Sydney :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

Video Marketing

I wish I had known a few years ago what I now know about using video to tell my business story on line and I wish I had taken action then. Not that it’s too late, just that now the world is starting to realise how powerful video marketing is I’m having to catch up fast!

It’s not that I hadn’t seen the statistics, like that there are over 92 billion videos viewed each month on YouTube and that some 80% of people who reach a website with a video on it will watch it and then, of those, about 50% will take some form of suggested action.

But for a combination of reasons I did not take action.

I guess I could sum up my “reasons” as:

too expensive
too technical
too time consuming
not a good investment of my time
something I’d would get around to later

In hindsight it’s probably more realistic to say “excuses” than “reasons”.

Eventually I got started, but I was still feeling a bit daunted about getting it all moving smoothly.

The Amazing Brossmans showed me the way

I started to be more determined about taking action once I became aware of how much success my friends Pam and Steve Brossman and their clients were achieving through using video to market their businesses, their products and services.

Then just last month, as part of the SheExperts course I was doing in Sydney with Pam Brossman, I had the benefit of a day working with Steve on video speaker training. This was a terrific day of experiential learning (the way I like to learn) – fun, invigorating and definitely empowering.

So of course I’m now keen to see others have the experience I had, plus the practical guidance on how to take action and get results in this fast moving field of video marketing.

Australian seminars coming up

For anyone in Australia, especially people on the east coast, there is an opportunity coming up to experience the fun and excellent learning you can expect from a day with this dynamic (and down to earth) duo, Pam and Steve.

They are holding a one day seminar in Sydney (May 21st) and another in Melbourne (May 14th, where they’ve told me they will be sharing such gems as:

How to use videos to attract more clients and get them to pay more money
How to create videos without your having to get in front of the camera

I love the fact that in their no nonsense way they can help you to, in their words, “make videos that get found, get watched and don’t break the bank”.

And if you are one of the many people who are nervous about getting in front of the camera they will help you with that too – painlessly, I can assure you from my own experience!

Des and I were at the Brisbane workshop, and it was content rich

Details for Sydney here

Details for Melbourne here

Anyone who has travelled around Australia at all by road will have noticed some Big Things: the Big Merino just out of Goulburn, the Big Guitar at country music capital Tamworth, the Big Prawn (or maybe Shrimp to you) at Ballina, the Big Banana at Coffs Harbour, the Big Pineapple near Nambour.

Big Lobster, South Australia

Perhaps even the Big Lobster at Kingston SE, South Australia (picture by sixty4coupe via Flickr, courtesy of a Creative Commons licence)

Name the Big Cable Competition

And now the Very Big Telco, Telstra, has announced a naming competition for a new “very big, state-of-the-art, fibre optic cable stretching across the ocean floor for 9,000 kilometres (5,600 miles or so) between Sydney and Hawai’i, which is connecting Australia with the U.S.

The new cable sounds pretty impressive:

17 millimetres wide and capable of carrying 1.28 Terabits* of traffic per second from Australia to the US – the equivalent of 160,000 simultaneous high definition television channels

This competition is apparently intended to stir some genuine creativity, with a nice prize to aim for.

There’s no prize for calling it the “Big Cable” but anything a bit more creative will be in the running to win a pre-paid mobile phone and a $100 pre-paid wireless broadband kit.

According to the press release, the new cable will provide much improved service for all Telstra customers, both retail and wholesale.

As an Australian not living in a big city, I hope there’s no fine print on that, along the lines of “…in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide …”.

Details of the competition are on Telstra’s Now We Are Talking site. Some will find the graphics cute, but I have to wonder what Telstra paid for the animated cartoon with the juxtaposition of a kangaroo with boxing gloves (yawn) and a Hawaian girl with ukelele (original) on the opposite shore.

As to my entry, I was thinking something like “The Big Kahuna” might not cut it, but after seeing that graphic, I’m not so sure. Maybe I should get it in before someone else does!

The competition is open to all Australian residents 18 years or older. For my US readers, sorry about that: but just so you know, I hate it when I get excited about a competition and then find I have to be a resident of the US or China or Kazakhstan or wherever – no, I haven’t seen any China or Kazakhstan competitions: it was a kind of feeble gesture in the hope of not singling out the US.

But couldn’t they have had some sort of a prize for our mates in Hawai’i at least? Strictly Limited Alohas for Telstra on that one, I suggest.