Chapter 7
How to Make Millions of Dollars Using Presentation Skills on YouTube and Podcasting Websites
“Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.”
—Walter Benjamin
Okay, so you’ve designed a great presentation with five really important and well-vetted bullet points, and you’ve practiced delivering the presentation a couple of times to ensure you have a killer delivery. Once you deliver the presentation for the intended audience, though, the value of the presentation is over. Wouldn’t it be great if you could share this information with thousands of audiences versus a single audience, build your credibility immensely, and add a new revenue stream that becomes what wealthy people used to call “mailbox money,” where the revenue comes every week or month without you ever doing anything else? Enter YouTube!
You will always practice your presentation at least once or twice before you deliver the presentation to your actual audience, so during one of these practice sessions, why not just set up a video recorder? Remember that this wisdom that you are sharing, although pretty common knowledge to you, is something that people outside of your industry know very little about. It is information that is valuable.
You can record high-quality videos using your laptop or even with your smartphone now, but if you want to pay a professional to record you instead, the fees are fairly small now and well worth it.
Once you start to think differently about being an expert in an industry and using technology to capitalize on that expertise, you will start to see opportunities everywhere. For instance, a few years ago, my wife and I bought a new house, and for the first time in my life I was a pool owner. I’m a pretty good swimmer and I was a lifeguard in college, but I’ve never actually maintained a pool. A few days before we moved into the house, the man we bought the house from took me step-by-step through the whole process of how to check the chemical levels, how the valves worked, how to clean the filter, and how to backwash the filter. He also gave me all of the percentages and numbers to look at to know when to do all of these things. I was feeling pretty confident; after all, I’m a smart guy, and I have a pretty good memory. A week or so later, after we had moved in, I went back out to the pool. Unfortunately, everything was a little fuzzier than I expected. The pipes looked like a maze, and there were all kinds of valves and switches. I couldn’t remember the numbers, and I had to go out and reidentify each of the valves by trial and error. I took a lot of trips down to the pool store, and the guy at the counter could see that I was in over my head. He looked at me and said, “You know that we have a pool school, right?” Turns out, the pool company will send a tech out to my house for less than $100 and have the tech take me through the entire system. He suggested that I record the guy when he came out.
It was brilliant. I knew that if I just had the pool technician come out and walk me through it one more time, I might be fuzzy on the details at the conclusion of this coaching, too. But if I had a recording, I could review it after the technician left. By the way, it worked perfectly. The technician let me record him, and he walked me through the whole process step-by-step. The pool school got me through the normal day-to-day maintenance of the pool, but at the end of summer, I had to clean the filter by myself for the first time. Since it was something new to me, I pulled out my smartphone and forwarded the video that I recorded to the part where the technician cleaned the filter. Then all I had to do was follow along.
This is exactly the type of information or expertise that is valuable to potential customers and that can funnel new customers to your website. The pool supply company could either give this information away for free in order to attract new customers, or they could sell the online pool school for a lower price and increase profit.
GIVE INFORMATION AWAY TO ATTRACT A FUNNEL OF NEW CUSTOMERS
My friend Mike Koenigs is the cofounder of a company called Traffic Geyser (www.tli-trafficgeyser.com), which is a website where members can upload a single video and have the video added to dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of different video-sharing websites. His philosophy is to create 10 different videos with your top 10 most frequently asked questions from customers and clients and upload those videos to video-sharing sites to funnel customers to your website.
Using the pool supply company as the example, the owner of the pool supply company could break up the recording of the pool school into five to ten 2-minute videos on each of the topics covered in the school. For instance, one video might be about how to connect the vacuum cleaner hose to the skimmers to manually clean the pool. Another might be about how to regularly clean the skimmers themselves. One might be about how to keep the chemicals in balance. One might be about how to maintain the heater in cold weather. One might be about how to backwash and clean the filter. If the pool supply company gave these videos away for free, they could have each of the individual videos feed back to a single page of their website to access all of the videos in one place and just require that the viewers enter their e-mail address to access them. Every time a new person enters an e-mail address, the pool company’s list of potential customers grows. They can send out e-mails to this list with coupons for pool supplies or maintenance service.
“Oh, but what if the pool company is just a local store?” There is almost no such thing as a local store anymore. For instance, the pool company could simply put the phrase, “Order today, and we’ll deliver it tomorrow” all over their website. FedEx makes any local company a big player in the world market.
So what does it cost to give this information away? Well, by giving the pool school away for free, the company is losing the potential to make a one-time $79 fee a few times per month from new local pool owners. I mean, really, how many first-time pool owners are created in a single neighborhood each year? However, when you think about the number of first-time pool owners in the world each year, the market is incredibly bigger. The company has the potential to create new customers every day via mail order. In fact, the company could create a membership where customers get all of their pool chemicals shipped out every month and delivered by UPS or FedEx, with the monthly fee automatically charged to a credit card.
CHARGE A FEE FOR YOUR EXPERTISE
Another option is to charge a fee on the front end for the information. Instead of using the individual videos as marketing pieces to funnel leads to your website, make them an online study course. When the pool supply company sends a technician out to conduct the pool school, the company has to pay the technician to do it. Let’s say that the technician gets paid $50 to conduct the training, so the company keeps only $29 of the $79. If the pool supply company supplied the videos online and purchasers could access each video on an as-needed basis, the company could charge a onetime fee of $39 or $49 and actually make a little more profit than what they were making when they were charging more. In addition, to make the purchase, the buyer would need to enter his or her name, mailing address, and e-mail address, so the company now knows of a potential new purchaser of pool supplies as well.
Once the videos are created, they can be copied over to a DVD or a flash drive. That way, if the company decided to continue to do the in-person pool schools, they can charge an extra fee to give the videos to the customer as follow-up materials after the technician leaves. Added value and added service lead to more loyal customers.
Regardless of whether you use videos as a marketing tool to let the world know about your expertise or if you use videos as a new revenue stream, it is a good idea to keep a record of the presentations that you have created and delivered in the past. A video recording is an easy way to keep track of these past presentations.
USE A PODCAST TO GENERATE NEW CUSTOMERS AND REVENUE
Recall from Chapter 6 that the word podcast is just a geeky word for Internet broadcast or audio or video recording on the Internet. Using podcast websites, you can create a channel that is basically your own personal radio station that plays the content you create and upload. The podcast could be as simple as the few videos that the pool supply company made, or it could be a daily teleseminar or webinar, with new content added every day.
I have a friend who started conducting an in-home Bible study group at his house while he was attending a seminary in Dallas. He wanted to do really in-depth studies, because he realized that it was difficult for people to learn the content from the Bible in the standard 15- to 40-minute sermons that they tend to get in a normal church service. Within the first year, though, he noticed a big problem. Because the study was so comprehensive, when new people started to attend the sessions, they became frustrated pretty quickly because they were so far behind.
A few years ago, he changed the format to a webinar series versus an in-person series, and all of the sudden, his number of attendees jumped and grew exponentially. He still has dozens of people who attend the sessions live every Wednesday night, but now, his attendees can access the webinar anytime they want. At the conclusion of each webinar, everyone who has ever attended any of the sessions receives an e-mail with a link to the most current recording. If someone misses a few weeks, that person can access the archives and catch up. And when new people join the study, they have the choice of jumping into the live series, starting at the beginning of the current series, or even starting over from scratch with the very first recording. Each participant can go through the sessions on his or her own schedule, so if anyone wants to listen to two or three sessions each week, he or she can.
Of course, the pastor doesn’t charge his attendees to view or listen to his recordings, but if you use the same type of strategy for your company, you certainly can. You can either charge viewers for every session that they watch, or you can create a membership where a monthly fee is assessed regardless of how many sessions are viewed.
Another great way to create a podcast is to hold weekly teleseminars where participants can come with questions for the expert or where you interview other experts in your industry. Every time you add new content that will be beneficial to your customers or prospects, you can send them an announcement e-mail; if you have a podcast channel, those e-mails go out automatically, helping keep you and your company top of mind for these customers.