How To Succeed With Video Marketing with Gideon Shalwick in PDF

Guest Intro

Welcome back to another episode of Teach Traffic. I’m your host Ilana Wechsler. And in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking all about video. And if you’ve had any experience with using video to promote your business, it’s an incredibly powerful tool. Now, I’m not an expert in video, although I do now do quite a bit of video.

So I’ve invited a guest called Gideon Shalwick, who has been in the video marketing space for a really long time. And we’ll delve into his background a little bit as well to talk about really the elements of a good video, the pitfalls that you should avoid making. Yeah, so you don’t have a bad video and really about what’s working right now in the video marketing space.

So definitely want to stick around for this episode will make show notes available at teachtraffic.com at the podcast section of our website, and let’s get stuck in today’s show.

Ilana:

Welcome to today’s episode of Teach Traffic. I’m really excited about this episode because I have a special guest called Gideon Shalwick have I pronounce that correctly?

Gideon Shalwick:

Yeah, sure you did! Thank you. (laughs)

Ilana:

Yeah, no worries and I’m super excited to have you here because you may or may not know, but I’ve actually known about you for a really long time and I’ve watched you over probably the last decade.

Well, that’s kind of when I first started online and you’ve always been in video, I guess you’ve stuck to your guns in that respect to double downing on video, so I really came to connect with you, number one, and number two, talk to you about the video.

And importantly, what’s working right now in video. And as we approach you know, 2020, which is pretty crazy. So, and also about your business, which we’re going to talk about, as well. So before we kind of get stuck into all these elements, do you want to maybe give us a little bit of a background about who you are as a person I know we all have crazy journeys.

I certainly stumbled into this industry. That wasn’t part of my life plan but you know, such happens so I’m always fascinated by people’s journeys so you want to maybe just give a brief overview about you and your journey.

Gideon Shalwick:

Yeah sure. The rags to riches story right? Now wasn’t, I was never in rags, I’m all good. But yeah, basically about 14, 15 years ago, I still had my last job that I had. And I felt that I needed to change it. And you know, we were still in New Zealand at the time.

And I remember telling my wife, I said, Look, I don’t want to work for someone else anymore. I want to start my own business. So let’s apply for jobs in Australia, and then we can immigrate to Australia and then you know, start a whole new life there, you know, that would be our ticket.

So I started applying for jobs. And three months later, I had a record zero responses from people from Australia, saying that they want to do for me which was very encouraging for me to become an entrepreneur and Exactly.

So I told my wife, look maybe you should start applying for jobs. Basically within a week she got three job offers, accepted one a month later, we landed in Australia, I was jobless. She had a job. She, you know, she was working and paying the bills while I was setting up the business and really just mucking around trying to figure out what this business thing is.

And so, one of my first products was a book that I wrote an Ebook, sold it online, did well for the first two weeks and then ran out of traffic didn’t know what the heck I was doing. started interviewing people. I happen to interview people on video, this is back in 2009, 2007 runabout there. When video wasn’t the thing yet.

And so then I learned the value of not trying not to be the Pioneer or you know, it’s not always a good thing being the Pioneer because it’s really hard working. You got to clear the forest.

And oftentimes you’re the guy or girl with the arrows in your back. So but Nonetheless, that’s how I cut my teeth and the whole video game and learned from it. But still it took me another two years after I launch my first product or so before I had some real success.

I teamed up with a friend of mine, Yarrow Stark, who might actually met through that interview series. And we did a project together called Become A Blogger. We launched that in 2008 ran about there. And this thing just went crazy in comparison to what I was making like I was making around about negative $1,000 at the time.

Ilana:

I love your honesty.

Gideon Shalwick:

And so when we launched together it was so interesting because there was a six month lead up to it where we we published 10 free videos on another site wasn’t even YouTube. It was like a site called blip TV. So this is how far back it goes.

Right? YouTube wasn’t even a thing yet or at least usually was around but the quality was so terrible. We decided to go with blip.tv. Anyway blip sent us a lot of you know Attention right at the beginning we had, like, if I remember right, it was running about 300,000 downloads of those 10 episodes before we launched and so by the time we launched, people already knew about us, and within two weeks of launching, we had about 10,000 people join our email database.

And within a month, we had monthly income of about $23,000 roughly about there which was you know, kind of life changing compared to negative thousand dollars a year. Yeah, well, that you know, we live comfortably I mean, we say that, you know, this kind of rags but in a way it was compared to what we had because I had a proper job and we were living well.

And then when we immigrated, we had nothing like we literally came with our mattress and my computer and our clothes. And during those first two and a half years, there was really not much money coming in other than my wife’s money. Most of that went to the rent and food basically. So we didn’t go out. We didn’t buy clothes.

We did have a car. I mean if you say this in a third world country, they’ll just laugh at you and say you’re still living like a king right? But so it wasn’t it wasn’t really a big deal but it was a big change what we had and then, we did the, “Become A Blogger,” project but you know, just in terms of the ups and downs that was really, really tough two years because the first beginning stages for me as an entrepreneur wasn’t so rosy as I was you know, a few times we were looking at each other, me & my wife and going you know, what is…what are we doing, you know, we were thrown away our careers at least mine and and this is not really working out, you know, maybe we should go back or you know, maybe I should try and get a job again, but of course, no one wanted to employ me so I had to make it work.

And you know, since then I’ve just done project after project all within the video space, that a project and the magic niche I teamed up with a local magician, JJ and I did the video marketing. He did the magic Jake, we launched it on YouTube. Eventually, that became the number one YouTube channel channel on youtube for free magic tricks.

I was only with that business for the first year. And then JJ ran it after that. Then I launched a program called, “Rapid Video Blogging,” 2010 and teaching people about what I’ve learned about video and video marketing and using that to grow your business. And that was really my last launch then our first daughter was born.

And I realized I have got to make a change, building these businesses that are built on my brand, you know, and based on my brand, basically, and the success was so dependent on just me, I realized that I needed to do something else. So I started building brands, that’s when I created the original Splasheo worked on it for about a year and then got distracted with another software company called Veeroll did that for about four or five years.

And then just earlier this year, but a year ago, I left that company and back onto Splasheo radio So it’s pleasure now it’s all about capturing people’s videos and turning it into a social media friendly format ready to publish and ready for you to impact the world with your amazing message.

What Type of Video Content Works

Ilana:

Yeah, wow, that’s quite a journey. Yeah. And I’m sure you have seen massive progression from when you started with video to now can we maybe sort of dive in a little bit on I guess, you know, you would have an amazing exposure to a wide range of type of videos over the years and also what’s working right now.

So do you mind want to touch on the kinds of videos that you see working now be it the format the face to camera, kind of, I guess that the elements of a really good and engaging video because I know first-hand, having a good video, it’s worth its weight in gold.

I mean, and you keep using that video over and over again. But there is an art and a science to it as well. So I’m not going to, I’m not a video expert, which is why I’ve got you on today’s show. So I’m going to maybe touch on some of the kinds of the elements of a good video.

Gideon Shalwick:

Sure, well I guess it goes without saying, before I dig into it that you know, video is just such an amazing medium for building connection, there’s nothing really better online at the moment for building a really strong connection with your, with your prospects, right and your clients.

So that’s why I love it so much, because it’s almost as good as being there in person. So, if you can get to the point where you can create a video where it almost feels like you know, your audience feels like you’re in the room talking to them. I mean, that’s kind of what you’re aiming for here. Since it’s not so much going for the sale, although that obviously can work well it really well too.

But we all know that people do business with other people they like, know and trust right? And so video is a fantastic, fantastic vehicle for that. Now in terms of the…you know what works well..

It really depends, these days, very much on the platform that you’re operating on. For example, on YouTube, you know, longer videos seem to be doing much better now. And in the back in the day, it was like if your video was over 30 seconds or a minute that’s too long to be able to make it go viral. But then YouTube changed, of course, a few years back and started rewarding watch time and session time.

So people started creating more valuable content, and the video started getting longer. So now, from what I hear, understand, it’s around about 12 to 15 minutes is a good length video. And so when your video is longer, obviously you got to think a bit more about what, how do you make that engaging and how do you get it?

How do you create it in such a way that people will want to watch the whole thing and arrive through as well? If you’re in a place like Facebook, total different ball game again, because Facebook is you know, it’s a very, it’s much faster paced sort of thing. It’s maybe a lot more. I don’t know. You know, it’s a- I don’t want to use negative words here too much.

They certainly didn’t. kind of conversation on Facebook, than say on, YouTube. But on Facebook, maybe it’s a bit more snappy, you know, that sort of thing and shorter in general. But it depends again on what strategy you want to use on that platform.

So for example, if you’re, if you just want to get the views and obviously want to go shorter, if you want to build engagement, and you want to build remarketing list, if you want to combine it with an advertising strategy, longer videos can work really well. So for example, you’ve got a like a 10 minute long video, and you’re running ads to that video and you’re building a remarketing list based on the views of that video.

If you can build a list based on people who watched 80 to 90% of that video, you know, that’s going to be a very, very valuable list of people that you can then run other ads to so again, it depends a bit on the strategy there but also the platform then applies like LinkedIn for example is it’s so exciting for me it’s a very, very exciting platform for me because the video game and the feed thing is still very new. I think video is only and maybe two years ago that much.

And I just saw earlier today that I think it’s only 1% of people who are on LinkedIn at the moment are publishing content regularly, which spells massive opportunity in terms of growth. So it’s an exciting platform. It’s still very, very new and young. And it’s still going to grow in many aspects in terms of features and stuff like that.

But in terms of getting engagement there, I’ve seen nothing else better. It’s incredible. So there, you want to have shorter videos, again, you like two minutes max. I mean, you can have longer ones, again, depending on how engaged your audience. But shorter videos in general seem to do better there. Because again, you’ve got you’re dealing with a scroll and a feed thing.

So and people are busy, you know, and you’ve got to, you don’t have all that much time to engage people and get them to watch your content. So yeah, it depends a bit on the platform as to how you treat it in terms of the length of content, the kind of content and also the different kinds of strategies that you want to have. So it’s no longer just a one size of stuff. It’s all you’ve really got to design your content, your video content specifically for the platform.

Ilana:

I heard a statistic and you know, we all know statistics lie, and I definitely don’t have the source of the statistic but that the average watch time of a video on Facebook is two to three minutes. But on YouTube, it’s 40 minutes, which is, I guess, you know, in line and consistent with what you’re saying. What are your views on on Instagram? I mean, do you think it’s the same as Facebook in terms of watch time or from what you’ve seen? or?

Gideon Shalwick:

Yeah, so okay, so this is probably a difference is two things to notice this watch time and then there’s session time right? So the watch time is how long people watch your particular video for.

And then session time is basically how long people stay on the platform as a result of watching your video or just in general. So depends a bit on how that’s defined. So on Instagram, up until recently, the videos right Like one minute long right?

So the longest watch time you could have was one minute but then you know they’ve introduced it TV which now allows you to have much longer videos much, much longer videos. And so which means you can have you no longer watch in session time then as well I suppose. I’m not an expert on on Instagram or IPTV but I have seen Sydney’s a lot of our users jump on that a lot more now.

Especially with the we call it the portrait format and getting it optimized for it TV in particular. So because you know, the first minute still previews as if it’s Instagram video on Instagram, and then people can click through and watch the longer video.

So I don’t I’m not familiar with the stats at the moment in terms of what what the watch time and session times are on Instagram, but, you know, I would say something like IG TV would definitely have improved quite a bit.

Elements of a Good Video

Ilana

Yeah. Can we sort of go a bit deeper into the elements of a good video, be it you know, face to camera versus You know, text on a screen just you know, perhaps the audio that’s turned into a video I guess if you could break like always storyboarding, you know, like, Are there certain, you know, is the first 10 seconds crucial to hook people in like kind of those kind of elements? Is there a bit of an art and a science to those element?

Gideon Shalwick:

Absolutely! And again, it comes down to which platform you’re optimizing this for. So in general, so let’s see if we could exclude YouTube now from this part of the discussion. In general for all the other platforms. There’s the scrolling effect and people watching content on silent play on YouTube is not as much of an issue because, from what I understand is people actually, they don’t go there to watch it on silent they go there for the experience into they actually want the sound on so oftentimes, you know, people would, you know, maybe they’re scrolling their home feed, but then they’ll actually click on it and watch it.

Whereas with with most of the other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even Twitter to some degree. on those platforms, people watch it on site and they watch the video content on silent. I think Facebook had a stat recently Actually, I don’t think it’s definitely Facebook had a stat on this recently 85% of people watch the video content on silent mode

Ilana:

Now 85% that’s huge!

Gideon Shalwick:

Yeah, it’s huge, right? And it makes sense. I mean, I watch most of my content on Facebook on silent as well. And purely because of the scrolling effect that you know, in the feed like this, there’s always something new and I want to press play all the time.

I want to quickly see on silent play, whether I actually want to engage with this content or not. So you’ve got a very short time frame to grab people’s attention on these auto plays auto silent play platforms, let’s let’s go on that.

So insane for Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. You know, it’s this talk about those, those three big ones. And so you’ve got to do something to get people in. And so the best way we found so far is essentially with captions, captioning your videos so that people can read your videos instead of watching them but then also wrapping it in.

I mean, what we just call an engaging format, where you basically have something like a headline, a visual headline that people can see above the video, then your video content in the captions down below, so the headline is designed to stop people in their tracks when they when they’re scrolling, and to, to make them to qualify them and to make them ask themselves the question whether they actually want to watch that video or not, you know, with a headline, you can achieve that within two or three seconds, then with the captions that’s designed to draw people in and engage them even more, because then they can if they’ve been sort of sold on the headline and the topic of the video, when they start reading the captions, you know, maybe they’ll read that for another 30 seconds or maybe they’ll they’ll read that for the whole video.

They might never actually play on it because through the captions, you can consume all the content or the main content, I guess you could say, because you can read the whole thing. And that way, when you do that you can massively increase engagement, we are regularly seeing people getting Well, I wonder, I want to be careful here with how I phrase this but because we have some people coming to us and saying they’re getting like a three times increase in views and engagement on their videos, when they start using our service.

And our service, all we basically do is we take a video, and basically, we transcribe it manually burn the captions into a video so people can turn it off. And then also allow you to add your own headline in your own branding and this sort of stuff so that when you publish it on social media, people can immediately you know, get it get attracted to it and then get engaged as well.

And just doing that, not changing the content at all gives them that sort of improvement, which is incredible. So and oftentimes some of these videos hardly have any editing in them to start off with anyway, it’s just basically talking head video of someone talking about a certain topic, and then it’s just well captioned and well framed. And that makes all the difference.

Other Elements that Makes a Video Stand out

Ilana:

Interesting. Okay, so we’ve got shorter style videos, captions with the headline, and face to camera. Are there any other elements you think? Or is it just as simple as that?

Gideon Shalwick:

No, this there’s lots of things you can do, the core idea or the core thing to get right is your message, basically your content, right? So if you’ve got the wrong kind of content, that doesn’t appeal to your to your audience, then it doesn’t matter all that much what you’re going to do to help, you know, get more views and get more engagement right there.

Just, you know, you’ve got to make it exciting and interesting for your target audience. So and that very much comes down to the topic that you’re that you’re talking about on your video.

So make sure you get that right and for you to be able to get that right, so you got to really understand your audience. You got to know what it is that they want to know what it is, what they want to consume, how they want to consume it, and how they want to interact with you.

And you might not figure this out on day one, you might only figure this out on day 60 or whatever you know as you create more content so it’s an attractive process.

Ilana:

Is it the kind of thing that you would almost call out your target audience from the outset or call it like, mentioned the topic straight-away, rather than rambling on just sort of pre-qualifying people from from the outset?

Gideon Shalwick:

You can do that with your headline as well you know, just with your headline you can immediately do that call out the right audience and on it and the topic with the videos about you know and that can often do that in just three seconds.

But then you can also do it within the video as well. I mean, what’s popular these days is to actually be popular for a long time, but basically, you know, people like Gary Vee is making it a bit more popular.

But when you take a content like a long-form content piece, but then have snippets out of that longer form, content piece and then within the snippet, you know, that’s what you publish this snippet on social media and in this sort of format, but then you take a little piece out from the middle or somewhere within the video and move it up to the front which has been called the hook.

And it’s often a little piece that may be controversial or that the core message now that you bring out right to the front only a few seconds, and then it moves into the rest of the content. So….

Ilana:

Like a preview?

Gideon Shalwick:

Like a preview absolutely. Kind of like in school this iconic affecting where you open up loops. bloomers organic was a Russian psychologist in the 1800s.

And she figured out if he introduced suspense in your in it, or she figured out if she introduced suspense in our lessons, then his students would would pay more attention, right? So movie makers, TV series, producers, they’ve all been using this where they open up loops right at the beginning, throughout the episode, but then also the end where they have cliffhangers. Right?

So there’s open loops all the time and in closing them, you know, throughout the video or the episode or the next video or episode, so it’s a lot you can do with that to engage your audience. So, let’s just take it back. So starting off with with with grabbing people’s attention right at the beginning, opening up some kind of a loop either by pulling in that hook in from somewhere in the video to the beginning, or just starting your video with a question or with something that intrigues people and make them go.

This is interesting I want to keep watching and oftentimes, probably most often it’s going to be by opening a loop some kind of a loop that you only closed later on in the video. A lot of people then use something like a little logo: Sting, you know, after they’ve got the hook, just for a bit of branding for those you gotta keep it really short like half a second, you know, as long enough almost, you know, three seconds is almost too long these days. Five seconds is definitely too long for at the front of your video, so you want to have it you know, nice and short and snappy.

Now let me take a look at what Gary Vee does or Korean right here in Australia, he does that as well as like a quick little blue you know thingy with a logo and and then the rest of the content continue and then, there’s the meat of your content. And this is different ways of structuring that depending on how you create it.

And then you basically, oftentimes in with, with some sort of a call to action. With the strategy we normally use, we don’t really have a call to action, because it’s more about building the relationship and building the audience. And then you do your call to action at a later stage when they’re deeper down the funnel.

So oftentimes, we might just have the content and the call to action might be something as simple as, “hey, do you like this? Share this with someone else or leave a comment?” There’s no specific call to action to get a lead magnet or anything like that. It’s really just designed to build a relationship and build an audience.

“Hygiene Factors” of a Video

Ilana:

Okay, cool. Yeah. So you gotta say something else?

Gideon Shalwick:

Well, there’s a lot more, I’m not sure you have to tell me where to start. But I mean, there’s this things like, you know, hygiene factors for your video, for example, where there are things that people notice if it’s not there.

So for example, if you don’t have the right kind of lighting in your video, people notice it and that video looks a bit pixelated or something. Or if your background is messy, people notice it right, it’s lacking missing a clean background, or a very important one, probably the most important one is audio if you don’t have good audio, people notice it.

And you don’t want people to notice stuff too much, you know, that kind of stuff? It’s almost like, you know, walking into a house and the house is really messy. You know like, you notice it, you notice the dust on the house on the ceiling on the vertical that the rail.

Ilana:

Really I don’t have children. (laughs)

Gideon Shalwick:

Get someone without children walking into the house. You know, they fall over the implements and I go to this place is a mess. And you don’t generally notice a clean house as much unless it’s your own house.

Right and you had to clean it yourself. But yeah, but you know, it’s what they’re called hygiene factors. So There’s certain few things you gotta get right.

Another one is, for example, that the framing just if you’re, for example, too low in the video or too high or your part of your head is cut off, or you fall to the side or something, you know, that’s also something that people will notice and in a bad way, and that can distract from the quality of the video.

Best Ways to Start and Get Traction with a Video

Ilana:

I mean, as you’re talking about all these things that you can do wrong, I can imagine, you know, these are the objections that people go on in their head of why they don’t do video because it’s like, oh, the lighting is not right.

I didn’t, you know, they get all the elements, right. So, for the people of the world who are not really doing much video and I think it’s probably more people than we think that people who want to do it and just for whatever reason, or mental hurdles, they can’t get over. What would you say in order?

What’s the best way for those kinds of people? Just to get started, you know, like, in terms of equipment, I mean, I know we’re all got basically the most amazing cameras in our pockets these days and it’s never been easier to get started with video. So what are some of the best ways that you think people can get started and get some traction with video?

Gideon Shalwick:

Yeah, absolutely. Well the first thing to realize is that we all have a fear of being rejected at some point by someone. It’s not a unique thing.

So if you if you have any kind of fear about being on camera and being seen and and possibly getting, you know, ridiculed or whatever else, it’s pretty normal. You know, just just get over it.

Yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s easiest just to get over it and to realize that you are your worst, your own worst critic, no one else really gives a damn.

They all just give a damn about themselves and how they look at themselves, they don’t really care about what you look like. And in general, people are quite forgiving, you know, in terms of what the video quality might look like or the audit quality/

Certain Apps that are Good to use as Starting Point

Ilana:

But are there certain apps that you think are really good starting point for people to use more, also, I know you. And we’re going to get into now let’s say we with your service business that you do the whole post production element of it.

So maybe we can sort of talk a little bit about, you know, I guess, you know, people send you a raw file is it as simple as that? And then that’s all they need to do in terms of getting, you know, the output kind of social media ready?

Gideon Shalwick:

Correct. Let me give an example. And this is someone who is an experienced business person and you think that if they wanted to, they could have upped their game with the video production side, right? So his name is John Lee Dumas. Some of you might know, John.

So he’s one of our users for Splasheo Oh, so what he does is he records on his phone. I’m pretty sure it’s an iPhone, a little one minute video clips, and I don’t think he even uses a fancy Just uses the normal phone camera app that comes through the phone, records them and then gets them onto his computer I’m guessing, and then, you know into Dropbox and then he sends us a Dropbox link basically submits as part of our submission for me since you just submit a Dropbox link.

And that’s that’s all that he does. He doesn’t even edit and do any editing on his phone like you know he doesn’t even take out any front bits or back bits. He doesn’t have any trimming he just literally gives us the will file and and then we you know we take it from there.

So we don’t do proper video editing in a traditional sense, but you know on purpose because we find that actually quite distracting for when people reading the captions, they don’t want to see lots of movement too much in the video.

They want to just read the captions. So these talking head kind of videos where it’s basically just you on camera, kind of like we are now they can work really, really well and it can be as really as simple as that.

I mean, John, he publishes a video every single day. Wow, he’s got a video every single day on Instagram and on all these social media platforms. It’s just incredible. And you know, just looking at that I’m going you know if… you know he used that on purpose he keeps it simple on purpose otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do it every day and he’s building significant traction on that on especially on his Instagram page if you want to go there, you can check out the videos we’ve made for him and the sort of views and comments that he’s getting from that from his daily videos.

So the message here is that is just to keep it simple. I mean, he’s literally using his phone and that’s it, you know, I don’t even know if he’s using a fancy microphone to go with it because he’s close enough to the phone to record good audio.

Ilana:

Actually that’s kind of where I’m going with this question. You know, in terms of getting started like the camera app that comes inbuilt with your iPhone, if you’ve got an iPhone sufficient and is that microphone that comes without, you know, do you need a special microphone? But I guess you’re saying No, you don’t.

Gideon Shalwick:

You don’t really know like it depends a bit on the environment we’re recording if you’re in a like in a room or an office where there’s no other background noises, then you’re probably going to be fine with just the microphone on your phone.

Depends probably a bit on your phone too. But these days, all the new phones have great microphones so you can be you know, if you’re just relatively close to it still, you know that it’ll pick up on the sound just fine.

There are other things you can get for example, I want to show you this one. So this is a video microphone and just plug straight into your, into your phone, your iPhone, and it’s a little really cool that a little

Ilana:

It’s a USB or whatever,

Gideon Shalwick:

Yeah, it’s got an iPhone connector. That’s right. So that’s right into your phone and you’re ready to go and it just improves the quality of the audio a little bit. This other sort of microphone you can get for, you know, with a lapel mic that that also can go into your phone, even wireless ones around.

From rode microphones as well, this there’s a whole bunch but I mean that the key thing is to not let anything hold you back for getting your message out there, especially at the beginning and because you just want to get the messages out there so that you could start seeing what what people respond to and then learn from it.

I mean, if you’re starting out with this, that the most important thing is becoming comfortable with yourself being on camera. And that’s probably the most important lesson that you learn for your first few videos. It’s not going to be about building an audience, or even learning about what your audience truly wants. It’s going to be about you becoming comfortable with being on camera.

Another really cool shortcut if you don’t like the camera idea is to basically with me and you are doing here right now. I mean, we’ve got a Skype conversation. It’s getting recorded. We’re just having a chat. There’s no you know, there’s no script or anything funny like that.

And we’re able to have an intelligent conversation and talk about useful topics right that that can then be used for, for little video clips afterwards, it was the whole thing’s recorded. I mean, I told you before the school I’m recording it, so that afterwards, we could chop it up into small little bits.

And then we publish that to our social media channel. So it can be as easy as that. And I mean, either Skype or zoom. It can be really easy to create this content without too much trouble.

About His Business Splasheo

Ilana:

Yeah, right. Interesting. So let’s talk a little bit about your business Splasheo, which as you said, is the service to make these videos. But what I’m interested in is, and I hope it’s okay with you.

And please feel free to say no, is just to pull back the curtain a little bit to how you’ve built that business and your traffic strategy because this podcast we talk all about traffic and traffic generating strategies, and I’m sure you will be using video to promote your Yeah, so I guess maybe you can touch on certain traffic strategies that have worked well to grow your business because I’m sure if it’s growing your business, then it could probably inspire and help other people in obviously a different business. But there it is.

Gideon Shalwick:

For sure, you know, I’ve been added now for 14 years all up as an entrepreneur and have started many different businesses over that time and/or business ideas put it that way. I’ve had a few companies that I’ve started up as well throughout throughout the years.

And I can honestly say that I don’t think there is a holy grail for no one answer for anything when it comes to traffic. And even to this day was last year now this is still a bunch of trial and error that happens for us to find out what are the best methods for us to promote.

But one thing I will say and I think this transcends any traffic generation strategy for any business, and that is, if you don’t have the right product at the right time for the right people. It doesn’t matter what traffic generation strategy you use. I’ve got it.

You got to have something that people actually want at that specific big time. If you look at the number one reason why start-ups fail, the number one reason is because start-ups create products that nobody wants. Yep, and so if you layer on a traffic generation strategy on top of a product that nobody wants, then it’s just not going to work and you’re gonna, you’re going to get totally frustrated.

And Splasheo. Oh, to me is a really good example of that. Because with some previous businesses I’ve had, they weren’t as well aligned with having the right product at the right time for the right people, right? And so we would have to really go out and search for these traffic strategies to help us grow, and it’d be awfully frustrating. Whereas with Splasheo Oh, it’s been really interesting, certainly in the first quarter of this year with which we just started, you know, trading basically end of last year, so it’s only been, it’s only been about a year now.

But really, what well, for this new version of the business, we write the previous version of Splasheo. It was started Six, seven years ago, but I live on the back burner while I was working on Veeroll I didn’t touch it for like four or five years. So and this foot so what you see now as a total pivot, you know, we are interested in pivoted the business.

Yeah. So we essentially started from scratch in a way, it’s like a start-up. So we basically started about a year ago, and our first quarter, most of it was organic, word-of-mouth sort of growth. We didn’t do any ads or anything like that this there was a lot of, you know, some, I guess some influences used us a little bit and maybe talked about it, but certainly that the majority of our sales came from word-of-mouth, quarter to we started experimenting with ads a little bit.

And that, that definitely brought us a lot of sales, Facebook ads in particular. And then quarter three, we started a bit more of a content generation strategy mainly on LinkedIn. And that remains to be seen whether well, we’re not tracking it as well on LinkedIn because it’s you know, it’s a different kind of a game they’re probably should do a better job with that, but I suspect that that eventually will bring us more traffic and sales as well.

But it’s been very simple to be honest, it’s been extremely simple. It’s been word of mouth, but a Facebook ads traffic and then I mean, the organic stuff through LinkedIn, and not much else.

So, but I think part of the key to our success so far, has been, because we have a product that people actually want. And they want to, you know, now it’s not like we don’t have to educate them about it.

We don’t have to educate them about the use of captions or getting it into the right format of social media, they already want it. And we’re just saying, you know, the demand already exists and we just redirecting that demand on our product and service.

Ilana:

And I would imagine an influencer like Gary Vee, for example, who is such a prolific content creator and does the captions as well would almost be a brand ambassador for you to some degree, you know, in terms of creating that desire or hang on a minute.

I’m watching him correctly. content like this, I want to do that, how can I simply and easily find a way to pump out content? You know? Maybe one day you can think,

Gideon Shalwick:

Well, he’s not one of our users, not just yet, but it would be great. Would it be great to have Gary on border or you know, other folks like Kerwin because obviously they’ll they’ll help spread the word a lot faster.

But you know, there’s many different options around this you know, this the software options around that like dedicated software that’s specifically designed for creating video captions then there’s you know, more advanced software we do a few things together like Adobe bring a year or you know, after article after effects and can’t remember the the apple one anyway, a Final Cut, right?

But they’re a bit more advanced, you can do more fancy stuff. And then there’s the other option of just getting someone else to do it for you. And so that’s why splashes since we saying okay, we get that you can probably figure it out to do it yourself or your software, but we’re saying, hey, did us just do it for you save you a ton of time.

And then, you know, you can spend your time on being awesome and, and creating the content as opposed to, you know, getting stuck with it editing or trying to figure out the caption. So, you know, we for people who don’t want to do it themselves and appreciate the value of their time.

Learn More About Gideon Shalwick

Ilana:

Yeah, fair enough. I caught well, I mean, I think we’ve covered some really critical elements in today’s episode. So thank you so much for coming on.

And where is the best place where people can find out more about you? And I believe you’ve got a special offer for listeners of this show as well.

Gideon Shalwick:

Yeah, sure. I think if people want to connect with me happy to connect with you on LinkedIn, just senior a request a connection request on there, and they just remind me that you watch this episode so that I know who you are, and happy to connect and have a chat. LinkedIn at the moment it’s I think it’s for me, it’s the number one number one social media platform in terms of..

Ilana:

I’m enjoying it too actually.

Gideon Shalwick:

And then, yes, we have a very special little page that we’ve put together, where you can get your first four videos done for free. And so just keep in mind this is we don’t have, it’s not software that you sign up for. It’s, you know, it’s all done manually.

We’ve got four people working every video that comes through the system, the first person transcribes it, the second person reviews the transcription.

Third person does the video editing puts it all together. fourth person does a final review, and if it’s ready, they send it out to the customer, the client, so it’s all done manually.

You get your first four videos done manually. Well, for the first four videos done for free, and you can grab that at Splasheo.com/TeachTraffic.

So Splasheo is just Splasheo.com/TeachTraffic.

Ilana:

Awesome. Too easy. Well Thank you so much. I’ve certainly picked up a few tidbits of what I’m going to do for my videos. I thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure connecting with you. And thank you so much for your time.

Gideon Shalwick:

You’re very welcome. And thank you for your time any opportunity, really appreciate it. No worries.