

I think in the back of our minds, we might often think “Hey, this could be seen by millions of people, what are they going to think? What if they don’t like it?” There’s a subconscious block there that might prevent us from wanting to record a video in front of the camera, that’s the sort of thing that freezes us up.

The other thing that I think doesn’t help is the way we view ourselves and hear ourselves on video. You often … I think this happens to everybody actually. It’s not just people new to video, it’s everybody even though it just seems extremely comfortable on videos but it’s how we look to ourselves and how we sound to ourselves.

You often hear people saying that they watched themselves back on video and they cringe and they go, “Oh, I don’t look like that, I don’t sound like that” and it’s actually true. To yourself, it is a shock to your subconscious mind because to yourself, normally you sound and look different to what you see on the video.

I’m not sure if you’ve picked up on that Jake. I’m sure you have been on video for such a long time.

Jake: Yes, yes certainly. This is obviously … It’s common. Everybody experiences it. How do you … for those in your audience, how do you … Do you have any resources or do you have any tips for people getting over the mental …

Gideon: Let’s look at the reason first for why this is happening. Why, when we look at ourselves on video and hear ourselves on video that it seems so unacceptable?

There’s a couple of reasons. The first one relates to the way we look on video and the second one is the way we sound. Now, I’ll ask you the question Jack, when you look at yourself most often, when would that be?

Jake: In the mirror.

Gideon: Mirror, right, okay. Often that’s not the true image of yourself, right.

Jake: No, it’s the opposite really, isn’t it?

Gideon: It’s the opposite of image of what you truly look like but to your subconscious mind it’s been used to seeing the mirror image of the true you for such a long time that it’s programmed to think that’s the real you.

If you see yourself on the video it’s a mirror image of your mirror image so to your mind it’s unacceptable. Your mind just goes, “Hang on, I don’t look like that.” The reason why it looks so different is because obviously our, perhaps not as obvious, but quite often for most people unless you’re super duper supermodel, our faces are not symmetric. When you flick it around in the mirror image it looks different. Maybe your one eye is not quite as open as your other eye or maybe your one nostril is bigger than your other one, which is the case for me. When it’s flipped … I think your subconscious mind just goes “Hang on, that looks weird. It doesn’t look like me.”

What’s funny though is when you ask all your friends and everybody else that’s watching the video, they would normally go, “No, that does look like you” even though they don’t think so.

The second issue is you sound weird to yourself so same kind of thing. Normally, when you hear yourself, the sound is coming from your mouth. Obviously the sound goes through the air and into your ear but it also travels through your head and into your eardrum as well. It’s the combination of those two that makes it sound a little bit weird. So when you hear the sound of your voice the first time through speakers, that’s not coming from inside your head, obviously it’s going to sound different.

The cure for this is essentially to recondition your subconscious mind. The only way that I found to recondition your subconscious mind is through repetition. What I mean by that is to basically repeatedly watch a video and listen to a video of yourself over and over and over until your subconscious mind is reset with the true image and the true sound of your voice.

Over time, once you’ve done it enough, you won’t look weird to yourself and you won’t sound weird to yourself anymore. That’s the only cure I found so far. I guess the only other cure is to maybe look at yourself in the videos and just to record it and then look at the result.

Jake: Which is a little bit impractical.

Gideon: (laughs) Yeah. That would be what I’d recommend if you don’t like seeing yourself on video. The other recommendation for … if you’re freaked out about potentially being seen by millions, first of all, I think it’s only something like one percent of videos on YouTube that has over a million views, it might be even smaller. It’s a tiny percent. I’ve got to double check the number but it really is tiny.

Once again I’ve got to freshen up on my status but last time I looked it was something like if you’re getting over 2,000 views per video on your YouTube channel, you’re in the top 20% of YouTube views which is quite revealing, it’s not that many views. Most channels, especially new ones only get a few hundred, tens of views on their video. You may not have such a big audience after all, that’s one thing to keep in mind.

The other thing is when you’re recording your video, it’s in front of a freaking camera, it’s not like it’s an actual person. The beauty of video of course is that if you don’t like it you can just do it again and you can edit things out.

I watched one of your previous videos Jack, where you showed your setup which is just fantastic; I liked how you showed how you essentially make mistakes and things like that, and uhm and ahs and look at your notes and things like that and you just cut that out afterwards. The end result is just fantastic.

Yeah, it’s a camera, it’s a thing, it’s not an actual person and you’ve got the magic of editing to make you look spotless.

Jake: Yeah, absolutely. You can even touch up like you can probably even shrink a nostril as well or something like that.

Alright, viewers, let’s say now that you’ve got over the hump or you’ve removed all your bottlenecks through any editing process or the mental bottleneck of getting on camera, I guess the important part now is putting your videos on YouTube and driving traffic, but more than that, driving the bottom line.

Now, Gideon, would you mind running as through some tips, or some suggestions for our viewers as to how they can best leverage the videos they pop-up on YouTube?

Gideon: Sure. I think one overarching thing to keep in mind here is that it’s not just about getting views on YouTube, it’s much, much more than that. There are many videos, for example, on YouTube that gets a lot of views – millions and millions of views – but that’s it, that’s just the video that gets the views. From that point onward, nothing else really happens.

If you’re using YouTube for building any kind of a following or building a business or even a charity or any kind of a cause then you need to think a bit more about your overall strategy. It really all starts with your content strategy. What it is that you want to upload in YouTube, what kind of content? That is super important. You can’t just upload any kind of video and then expect that to go viral. You need to do a little bit more homework to try and build your audience there. You build you audience through creating a content that they absolutely love and that they want to share with all their friends. That is really the starting point of the overall strategy or the overarching thing. You got to have great content that you upload to YouTube and You Tube will reward you for that over time, that’s the name of the game. If you … Content is still king.

I was just reading through a very interesting report that was sent to me earlier today that content is certainly not going away, especially paid content is something to watch out for in the future as well. A lot of people used to say that paid content would be a thing of the past, but I think that is … We ain’t seen nothing yet, there’s is a big, big profit area. So it really comes down to having great content for your target audience.

A level down from that then is to … it’s still strategic, it is still not just about views. The way that I look at it is it’s a series of conversion steps for growing your following and for growing your business, so if we apply this to your business or any organization really.

Obviously, the first point is getting your videos on there and getting some views. Increasing your views is the first thing, without views you can’t really do much more. While you need the content, then the views is next.

The next thing in line is to turn those views into traffic to your own online assets. What I mean by that is say your own squeeze pages or landing pages or your website or your blog. You need to figure out ways to re-divert that traffic from YouTube onto you own online assets. That is super important, similarly as with Twitter and Facebook. You don’t actually own your own channel on YouTube, you don’t own your own profile there. You Tube owns your own profile and Facebook, because on Facebook they own your own profile.

It is not your own asset and remember how I talked about owning my own assets back at the beginning of this call, that is very important to me. You have got to drive that traffic to your own online assets and build your own business, collect you own … Build your own database of email subscribers for example on your own website.

Views is the first thing, turn those views into traffic. From there the next stage is to turn the traffic into leads. For me, it is normally in the form of getting people’s name and email address or just email address in the least. Then from there, the next step is to start thinking about sales. There’s a good, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 conversion stages there, from content to views to traffic to leads and to sales. Once again, it is not just the views. You’ve got to look at the bigger picture here.

The other thing to keep in mind also is that … once again, it really is not just about views but from another perspective. If I were to give you the option of getting a million views from a group of teenagers who don’t have access to a credit card or a hundred views from a hundred millionaires who do have access to credit cards and lots of money, what would you prefer? A million views from teenagers on your video or a hundred views from a hundred millionaires?

Jake: I think that is quite clear unless you have got an amazing talent like a Bieber or something like that which the vast majority of us don’t, so it is a pretty clear choice.

Gideon: Exactly, you can’t rule out those sort of cases where the Justin Bieber kind of cases or the Gangnam style type videos. They do work but it is by far the vast minority of videos that go viral on YouTube. If your video is not going to go viral, you need to have a secondary strategy perhaps to build your views and your traffic and your business. You can’t just rely on a viral strategy because if it is not going to happen, you will struggle. (laughs)

Jake: Yeah, and I think that is really probably the issue. A lot of people get caught up with views and measuring the wrong things. I think this is probably being key to all your success online is the fact that you don’t look at that at all. You are looking at the bottom line and you have implemented a set of steps which is … Well, you have created businesses, and I think that is the key.

It’s a simple process or I am sure that you probably have a number of checklists that you use to create these businesses but then they are repeatable.

Gideon: Absolutely, I mean that what I have just explained there is the content. Use the content to drive, to get views on YouTube. There is a ton of things you can do to increase your views, obviously but then use the views for traffic and then leads and sales. That really is a business in a sense because you can pretty much divide that into two halves. The one half is essentially traffic and the other half is conversion, conversion into leads and sales.

The conversion side has a lot to do with things you offer for free, in turn for an email but also things you offer in return for payment. The traffic obviously the views and the traffic, the views and the traffic to your sites. It is actually very simple when you break it down. It is not a complicated formula for setting up a business and it is essentially that same structure that I have used for setting up the Become a Blogger business, for setting up the Magic business, for setting up the RapidVideoBlogging business, for setting up now my personal blog business. It has a similar structure.

Even now with – it is not an information publishing business, but this business that I am working on, is following a very very similar structure once again to pull the business. It is definitely a repeatable model and it works. Absolutely.

Jake: It does. It does. Now if we can … Let’s jump back a little bit. We were talking earlier about some of the bottlenecks surrounding yourself. I’ve noticed you are obviously continually improving. A couple of things I have noticed recently is that how you have started to bring on I think it is the first of obviously a number of guests or guest bloggers that you want to bring onto your YouTube channel … being Chris Ducker, being the first one.

Two, you have also recently, I believe, refined your equipment. You were on DSL but I believe that you are coming back to bringing it down to basics again, back down to an iPhone.

Gideon: Yea, it is an interesting one. Let’s tackle the first one first. Guest video blogging – I have really started playing around with that. I am not sure if is a strategy that I’d continue, well at least not for my personal video blog, my GideonShalwick.com blog. The reason for that is I think people go there to see me, they don’t go there to see someone else. I think I’ve got a bit of a feeling along those lines with the previous, my first test on video blog post.

I am not sure if I will continue that, but I don’t see it as a bad strategy at all for a branded type of business where revision three, for example. It’s a great example. There is a lot of I think eHow as well. There is a lot of channels on YouTube where they have a lot of experts come on board to submit their videos to create content. It’s not about any particular individual, it is about the content and the brand.

I think that is a fantastic strategy for building your content. Get other experts on board, but being branded accordingly. Don’t brand it as your personal thing. From the beginning, kick start it with the emphasis on the brand and that you are going to have different video bloggers come on board for that. I think that is a nice clean strategy.

The trouble is if you are building the brand yourself, I think you all are experiencing this a little bit, if you are building the brand yourself and then switch over to a guest blogging model, I am not sure if that actually works. Perhaps it can, but it requires a lot of effort to change that momentum that you have built up and that relationship that you’ve buitl up with you personally and then changing that over to having a relationship with other people. I am not sure if it is a great strategy. I think you are better off starting off with the brand as a standalone thing and then separate people underneath the brand submitting their content.

The second thing you asked about was my video equipment and streamlining that. For that one, I think what is important to note there is that it is sources for causes. There is so many different cameras out there and so many different kinds of videos. It really depends, I think, on the kind of video that you are trying to create. I have mainly say three different kinds of videos that I create in general.

The first type is or the first kind is traffic and relationship building type of video. These are the videos that I upload to YouTube normally. The purpose of them is to build a relationship with my audience and to build a following, to build those views and traffic.

The second kind of video that I create is promotional type of video. Let’s just take a step back a bit. For the traffic and relationship videos, I think if you can figure out a streamlined way, an easy way, an affordable way of doing that, that is great. I have been experimenting with just using my iPhone for those videos more recently and that is working fantastically.

The second kind is in the sales and promotional videos. Not just sales but also lead generation videos and that sort of thing. For that, generally, I like them to be at a bit higher quality, so I would use my DSLR camera for those still. Similarly for the third category which would be my product, I want to have them at a higher quality so I would use my DSLR camera for that as well.

I think that it’s really sources for causes when it comes to say … These are not the videos that I normally do myself, but if I were to run an event then I would use a totally different camera. I would get a professional to come in and record the whole show with their professional video camera. We’ve got three video cameras there for those four different applications. You probably can cover most options with those three types of cameras.

If you wanted to stay real lean, you can just use your iPhone. Get a nice microphone that you can plug into it. You need to get a special cord with it but, seriously, you can record some amazing videos with just your iPhone. It is not going to be as flexible as perhaps a DSLR camera for creating some beautiful videos.

Jake: Yes, absolutely. I guess for the vast majority of our listeners, if they haven’t experienced video or they don’t know, if they can commit to video, most of you will have an iPhone so at least you can test the markets or test the process to see if you can actually get it down pat, rather than having to spend a whole heap of money on upgrading your equipment. You more than have got all the equipment you need in the palm of your hand right now.

Gideon: Absolutely. I think that Jules Watkins says … he is the iPhone video hero guy. It was something along the lines of, in terms of if you have a question of which camera should you use? It should be whatever camera you have with you. (laughs) I think that is good general advice, “Just use whatever you’ve got.” Get started with it and get something online, get some before you start really investing a ton of money on expensive equipment.

Jake: Now there is a couple of new features that have been announced by YouTube over the last couple of months. The first one was in-video programming. Now, I saw a video that you put out about that a few weeks ago. How are you finding that? Have you got any stats on how it is working for you, this particular feature?

Gideon: Unfortunately I haven’t really looked at tracking the stats for that. I don’t think that YouTube tells you exactly how many clicks you are getting on your little in-video and it tells you, perhaps you do. I know that I have introduced some stats for annotation but to be honest, I haven’t really looked at that. Intuitively, I can say that it is very likely that you will increase views to that one particular little video if you have it sitting on all your videos especially if you have an attractive thumbnail for that little video.

Jake: Sure, that is something that we have discussed in previous episodes a little bit about thumbnails. I certainly … I found that they increase click-throughs or whole plays of the video and I am sure that you have probably experienced something very similar.

Gideon: It is super important. I am not sure if there are any regular YouTube video watchers out there, I am sure there are. If you’ve got your own channel and you subscribe to other channels, I am not sure how everyone else does it, but it is certainly the way that I do it, is when I look through every … I look at it every single one of them more than once a day. I am making a revelation there. I do check my YouTube channel quite often every day.

Jake: Alright, now there is one other feature which was only announced, I believe, over the weekend so you probably haven’t had a chance to have a look at it. The associated website annotation links, have you had a look at that at all?

Gideon: Associated websites, yes. Just before I go into that, I want to finish off with what I was saying there about watching your channel. Whenever I look at my subscriptions, the first think I look at is the image of the video. Then if that grabs my attention, I will look at the text.

Certainly it is super important to make sure you get your thumbnails right for your videos. It is very, very important. Just to give you an example for what I used for my little in-video thumbnail, I used the text and really big and bold, free video clips that boost your channel so people can really easily read that even when it is very small. When they see the word free, that is an old copywriting trick, that grabs their attention and they want to see what it is about. They are much more likely to click on the video then as well. That is just applicable to my video in my case. I think in general, think carefully about how you can create thumbnails, not just for your in-video but also for all the other videos too.

Now for the associated websites, that is pretty cool as well. That’s been around for a bit longer than the in-video one. What is fantastic about that is that you can link your main website to your YouTube channel.

Just recently they started rolling out the ability to have annotations, clickable annotations inside your videos so that when you click on that annotation it will actually take you to that associated websites. I haven’t got that on my channel yet. I am not sure if you have got that already, Jack?

Jake: No I haven’t. I saw over the weekend that they apparently had rolled it out to everybody but I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet.

Gideon: It is Monday here today so I haven’t checked that feature yet. I will check it out after this call actually. I guess the reason why they haven’t done it is because it drives traffic away from their own site, YouTube. It has been a clever strategic move on their part, but I think that it is something that a lot of people have been asking for and screaming about.

Perhaps they had finally given in and giving people what they are asking for which is fantastic.

Jake: It is, and it potentially has big implications for your ability to be able to convert traffic where you want it to.

Gideon: Absolutely and so the only caveat, of course, is that you can only send traffic to one link. Having a quick look here on my channel, I don’t see the ability to do it just yet on my channel, Jack. Maybe I am one of the unlucky ones.

Jake: That is great. Gideon, what are you working on at the moment? You are talking about the fact that your information business or information product business is running almost on auto-pilot. Are you still producing products for that or are you working on some other things?

Gideon: I haven’t been very active in creating my own information products anymore. I have more of being just building traffic and building relationships with my audience. I do have products in the back end of the business that people can purchase, that they get introduced to as they go through my business funnel. That has certainly not been an emphasis for me. The emphasis especially for the last year has been focusing on new Splasheo.com business.

Jake: I’m sure not many of our listeners are probably familiar with the business, Splasheo. Why don’t you run through a little bit about what it is?

Gideon: Sure, so the vision for the business, for the Splasheo business is really to remove those obstacles that we talked about before, those bottlenecks … for people to allow them to get their voice heard, to get seen around the world. I think there is a lot of people who are struggling. Perhaps they are struggling because of technical issues, perhaps they are struggling with the process issues but perhaps they are struggling because they don’t feel that their videos look good enough and perhaps they can’t afford an expensive video editor or even an outsourced video editor, or maybe they just don’t have the time or skill to use these expensive video editing programs.

With Splasheo, the vision is to remove all those obstacles to help people create amazing videos really quickly, really easily and really affordably too. The first way of doing it is to just help lift people’s … Do two things, help lift people’s production value of their videos with some clever animated little video clips, custom ones. Secondly, to help them make their videos more effective, so to get them … help them get more views, help them get more subscribers, more comments, more likes, and all this sort of stuff.

The way we are doing that is by offering people three things at the moment. One is animated little video intros. It animates your logo for you, a little five to ten second video clips that you get with your logo animated.

The second one is with adding some low effect, animated low effects to your videos which you can use for just … If you are on the video for example just to introduce yourself or the topic of the video, it’s pretty handy for that sort of thing, just to lift the professional look and feel of your video.

Then the third one which we have just released a couple of weeks ago is some animated outro’s or calls to action for your videos. This is really where it comes back to getting more views, getting more subscribers and comments and likes, and more of the social stuff. This is all more traffic to your site. This is where you can basically add a little video clip with a specific call to action at the end of it.

We’ve had some very amazing test results that we’ve run. For example, I ran a test where I uploaded exactly the same video to my YouTube channel. I uploaded them both as unlisted ones, I didn’t go public. The only difference between the two was the one had a little outro at the end of it with a call to action and the other one didn’t.

This call to action asks people basically to leave a comment and to like the video. What I did then was I sent a split-test e-mail of both of those videos and 50% of the e-mails went to one video and 50% went to the other video.

The one with the outro had an amazing result, much better than I actually thought. I knew there would be an improvement but I didn’t realize it was going to be so high. The one with the outro had 160% increase in comments compared to the other one and an 194% increase in likes compared to the other one.

To me that was like an overwhelming positive result and what was interesting about that was that it was a fairly generic kind of call to action. It wasn’t even very specific to my brand of business. That was very, very encouraging. What we’ve released now is for people to create their own little outro’s with their own custom text and custom graphics in there to get even better results.

Jake: That’s excellent. I’ve got a little bit to add to that. I went through the process prior to ’89. In fact, it would have been before Splasheo was launched publicly and I went through Fiverr. I can guarantee to your listeners out there that if I had known about Splasheo before investing the time and into getting some videos from Fiverr it would have been absolutely no question about it, straight to Splasheo because even though we’re talking $5.00 to get something done. I would have spent three or four hours trying to first, wade through all of the different options and the second, to coordinate with the Fiverr deal how to I actually get it done.

Your plot Gideon is super easy, it’s very straight-forward, it basically steps you right through the process of choosing the videos, the music, your call to action, and very well priced as well. I can tell you right now, anything in the future that I need, will be going straight through Splasheo.

Gideon: Marvelous, thank you for that, Jake.

Jake: I think one more thing to add regarding the outro’s and I think this is very important. Personally when I’m looking at a lot of videos I tend to switch off as soon as somebody starts winding up. I guess the big thing about … Your outro’s from what I’ve seen of your samples on your site is that they are very engaging, and they’re quite unique. I think that would actually help snap people back to attention. I think that’s very important as well so I think you’re onto a very good thing with those.

Gideon: I think the difference also between say what we are doing on Splasheo and what some people might find on a site like Fiverr is that with Splasheo it’s not really just animations and little video clips that you get. You’re actually getting much much more than that. You’re getting all the year’s worth of trial and error that I’ve had on-line.

I’ve studied conversion a great deal, and copyrighting a great deal, and psychology a great deal, and how to move people to action with video a great deal. All of those things are infused into what you get. You don’t just get a video clip, you get a lot of business and human psychology and helping move people to action, helping to persuade people as part of what you’re getting.

I don’t know if you’d be getting that sort of thing from someone who works for $2.50 an hour in another part of the world, perhaps you could. I think you are more likely to find someone who perhaps has a good video editing skill but perhaps not much knowledge when it comes to marketing and using video to promote your business. I think that’s an extra adding thing that people get that they may not always realize.

Jake: Yeah absolutely. It goes along the lines of having your web designer teach you about SEO which most web designers I know, don’t know a thing about SEOs.

Gideon: Exactly.

Jake: All right Gideon, I really appreciate you coming on the call again. I’m conscious that I’ve taken up too much of your time. Again, I really appreciate it. Where can our listeners find out a little bit more about you and some of your products and also Splasheo?

Gideon: I will give you a couple, Jake. The first one is, probably best is if you want to learn a little bit more about me, it’s just my name www.GideonShalwick.com. I’m sure, you’ll perhaps have a link below this call as well, Jake. Also then for the Splasheo business, it’s just Splash with an EO at the end for video. It’s Splasheo instead of video, it’s www.splasheo.com. It’s www.splasheo.com and you can … There’e some free stuff you can get there and also if you are interested in the custom stuff, there’s a link at the top that takes you to the custom animations.

Gideon: Sure.

Jake: Would you mind popping across to the show notes every now and then, and just to answer any questions that any of our listeners have below the show notes.

Gideon: Sure, no problem at all.

Jake: Fantastic. So listeners if you’ve got any queries at all of Gideon, if you head across to the show notes on multimediamarketingshow.com/gideon you can use the comment section to ask any questions and more than likely you’ll get a response from Gideon. So head across there and we’ll ensure that we get to any queries you have answered.

Gideon: Brilliant. Thanks Jake.

Jake: Fantastic. Okay Gideon, thanks very much for coming on. Hopefully we’ll get to touch base again at some stage in the future, but again, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken today. I’m sure our listeners have got a lot out of this particular episode.

Gideon: Brilliant. Thanks Jake and all the best to everyone listening. I look forward to seeing all of your wonderful end results. All the best.