Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

We’ve been talking a lot lately about using simple videos to promote your content – even if it is just simple slides put together with your audio interview. The learning curve for doing smart web video is getting shorter and shorter, thanks to web video experts like Dave Kaminski.

Dave shows people how to use web video in a way that is engaging and attracts attention. In this quick interview, I talk to Dave about getting started and the future of video. We talk about the mess of formats and why it shouldn’t stop you from creating video now to make your site more compelling.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

WebVideoClass.com

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Hello everybody. Welcome to another show at MemberCon.com. You know, I’ve been talking a lot about the power of using videos to promote your content whatever you may be producing on any subject and the gentleman I have on the line today is Dave Kaminski. He’s got a really popular site that deals with obviously that subject which is WebVideoClass.com. And so, Dave, thanks very much for joining me on the phone today.

Dave Kaminski: Thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Bourquin: Well, so you obviously get a lot of people who kind of realize that video is the way they want to go ’cause they see so much of it online but they’re not quite sure where to start. Is this something where I can come to you and kind of if I have no video editing experience I can kind of get up and running?

Dave Kaminski: Yes. The training that I provide, it’s meant for the person who has never touched a video camera in their life, and basically I walk you through step-by-step and, you know, everything you need to know about as far as equipment, technology, and best practices, as far as business and marketing and, you know, walk you through things step-by-step so you can start off knowing absolutely nothing and as fast as possible get videos online that are helping your business.

Tim Bourquin: Now, the thing I see people doing is two different types. So basically, are doing real video of people in the video itself or they’re doing some sort of slide presentation that’s accompany — is audio. What do you think is the best way to get started with that?

Dave Kaminski: There’s not one clear advantage as far as one over the other. What I actually do is I actually combine the two most of the time, but basically you have live video and by live video that’s going to be video that you shoot with a camera, and then you’re going to have screen capture video and that’s where you see like the PowerPoint slide presentations. And they both require different software but like I said, you know, I combine the thing so, you know, as part of my training, what I do is I show you okay, let’s take some live video and let’s take some slide and mix them all together. Now as far as someone who is just starting out is probably going to be easier for them to master the screen capture part first and then move on to live video.

Tim Bourquin: A lot of people are saying that the video is the best way to either put on your squeeze page or your homepage down instead of the text and long sales page. What are your thoughts on that?

Dave Kaminski: I would agree with that. I’m going to agree with that based on the successes of my students and based on my own experience. You know, video is a much more engaging format. If you go to a website and it just kind of a text opt-in well, you know, you kind of hesitate. You know, do I really want to opt-in? So I really want to get my email address to this guy? When you see a video and you see the person on the screen and the person does a real good video where they’re what I call transparent, meaning they’re showing you that they’re a real person and not trying to be something that they’re not, then the video is going to be far more effective than just plain text in that regard.

Tim Bourquin: The trend I kind of see now is people doing these longer maybe 30 or even 40 minutes, even an hour long videos and doing four or five of them after they opt-in to sell maybe a course at the end of that. Are people really paying attention for that long, for that many days? It seems like it used to be where it was 10 minutes, right? Anything that would fit on YouTube is what you want to do. What are you thoughts there?

Dave Kaminski: Well, statistically, people have a very, very short attention span when it comes to web video. Usually, it’s in around two minutes. They’ll watch it for about two minutes and then viewership drops way off. So what you’ll see a lot of marketers or internet marketers are doing is now disable the control bar on the video player so people are forced to watch the entire video from beginning to end. They can’t scrub through it. But statistically people have a very, very short attention span. I think on YouTube alone, I believe by the 60-second mark, I believe 75% of viewers are already gone.

Tim Bourquin: And I’ve seen that a lot too where the player buttons are gone. Does that really work? I mean is that the right thing to do to force our users to kind of play by our rules, do you think?

Dave Kaminski: I’m not a fan of it. I think it’s poor etiquette as far as putting up web pages goes. You know, you never want to do anything on your web page where you’re taking control away from the viewer and in that case where you’re disabling the control bars, the viewer’s only option is to go to a different web page to get rid of that video. So I’m not a fan of it. I haven’t seen any statistics that says, “Hey, it works great” or “Hey, it doesn’t work great.” But like I said, it’s just in my opinion, it’s not very good etiquette.

Tim Bourquin: How about the other part of that where you go to a website and the video plays immediately rather than me having to click on the play button. What do you think about those?

Dave Kaminski: That’s something that I’m personally not a fan of either. Again, that’s controlling — that’s taking away control from the viewer. On all my videos, what I do, you know, people come to the site. They’re going to click the play button, they control it. It’s a little fussier than taking away the whole control bar but it’s something that right off the bat I wouldn’t recommend people do.

Tim Bourquin: And then a lot of people are trying to add clickable links within the video itself. Is that something you see growing in popularity and what else do you see is kind of the future of video here?

Dave Kaminski: Well, as far as clickable links, that’s something that right now can really only be done with flash video players and it’s becoming more and more popular. The problem is we’ve got HTML5 video coming around the corner and HTML5 video is the newest big thing. And basically, what people need to know about HTML5 video is that it was designed to make it simple. It was designed to make web videos simple. It was going to define a single web video format and it’s going to make it real easy for people to get web videos on their web pages and it’s going to make it real easy for people to watch web videos ’cause they don’t need any plug-ins for their browsers.

What’s happened is Google and Apple and Mozilla Firefox and all the powers to be they turned it into a big mess. No one can agree on what standard video format will work with HTML5. There’s different browsers supporting different formats. So as far as a big thing being HTML5 video, right now it’s a mess and most of the people on the internet who are not using mobile devices, they’re still going to watch flash videos which means you can go back and use a flash player where you can have the clickable objects.

For example, I offer a player where at the end of a video an opt-in form can come up or people can click a “buy now” button. Again, stuff like that can only be done with a flash player and it hasn’t been determined yet but flash might be on the way out and it might be replaced with HTML5 where we can’t do all these fancy things with video players but HTML5 isn’t going to take a hold until, you know, all the powers to be, get things sorted out and agree on one format for web video.

Tim Bourquin: And then, of course, all the editing software is going to have to be updated to save and whatever — what is the format that it goes into?

Dave Kaminski: Well, for HTML5 video — well, first I’ll back up. You know, if we’re talking normal video like you go to YouTube and watch, all that is flash, and video editing software actually won’t convert your videos to flash. You need to use third-party software that will convert it to flash and there’s a number of tools available on the internet both free and paid for, but with HTML5 video different formats.

First, we have H.264 which is a codec which is the code that produces a video and H.264 codec can actually be used in a flash video player. A lot of the videos you see on the internet right now that are playing in a flash video player including my own, they’re all encoded with H.264 and it’s a codec that gives you really good video quality at really small file sizes. But not all of the browsers, when it comes to HTML5, support this codec.

For example, only Safari supports it and all mobile devices such as iPads and iPhones, they support H.264. Google Chrome supports H.264. Now as far as the other formats, we have Firefox, they do not support it because it’s not an open source codec. They support what’s known as the AG format and Google just released a new open source video codec called WebM. They did it yesterday and that’s supported by Google and Firefox but it doesn’t work with all the other guys who are, you know, arguing over which format to use.

So right now for someone who wants to produce web video, what I recommend they do is produce it in an H.264 format. It will work in flash player and it will work on majority of the browsers out there excluding Firefox.

Tim Bourquin: All right. Well, obviously, there is a while lot to learn here and if you’re new to video like I am, I’m just getting started doing some of these PowerPoint and audio screencast together, Dave’s site is a terrific resource for that so you can go to his site right now by clicking on the link below this video here and find out all about the offerings there because obviously if you’re not using video now, you’re getting behind the times that most people will tell you that you’ve got to start getting that interactivity on your site very soon so… Dave, thanks very much for your time. I really appreciate your time on the phone with us today.

Dave Kaminski: My pleasure, Tim.

Find out more about Dave at WebVideoClass.com

creating content, site marketing using web video