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Dave Kaminski Interview – Create Powerful Videos That Drastically Improve Sales

Learn how to create Powerful Web Video that Captures your Audience and Converts Website Visitors into Sales, with Dave Kaminski’s Easy-To-Follow Video Creation Tips and Advice…

[podcast]https://www.blogtrepreneur.com/recording/DaveKaminski.mp3[/podcast]

This fantastic interview sees web video expert, Dave Kaminski deliver an endless list of resources for you to use to easily create web video and embed them onto your website or sales page. Learn how to create effective web video on a shoe-string budget, while managing to maintain a professional quality and message within your videos.

Dave has tips for the complete beginner right through to the expert – discussing such elements of video creation as lighting, appropriate video length, quality cheap cameras, the best microphone for web video, free screen capture software, editing videos using iMovie and other Windows alternatives and the best way to monetize your web videos.

From listening to this interview you will also discover the secrets to tackling your nerves when it comes to jumping in front of the camera. This is a very common reason why so many online marketers are not creating web video, but as Dave points out, these marketers are missing out on a huge amount of conversions and more importantly….SALES! Use Dave’s tips to slowly but surely overcome your fears and concerns about being on camera.

It was an absolute pleasure to interview Dave and I am certain you will come away from this interview knowing exactly how to start creating professional and powerful web videos to put on your website, blog or sales page.

I know you will manage to reap the true benefits of implementing Dave’s tips and I look forward to hearing about your progress (Let me know how you are getting on in the ‘comments’ section below this post).

If you like the sound of Dave Kaminski’s advice and would like to check him out a little further, head on over to his podcast blog by clicking here!.

I wish you all the best with your web video creation!

Luke Etheridge
“The Interview Guy” at Blogtrepreneur.com

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Dave Kaminski Interview (Audio Transcription)

Luke Etheridge: Hi, guys. Welcome to another great interviewers part of our interview series here at Blogtrepreneur. As you know, the overall intention of our interviews here are Blogtrepeneur is to increase your knowledge of Internet marketing and to give you the tips and tools which you need to start your own profitable online business. As well as those things, we also like to inspire and really fuel your desires of becoming an entrepreneur.

Clearly our main focus is Internet business. And a huge revolution in the last few years when it comes to creating websites and sales pages with high conversion rates is web video. If you every thought of using video on your websites or creating video tutorials as a way to grab your visitor’s attention then you’re going to love this interview.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce a true web video guru to Blogentrepreneur, a successful Internet marketer that has the ability to walk you through the ins and outs of web video creation from beginning to end ultimately allowing you to increase your sales options and over all conversions. This guy goes by the name of Dave Kaminski.

Welcome, Dave.

Dave Kaminski: Hello. Glad to be here.

Luke: First off, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell out readers and subscribers, if they haven’t every heard of you before, actually what you do online and how I’ve sort of come across you? What’s your website about?

Dave: Sure. What I do… The website, is webvidoeuniverstity.com. What I do is I teach people, people who are basically starting out with no knowledge with video. I teach them everything they need to know from A to Z on how to create videos, how to market videos, how to get traffic with videos, and how to get sales with web video.

Luke: Cool. I mean, web video has sort of had a bit of a boost in the last two years, would I be sort of correct in saying that?

Dave: Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s basically the fastest growing form of media in the history of the world.

Luke: Cool. Cool. Do you think it’s very important for somebody to start integrating video into their website? Do you think it makes a big difference?

Dave: Yeah, it can. Because video allows you to do some things that you can’t do with just the written word. The biggest thing it allows you to do is it allows you to be transparent. Which means anyone can go out on the web with just the written word and pretend to be whoever they want to be. However, when you are putting your face on video, people can see that you’re a real person, you’re the real deal. And as long as your transparent, as long as you pretend to be someone that you’re not, and you use web video to show who you are or what your business in about, it can be extremely effective.

Luke: So you think it’s probably quite fundamental to actually build trust using video.

Dave: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s one of the biggest benefits of video.

Luke: I’ve read some really great reviews actually about your web video course. This must obviously make you quite proud of what you’ve actually created. I believe it was created a little while ago now.

Dave: Yeah, three or four years ago now.

Luke: Yeah. When you actually first set out to create Web Video University, the actual course, did you ever think it would grow to be this popular and so well received?

Dave: It was one of those things where I had an idea that it might get real popular but I wasn’t sure. What I had been doing up to that point was making videos for other people. And I just had so many people ask me, ‘hey, how do you do this? how do you do that? how can I do what you’re doing?’ that I thought, ‘you know what? Why don’t I put something out there that teaches people what I know and what I do?’ And as soon as it released it kind of caught fire. And I haven’t looked back since.

Luke: I’ve been really enjoying the reviews and I’m sure you really get this all the time. But I find them really easy to understand and digest. I think all of the ones which I’ve watched so far have made me actually want to go out and buy the thing that you’ve been reviewing. Has that always been your kind of intention with your reviews on your website?

Dave: Yeah, one of the things with web video is you really have to get to the point. Because people have a very, very short attention span with web video. I think statistically most people are gone or stop watching web videos by the two-minute mark. So I try to keep everything within a two to three or maybe a four minute window. I just try to get to the point in my videos and just use, even if I’m explaining something technical, just use common language that everyone can understand, and it’s a format that, like you said, that people seem to enjoy.

Luke: Yeah. Just to let everybody know the actual specific section of your website we’re talking about is actually webvideouniversity.com/podcast. When you actually first started the course, what came first? Was the podcast first and then you did the course or did you do the course and then realize there was a demand for the podcast site?

Dave: What I did was I started out with a course, and what the podcast is designed to do is it’s basically a lead generation tool. With the video podcast, every week I put out videos that are completely free, and I share high quality relevant content. Like I said, it’s a lead generation tool because people find me through the podcast. They see the videos. They like them. They can understand. “Hey, this is a guy who knows what he’s talking about, ” and I can build trust with them, and then eventually a certain percentage of those people do sign up for my page training.

Luke: Yeah. That’s obviously a very clever idea. Is that how you actually manage to monetize you videos on your site, or is there another way? Is there a kind of commission structure to what you actually review?

Dave: As far as what I review on my videos, I very infrequently lie, actually promote something as an affiliate. Most of the videos are really just my honest opinion as to, “Hey, is this product good or bad?” People can tell you I am not using an affiliate link. I’m linking directly to the websites. So I think that builds some trust too.

But really kind of the whole idea of what I’m doing it with it is that people on the Internet these days they become consumers before they become customers. What that means is that they are going to consume your content first, and like I said, you’re going to build trust and show them that hey, you’re and expert in this. And, once they’ve consumed enough of your content, they’ll become customers.

This is basically my main marketing tool for what I use. Now, I do offer an affiliate program, as well, and affiliates do drive up a certain percentage of traffic. But, the majority of my business comes through this one video podcast site.

Luke: Yeah, so I believe it’s probably like anything really. When you’re going to go and buy something, say someone lands on webvideouniversity.com., they would then want to find out who this Dave Kaminski guy is, see if he’s the real deal, then they would sort of search you on say Google, for example.

And then, obviously, if they come across one of your review videos, you’re hoping they get a good enough impression with such great free content that they want to, obviously, sign up.

Dave: Right, right. And, hopefully, they’re going to join my mailing list, too. And, all I really do with my mailing list is tell them every week when I release a new video.

Luke: So, do you actually monetize your mailing list? So, is there a kind of technique of using video to actually monetize a mailing list or even build a mailing list? Is it a good idea to build a mailing list using video?

Dave: Well, you absolutely need a mailing list no matter what you’re doing because you need a way to contact people. As far a video and a mailing list go, the thing is you can’t actually send a video through email because all the email clients are going to block videos because of virus potentials and all that.

So really, as far as video and emails go, I’m using regular text email. I’m sending an email that everyone uses, it’s just that the carrot at the end of the stick, so to speak, in my emails is hey, watch this video. So, when I send out an email about a new video I’ve put out, I usually use some teaser copy, hey, what’s the best microphone to use? Well, I found this one, it’s dirt cheap, click here to get the rest of the story.

So, I use video more as the carrot at the end of the stick.

Luke: Yeah, yeah. So, you don’t actually directly sell to your list, so you don’t sort of go in for the kill straight away. You go for the kind of technique where they would actually stumble across your video from the…so that there’s sort of a process where they would click on the link in your email and then find the video. And then, hopefully, either buy through an affiliate link, if there is one, or just enjoy the video and then go and purchase the course.

Dave: Yeah, that’s exactly my approach. I generally never hard sell through email at all. And the reason I don’t do that is that along the journey, along the way, I found out that, you know what, you can have a really small mailing list and as long as you’re feeding that list quality content, if you do tell them to buy something, a lot of them will buy versus someone who might have a huge mailing list and every week they’re just sending out affiliate pictures, or whatever.

They actually get a lower response rate, or make less money than the guy with the real small mailing list. So, I don’t worry about size of the mailing list. I just worry about, every time I email those people that they’re getting some type of quality content, and I’m not just giving them a sales pitch.

Luke: So in that sense, it really is true that content is king and that quality is better than quantity. So, the quality of your list sort of wins.

Dave: Yes. It goes along the lines of building a business instead of a money maker. Where there’s value to your list, when people get your emails… I get emails from people all the time saying, “Hey, you know what? I get 50 emails a day, and yours is the only one that I open because I know you’re going to give me something good, and you’re not going to try and sell me anything.”

But like I said, on the rare occasion when you do try to sell something, they respond very well. And again, the idea is that they consumed so much content that they are going to come back and buy your stuff voluntarily anyway.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah. So, the idea is to sort of build this kind of real following almost, not just a list where they know that your emails are just going to be rubbish. You actually want to build this sort of following where they’re actually more likely to look forward to your emails.

Dave: Exactly. Exactly.

Luke: So, I mean, for the complete newbie blogger, or somebody who’s just starting out with Internet marketing; what tools can you recommend that won’t cost you too much money? I’m sure you get these kind of questions all the time, but tools that can create smart solid videos that are just of enough quality to insert into your website or your squeeze pages. What kind of camera, microphone, screen capture software, or editing software can you recommend to anyone?

Dave: Sure. Basically with video cameras what people need to understand is that you’re absolutely going to get what you pay for. So if you buy a two-hundred-dollar camera, don’t expect to get broadcast quality [laughs] footage out of it. But cameras have gotten so good and they’re so cheap these days that you can actually have really nice-looking videos with inexpensive cameras.

On the bottom end of cameras, we’ve got the flip-style cameras. There’s various makers. There’s Flip and Creative and Kodak, and what I would recommend for people in that price range is they go with a Kodak Zi8 or a Kodak Playtouch. And the reason I recommend those cameras instead of something like a flip camera in the Flip brand is because the Kodak cameras come with an external microphone jack.

One of the things you run into with video is audio, and actually audio is a very important part of video because statistically people will watch a video longer that has good audio versus a video that has bad audio.

So with one of the Kodak cameras with the external microphone jack, what it will allow you do is it will allow you to plug in a microphone that you can attach to your shirt. That way you’re not using the camera’s built-in mike, and you’ll get much better audio. So that’s the advantage with the Kodak cameras.

If you want to spend a little bit more money and you want to go into the traditional video cameras, which we all know what a camcorder looks like, what I recommend to people is they stick with anything in the Canon Vixia line. I believe outside of North America they’re called Canon Legria’s I believe.

But anything in the Vixia or Legria line can cost you anywhere from $400 up to $1400. But whatever camera you get, it’s going to be really good.

Now as far as audio goes if you want to plug a microphone into your camera, if you’re going to go with a wireless system, those cost $700, $800 – which is probably going to be out of most people’s price ranges.

What you can do is, you can have a wired mic, where the mic is going to plug into your camera. The other end is going to attach to your shirt and you will get real audio. And what a microphone you’d want to look for is the Audio-Technica. I believe it is the ATR35.

Luke: OK.

Dave: And that might actually be an old model. But if you got out to like Amazon and just type that in, it will come up with maybe the most recent model of that mic. It will cost you around $25 to $30.

Luke: Yeah. Great resources. I mean, thanks for that. Is there any kind of specific screen capture software if you going to, say, do some tutorials online? Is there anything that you personally use to actually do the screen capture part of the video?

Dave: Yeah. [coughs] Excuse me. For, Windows users, I recommend they use Camtasia, which is available from Techsmith.com. Camtasia is basically the gold standard as far as screen recording goes on the Windows side of things. Now, on the Mac side of things, Camtasia does have a Mac version. However, I don’t recommend people use it, because it’s not nearly as good as they’re Windows versions.

On the Mac side of things, I recommend people use a product called ScreenFlow. And it runs around, I think, $80. It’s an absolutely fantastic product that you can use to create screen recordings and you can even mix in live video with it as well.

Luke: So you think it’s really worth that $80?

Dave: Absolutely. I use… Whenever I’m on a Mac, and I’m doing anything screen related, I use ScreenFlow.

Luke: So can you actually edit your movies with that? Or do you use a separate software along side that just to edit things and cut and paste parts of videos and all of that kind of things – put intros and things like that?

Dave: Well, technically, you can edit video within both Camtasia and ScreenFlow. But I don’t really recommend it, because those programs are screen capture or screen recording software. They’re not video editing software, which is a different animal.

So if you’re on the Windows side of things, and you’re looking video editing software, I recommend Sony Vegas. And if you’re on the Mac side of things, you can obviously use iMovie, which comes free with the Mac. But if you want a little more flexibility, I recommend you use Final Cut Express.

And the reason I recommend Final Cut and Sony Vegas is that each of these offer upgrade pass. Meaning, you can start with inexpensive versions, you can learn the software, and then when you kind of hit the ceiling and you want to do more things, then you can upgrade to more expensive versions of the software. And when you do upgrade, you don’t have to relearn the entire inter-phase again.

The software looks and works exactly the same. It’s just that there’s more stuff that you can do. And basically with these two titles, Vegas and Final Cut, they are the only ones that allow you do this. With other tittles, either, you need to spend a lot of money to get started, or they’re going to have… or there’s going to be titles that are real cheap, but once you hit your limit, there’s nothing you can upgrade to.

Luke: Yeah. That’s sounds perfect. I mean, you did mention iMovie just then. I mean, what’s your opinion on iMovie? Is it good enough to do decent amount of video editing?

Dave: Yes. iMovie is going to give you the basics. It’s one of those weird things. I’m not sure what Apple’s doing, because they’re really focused on the mobile devices. But basically, about every year, they update iMovie. And, unfortunately, they haven’t updated Final Cut in several years – at least not enhancements that are major.

So it’s one of those things where maybe iMovie is almost catching up in some regards to Final Cut. And you can’t do as many things as you can do in Final Cut as you can in iMovie. But the current version of iMovie, someone can go out with video from their camera and they can do just about everything they want to do.

Now, if you’re a professional who makes videos for your living, iMovie is probably not going to cut it for you. But for the person starting out, iMovie is fine.

Luke: OK. I mean, is there is a point where you can go a little bit too far with video editing and inserting graphics into your videos? What kind of advice can you give to someone who’s sort of never done it before? What would you point to? What would you say to avoid and what you say that you must include in a decent video?

Dave: Well, the biggest thing is what we’ve already touched on: which is going to be the quality of the content. Unfortunately, one of the things people like to do once they start with videos is they like to start adding all the fancy graphics, or they like to do green screen like the weather person TV, where they put a green behind him and replace the background.

And unless you have really high quality tools, that green screen, it’ going to look fake and people are going to know it. It’s not going to look convincing. So basically, just keep things genuine and real and keep things simple. Give them quality content and be very conscious of how long your video is. Remember about that two minute mark. Most people are going to leave. So you want to make sure everything is real synced and get to the point.

Luke: Yeah, I’ve noticed actually about your website. The reason I probably like the most is because you don’t have to sit through a lot of rambling about something that’s irrelevant. Everything you touch on is very irrelevant.

And you do this kind of… I think on the one I was watching, I believe you were reviewing a Kodak flip style kind of camera, the one that you mentioned earlier, where you were sort of cutting from different scenery and places and lighting and all that kind of thing. But it was done very, very quickly…

Dave: Right.

Luke: …which obviously made it very, very easy to watch. And it would obviously make me want to return. I do think that if it was a bit longer and you’re sort of speech was a bit slower, I probably wouldn’t have been so engaged.

Dave: Exactly.

Luke: Do you think that’s quite fundamental? Do you think that’s quite fundamental to your success of your podcast website?

Dave: Yeah. I think everyone ultimately has their own personal style when it comes to their videos. And that happens to be my style. A lot of people will do duplicate or replicate it, because it is successful: keep things moving, keep it to the point, tell them what they need to know and do it in a way that’s maybe a little bit entertaining.

Brain Clark over at Copyblogger.com calls it Infotainment, where you’re sharing information, but you’re still making it a little bit entertaining as well.

Luke: Yeah. I think it’s quite important to have a kind of… almost a little bit of humor in there to keep people interested. Do you think that’s important, or do you think there’s a time and a place for that kind of humor?

Dave: I think it all depends on the person’s personality. Humor can be very effective. It can also be something that you want to avoid if you’re not…

Luke: …kind of bit annoying. [pause] Hello?

Dave: You still got me?

Luke: Yeah. Sorry. I thought I lost you there. [laughs] Just a little bit off topic – a little bit. Have you had any experience with promoting websites for business with YouTube? I mean, what are you’re thoughts on YouTube? Obviously, it’s just absolutely massive and it’s grown to be so huge over the last few years. What are your actual thoughts on YouTube? Do you use it much?

Dave: I personally do not use YouTube. I do know people who use YouTube exclusively and they’ve had a great success. The reason that I personally don’t use YouTube is I choose to self host my videos, which means I have total control over my videos. I’m paying for people to watch. I’m paying for the bandwidth. I’m controlling everything.

With YouTube, what you have to remember is, you don’t own that video once you uploaded it to YouTube. YouTube essentially owns it. You can actually delete your video and YouTube still has the right to use that video however they want.

Obviously, most times they’re not going to do that. But it’s just one of the things… With my business model, where my videos are driving most of my traffic, it’s something that I want total control. But, like I said, there are people who will go out there and they will set up YouTube channels. They’ll pick a niche topic and they’ll actually use YouTube to grown their business.

And the way that happen is obviously when people go to YouTube. They’re on YouTube site to watch the videos; they’re not on your site. So you need to place a link so people can go to it. And basically what the successful people using YouTube will do, is they will, again, use some type of carrot and stick to get people off of YouTube on to their own sites.

Say for example, they’ll have a channel on YouTube and they’ll have their videos up on YouTube. Within each video I’ll say, hey, I have a free report or some other type of offer. You can get it over at this domain dot com.

That’s how they redirect the traffic, so to speak, from YouTube to their own site. Once people are on their own site, then the first thing they’ll do is capture their email address.

Luke: Yes, did you think it’s quite hard to sort of rely on someone to actually click on just a link in the info box?

Dave: Yeah, just imagine this, if you go out to YouTube and you’re watching a video. If you’re really interested in what the person’s talking about in the video and they have a link, you might click on it. You might not. If there’s some type of carrot and stick out there, I think you’ll definitely get more clicks that way.

Luke: So, if you were going to go into promoting your business or your website, you think you’d be sort of better off starting a blog that focuses on posting its own videos out there so you haven’t got to bother with YouTube?

Dave: Yeah, that’s personally what I teach. There’s multiple ways to skin a cat, so to speak. What I personally teach and recommend is, that people have as much control over their videos as they possibly can.

You remember again, if you’re putting videos in your own blog, when traffic comes to your site, you can monetize that traffic wherever you want. When your videos are on YouTube, and someone’s going to YouTube to watch your videos, you have really limited ways of what you can do with that traffic. It’s YouTube’s traffic, it’s not yours.

Luke: Yeah, yeah. I’ve even heard it’s a very important point to make about YouTube actually owning the video. Because, I have heard of many people actually losing like their back catalog of videos.

I don’t know how that’s happened exactly and I don’t know whether anyone has any rights when that sort of comes into play. But, I think just to avoid that, it would be better to follow your model.

At least that way, you’ve got a side bar there where they can click on your links. Go to other parts of your website, or even sign-up to your list for your newsletter.

Dave: Exactly, exactly.

Luke: So I mean, going again off track a little bit, I want to talk a bit about product creation. I mean you’ve obviously created a quite successful product. I’ve actually read a review about Web Video University on [indecipherable 24:31] . Obviously this is a very, very good place to get a review. When it actually comes to actually creating a product like this, it must have been quite time consuming. Did it all have to be very well planned so that you could provide the most value to your customers as possible? Did you actually make a conscious effort to create something which succeeds purely on the content that’s behind the course?

Dave: Yes, my philosophy basically when using video to create products is, you know, it’s a pretty simple one: Give people more than what they pay for.

Luke: Yes.

Dave: You know, I’ve purchased info products, and I’m sure you have too, and some of them, they just leave you so disappointed, and I just wanted to make sure that if people consume my products that at the end of it they’re like, “Wow, I got an awful lot, ” instead of “Nah, that wasn’t so good.” So basically from the get go, as far as my courses, the idea behind them is, “Hey, I’m going to give them more than they paid for.” But the whole idea with video-based products in general, at least for me, is that with was video product, it has a perceived value or a perceived worth that’s higher than maybe just a written type product, and at least for me personally, video products are a lot faster to create.

Let’s say, for example, you’re going to create an info product on something and you’re going to write some time of report or an e-book, you know it might take you 30, 45, maybe 60 days to write the thing, where with a video-based product you can usually knock these products out (depending on what they are) sometimes in as little as one weekend, and one example I give is a dog trainer that I know, and they wanted to put out an info package on dog training, written.

And I said, “Why don’t we just do video?” and ended up where I work with them. And we actually recorded all the videos on Saturday, put the website, the other, on a Sunday, and on Monday they were literally making money from the product. And you just can’t do that with the written word.

Luke: That’s fascinating. Obviously, you would sort of recommend this technique of creating products and making video courses?

Dave: Yeah. I think one of the strongest areas with video is in the educational or the ‘how to?” market. So if you’re in some type market, where you can create a product teaching people how to do stuff and you can you do it video, I think you would be surprised that how quickly you can actually create your product and how well it will be received.

Luke: Yeah. I mean, do you ever find that when you recommend doing video to people like this, like a regular dog trainer, are they sometimes a bit too shy or reluctant to actually get behind the camera? What kind of advise would you give to someone who goes through that kind of thoughts in their mind? How would you sort of give them the encouragement to pluck up the courage to actually create a video and get behind the camera?

Dave: Yeah. A lot of people are going to be camera shy. And I like to tell you there’s a magic bullet, and the only way around it is through experience: experience of being in front of the camera. Because there’s kind of weird thing of… you’re talking to someone face to face, then it’s no big deal.

But, when you sit in front of camera and you’ve got this dark lens looking at you and you’ve got no human feedback, then people… their eyes get big and they start to stutter and they’re not natural. So really, it’s just a matter of experience. Get in front of the camera and do that.

And the other thing is: remember that you don’t have to be perfect on camera. With video, we have this magic thing called editing, where we can cut out of the mistakes. If you look at a… If you go to the theater to watch a movie and the movie might be 90 minutes long, well, the fact is, they shot probably several 100 hours worth of video and they cut out all the junk they didn’t need to give you that little 90 minute film.

And when you’re shooting your videos, approach it the same way. If you screw up, don’t get upset, just do another take. You’ve mentioned my podcast videos several times throughout this. I never get those in one take. What you see on the screen is the edited version of maybe 20 minutes worth of footage that I edited down to two minutes. So even the professional, we make mistakes all the time.

Luke: Great point to make. I mean, how would you advise someone to actually start if they’re having those kind of thoughts? How would advise them to start? Maybe do some audio or some screen capture tutorials, so they’re not actually behind the camera physically and it’s just their voice first of all.

Dave: Yeah. Screen capture video is going to be the easiest for people. It’s going to have the smallest learning curve, and obviously the intimidation factor is not there. So what you can do is using PowerPoint or Keynote on a Mac or any other type of presentation tool you can put together, some slides, and then simply record the screen and do your voice-over.

Do a little editing and maybe you will put a free YouTube account and just upload the video. You can mark the video as private so no one can see it. And you can just kind of do that to gain some experience and get past the initial learning curve and get over the jitters. And then, once you’re comfortable with screen capture, definitely dive in with the live camera stuff.

The biggest thing I want to impart on people is that you absolutely have to take some type of action. If you’re just going to sit there and think about it, nothing is going to happen. I know numerous people who have become wildly successful with web video when they had zero experience. They became successful simply by sitting in front of the camera, making mistakes and learning as they go.

Luke: Yeah. I mean, practice makes perfect, like anything. Yeah, I think that’s a brilliant point to make. Lastly, just moving on to my last question. This is kind of a question that I make it kind of a theme, to ask pretty much all of our guests, most of them. But it’s not a very nice question, in the way that it takes you back to sort of working a regular job, if ever you did. Like a nine to 5.

If you actually lost everything that you’ve got so far and that you’ve managed to build. So your whole business and your products and your subscriber list, your following, your reputation and your contacts. How would you actually sort of redo everything, so that you are on the right path to success? How would you, would you do anything differently at all?

Dave: Well, I’ve done a million things wrong on the way. So the advantage would be that I’d know what to avoid.

What I would do, personally, is I would make sure that I had a video camera, any video camera. And I had screen recording software like Camtasia or ScreenFlow for the Mac.

And what I would do is I would pick an area or a niche that I know would do well with how to type videos. And I would basically install, I would get a domain on host data or some other cheap web hosting account, you know, for four or five dollars a month.

I would put a word press blog up and I would start doing videos. And then the next thing that I’d do is I might go ahead and upload those videos to You Tube, as well, so I basically have duplicate copies. One set of videos on my site and identical videos up on You Tube.

And then, at that point, I would see the response was, you know, what type of natural traffic am I getting. And if I’m getting some response from those how to videos, I would then turn around and create a product for I’d niche.

And then the final thing that I would do which is what I pretty much do with every product that I launch. I would research who the, you know, what websites are getting the top traffic for that niche. And I would send a personal email or maybe even a letter to the owners of those websites, asking them if they would promote my stuff.

Luke: So do you think that’s quite fundamental, that last bit. Do you think you’d advise most people to sort of contact everybody in their niche, on their niche, as you would say?

Dave: Yeah.

Luke: To actually get on board with the product.

Dave: Yeah. I think it is very fundamental and I don’t think a whole lot of people do it. I’m not exactly sure why.

As far as my site Webvid University, that was launched doing exactly what I described here. And you had mentioned my post on Pro blogger with Darren Rowse.

Me and Darren know each other simply because whatever it was three or four years ago. I sent him an email saying, hey. I’m coming out with this course, you know. Would you like to promote it?

And, you know, he was, he played a big part in launching my website. And it all started simply because I went through, I created a list of about a hundred websites that I knew had traffic that would be relevant to what I was doing. And I contacted these people.

With Darren it was by email. Some people within the United States I actually sent them a letter via Fed Ex.

And it’s what I did to launch it. You’ve got to contact the people, these people. They already have the traffic. And they can launch things for you very, very quickly. As long as you have a quality product and they know you’re not some fly by night guy.

Luke: Yeah, Yeah. Again, content is always going to be king, in that sense. Because if your sending these guys letters and your actual videos or websites that you’re sending them to aren’t of a high quality and teaching really, really good information then, they’re not going to want to promote it.

Dave: Right.

Luke: Well, and thank you so much anyway, for being our guest today Dave.

I’ve personally learned a lot, because I’ve never actually made that step of getting behind the camera. And I’m actually looking to do it here on Blogtrepenuer very, very soon with my interviews. But so far we’ve actually only just been doing audios.

So, I was excited to actually interview you, because I knew you were going to some sort of tips and some resources for me to go, go out and get behind a camera. And I’m sure you’ve had that kind of effect on our readers and listeners.

So thanks for that Dave.

Dave: It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Luke: Good to speak to you Dave and wish you all the success in the future with whatever you’ve got planned. Have you got any plans at all?

Dave: Not at the moment. I’m just, you know, keep doing what I do.

Luke: Cool. Well I’ll see you later buddy.

Dave: All right thanks Luke…

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