BFC #015 Content System for Social Video with Den Lennie

G', day guys. It's Dan Lenny here, host of the Business for Creatives podcast. Well, in fact, not for much longer because we are changing the name of the podcast. I've decided to call it the Video Business Accelerator podcast because we're actually being much, much more focused on video businesses. So if you're a creative business owner and you're listening to this, I'm sorry.

We'Re going to be doing a lot.

More focus on video, but the fact that everyone needs video, you might still.

Find this really useful. Today.

I'm talking about content now. In 2016, we created a web series called Bereal and we spent over $75,000 on that web series. And today we're going to talk about, you know, to you about was it worth it and what were the lessons and what do we get from that? It's so important to evaluate return on investment. Now in 2018, about August, we reworked our strategy around content and created created a system that allowed us to make much more content in a much more cost effective way. And that's a system we're now helping our clients with in the Video Business Accelerator program. So if you are looking for ways to create recurring revenue in your business and you want to understand how you can be making content for other businesses in a very efficient way, then today's episode is really going to benefit you. As always, I'm always keen to hear your feedback.

So.

So if you have comments, please leave them below. And if there's topics you'd like us.

To cover, then please do let us know in the comments.

Please make sure you subscribe and tell your friends. And we're going to be going weekly very soon in this podcast, so announcements will happen for that very, very soon. And as always, if you want to learn more about what we do, then you can check us out@videobusiness accelerator.com and in fact, today's episode is brought to you by the Video Business Accelerators. If you're looking grow and scale your.

Video business and you want to do.

It in a way that's not, you know, making crazy promises about making 50.

Or $80,000 a month, which frankly is.

Unrealistic, but actually you want to build your business in a meaningful way in a way that allows you to still have time with your family, then the Video Business Accelerator will certainly help you do that. So videobusinessaccelerator.com and here's today's episode.

You're listening to the Business for Creators podc where each week we uncover the secrets to balancing Creativity and business all in the one place with your host, me, Dan Lemmy.

Well, good day folks and welcome to this episode of the Business for Creatives podcast with me, your host, Dan Lemme. Now I'm going to continue this theme of doing some solo podcasts because we got some great response from the last one and I think what it enables us to do, or me to do is to kind of share some more specific insights to help you in your creative business around getting clients, keeping them, getting referrals, doing joint ventures. I'm going to be talking about a lot of those topics in the coming weeks and months and I want to keep coming back to them. I will still interview some cool guests and get their perspective on things, but I thought it would be really good to dig a bit deeper into some subjects. Now forgive me if you can hear a little fan if I'm really quiet or some squeaking birds. I'm actually up in Suffolk park in my mobile studio Stroke campervan on my way up to do a speaking gig in Brisbane. So what I decided to do was I had a gig called Systemology for Videographers with David Jennings, who's in one of our previous episodes of the podcast. Definitely check that one out. Dave is a systems expert and we held a one day event in Melbourne a few weeks ago where we had I think 10 filmmakers come along and we talked about how to systemize your video business so they can effectively work without you. And it was a really well received event. We had a great time. We did record it. So those recordings will be available at some point in the near future to buy. If you want to check them out or if you are already a member of the Creative Business Accelerator, they'll be going into your account. And if you're not a member of the Creative Business Accelerator then, and you want to find out more about it then just check out this link www.meetme.so denlenny and you can book a chat with me and we can have a chat about that program and let you know a bit more about it and see if it's something's going to work for you. It tends to be for businesses generating in excess of 150k a year, us looking to really scale and double and triple and quadruple their incomes. So it's not for everyone, it's probably not for you if you're a startup or a freelancer. But if you're looking to build a business then we've got some really cool stuff going on in there. But I wanted to come back to a question I got today from Duane Strauss, who's based up in Queensland. He left a comment about the podcast and I asked him what he'd like to see more of and he said the usual suspects around marketing yourself, generating leads, et cetera, but more so about video and content strategy, ensuring that clients get value out of your services. And given that content is such a big part of our strategy and something we spent a lot of money and time on, I thought it would be worth touching on that today to help you understand a bit about why we're doing that and what kind of results we're getting. So what I want to do today is talk for a little while about that. So if you've been following us for a while, you may have seen one of our daily videos. These are quite brightly colored thumbnails with, you know, topics like getting organized or how to get paid on time. And we've got Now, I think, 95 videos in circulation. We've just actually started recirculating the original ones. Now what we wanted to do was a basically a three month experiment to figure out, you know, how could we get content to work for us. Now we created content a couple of years ago. We did a series called Bereal, which was more of a docu series of four minute episodes. I think we did about 17 episodes. And it was at the time when I was doing a lot of speaking for Sony in Asia at YouTube pop up event. So I felt it provided a good backdrop for, I guess, people to get to know me a little bit and see what kind of work we were doing at the time. Now that whole experience, I hired someone full time to film with me and it was very much based on the Gary V. Approach of, you know, create good documentary content that documents you and your life. And I've got to tell you, you know, it was expensive. I think we probably spent about 70 or $80,000 in total Australian on that project.

Because I hired someone full time. They were a decent chunk of change. And plus we flew them various places in Asia, put up them in hotels. But what that enabled us to do was do this sort of documentary style series. Now that series, we also created a lot of what we called snapshots, which were one minute sort of, you know, bursts of advice. And we still got a fair number of them in circulation that we put out on Facebook and a little bit on YouTube. And, you know, that was our first foray into content. And I think there was a lot of big lessons from it because it didn't return for us the way we'd hoped just to be, you know, full disclosure. But I think with content, it's a long game strategy because a lot of my clients now have revealed to me that they were watching those videos a few years ago and have now approached to start working with us. Content is one of these things that it's very much a long game. You've got to be in it for the long game. So rather than be deterred, we decided to go down a content route again back in about October. But this time I wanted to find a way to create lots of content very quickly. And so we set up a studio and I pumped out about five videos a week. Now the system we use for that I'm going to talk a bit more about in this episode. But the objective was simply this was to do 30 a 90 day test, put out, you know, 90 to 100 videos over 90 to 100 days across all social media platforms and see what kind of results we got. So rather than think, because in marketing anything you think about is dangerous, you've got a test. So we put content out on our blog, we put it out on Google My business, we put it out on LinkedIn, we put it out on Instagram stories or Instagram TV, we put it out on LinkedIn and natively on Facebook. Now, before I talk about the results, I want to share a bit about how we managed to do this in quite a cost effective way. So we actually built a system and if you've been listening to me for a little while, you'll know that systems are one of those things that I was very hesitant about right in the beginning and now can't imagine running my business without them because it actually enables me to be more structured, more disciplined and enables me to have more time and available space to be creative. For example, I'm on this 28 day road trip now. I'm still running all my calls, running my business, but I have a full time assistant who runs the day to day for me. And so rather than just fly to Melbourne, pay for hotels, fly out again, I decided to take the van and drive down the thousand kilometers to Melbourne and then take a sort of slow drive for a week up towards Brisbane where I'm doing another speaking gig. And that's really aligned with my values, my mission for being free, to have time to enjoy, you know, camping and enjoying being in the great outdoors. And I find it so inspiring. I've been to some incredible places this week where I've just, you know, come across some Incredible wildlife or camped in very isolated spots. And that is a very creative process. And I've flown the drone a few times, taken some pictures and what I was finding running a business was I was losing touch with the creative side of what I was doing. I didn't, I was, there wasn't time. I was living in a city, I was commuting. So I decided to do this trial where I go, well, can I, can I live in the van for 28 days, still run the business effectively and do these speaking gigs? And that's what I've been doing. But in order for us to maintain the consistency with posting on social, I have John, who's my full time assistant, sort of my, we call him my executive assistant for a glamorous title. But John is my right hand man and he's a terrific guy. Been working with him for about six to eight months now. He's based in the Philippines and is very diligent. And I'll Let me talk about how to hire virtual assistants in another podcast episode. Might get Charlie back on to help with that because he's. It's his company that provides the service. But we created a system for posting videos Monday to Friday. And that system, if you're interested in having a look at it, you go to the website filmmakersbusinessacademy.com and just click on the blog.

You can opt in there and get a copy of this system.

Plus we'll let you know when new episodes come out. So this system is based on us using Loom, which is the screen recording software in the cloud. And the reason we use LOOM and not a desktop app is that when I finish recording, I can literally title it, copy and paste the link and put it into a Google sheet. And then John simply grabs that and starts the editing process. So for all you filmmakers listening, I don't edit any of this content. I don't post any of this content. I simply record the initial video. So I can probably record five videos in about 10 minutes, maybe 20 minutes at max for some thinking time. And that gives me all my content for the week. Now what we do first is we schedule in advance on YouTube and then that posts an automatic update to Twitter. We then schedule natively on Facebook in a square format with a square thumbnail. And then John on a daily basis shares that across other pages and groups that we own to get some reach. We take the transcript from YouTube and John tidies that up because it kind of comes out a bit messy and not always accurate. He tidies that up. It's probably the longest part of the process. And then he can pull from that the basis of a blog post that can then be written up with an embedded YouTube video onto the blog. And that helps with organic SEO search. Now, Instagram we've not been too consistent with. We've been posting on Instagram TV consistently and we've had a few people comment, and that's enabled us to have other guests lined up for the show. So it's been a value.

But again, native video, we found that not posting native videos to Instagram just been. Because you can't link directly from Instagram without going into the comments or the bio. So I just kind of. We've not found that Instagram is where our audience really is.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, we started doing LinkedIn articles, but we found that posts got greater reach and greater engagement. So we were writing a post like that we copied from the blog and then we'd embed the YouTube video and that would share to Twitter. But we just found that LinkedIn articles just didn't get the reach. And so we've just now natively uploaded a video a day to LinkedIn. And we've actually been very surprised by how much engagement we got on LinkedIn. And we look at our stats for YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. LinkedIn on certain topics is, you know, trumping Facebook and YouTube by a factor of four or five. We found that YouTube is doing very, very little for us. The content we're putting out on YouTube just isn't getting any response. So we need to look at that and consider a different strategy. And then we use Google My Business, which is a fabulously underused and underutilized service where you can register your business name. And basically when someone searches for your business name and ours is Filmmakers Business Academy, even if someone says Filmmakers Academy, we pop up and dominate half the page. So forget about trying to get to position one and two. Imagine you had half the page dedicated to promoting your business, or if you're on an iPad, the whole frame. So Google My Business is something that is very, very powerful. And again, we share this inside the Creative Business Accelerator. Exactly how to optimize it. Get reviews, stay top of mind, and tie this all into the content strategy. But this whole process takes John about two days. So when he gets the five recorded videos from me, it's. It's very formulaic. He edits them, he does all the thumbnails he formats for 16 by 9. Formats for 16 by 9 with burnout and subtitles. Formats that for square formats that for 9 by 16 for Instagram TV. So there's a number of different processes, but what that enables us to do is to have literally a piece of content a day going out across five different social media channels. And what's been interesting about that is some of the results we've got some of the stats. Now we have a big spreadsheet called Video Ideas 2018. That's when we started. And in that spreadsheet and I might do a screen grab of this up in the resources side or when I show you the download possibilities, the downloads for this.

The brain's just gone fried. The template we're using for publishing content. But basically we have a load of different topics around mindset systems and team marketing, business operations, sales productivity. And what we do is we post them on a different day, different videos and different channels and then we can track everything. But what's really interesting is John did a reviews tracker and this is where the content strategy really becomes into its own and this is where you can really sell it into clients. So we all know that social media needs a lot of content. So we talk again in the Creative Business Accelerator about how to set that up for clients, how to sell them into ongoing subscription based content creation so that they can spread the cost of content over the year, but with the added benefit to you that they sign up for a six or 12 month term. And so you get, you know, anywhere from two and a half to $5,000 a month or higher of recurring revenue. But the clients, you know, spending, you know, somewhere between 13, 60 grand over the year and getting, you know, 100 videos plus. So this is based on maybe, you know, four videos a week or 16 videos a month. We've got different, different sort of spreadsheets set up for that inside the Creative Business Accelerator to help people kind of, you know, kick that off and take some of the pain away. But what's really interesting is the videos you think are going to do well for your market are not the videos that end up doing well. So what we've got is a spreadsheet which obviously you can't see, but it's pretty involved and it has all the videos that I've done well organically and those are topics that we will then boost. Because Facebook is a pay to play platform. You know, they're all kind of pay to play where they'll only show your content to us, a limited number of your fans. But what I like to do is look at what happens organically and then put some spend behind the ones that organically, naturally are of interest. So we had one, for example, that was like becoming an authority in your niche, which had, you know, 284 views on Facebook, not a huge amount on its own.

We had another one here.

How much are you willing to spend to acquire a customer? And the topic was about how to buy clients, how you can't really get clients for free. You have to, you know, pay to put your message in front of them. And we had 214 views on Facebook. But on LinkedIn, the very same video had 505 views and six comments. So that tells me that that topic, buying clients, is a popular topic. Now. What was interesting on YouTube, only 38 views. So the reason that we post across multiple channels is to find out which channels are going to be most profitable, if you like, in terms of building relationships with potential clients. So for us, LinkedIn is something that we're going to be spending a lot more time focusing on. And the style of videos seems to work well on LinkedIn. What's really interesting is I did a video a couple of weeks ago and actually did a podcast about this as well, about an American production company that hadn't been paid for a music video and rather than, you know, follow up through regular channels, decided to make a kind of mock video that basically, you know, kind of mocked the rapper for not paying. And I did a podcast and that if you want to listen to that, it's worth listening to because I feel that they kind of got it really wrong.

But what's interesting about that is that they got a million and a half views on YouTube at the time. So maybe it was a kind of big scam. But I did a video on that, just a video in the van here on my iPhone, and we saw that getting considerably more views than anything that was properly shot and set up. So there's an interesting scenario that appears to happen, which is when you do a kind of down and dirty video, it appears to be more authentic and therefore people seem to be engaged with it more. So something that I recommend you test. But certainly we haven't. It hasn't been a waste creating all these videos because we've done them very cost effectively. And what you can do is potentially set up the same system. And if you want to come and work with us, we will give you all these systems so you can actually help you hire a virtual assistant and help train them because they can follow the system. But I digress. The purpose of this chat is to kind of give you an idea of how we're using the content. So we're putting all this content out. It's starting to kind of, I'm feeling like it's getting a response and we're seeing by the data because you know, there's kind of like us creatives going, oh well, it feels like we're getting some good responses, but then you've got to back up with the data. So what we're seeing now is that there's some certain video topics have done very well. So out of the 95 videos, I think that's 15 that have organically reached over 250 or 200 views. Now these are not huge views. We've only got about a thousand fans on our Facebook page. So we're actually getting to a lot of them. And the more your content gets shared and commented on, the more the Facebook algorithm we believe sort of shares it with more people. So it's a strategic approach. And what you can do to sell this to clients is say, well, if you've got a hundred questions that you get asked about your business, product or service, make a hundred videos that answers the hundred most common questions. And then you can start to see which ones are actually organically getting reach. And from there you can decide which ones are then going to become bigger topics. So our plan, our strategy is to take these 95 videos, pick the top 15 and then go and make 10 or 15 minute tutorial versions on a whiteboard or some other form, put them on YouTube and then share them and stick them on LinkedIn. Because what we believe is if those are topics that people are interested in, we will make more content around them. And that's the whole strategy around content. So the idea is that you make these.

Videos and you share them around. Now just a quick practical thing, how we run these projects with my assistant is I'll record the five videos, put them into a Google sheet, and then we use Asana project management software. I'm just using the free version of Asana and we set up a project that says, you know, hey, I've just created the next five videos. Please step one, go and review them. And then step two, follow the system we built for, for creating them. And then we use a piece of software called System Hub. And System Hub is the software we happen to use to run our systems. Now you can just use Google Docs or, you know, spreadsheets, perfectly fine. But the good thing about System Hub is if you, if you get System Hub through our link, we actually give you the system already pre done and so it helps you just to, you know, kind of smooth some of that, kind of figuring out maybe probably spent three or four months building the system. And so, you know, it's going to save you that time and money. And of course anything that saves you time and money is a good thing. So System Hub is a dedicated systemization software program. And the other thing that we also make sure you get when you, when you join System Hub is you get some pre done video specific systems. But I'll get Dave on again at some point. We'll talk a bit more in detail about System Hub. So the idea is that we create this system that gets followed the same way every time. And the advantage of that is when you're training someone new, there's no guesswork. They're not trying to figure out or how do I do this, how to do that, they're not asking you questions for five minutes. It's a very efficient way to get a lot of things done. And so yeah, we get that all popped up. It takes John about.

I think about two days to edit all five videos. And that's editing, subtitling, burning in the subtitles, doing the graphics and uploading them to the various channels. So you know, it's a pretty effective way to get content out every day. And that content then provides us with a lot of feedback because you, what you, what you notice is on LinkedIn especially is people start to comment and agree or they like to, you know, have a conversation or give them your opinion. And so what you can do is connect with those people and say, hey, listen, thanks for leaving your comment on this. Really good to connect. I hope we can, you know, be of help to you at some point. So that's the way you're building relationships and your social media builds trust, not sales. So using a content strategy should be about creating value first and enabling you to begin relationships with people in a way that it's kind of like dating. You know, you don't go on a first date and go, hey, you're really awesome, let's get married and buy a house. You spend some time, you know, delicately getting to know someone, figuring out if your values align and from there you start to kind of perhaps see if something can develop into something more. So I always say, you know, social media and building a business, getting clients on board is a bit like dating. You should take your time, not be too keen, deliver value first and, you know, make sure that there's a good fit before going forward. And that's really where I think the social media content creation comes in. But I think overall where we're seeing work really well inside the creative Business accelerators is bigger. Clients are seeing the value of paying a one off monthly fee to create lots of content. And some of that might be them shooting up themselves in house. Then you offer to do the editing. There are certainly enough clients out there who are interested in this who see it as a big player plus. And some of our clients are doing training days for clients on how to shoot their own content because they just want to shoot it in house. And it doesn't matter how much you try and sell them on the benefits of higher quality video, the fact is they just want to shoot their own video. So what I recommend is you go in and you train them because what will happen is they will, they will not, it's not as easy as it looks. And they'll get so far and they'll get stuck and one or two things will happen. They won't produce the content to the standard that they want, they won't produce it to the quantity they want, and there won't be the consistency that they want. So what you're going to find is they will end up coming back to you and saying, hey, can you kind of give us another training day or perhaps you can help us with the post production. And then what happens is once you're in as a provider of ongoing content, they will come back to you automatically when they want more done and they will want more done. They'll be like, hey, cool, we get some videos done on this. So, you know, it's really important to build that relationship and become a kind of trusted partner. Make it easy for them to buy from you and make it easy for them to kind of come back and work with you again. And that's really where our content strategy is coming to play. Yes, we're using it to build our own business, but our clients that we're working with inside the Creative Business accelerator are also using it to sell additional services into their clients. And it's a great conversation starter because they'll say, hey, I'm sorry I've not spoken to you in a while. We've been really busy working on some exciting new programs around delivering volume content for social at a kind of low monthly fixed fee. And I think it'd be really beneficial for you. I'd love to grab a coffee and tell you a bit more about it because I think you're the kind of client I think it'd be perfect for. How does that sound? I guarantee there'll be enough entry for people to say, hey, let's check this out. Let's figure out if this is going to work for us. And if not, you're back having a meeting with them and they'd be like, wait, we don't want to do that. But actually, you've got this other project over here. So it's a content strategy that wins on every level and it's based on consistency. So look, guys, you know, I hope that's been of some value to you. If you go over to the website filmmakersbusinessacademy.com and click on Podcast and Blog, you'll be able to download some notes from the show, including some templates for how we lay the content out. You just need to put your name and email in and we'll send them on to you. So thanks very much. And if you have any questions or any topics you'd like us to cover on the show, please do connect with me via the blog or via Facebook or Instagram and send a message. Say, hey, I'd love to hear you talk about X or Y, because I want to ramp this up to a weekly podcast as soon as I possibly can and the more topics I have that are relative to you. And thanks again to Duane for dropping the message on social on Instagram for this podcast. It helps me to make sure I'm giving you content that's of value to you. That's it, folks. I'll talk to you soon.

You've been listening to the Business for Creatives podcast with your host, me, Dan Lenny. If you're a creative business owner who is struggling to get your business performing at the level you want, then head on over to businessforcreativespodcast.com to take a free business evaluation survey and discover where you can plug the holes in your business. You can also access a range of free training to help you build your business faster. Also, don't forget to rate the show over on itunes so we can get the meta out there to more creatives who need to hear it. Thanks for listening.