Video Marketing - Yes or No? - Ask Evan

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my forum readers, GT, who's asking about video marketing, video blogs. He's expressed some frustration in watching long videos that don't share any useful information and don't have any text underneath the video to be able to kind of know what it's about. He hasn't jumped on board the video marketing bandwagon yet. He's not convinced that it could work for his business and wanted my thoughts on it. So, GT, maybe I'll be able to convince you with this video. We'll see what happens. First of all, when I include videos, these short #AskEvan videos, I always below include some text just to say what it's about and what the question was. You can kind of gauge if you want to read it or not, or watch it or not. And then for my longer videos, the Famous Entrepreneur Profiles, I'll include a full transcript to allow people to be able to kind of get the points quickly if they want, or they can sit and watch the entire video. They have to be kind of entertaining and have lots of useful information if you want people to watch that, you know, 9-10 minute videos as well. Why I got into video? I think it depends on your style. I can answer a question a lot faster through the video than to write up the text, and people are a lot more forgiving if I make a mistake or the words don't come out perfectly on video. It's a lot more forgiving because you can kind of see me one-on-one, than when I'm writing, you kind of have to have the a perfect answer, well-written when you're creating blog content. So that's one reason. But the other reasons why I created it, one, I wanted to build a better connection with my audience. So a lot of people are writing in asking questions and I always answered them, but it's great to be able to see me. So when I first started my site, I didn't even have my picture anywhere on it. It was kind of just showing the profiles of famous entrepreneurs and we've evolved that as people wanted to learn more about me. But it's a great way to be able to connect with the audience on a big scale. People can watch the videos, they feel like they know me, kind of get to see the face. A lot of people also visual learners, they like to see the person behind it and relate well to videos. So that's one reason why I do it. For answering questions, I used to just answer everybody by email. So they write in with a question, I answer by email, and that's great for them, but it doesn't help the whole kind of entrepreneur community. So I created these videos to be able to help everybody. So It's great for me that I can leverage the answer once and reach a lot of people, and it's also great for entrepreneurs, who are my customers, I guess, to be able to get that knowledge and useful advice. I'm helping many people instead of just helping one person. And then the third reason why I really like using it is it comes up in Google searches. So YouTube is obviously owned by Google. Google loves video, and for important keywords You can often rank much easier with a Google video through YouTube than you can with content. So it's a great way to connect with people, it's a great way to get them to know you better, build a better connection with your audience. It's a great way to reach more people than just helping people one by one, and it's also a great way to show up in search engines and drive more traffic. So, GT, I don't know if I convinced you. Hopefully you're thinking a little bit more. There are some struggles with video. It takes a a long time to kind of get used to standing in front of a camera and, you know, kind of coming up with what you're gonna say and being comfortable there. And you might have to invest in some gear to make it worthwhile. For me, I always— I started it very simply. I used my little camera. I didn't go out and buy any expensive equipment, any lighting, any backdrops, anything until I knew I was committed to it. I didn't want to spend a whole lot of money till I knew I wanted to kind of stick with it. So my first videos might be really bad. If you go back and look at some of the older videos, they're not great. But people still like them and leave comments and they enjoy them, so that's good. But don't make a huge investment until you know you're kind of committed to it. But I encourage you to try it out and see what the reaction is of your audience, and you just might get hooked. So I hope you guys enjoyed, GT. I hope that was useful for you as well. If you guys did, please give it a thumbs up, please leave a comment. I love hearing from you. It helps me make more of these videos. Every time I see one of your comments or thumbs up, I get motivated to create more of these videos, so thank you for that. And hopefully I'll see you on the next episode.