10X Your Revenue by Including Videos in Business Ecosystem | The Ask Avi Arya Show

But what it does is it helps you build that outer audience that you can help then attract further into your business. Then as people get into your business, you can use video again and again, but with different purposes, to help convert them into leads and into sales and into evangelists later on as well. And each video that you do at those different stages, you know, it has a different kind of a flavor. For example, the ones on the outer edges are more related to sort of generating interest and intrigue and getting engagement and connection from your audience and getting people to know, like, and trust you. That's really important for that outer layer. Once you've got that know, like and trust factor, the next thing is.

So, Gideon, thank you very much for.

Taking the time out. My dad always says the most important thing that you can ask from people is not their money, but it's their time. So thank you for taking the time out for this. I always say the shortest distance between two human hearts is a story.

And if you tell a story to a perfect stranger, you connect with them for life. So for our audiences today, tomorrow, and forever, who will be watching this digital version of you, what's your story?

Depends where you want to start, how long back? But let's. So let's start with my entrepreneurial story and my journey of becoming an entrepreneur. So I went through the normal schooling system back in South Africa. You know, got taught that you got to get an education and a degree to be able to get a job, and then you can, you know, pay for your living, maybe buy a house, get a mortgage, and, you know, I don't know, grow older and die. That was basically the dream that was sold. Or at least the dream of. Of success and wealth was through, you know, becoming educated and getting a degree and getting a job. So I went through that, and I did enjoy study. I enjoyed it mostly. I did engineering, electronic engineering degree, and that was really tough. After that, I realized I don't want to be an engineer. So I did another degree in engineering management. And then at least I started doing some work in project management in engineering companies, and later business development. But very soon I realized that, hey, this is not what I thought it would be. As soon as I started working, in fact, day one, I thought, hey, this is not what I signed up for. Anyway, that didn't really change much for five years. And then after five years, I told my wife we were back in New Zealand. I said, look, this is not working. I don't want to do this anymore. Let's quit our jobs and immigrate to Australia and start a brand new business. She was keen, basically. I said, okay, well to get into Australia, let me try and apply for jobs. And just as our ticket into, into the country. So we have a bit of a soft landing and I applied for jobs, applied, applied, applied, nothing came back. Three months, nobody in Australia wanted me to work for them. So I said to my wife, hey, let's, let's get you to apply as well. Sort of double down a bit. And within a week she got three job offers and flew to, said yes to one of them. Within a month we were in Australia. My wife was working. I was not, I was looking, I was trying to figure out what, you know, what sort of business to begin. And that was the beginning for me, you know, and looking back, that was, you know, it was pretty interesting because if I, if my wife didn't get that job, I think we wouldn't have been able to come to Australia and I wouldn't be able to start a business because she was basically paying the bills while I was mucking around trying to figure out how to, how to start a business. Anyway, I teamed up with one of my mentors, he showed me how to write a book and he promoted for me as well. And we got some pretty good sales. This is back in 2006 and maybe start of 2007. And I was amazed. It was an ebook and everything was done electronically and I just thought this online thing is incredible. I could work from my lounge, from home and just write a few books and promote it and you know, and then make millions. That was the dream. Anyway, long story short, I, after that first promotion with my mentor, I ran out of traffic. I didn't know how to actually build traffic and build a real business. So ran out of traffic, ran out of sales, ran out of money. And basically for a two year period I was really, really struggling. In fact, it got so bad that towards the end of it I was looking at my wife and I said, look, this is not working, let's, in fact, she was looking at me more going, hey, this is not working. I said, what shall we do? You know, shall we move back to New Zealand or shall I just try and get a job again? And we agreed that we try for another month. At that time I started interviewing people because I was so fed up with not being able to succeed. I started interviewing people very much the same way that you're doing now. And I did it on video. Back then, no one was doing video, no one was doing video interviews. It was just too hard. This is 2007, 2008 roundabout there, right? And YouTube was just about a year old and I was doing these interviews on video and it was incredibly hard. I was going to build a membership site out of it and charge people a monthly fee to watch the interviews. But it turned out to be such a big and bulky project, my computer died. It was just not capable to handle all the big video files and it was just too much for me. But one of the people that I interviewed was a friend of mine who lived in Brisbane, where we lived as well. And he then approached me, said, hey, let's do this project together. We called it Become a Blogger. And because he noticed that I was really good with video and he said, why don't you do the video and I'll help with the marketing? And he's got the audience. So at that point he already had like 20,000 people on his email database and a very successful blog called Entrepreneur's Journey. And anyway, we launched within a month we had 10,000 people join our email database and, and got our recurring income to around about $23,000 per month. Which is awesome because the time before that I was earning negative money. And so I remember looking at my wife before that point and I said, because I remember telling her at the beginning, look, if I can't make my salary back from quitting and doing running a business, then I really don't deserve to earn that money. And I remember sort of looking back at her back then and going, you know, know, gosh, I've been making negative money. So is that what I'm worth? And you know, am I worth negative money? All this, all this work and effort for nothing. But then finally we had that project. It ended up working out really well and that became a really nice stepping stone for me to create video business after video business after video business. So 14 years later now, since, since that beginning, now I've done a multiple really great, great successful projects. And with, with video as backbone to it, I've also had quite a few failures, which has been very good learning lessons. But today I'm running a business called Splashio.com where we, we help people get their videos ready for social media. We help add engagement elements to their videos and make them a lot more engaging. All you got to do is send us your video and we'll process it for you and send it back to you the next day within, you know, within 24 hours. And I'm really enjoying it. I've. I'm using all the lessons I've learned over the last 14 years to grow it and. Yeah. And having a lot of fun.

That is a fantastic story all the way from New Zealand. When you said you're not getting a job for three months, you said, this is an entrepreneur mindset. What else can I do? It's not working out. Okay, fine. Let my wife apply. She got it in one week. She got three offers. You're off to Australia. You go there, things start looking up because you. One person is there, and then two years of nonstop waiting for the second person to get in. What probability of one person getting a job in one week and the other person having to wait for two years and then after that, for one month? You gave yourself four weeks to say, let's go back. And in those weeks of going back, you gave it your best. You said, you didn't start packing your bags already. You wanted to stay. And then things started happening. So this is such an amazing story for all our listeners because life, like I said, is a series of multiple events, some of them successful, leaving you to where you need to be. All other mistakes that pay the bills in the macro. And I totally understand your mistakes in the short run are not, oh, wow, I made a mistake. I learned something new. Your wife or your spouse is not going to be happy about. Another mistake. Like your mistake is helping your entrepreneurial career in the long run. What about the bills for today? So I love the journey that you've been through, and I love the way you put it because it's going to help so many other people saying, you know what? I see myself either before, during, or after in Gideon's path. And the idea of these interviews is.

Always selfishly, I get motivated and inspired, and I learned so much. But also for the audience to understand, to find themselves in the guest. The guests that we interview to find themselves in their journey and say, you know what? I can do it if he did it too. And for all of your listeners or if you're watching on YouTube, if you found yourself in Gideon's story, so far, this has been a successful start to the interview. So, Gideon, thank you so much for bringing us so far over here in your journey.

Great. I am all about videos I.

Wrote. Like I said, my video journey came because I needed to be just close to my family and make sure everything's on videos. When I started doing that, it became so successful that people started saying, can you. Can you? You know, is there a system? I said, there's no system. I'm doing videos just so that I can run an agency from different parts of the world and take care of, you know, hundreds of clients. But there must be a system. So I realized that people like finite systems. So I created this, the Micro Video mastery method, the 33 micro videos to grow your business and stay close to your family. So everything became a system. And, you know, we talk about micro videos I saw on your, on Splashio and everything. Your life is all about videos. You teach, you know, you talk about, you know, how videos are. Then, you know, I say it's a, it's a superpower that you need in your arsenal at all given times. Don't hire salespeople. Hire a video person and a video, then create a YouTube video. That video will go out and get you sales. For all the people who are listening.

Right now, and let's say they're startups.

They don't have a lot of budget. They want to grow their business. And to grow your business, you need three things. Get sales, get leads, get known, get leads, get sales. You do these three things a startup does well. How do videos fit into this startup ecosystem?

Yeah, I think that's what's so amazing about videos is that it's very multipurpose. You mentioned already the, the ability to get you sales, but there's a bunch of other things that it can do as well. You know, Jay Abraham talks about preeminence, you know, building preeminence. And that's one of the most powerful things you can do in business. And really all it means is becoming known or having your, what do you call it, Your people knowing you, sort of knowing about you before you even arrive. So your reputation precedes you or precedes you. So that's really what preeminence is about. And so what you can do with video is use video, especially through social media, like on YouTube and LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook, Instagram, TikTok these days as well. There's so many these days to use video to help create content that you can put out there in the world to start building that preeminence. Now, you might not get necessarily sales or leads from that, but what it can, not from everybody at least, but what it does is it helps you build that, that outer audience that, that you can help then attract further into your business. Then as people get into your business, you can use video again and again, but with different purposes, to help convert them into leads and into sales and into evangelists later on as well. And each video that you do at those different stages, you know, has a different kind of a flavor. For example, the ones on the outer edges are more related to sort of generating interest and intrigue and getting engagement and connection from your audience and getting people to know, like and trust you. That's really important for that outer lay. Once you've got that know, like and trust factor, the next thing is to get people to convert, to get them to convert into some sort of a prospect or a lead. And once they're in, you know, and you use a different kind of a video for that, it's maybe more of a promotional style video. From there you need a more of a, an even more of a promotion style video. Maybe it's more, I guess you could call it a sales video or maybe it's a webinar or something. A lot more thought goes into these videos. They're much more structured and this is where you turn people into actual clients and customers and then that's not enough yet. Once you've got people as clients and customers, you can use video again to welcome them into your business and to make them feel welcome and to help increase retention to get people to not just stay in your business, but to keep on coming back as well. Because that's really where your business starts growing when you start building that back end of your business. And then if you want to really put things onto steroids, you build an army of promoters or evangelists for you as well. And this is where you start teaching them to use video as well as to start talking about your business. And that's where things can really start taking off. So there's a whole range of really amazing things that you can use video for. So yeah, it's like the silent salesman in a way. You know where they take. You can use video to take people by the hand and take them through the whole process of your business funnel. It's really powerful.

Lovely. I loved what you said about every aspect of the business, all the startups, business people listening to this or watching this. Go back, pause this video right now. Go back 120 seconds and listen to this again.

How Gideon has explained on how you can use videos at every stage of your business from getting known, getting leads to getting sales. I think you need to listen to this one minute, 20 seconds once again. And if you've already done that, they will move ahead. All right, Gideon, you said, what was that last part when you said that we are going to. That you actually teach other people to evangelize your stuff. How did that work?

Okay, so, so I guess what you could do there, depending on what kind of business you have. But this number of ways you can do that, one very easy way is to create videos for your clients that they can use to help promote your business. So I guess we could call that collateral or promotional collateral that you could create for them. So I guess you don't even have to educate them on video production or anything like that. You do the. You create the videos for them, maybe you add their brands or whatever to those videos and you customize it for them and you say, hey, here it is. Use this video to promote my business. And maybe you give them a kickback. You know, maybe it's. There's an affiliate relationship to give them some incentive to promote the business for you. See, that's. I mean, that's. As you know, you can spend that much time on it to sort of customize each video for each promoter or each evangelist for you as well, if you wanted to. Or perhaps you just reserve that customization for people that, you know are really influential for your target audience. You know, so you sort of, maybe if you don't have the resources to do everybody, you just do it for a select few where, you know, you can get the biggest bang for your buck, so to speak. But depending on your business model, like if you're in your. In your example, Avi, I mean, you're. You're teaching people about video, you know, it wouldn't take that much to teach them how to create a little promotional video that will allow your clients and customers to talk about your business to their clients. And maybe some of the things you can provide them. There are some branding elements. Maybe there's a logo, animation, maybe there's a cool call to action, a little video clip that they can add to their videos. And so they combine that with their own content and what you give them to create something that's really customized but also very personalized because it'll be them inside the videos and that way help them to get an even better conversion rate. So there's a whole bunch of different things you can do there. To be honest, I'm just sort of shooting off the cuff here. Some ideas.

Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. Just to sum it up, you can make promotional videos of your service and have your joint venture affiliate partners promote them because you made it for them to share with their audience. It makes it personal, and it allows them to bring back sales for you. How much effort does it take? Maybe half an hour or one hour of creating a video per partner, work on 10 partners, even if two of them start performing, you have two other businesses that are promoting your business. I love that. I just wanted to break it down for everybody to get a recap of all of that.

Just something that I've done in the past that works pretty well too is what you can do is you can actually interview some of your top affiliates or top joint venture partners or clients that could promote for you, perhaps very similar to what we're doing right now. And as part of the interview, you get them to talk about your business and, and give you a case study or a testimonial. And what you can do then is take that same video, maybe you process it a little bit afterwards, but take that same video and create a unique landing page for your affiliate partner or joint venture partner and add that video to their page with their unique link. So, for example, say I want to get you to promote splashio. Just. Let's just use that example. What I might do is I might create a link for you that's@splashio.com Avi. Right, Avi. And. But then on that page, instead of just having the normal sales page for Splash here, we say, okay, let's put a really cool video of me and Avi on there with Avi, or just Avi, where you're talking about Splash here and saying how great it is. But we pop it on top of the page so that when you send it to your audience with your unique affiliate link, they get there and they see you and they go, oh, yeah, we know Avi. Maybe some branding elements are on that page as well. But you're in the video there endorsing that business and that will just, It'll transfer that trust over to the new brand that you're promoting, which means your conversion rate is going to be so much higher. So that's a really powerful way of doing it as well.

Interesting. I love that idea. Very unique and love it. I'm definitely going to try it. I've got. I've got two more questions right now. Sure. How can the audience listening over here use splashio and how should they get in touch with you?

Sure thing.

So.

So with splashio, what? One of the cool things we do is we basically help you make your videos more engaging. That's one of the key things we do. But then the other part of it is we remove the production component for it completely for you. And because that's. Those are the two big pain points we found. We found that people, you know, submit their videos on social media and then they don't get a response, they don't get engagement. So that's one of the first things we do. We help add engagement, engagement elements. So we add things like a frame around your video where you can add your headline in it. We can add a video progress bar that helps with engagement. We transcribe your video and add the text as burnt in captions into your video so that no one can turn them off and that, that's shown to massively increase your conversion rate. Well, your engagement rates as well. I think I had some stats up here. Let me just get it here. So Uscreen had this test running where they got 15% more shares when they had captions. This is on social, social video. And that's 17% better reactions. And this is the big one, 26% more call to action click throughs just from using captions in the video. So that's just one of the elements we help add for you. Then there's things like adding a call to action at the end, maybe a logo, animation and branding elements. All of it is designed to help you get more engagement. And then the second big thing we do is we just take care of it all for you. So all you got to do is submit your video to our service and then our team of video editors and transcribers and admin folks will work on it like crazy and get it back to you within 24 hours. So yeah, so that's. Yeah, if you want to find out more about that, that's@splashio.com we do have a free trial at the moment. We can get your first four videos done 100% free. And you know, we don't add any watermarks, anything like that. We still produce them all manually as well. So there's a real cost to us. But yeah, you can, you can sign up for that trial whenever you want.

Excellent.

So guys, I'm going to link it up in the show notes in the description. Splashio.com offer to get four first four videos done for free. If you are intending to hire a company, an agency to you put out your phone, your cameras, do your videos and send it to somebody, they do the editing. And they not only do the editing, there are people who understand marketing to be able to say what elements go into which video to be able to get your results. So special.com guys, don't forget this is one free service that I'm going to take on to see how it works. And then I'd be, I'm sure I'd be leaving a great review on on any of the review sites after trying that off.

Great. Thank you so much. This is one quick thing I want to say. So we don't actually do. In video editing for you, there's some basic things we could do, like trimming out the start and the end, but we don't do fancy things like adding animations throughout the video or B rolls. We don't have that capability. But all of those other things I mentioned, that's definitely part of the service. So just keep that in mind. But what we found in general is for the kind of videos we're talking about, like that outer level that. That I mentioned at the beginning, these are just perfect for that. For those sort of videos, you don't actually want to do lots of editing for them because it defeats the purpose of building connection with your audience. Like, when it's overproduced, people lose that connection and they think, oh, this is a Hollywood production. They sit back and watch. Whereas if it's more of a production like this, they lean forward and they want to engage, which is really important for that sort of video. So I just wanted to point that out as well.

A hundred percent reality TV version of your life is what people want to see. So keep it as real as possible, and so get it. Okay, so, Gideon, now I'm coming to my last question. Now, the thing is that I've done hundreds of shows and this last question, A lot of people. It's a sensitive, personal question, and you can choose to say no if you don't want to. A lot of people have, you know, when I've asked this question in the past, many of our guests have felt. I mean, some people teared up and said, I'm not going to answer this, so if you want to ignore it, ignore it. So, okay, very.

I'm ready.

Who is your favorite superhero and why.

I'm tearing up here? Avi.

I knew it.

I told you.

Let me see. I think I would go for the Incredible Hulk, mainly because. No, see, I don't even know the name of the other one. The Iron Man. Iron Man. See how bad it is? So I didn't know.