James Wedmore, Leading Video Marketing Expert

Hey everybody, this is exciting here. We’ve got one heck of an interview coming up with one of the top leaders in the industry.

In fact, James Wedmore is one of the most sought after authorities on video marketing.

James is the founder of Video Traffic Academy, a 6,000 plus strong members’ community of small business owners leveraging the power of YouTube and video to grow their businesses on line.  He actually has a film degree from a prestigious LA Film School and James has taken his passion for video marketing to show anyone how to drive more traffic, attract more leads and make more sales using the power of video. James ability to teach and communicate his effective strategies creates a blend of professionalism with simplicity that allows his students to produce real results.

James, this is fantastic. I’m so excited; you’re a hard man to track down. I’m glad you’re here. Can you hear me?

James:  I can, Jon. Thank you for having me.

Jon: I was telling you its really hot here in LA.  I think we have the Santa Ana winds here today but I think this interview today is going to be even hotter. I appreciate it.  What I have here today is a little case study I want to blurt this out in a minute and I hope it’s okay to put you on the spot. I know we haven’t talked about this, but I think it will be very useful to put both a tactical and strategic plan right here on this call today.  If that’s okay, I’ll start diving in.

James: Please, go ahead.

Jon: As I said, strategy is part of any build out for any plan, whether you are building a house, a website or a video marketing campaign.  We will cover a few of those today. Also, I should say in the small business marketing community, small business marketing on line, being an entrepreneur or solepreneur there’s just so much to do. One thing is running your business, but doing all this on line marketing stuff can be pretty time consuming. Being an entrepreneur, there’s a lot about mind set. Getting things done. If this was easy, everybody would do. I think the idea that something is simple doesn’t necessary mean it is easy.  Today, as we’ll see, James is going to break this down into a kind of live case study and make this pretty straight forward for you. What I’ve been thinking of for this interview is to really talk about a few goals. James, I wanted to break these down as I wanted to hear about how you got started. We got that wonderful introduction, but I wanted to dig down a little more personally and see what drove you to get started. Why video and video marketing? Perhaps we can start with that.

YOUTUBE VIDEO INTERVIEW:

James: In a nut shell, I’ve had a passion for video and film my whole life. That is why I went to film school. The reason I didn’t pursue the Hollywood route, after my parents invested this $30,000 – $35,000 education into, was because I thought of my creativity and what I wanted my control was always authoritative. There was always a lot of “no”, there was a lot of “you can’t do it this way; you have to do it that way”.  I just didn’t feel happy going down that route. That’s where the entrepreneur inside of me starts to come out and it’s all about freedom and doing it our way, on our terms.

So I was a big fan of that and at the time in college when I was in film school I was working as a bartender and I had these same kind of experiences that I was experiencing in film school and you had to do these free internships and be really good at getting coffee for people for years before you even get to do anything or make any money. As a bartender, I was experiencing the same thing where I had crappy managers telling me what to do all day and drunken patrons yelling at me because I didn’t put enough booze in their drink. I was actually so feed up with that stuff that I created my own little business on the side of doing private party bartending. I would just bartend at local birthday parties, weddings, and corporate events. That grew extremely fast. So, the more I did it the more I feel in love with it. I was literally in my early 20s getting paid to go to parties. I built it out to a staff of about 15 all throughout southern California and I got to learn all about the principals of marketing, copy writing, and direct sales.

I got to look at this business that I had and play with it. Play with all the marketing that I was learning and at the end of the day video was still my specialty and still such a new media at the time that I was able to do some very cool stuff with video.

GOOGLE & YOUTUBE

Everything from getting my videos found and ranked in YouTube and Google, to having video testimonials, videos on my website, video messages to past customers and all kinds of fun stuff. That really set me off on this path of understanding of where the internet is going in terms of this more interactive medium … which is video.

Jon: That’s very interesting. The fact that you can use your own, eating your own dog food of to speak.

James: Exactly. When things are working and everyone around you, peers in the industry and even mentors, are coming to you and asking; how did you do this? How can you do this for me? I transitioned into doing a lot videos for other people to the point now that we’re truly to point of where my passion lies, which is in the teaching. I am a teacher at heart. That’s what I love to do; teach, coach and share this information.

TRAFFIC!

Jon: As we dive into this, a little further … the next question that I get in this space as we’re dealing with so much from blogging to video to podcasting, just really text (writing); how do you get traffic to your website? When we drill down into video questions it quickly becomes; how do you use video to do that and what platforms – the most heard of one is YouTube, but is that the only one? This next section gets into what are the traffic strategies and platforms we should use? What they are? Also, how we get to build our first video.

I realize there’s a lot in there, James, from building out the content and scripts, there’s cameras and equipment, of course you have the iPhone and the power of that, lighting issues, etc. I get the question of how long should the video be? Should I speak directly to the camera or do an interview style? Should I just do slides and speak to that? There’s editing software. It gets absolutely crazy for people out there. We want to start simple, we know that. So I wanted to use this mini case study and perhaps apply some of these rules and thoughts you have on how we can drive traffic, get some visibility and really what we should start with. Kind of one, two, three.


“LIVE” CASE STUDY – DAY SPA (LOS ANGELES) – A VIDEO MARKETING EXAMPLE

So what I did was, created this around “Kathy”, who is my persona who deals with her day spa. She’s the owner of a day spa and her job is to improve health, beauty and relaxation. That can range from deep tissue massage, facile, mud wraps, body and foot treatments, and even product sales. She’s looking to take her business to the next level using video and video marketing. She wants more clients, but she also wants to build out referrals. Kathy is very busy and she doesn’t have a lot of help to deal with this online stuff and video marketing. So, this is directly right now to you James. What should she do to get started with video and video marketing to meet those objectives of traffic and client building? How can she track her success? I know that was huge.

James: It is, but I got it. This is fun. The first thing which you really touched upon and I do want to make sure to say a little piece here; a lot of people don’t wind up doing anything or taking any type of action because they fill themselves with all these questions of the unknown. I call it the sea of overwhelm. There’s just so much that you think you have to learn before you think you can make your first video that you wind up not doing it. So for someone like Kathy and she’s in this place, let alone being in front of the camera; what kind of camera do I need to get? How long does it need to be? That stuff is really secondary, in fact it’s those types of questions that can really hold you back completely. Not just from not doing it, but you begin focusing on the wrong things.

STRATEGY

You mentioned the word strategy a few times and as marketers and business owners, it is our job to focus first on the strategy. If we don’t have a strategy or an intention, with what we’re doing how can we get a result? All we’re saying is; I want to make a video. A video sitting on your desktop collecting dust won’t make you any money. It’s what you do with that video and in turn what that video does for you that will see result. Unlike stuff like Facebook or Twitter where we can play around on there for a couple minutes, how long does it take to send out a tweet, we can afford to experiment a little more before we dial in with what’s working and what’s not? With video it’s not necessarily the case. We need to not waste time and keep it clear and simple.

TRAFFIC OR CONVERSIONS (BOTH)?

With that being said, anything that you’re doing on line needs to follow one of two intentions for your strategy and video is no exception. Magically video can do both of these. That is either to drive traffic or make some sort of conversion. We need people to come to our website, blog, or wherever we want to send them and then we need them to take an action.

So with this example of Kathy, the first video I would want to make, or series of videos, are traffic getting videos. The place to do that, the platform, is definitely hands down YouTube. There are other sites out there and people ask me all the time if they should be using them. It’s the 90 / 10 rule.

YOUTUBE AS A VIDEO MARKETING PLATFORM

In 90% of your effort and results is going to come from YouTube. I don’t use any of the others, I have in the past but I know I am going to get the majority of my results from YouTube. YouTube is owned by Google. 800,000,000 unique users; 4,000,000,000 daily views; third largest website in the world. Your videos can get indexed not just inside of YouTube, but on the first page of Google for search results.

That’s another thing; people are using YouTube today as a search engine itself. YouTube is becoming, in some forms, a substitute for Google. People are going there to get answers to their questions not just to search for silly videos.

So if you want to get more traffic and Kathy wants to get more eye balls to her website, it’s not necessarily to get more customers yet, it’s let’s get more people to her website. It starts with making a few YouTube videos.

KEYWORD RESEARCH – THE DAY SPA

The way we get those videos found and ranked starts with a very simple concept of keyword research. What we like to call video STS. So to keep this very simple, we need to know and Kathy needs to know what her audience, or ideal customer, searches for when they want to go to her day spa. If she’s out in LA and businesses like hers, brick and mortar, is going to be geographically limited, it’s targeted. So Los Angeles Day Spa, or LA Day Spa or Massage LA or whatever else people might type in.

GOOGLE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOL

So it starts with identifying what people are typing in. I use Google keyword research tool. It’s a free tool; you can just type in keywords when you find it. I come up with a couple of keywords and make a video off each one. The making of a video is simple. Trust me; it’s actually the easy part if you know your strategy. We can make two to five to ten videos around keywords.

OPTIMIZE THE VIDEOS

We put them on YouTube and the goal is to optimize them, put the keyword in the title, in the description, in the tags and get them ranked at the top of YouTube. If you get them at the top you have a really good chance at finding them inside of Google and people will stumble onto them.

Here’s why at the end of the day, and we can go much deeper, is why this is so exciting. I told you earlier that I had a bartending business that I turned into an event staffing company I sold the business, but I still get leads and still get people coming in who found me from the YouTube videos that I made four years ago. People tend to (business owners), gravitate towards sites like Facebook, I’m not knocking Facebook in anyway, but because it’s simple and easy.

YOU & SOCIAL MEDIA LIMBO

It takes 3.5 seconds to update your status. Let me ask you this; what happens to your latest status update or link that you shared after two or three days or a week ago. Where are your updates from last month? They’re buried in social media limbo. Yet, YouTube is the opposite. It’s like a fine wine where the older with age it gets the more clout and authority your videos get and the higher they can get ranked, the more views that they get.

MATURE & GROW

We do a lot of experiments with this, actually now it’s our practice, the more we are uploading video the more we exponentially grow with the results. When you not only have more videos out there spreading your virtual property all over the Internet, you’re getting more people finding you in more places and watching multiple videos, which then causes people to share your stuff with other people, which gets ranked even higher. Your views go up on an exponential base. Which I love this, because it’s just giving it time. If you’re willing to put some time into something you can see it absolutely mature and grow. Does that make sense?

Jon: I attest to that fully, James. I had a video I had forgotten about on a locale SEO, tips and stuff, it’s number one in Google, YouTube. I forgot about it. It has about 11 or 12,000 views. I started to see more and more referrals from it. It was like from a year ago and it’s absolutely amazing how it keeps on growing and growing.  It speaks to exactly what you said.

YOUTUBE, ADVERTISING REVENUE AND YOUR VIDEO RANKINGS

James: We have a lot of real-estate agents that go through my program and that’s all they do. Properties for sale in LA or San Diego. That’s where they get their calls, traffic to their website, people fill out forms, and they go through the funnel. Today it would be hard if you want free long term organic traffic it’s hard to play that SEO game. A good friend of mine business went bankrupt because of Googles latest SEO algorithm shift that happened back in July or August. The thing is, when you send them to a YouTube video, they’re never going to de-rank a video. Google owns YouTube. They want more people on YouTube because now, this year especially, advertising venues coming from companies paying to put little video placements, 10 to 15 second little ads videos placed at the beginning of videos, is generating so much venue for Google and YouTube that they would be crazy to de-rank.

Jon: Exactly. This is so exciting and you’re really laying the ground work here. I want to tie back to the keywords and this organic representation.  Creating a video to match optimizing strategies, as you said the keywords, keyword research tool, the description — I find that people can get behind that and get it done. But you said something very important a few minutes ago at the very top when you started out with; they’re stopping themselves because they have this anti or must be difficult, I’m not a star so I’m not going to be seen on any camera anytime soon.  If they got past that and they understood all the research principles, if we used for Kathy a term like “deep tissue massage Los Angeles”, I realize depending on where you’re at, some of these things will show up by default. (explicit vs implicit search)

The question really then becomes, if Kathy says “I’ve learned so much from you, James, already but how do I create a deep tissue massage video”? Meaning, if I spoke to camera or made a power point slide and spoke to that, what content and what scripts? How do I write this out and get it to be applicable to my business and not sounding to weird, sales-y, hype-y, long, short or whatever. What’s your recommendation there are you start to drill down into this?  This is great, by the way.

THE “SIX STEP PROCESS” TO VIDEO CREATION

James: This is a great question. I want to start by saying, I teach in my program a six step process for creating any video. A lot of people think six steps, that’s a lot of work. The reason I make it six steps is because I did indentify that most people don’t make a video because they are afraid.

Let me tell you this, one of the latest predictions on the internet by some big company that does all these predictions, is that by the year 2014 90% of all on line traffic will be video based. I don’t even know what that really means other than the fact that it means …more video! That’s what Internet surfers want. We can’t let this fear creep in any further.

MAKE IT SIMPLE

The analogy that I give is that I went skydiving for the first time back in March. I told myself about two years earlier that I was clearly never going to jump out of an airplane as long as I lived. I have a very healthy fear of flying, falling and heights. So skydiving was very hard. Then I got conned into it by a friend. He posted it on Facebook, saying James is too afraid to go skydiving and won’t you help me convince him.  20 minutes later 200 people commented and I felt like I had to go. The only way that I could mentally do it, jump out of an airplane willingly, was if I only let my brain focus on one step at a time. Step one; put on the jump suite. Step two; just get on the plane. I feel that that works the best for people.

INTENTION

So step one for making a video is always intention. We already talked about this, are you going to use this to use it to drive more traffic or are you using it to get some type of conversion or to take an action? If we’re doing this video, Kathy’s video, and we’re putting it on YouTube and the intention is just to drive traffic I like to say then from there the world is your oyster. You have an absolute unlimited amount of potential with what you can do with this video, as long as your goal stays the same. At the end of this video you’re telling them to hop on over to my website, adding a call to action. Maybe you have a free report, more free content, a free session, or a discount.  You can get so creative with your marketing if there is a call to action to have them go fill out a form or call our number and tell them you saw our YouTube video and we’ll give 20 or 50% off your first massage. We can be so creative with this marketing if we know what our intention is, which is get people to the website and we have a call to action.

WRITE A SCRIPT BASED ON INTENTION

What happens in between that? I think that’s what Jon’s asking. Really, anything you want. It could be as simple as writing a script or having someone else write it, talking about the amenities of your facility, the benefits of what having a deep tissue massage can do for you. It’s all about them more than it is about Kathy; it’s all about the customer and the end result that they are getting. Make a short video that way.

If Kathy is saying “I don’t want to be on camera”, I know a lot of people have a face for radio and don’t want to be in front of a camera. Here’s my big secret: I don’t like being in front of the camera myself but I do it to be the genie pig for my audience. If I can do it, you guys can. But if Kathy doesn’t want to do it, that’s fine. We can use video footage of the facility, of the building, you can even just do images, have a photographer come or you take pictures, and use images in a slide show. It’s literately endless as to what you can do.

COMPARISON RESEARCH

My biggest suggestion is to do a Google search for similar stuff. Find a video you like and you can find people so inexpensively to make a video for you.  If you have a marketing budget and are spending a couple hundred bucks a month to do yellow pages ads, I guarantee you can find someone for under $200 in your local area to come to your store, with a video camera, film, edit and put it on the Internet for you. As long as you know what your strategy is, what you’re saying in the video, what the intention is and what it’s supposed to do.

I’m actually doing the same thing. I went to film school but I hire guys all the time and outsource a lot of the videos I do because it takes away from the stuff that we are meant to do which is serve our customers.

I kept that very vague and open ended because there are countless things that you can do. I have another channel that I don’t even tell people about where I do a lot of test videos. It’s not associated with my name or brand what so ever but I outsource the whole process. It’s a very systemic approach where I have a guy I found  on oDesk.com who writes the script for me I pay him about $35.Then I found a guy on Fiverr.com for five dollars who does a professional voice over, he just reads the script into a microphone and sends it over as an MP3.

I have another guy in the Philippines who edits together little videos using animations, texts and images and we put these things on YouTube. I don’t even touch any of these other than picking what the topic is. We do it that way. You can make video as complicated as you want. You can spend year making one video. But you can also make it extremely simple.

Jon: That’s brilliant. To create this video we talked a little bit about this outsourcing and a person coming to your place of business but what about if you just wanted to go at it yourself? I know you have a really good video on iPhone. For example, have somebody in the spa film it using the iPhone and speak to it. What do you say about that kind of work? I’ve seen videos that are really not well put together, the lighting is not awesome, the sound is not great, yet they have an insane amount of views. Where do you draw the line? “I have to have to this total professionally done because I can’t associate my brand with anything less than that”. I know people get stuck there.

BRANDING ISSUES AND NEEDS

James: It’s a great question. Branding versus the getting it done. The done does trump perfection. I think everyone is unique. I still do videos where I do them all myself and I do videos where I outsource them. I try and see where that middle ground is. It’s really up to you and your budget, your style and where your strengths lie and go with that. I have some that I created called the hierarchy of video needs. We have Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People have this false sense about the order of importance as to what they need to make a better video.

EXPENSIVE CAMERA BETTER?

The first thing that they always think they need is a more expensive camera. Like if they throw down more cash they’ll get a better quality video. That is actually not really the case at all. If you want a better video, we can use our iPhone and iPads, but the number one thing that should be absolutely essential if you decide to video yourself is …audio! You could have a $5,000 state of the art, top of the line camera but if there’s a plane overhead or wind blowing in the microphone and we can’t hear you because your ten feet away, I don’t care how good the picture looks, I’m not going to watch the video because I can’t hear you. Right now as you guys are listening, both Jon and I both have really nice microphones and we’re speaking about three inches away from them so it’s crisp clear audio. That’s so crucially important.

CAMERA, AUDIO, LIGHTS – IMPORTANT TIPS

Even with the iPhone, you can get a little extender piece and connect a wired or wireless lavaliere and hook it to your blouse or collar and now your audio is right there, just a few inches from your mouth so it picks up perfect, clear, crisp audio. So that’s always the most important thing. Still you don’t need to spend a lot of money. We can go get a microphone for 30 bucks on Amazon. You just type in lavaliere microphone for video camera and you’re going to find one for 30 to 40 bucks.

The next thing is lighting. You want to improve, to buy better cameras, but really all you need is better lighting. You can buy lighting kits on Amazon for $100 to $200, but you can also use the free lighting kit up in the sky called the sun.  You should use the sun at the right time of the day in the morning hours or the afternoon hours where it’s not directly overhead. If the suns directly overhead, you’re going to get those harsh shadows. If it’s an overcast day, that’s the best time to film. I know you don’t have the blue sky, but from a lighting stand point you won’t have any of those harsh shadows, so that’s the best time to film.  The lighting of the sun is what most low end cameras were built for. So go film when the sun is at 11 in the morning or more like nine or ten in the morning right on your face and you’re going to have this beautiful crisp and clear image. You’re going to be like “man why doesn’t it look this good when I film this inside my office?”  It’s because you have crappy lighting in your office.

Jon: That’s beautiful. That speaks to mindset and blockages to technology. I can speak to this myself. It’s gotta be just right, but it doesn’t help anybody. At the top, we spoke about strategy and intention. We talked about this, scripting, benefits, short videos, keywords, competitors – all of that is awesome. Let’s say we have this all created. What is the final piece? How does Kathy look at this? It’s been a week, I Don’t see much coming to my site, no calls, etc. How do you determine success? How can you track this? How do you look at the ultimate success criteria?

VIDEO MARKETING ROI, TRACKING & SUCCESS CRITERIA

James:  This is like the age old question of ROI, but it’s more of an ROI on our time investment. We can do everything I just said, for free. If you already have the iPhone or a video camera you are not spending any additional money. YouTube doesn’t cost you any money and you can literally make a video in 45 seconds.

How do we track this? How do we know it’s working or not and how do we improve?

So the first way, I do it from the beginning, is I don’t make any judgments until I know my video is in the number one spot. It actually takes, and this is what’s so funny and why a lot of people don’t jump onto YouTube, is because people are searching for that instant gratification.

They are sold on the idea of a push button magic software that can make them money by just doing this one thing really quickly.

I’m a big fan of long term business strategy and I’m running the marathon and everyone else should do that as well.  If you want something to happen over night with YouTube, like you put it up there and two minutes later you get a phone call that’s pretty unrealistic.  YouTube, if you give it enough time, you do a lot of the optimization strategies that I teach and are more advanced but are fun and simple stuff that you can do, you can get any video no matter how short and shaky, you can get it to the number one spot for your keywords inside of YouTube.

That’s really the first element that I look for: where am I? Am I ranked number one when I type in LA deep tissue massage?

ARE THEY TAKING ACTION?

Once it gets to the number one spot now I know that everyone who is typing that in they’re going to find me first.  If I’m the number one spot and I’m the most looked at video on the list, because I’ve got the number one position, the next step is to look at how many of those people are taking action. You can put a link inside your YouTube video that when people click on it, it goes to your website. I track those links and look for a minimum of 10% of my views converting into unique visitors to my website. If I have a hundred views on a video, I should get ten people to my website minimum.   I want higher than that, but I use that as a bench mark. I don’t use that measurement until I know my videos number one spot.

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO GET RANKED #1 IN YOUTUBE?

This is very possible for people to do this. It takes two weeks for some people, some people it is over night. I think that’s the real magic. Once someone is on your website, just because they click a link doesn’t mean they are going to call you, buy from you, and give you money, whatever. Now it’s part two of the strategy, what are we going to do to get them to pick up the phone or give you their contact information or give you their credit card information. That’s were video can come in again, when you tell people what the next step is; now that you’re here on my website, sign up for a free session, free massage or 50% off your first massage, whatever it is. Get people really excited to get them to sign up with you. Does that answer the question Jon?

Jon: That’s a great way to look at it. 10% of your unique, great place to start. Also being #1. For some this will go faster, but if somebody was in the 3-4 position, what can they do to move their position to number one?

3 KEY RANKING FACTORS FOR YOUTUBE TOP LISTINGS

James: In a nut shell and this is basically what we teach in our programs, YouTube is looking at three things to rank a video. This is what it comes down to; when you have great keyword like deep tissue massage LA and you get your video to the number one spot your good. You have accomplished the goal. But YouTube is looking for three things to determine if that is your video or somebody else’s video. It comes down to

  1. relevance,
  2. quality and
  3. clout.

RELEVANCE

Relevance is everything that we have been talking about; where if someone is typing in deep tissue massage your video has to be titled deep tissue massage. It needs to be in the description, the tags, which YouTube will ask you for when you upload the video, but it also needs to be in the video itself.  One of the things that you can do is upload a transcript to your YouTube video and YouTube actually indexes the entire transcript. So if you say deep tissue massage four or five times throughout the video, you’ve done a much greater job to tell YouTube what your video is all about.

QUALITY (RECENT YOUTUBE ALGORITHM CHANGE)

The second thing is quality. This is huge. Quality does not mean what we have been talking about, the quality of your video. It means the quality of the value which you deliver to your audience. YouTube has recently changed their algorithm to include much more on the topic of engagement and audience attention. If people dislike your video and leave after the first five seconds, YouTube is tracking that. If you’re producing junk that is just like spam, that is the best way that YouTube knows that they have to push this guy or gal down. If you have great content, maybe you give tips and advice on how to take stress out of your life, because that’s what someone who wants to get a deep tissue massage would be interested in, people are going to watch your video. It always becomes about the audience first; what do they want from me? I put myself and my business last to provide value to them as much as possible.

CLOUT

The third one is clout. Now clout is simply the fact that I eluted to that the more you upload videos, the more of an exponential growth curve you will see. When you have a channel with one or two videos that has much less clout than a similar channel with a 100 videos. It’s really about applying a consistent strategy if you want to maximize your results. Doing a video every couple of weeks consistently will, in a long term marathon, get much larger results than just putting up one video, walking away and never coming back.

Those are the big three things. It’s funny, as I’ve seen my views, I would put up a video once a month and I was getting accumulate of 20 to 25,000 views a month. Then I started putting up a video once a week and all the sudden I’m up over 50,000 views. I doubled my monthly views because I decided to put up more videos.

Jon: That’s cool. That’s extremely valuable information. Ultimately, starting out – it’s simple, but not necessarily easy. But, it’s very valuable – because simple is now easy. You’ve broken this down to strategy, intention, competitive analysis, keywords and looking for the tracking and via the 3 factors you mentioned. The clout really makes sense. In fact, I know  you have the traffic video academy. Or, what resources can you share?

WHERE TO GET MORE INFORMATION ON JAMES WEDMORE

James: Videotrafficacademy.com is my program where I teach all this and more.

We just spoke over about 30 to 35 minutes on this and it gives a good overview, but the way I keep things simple; follow me step by step. What I actually did is, because I’ve been doing this for so long, I choose a random niche, a random keyword and a random video and I walk people through from scratch, showing them how I came up with an idea, keyword, made a video from that and then got it to the number one spot and got all this traffic from it. I actually did that over a year ago. That video is still at the number one spot inside of YouTube and inside of Google because of that. I just show people, step by step how you can do this and then the magic comes when you replicate it. I got one video that got me 22,000 views in a few months time. Now image if we’re doing this with one video a week.

A lot of our students who come to us will admit that they don’t use any other of this social media stuff anymore because YouTube is their number one marketing strategy. The only time they use other social media stuff is to promote their YouTube videos. It’s a very simple process; it’s videotrafficacademy.com.   You can check it out. I would also love people to find me on the social networking sites or find my YouTube channel. You can just Google my name, James Wedmore, and just reach out and say hi and tell me just listened to the interview so that I can say hi back.

Jon: Beautiful. Enormously kind of you to share these extreme nuggets and strategies. We focus on beginner to medium level marketers. Tips are good, but tying this into a solid strategy is important. Any final words today?

FINAL WORD: DISCOVER YOUR BASELINE AND JUST START

James: My final words are; if people are worried about getting started because they don’t know how their first video is going to turn out is that one of the biggest things that I have learned, not from myself but with working with other people is that you cannot improve, grow, or be better until you know where you stand right now. It really starts with just getting something out there. When you get that first video out there, that’s the bar. That is when you know where you are and now it’s about improving. How do I improve? How do I grow from that? That’s just an incredible experience to always be testing your marketing and tweaking your messaging.

Improving your branding, how you communicate, create and being systematic to save time and be more efficient.

It starts with just getting it done and getting it out there first. I think that’s the same with everything, not just video.

That’s what I encourage you to do; take action with a strategy in the right direction.

Jon: Smart.
James, thanks a million for joining here today! Thanks everybody. Follow James and engage. I look forward to seeing you in a future video.

Digital Download: James Wedmore YouTube Video Marketing Laws (PDF, opens in new window)

About 

BOOK YOUR CALL NOW: Click Here For Schedule Sign up for a FREE breakthrough session Learn More About Our Online Sessions.
===
Entrepreneur Magazine says Jon Rognerud is one of the most sought-after Digital Marketing Experts. His clients extend from high-end brands and middle-tier businesses in both B2B and B2C. His SEO website optimization book, "The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website" from Entrepreneur Press is in bookstores now.