Converting Blog Content Into VLOG – Part II

Podcast:

Transcription:

Good morning, internet fans. Ryan Perry here, Simple Biz Support. Today is a Thursday, June 23, therefore, it is Internet Marketing Thursday. For the second week in a row, I have my special guest, which is Annette Penney with Inspired By Annette. Good morning, or good afternoon to you, being on the East Coast.

Annette Penney: Yes, good afternoon to me. And it’s inspiredannette.com. I don’t know where you got the “by” from.

RP: Inspire? Ah, I’m sorry.

RP: I like to work things in.

AP: People can find me.

RP: Inspired Annette.

AP: Yes.

RP: We’re going to continue our conversation from last week, talking about taking your written blog content that’s already on your website, and essentially re-purposing it into a video blog. Because I think a lot of people, especially if they’re just starting out, video can be a little overwhelming, it’s a little scary. What’s an easy way to create new content? Just take the content you already have and just do a video blog.

AP: Yeah, I agree with that. And when you consider that website visitors will stay on your site longer, when you have video content, 60% longer, actually, then you want to have some video content. And for the smaller business owner, they don’t know exactly where to start. I would say, “Take baby steps.” When you’re learning how to do something new, always take baby steps, then you don’t feel overwhelmed. What’s your biggest resource? It’s the content you’ve already created, and you’ve spent hours and hours, and who knows, hundreds of hours, writing, researching, writing, so go back to those categories, and choose one blog post from each category a week, let’s say, and create a little video from it.

RP: Yeah. And that’s essentially what we talked about last week was, how do you get started? This week, we’re going to get a little bit more detailed in the fact of, “Okay, now that you started creating content, what do I do with it? How do I figure out the timing? Where do I post it? Do I need to change my website?” So we’re going to get into a little bit more technical stuff but it’s still going to be really easy, and it should lay out a road map of what it is that you’re going to want to do. And the first thing that we want to talk about is a marketing calendar, because without a plan, things typically don’t go as well as they could, and a marketing calendar is a great way to keep the ball rolling, keep everything on track.

AP: Marketing calendars are good, especially… Let’s just take somebody who’s in real estate. You know in real estate that people who want to sell their homes are going to be looking at things in the spring and in the summer, like curb appeal, patio furniture, how to set up your backyard, how to make the front of your house look nice, should you paint the front door, blah-blah-blah. And should you do any additional landscaping for the summer months? Will you get a good return on investment for that? So you can predict that, and you can schedule it in your marketing calendar. Now there are some things, though, that come up suddenly. I use Buzzsumo. Have you ever used that?

RP: I haven’t personally used it, but I’m familiar. I’m familiar with the name.

AP: Right. So if you go in there, and type in, “real estate in California,” it will… And you can click in the last 24-hours, the last week, the last month. And you can find there… It will produce results and tell you what people are blogging about, and maybe, even creating video about, considering real estate in California. It will tell you how many articles have been shared in the past 24-hours, week, month, whatever you choose. And so, you can see by popularity, then. If there’s a particular component of real estate in California that people are talking about in the last week, and it’s a hot topic, you might want to kind of jump on the bandwagon there.

RP: Yeah, totally. And that’s where… So, we need our evergreen content. We need our seasonal content, and then having some blanks in there for what’s currently going on in the industry. Is that what you’re saying?

AP: Yes, yes, exactly what I’m saying.

RP: Okay, perfect. And a marketing calendar isn’t fancy. For me, it’s an Excel spreadsheet with each week, depending on each client, they have different needs. But essentially, it’s a matter of, “Okay, blog post needs to go. Facebook post needs to go.” And I already have the title. I know where the content is. If there’s images, all that’s attached. And then it’s just a matter of adding another column for video, and what it is that you’re going to talk about.

AP: Yeah, I use Excel, too, because I’m familiar with it, and why learn something new? And like you said, it’s simple, like your business name. So yeah, try to keep it simple, so you don’t overwhelm yourself.

RP: That is true. So, the key thing with the marketing calendar is also, I like to, when I’m doing a blog content, you look at your blog roll, I don’t want to see video, video, video, text, text, text, video, video, video. Ideally, you want to break it up a little bit. Even if you’re going to incorporate infographics, maybe on a quarterly basis: Video, written content, video, written content, maybe an infographic, and then you go back to your blog content. Break it up a little bit. That way A, it’s going to keep people’s interest more. And some people are going to be more into text than they are going to be video. And so, it makes it easier for them to determine which is which. The other thing I would say is that, based on your CMS that you’re using, if you’re, and even on WordPress, there’s so many different templates out there, some of them it will make it clear that this is a video versus just a text blog.

AP: Yeah and you have to look at time of day, so you may, for instance, post a certain type of topic during a certain time of day. Like I have one client, for instance, I post something really funny for 7:15 AM every day, it kind of opens up Facebook’s algorithm, it’s a little trick. Then at 11:30 AM it’s something else and then at 7:30 PM it’s a totally different topic. And then on the weekends people will be, you know, maybe more inclined to read or they’re going to be more inclined to click on a video. So you keep those things in mind as well when you’re deciding when to post video and blog and text and you know cartoon or whatever.

RP: Right. Before we get into social media, why don’t we talk about now that we actually have video content. Am I just going to incorporate that into the blog section? I know some people will have separate menus on their blog. It’ll just be blog and then they’ll have a separate category for video blog, or excuse me a separate menu item for video. And then other people will also go into your categories if you talked about real estate so you might have a category for curb appeal for buyers, for sellers. Do we need a separate one for video?

AP: Well, that’s a good question. I’m just designing a brand new website for inspiredannette.com and one of the tab menus that I put there this morning is called marketing videos. I do have a separate tab just for videos when I’m not putting blog content in there, blog content will be just in a separate tab. Here’s what I think and you know this better than I do when it comes to SEO, the more content you have on your website, the better. What I would do is I would create some videos and put them in a separate section that is only for video content, but then I would go back through my blog posts because I’ve probably got the idea for a video from a blog post anyway, and I would insert that video within the blog post that’s already there. Because that stuff is still floating out there and people share it and it gets shared once down the road and people come across it. That way a person who prefers to read will still come across your video and maybe watch it and some people who don’t want to read and only want to watch video, which is the majority of people now, they they will just go to your video section.

RP: Right. And then the caveat I would put with that is if you’re going to have a separate blog section from an SEO point of view, if all you do is embed a video into it you’re not going to have any SEO value. Google is getting more sophisticated but at this point, they’re still just rating zeros and ones, and when you embed video, basically you’re embedding a URL link from YouTube into your site. It doesn’t have any SEO value, it doesn’t tell you what the blog’s about or any content information. What I do with my clients is I actually extract the audio from the blog and I have a transcription service transcribe everything, so that I have the video at the top and then the content, transcribed content below that. That I can then do internal links, external links if I’m going to, but basically, SEO optimize it. And I love the idea of taking that video and putting it in your old blog post also, just as a little boost, if you will.

AP: That’s a really great idea, I didn’t know that yet but that’s a really good idea. Something just occurred to me, almost every person that has a business and has a website has success stories, client success stories, testimonials and that sort of thing and you could call those people up and say, “You know, last year, you provided me with a testimonial, I was wondering if I popped over, would you do a quick video with me?” And so then you don’t have to get new testimonials and call up some other people that are brand new, it’s just a good place to start, I think.

RP: Yeah. Testimonials are really powerful and any time you’re going to do a testimonial, I always recommend to my clients is do an objection-based testimonial. As you’re going through your sales process with a prospect and they’re like, “Oh you know, I just don’t know if I can invest that much time,” that’s one of the testimonials I’m going to get is from a former client who said, “Hey, yeah you know, originally I was really unsure if I was going to be able to invest the time but let me tell you, once I got into the program, I made it a priority.” That way, when you run across that objection, you can go, “Oh, totally understand.” I always like to send emails, “Hey Tom, it was great talking to you today. By the way you mentioned time was an issue, here’s a testimonial from somebody who had the same concerns. Take a look at it.”

AP: Wow. That’s pretty powerful. Overcoming objections in a testimonial, it’s like two things in one, I love it.

RP: Well, yeah, and it’s not coming from me. I mean, obviously, I’m going to try and sell you on my product or service where somebody who’s actually providing a testimonial, there’s no direct benefit to them, they’re just simply going, “Hey, this guy did a great job.” So testimonials, love testimonials and they don’t always have to be objection-based testimonials, but if you can, that is always the best way to do it. The other thing I do, before and after videos for general contractors, kitchen remodel, bath remodels, typical price point is 80,000 or more. And so any time the contractor actually schedules a new appointment, ’cause they have to go out and look at the house and do an evaluation to kinda figure out what the people want, when they finish up that phone call and say, “Yeah I’ll see you on Tuesday” to follow up with and email, “Hey Jane, it was great talking with you. I’ll be out next Tuesday. By the way, here is somebody in the same city, next city over who we just did a remodel for, so you can get an idea of our work.” It just makes it an easy sell so when they walk in the door to do that review, those people are going to love ’em, assuming the video is done right.

AP: Right, I like it, I like it a lot.

RP: Yeah, we’re almost out of time and I know you want to also talk about…

AP: This happens every time!

RP: Amazing how fast it goes, why don’t we talk about social media? As far as posting, what do I… ‘Cause if all you do is make a video, leave it on YouTube, boom and that’s it, you’re not being efficient.

AP: No, exactly yeah, it’s a really good point. There’s going to probably be a couple of ways that you’re going to create video content. Like for instance this morning I was on my way to a meeting, I did a quick Snapchat and then I shared it on Facebook after. So I was just on my iPhone. Now there is going to be the videos that you intentionally produce, edit and they are a little more professional-looking, whatever. Those, you can, I would upload them everywhere and my idea is create it anywhere, share it everywhere, so you can do it on your laptop, do it with a video camera, do it on your smartphone, and just share it across all of the social media platforms that you are part of. And yeah, why wouldn’t you do that? Because your audience is different on Twitter, on Facebook, on Pinterest, on Linkedin, our audiences are different. So we’re reaching whole other, yeah, there’s going to be some overlap obviously. But what are your thoughts on that?

RP: Yeah, my thoughts are definitely, in the beginning assuming that you have already targeted social media platforms that your audience is in and then it’s just a matter of testing and evaluating. At some point you have to look at the analytics and go, “Okay, are people responding to the videos?” If they’re not, is it because of the quality of the video or is it just not the right platform that people are interested in watching video on?

AP: Yeah, absolutely. I mean for instance, if you had a recipe and you posted a video of you making this recipe on Pinterest, yeah, you know what a lot of people go to Pinterest at supper time and they just want to read the recipe. Let me see the ingredients, they don’t want to watch a video. But I’m a big believer in testing and retesting and retesting. You gotta look at the analytics because like you said you could be wasting your time.

RP: Yeah, totally. And then the other debate, “I just did a video blog about this yesterday, should I upload to YouTube and Facebook?” and for me ’cause we’re out of time, the quick and dirty answer is, if your goal is to build your YouTube audience then I want to push all of my traffic to YouTube. So in that case I would upload only to YouTube and then I would share the link from Facebook to YouTube so that again I’m trying to drive traffic there to build up my YouTube channel because if you start off with zero videos, you’re not going to have any SEO value ranking, juice, quality, whatever you want to call it. As you start getting subscribers, as people start watching your videos, then the quality is going to come up in Google’s eyes and it’s going to make it much easier to rank on the first page of Google; which is one of my key things that I do. And then you can change down the road where yes, you still upload to YouTube but maybe then you start uploading the videos to Facebook congruently.

AP: Yeah, I mean I just read a study about that maybe two days ago, about how when you embed a video on YouTube, sorry, on Facebook as opposed to sharing the YouTube link, it just gets way more views and it’s way better, blah blah blah. But it depends on what your goals and objectives are. Like you said if you’re trying to build your YouTube audience and YouTube is the second largest search engine next to Google, so that’s a really good goal to have; a business goal, then you’re going to want to do, you know, upload it to YouTube first then share it to Facebook and the other social media channels, right?

RP: Right, Definitely. Alright, quick recap: Marketing calender, great idea; Excel spreadsheets, simple, easy way to go. I liked your idea of taking the video since again if we watch last week’s video, when we talked about where do you get that content from your current blog content, you want to use your content as much as possible so embed that video in the original post and then create a new post and I liked how you are creating a separate menu item for just your video marketing blog, so that people that are truly interested in just the video makes it real easy to find. And then we talked about social media platforms. That is a whole day conversation right there. Yeah, so we just kinda really just touched the tip of the iceberg.

RP: Annette, thank you very much, I appreciate your time, always love to see your beautiful hair. What new colors we might see?

AP: I was thinking of adding some pink next to the purple.

RP: Alright, I say, I say do it, darn it. I keep on adding, I keep on adding white to my brown.

AP: It’s great talking to you, Ryan.

RP: You, too. Alright, everybody, that is it for today’s show. Thank you for joining us. If you have any questions, comments or you think we might have left something out, feel free to leave a comment below and we’ll see you next week. Take care.