By Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude
Peter Brissette here, your North Metro SBDC Digital Marketing Consultant and CEO of Digital Marketing Dude. So, a very important question that I often have come up, I will share with you here in a moment. The first thing I wanted to share with you was to let you know about my upcoming course with North Metro SBDC, the Digital Marketing Boot Camp. If you’ve followed any of my webinars or if you’ve booked a consulting session with me in the past, then you know that developing a Marketing Action Plan is fundamental to your success and to my approach with small business clients. In the Digital Marketing Boot Camp, we’ll explore and learn about all eight main categories that are part of your Marketing Action Plan: strategy, websites, content, social media, email marketing, reviews, funnels and paid advertising. I encourage you to sign up for the Digital Marketing Boot Camp and really dig in with me for 6 weeks to hone your marketing. And, best of all, if your small business is in Westminster then the Boot Camp is FREE! Thank you to our generous partners at the City of Westminster for that.
So the important question I mentioned earlier is about content, and talking about creating content. And the question is, what is the easiest way to create content? My answer is, actually, it’s pretty simple. Step One is to make a video. There’s lots of ways to make a video. You can make a video with your phone and do it that way. That’s the primary method, I would say, of making your videos. These smartphones that we have nowadays make amazingly high quality video.
Now, for even better quality, you can add a lapel microphone. If you go to Amazon, you can order a lavalier microphone. They’re about 15 dollars and up. It has a cord that you can plug into your phone, you just need to make sure you get the kind that will work specifically with your model of smart phone, because the plug on the end is a little bit different for Apple and Android and so forth, so make sure you get the proper one. For a small investment, you will get really good audio with it. So, now you can make a video and you can talk about anything that you want, anything that you have knowledge about and that will be of interest to your customers. (If you want to see me using this technique, visit my blog at DMDude.com/blog) You can make videos the way that I’m make them on my blog. I’m typically using Zoom, I’ll record my screen, and I’ve got a quality recording of whatever I want.
Once you have that video, regardless of where you made it, next thing to do is you want to go to Rev.com, and on Rev.com you can then transcribe that video. Right now it’s $1.25 per minute to transcribe your video into written text. So, they just recently had a price increase, but the price is still super reasonable for saving you a ton of time typing—although you can also transcribe the video yourself if you are fast on the keyboard. Not my specialty though!
When I’m done with the video, I will upload it to Rev.com. An option when I place a new order on Rev.com, I can also choose “automated transcription”, which, if the quality is good enough, an automated transcription is even cheaper than $1.25 per minute. (Another reason to get a lavalier mic!) Questions for you are, is there little or no background noise? Are people speaking close to the mic? Is the conversation clear, without over-talk? Do speakers have easy-to-understand accents? So—if you can say yes to all of those, then you can upload a video for automated transcription. In this case it’s only 10 cents per minute. So instead of the $1.25 per minute, it is 10 cents per minute. So that’s a pretty cheap way to do transcription, if you have a longer file or something like that that you want to upload and get transcribed, but you know the audio is pretty clear, then this is a good way to do it.
And once you do that, they have a pretty cool tool that helps you if you want to clean up the file from there. You can see the video and the transcription, and you can hit play and listen to the transcription. You can see how it highlights where the text is there. And then if you see things you want to change, you can change the text and then when you’re ready to download it, you can save it as a Word doc.
Now you’ve got a video which you can upload to Facebook. You can upload it to YouTube. You have text. You could break that text up into social media posts with a picture, with an image. You could have different images and pull different pieces of text at different times. So, you have a whole lot of content now available to you, all from a simple, five-minute video. A pretty simple thing to do, and you can even pull out quotations from the text and emphasize those and then link back to the blog posts that you created from them.
For me, I think this is one of the easiest ways to create content—content that can be used in multiple ways. Just make a simple video. It can be one minute long, it can be three minutes long, it can be ten minutes long. There’s all kinds of different opinions about length of video. But make it appropriate to the content that you’re creating and get it transcribed, upload it, and then break that up and use it in a lot of different places.
If you want some more ideas on this or on any other digital marketing topics, please reach out to me. I’ll be happy to talk to you about more ideas on creating content. As I frequently say, I have a lot of ideas, and some of them are good. You get to decide which are the good ones. One good idea I know for sure is, sign up for the next Digital Marketing Boot Camp, starting August 10. Hope to see you there!
Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Thank you.
