When I was a kids entertainer there was a maxim: If you can't get a laugh from a fart joke then you're just not trying. So imagine the belly laughs I got when I made coins come out of kids' ears, elbows, noses and finally their bums. I was dealing in joyous surprise every show I did until...

A boy, maybe six years old, stands and excitedly proclaims, 'please can you make more money. I've only got $2.60.'

The room exploded with laughter

from kids and adults. Of course, kids say the funniest things so I prompted a follow on... why do you want more money?

'Cause I've only got $2.60 and it's not enough to help my mum because she doesn't any money right now'.

I struggled the rest of the show as the mood of the room had changed. But I had also become a better, wiser performer. As was so often the case, the best insights, as well as the funniest lines all, came from the audience.

And it's no different with a video audience.

I post videos on different platforms and every month or so someone...

Here’s a quick quiz to start. One billion hours of Youtube are watched every

A: Year

B: Month

C: Week

Barp!!!!    It’s a trick question.

One billion hours of Youtube is watched every day.

So reports the Wall Street Journal. ^_*1 Welcome to the video age.

For you, the business owner, the business leader, the sole practitioner, the rising noisy chatter about video for business is just another inconvenience that threatens to suck away time and resources you don’t have.

But for your customer, video is a huge convenience.

Even if you allow big margins of statistical error, the rate customers are using their smartphone as part of the buying process- they like to research, get recommendations, shop around - is going up and their demand for this information to be presented as video is going up.

Why do customers prefer video?

It’s very simple. On a smartphone text is small and fingers are big, It’s too fiddly for us to use text. We are a global community...

How often do you button pushing and faffing around before the video starts? Do you send an email and leave all your typos and spelling errors in?

The most common online video we see on most platforms including Linkedin is confessional videos - that’s where you speak directly to the camera and tell the world what you think - 

and we primarily shoot these on our smartphones and for convenience

- our convenience -

they are often uploaded as a raw unedited video because hey, nobody cares. 

I have no metrics but I certainly think that as we go into 2020 that presenting your professional service in amateur packaging is not the best idea.

Handmade and homemade are not the same thing

Learning to trim edit takes about 30 seconds to learn and about 30 seconds to do.

How to Trim Edit

1. Record your video as usual.
2. Open up your picture/video library.
3. Select the video and tap EDIT.
4. Touch and drag one of the chevrons at either end and the video clip is highlighted in a coloured box,...

Why would I suggest you take your $500 video budget and give it away to a stranger on the street?

Let's pretend for a moment. You're a fashion retailer. You choose if you are a small owner-operator store in the suburbs or a big department store in town. If I gave you $500 - it's pretend remember - and said go make a video to generate more business, what would you do?

So if you had $500 to spend on making a video for your business, how would invest it?

You could spend it on equipment. Maybe get a microphone, a tripod, a light. Enough for a DIY business video.

You could spend it on editing apps - like Camtasia, my favourite video editing app for business. You'd get a bit of change out of $500.

You could go hands-off and hire a video crew for a few hours and get some sexy in-store video that you can add to production later.

Or you could grab your smartphone, turn on the video camera, start filming, walk out onto the footpath and choose a stranger and offer to give them the $500 to...

Do you need captions on your LinkedIn video? Yes.

Are they hard to do? Not any more.

To be clear, you will only need captions 

•  if you want want to reach the 5% of the market that is hard of hearing
  
  
•  if you want to reach the 80% of LinkedIn viewers who choose to not have sound on when watching
  
  
•  if you want your videos to benefit from better SEO

but apart from that, no you don't need them. So that is to say captions are very beneficial for you to add to your videos.

What are the options?

There are many ways for you to do this: desktop apps, phone apps, web based apps, free, expensive, human, AI

Here's a quick and efficient way because you don't want to be messing around with this stuff

Step one . 

Make your completed video. 

Step two. 

Upload it at temi.com

Artificial intelligence will transcribe your video for 10 cents a minute and it takes just a few minutes to complete.

You can then correct any words it thinks it didn’t understand,...

Use the handy guide below to remember how to frame your Linkedin and other social media videos.

It was all going along just fine. You picked up a camera and it was designed to sit comfortably on your hand and that fitted beautifully with TV screens and cinemas, then somebody stuck a camera in a phone … and phones are designed to be held in one hand....VERTICALLY.

It’s not a stretch to understand how a species that is addicted to convenience evolved to wanting to shoot vertical video.

So which should you shoot? Vertical, Horizontal or Square

RIGHT-CLICK on the image above and save to desktop or device

The horizontal crusaders proclaim that horizontal mimics the human field of vision. If you have two eyes, you are seeing the world in 16x9, widescreen, horizontally. Problem with that is we don’t look at the world much anymore, we seem to vicariously live life through our phones which are vertical.

Vertical is the future! So say the vertical crusaders...

Framing Matters. Why do I frame myself off to the side like this instead of in the centre of the frame?

Well of course there's the traditional rule of thirds. Divide your screen horizontally and vertically and where these imaginary lines intersect, place points of interest. It's pleasing to the eye. 

But I have another reason...

If my videos, where I'm speaking to the camera like this, if they are repurposed and ends up on a video hosting site like Youtube, then this happens, and you don't get a second chance to make a first impression.

So framing matters. Think about where your video will be published. It influences so many of initial decisions.

When I walk into a room to set up for an interview I'll tell you what I'm thinking.

I'm thinking
Where are the power outlets?
How many circuits are there?
Is furniture moveable?
Is there an air conditioning vent? Is it noisy?
Where are the windows?
Is it sunny, cloudy or sun/shade/sun/shade?
How long is the interview?
How long do I have to set up?
Will it get hot with the lights in here?
Is there a stylistic look I have to match?
Has the interviewee got small eyes, bulging eyes, deep-set eyes?
Do they seem agreeable? How will they react to light right in their eyes?

All these questions and more take me generally about ten seconds to assess. Only then do I even think about what lights I will use. The choice of video lighting is the last decision I make.

So many ’Getting Started With Video' Blogs hand out the advice, 'when starting with lighting you need to get the essentials: a key light, fill light and backlight and arrange them so you get a result that's pleasing to the eye. That's like...

What do you do when you are given the chance to try something that makes you a little uncomfortable? Jump at it is the only answer I have ever known. That's simply the way I ended up delivering a Get Video Smart education session to the Commonwealth of Independent States Speakers Association (CISSA).

I was in Brisbane Australia speaking via a translator to a room of professional speakers in Moscow about the universal issue of adopting video as a communication tool for our businesses.

Was I little apprehensive how this would go? Would a fifty-minute staccato presentation - thirty seconds of me speaking then twenty seconds of translation - work? Was I worried my content would bore them? Was I worried that I would speak too slowly and appear patronising? Yes, yes and yes. Were these fears founded in anything but my imagination? No.

The irony was the opposite was the case. The room expressed gratitude that I had shown respect by speaking slowly and clearly and enthusiastically. Some...

How can you use the humble binder clip to make better videos for your business? 

Sometimes the little things can make a big difference. The humble binder clip that's in your office draw can solve some video production problems you may have.

1. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Link the arms of the largest size binder clips and you have created a great tripod substitute for your smartphone. Depending on the model of your phone, you may need to use a pen of a spoon or fork to prise the gap a little wider to accommodate your phone's thickness.
   
   
2. Save valuable time. Improve your editing workflow by organising your cables.
   
   
3. Make it easier to read your video script. Fold a sheet of A4 paper in half to give it a bit of stiffness, write your dot points to speak about in your, clip the folded paper into the binder clip, flick the arms upwards and use the flat base of the binder clip as a stand to hold your paper in a vertical position.  Place on a stack of books to...