I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who wanted to turn his passion (a small but very active collector/hobbyist market) into a full time home based business. Having worked in a corporate environment for a long time and with two young children at home that he fears he will lose as he watches them grow up, he has decided that he is ready to take the plunge and turn his twenty-year-old hobby into a profitable business. entry. Knowing that this is the type of consulting work I do, he stopped by last week with a business plan in hand to gauge my thoughts.
I loved most of his ideas, you could see the passion and tender loving care he had put into the process of coming up with the plan, but there was (for me anyway) one major flaw: outside of a budget of about four One thousand dollars. who had set aside to get this going, had almost 75% set aside for “video production and equipment” costs. I scratched my head a bit and wondered what he had planned to shoot for $3,000 in his first month in business.
He went on to explain that in his market, video, especially online, was very much in vogue, and many of the hobbyist sites he visited had video and they didn’t want to be left behind. So she was going to go out and buy an expensive camera and pay a lot of production work to get the same effect on her own site.
I chuckled and explained how EASY it is these days to put up a fully INTERACTIVE and engaging video site, with no camcorder, no experience, and no having to own videos of your own. There are many ways to do this, and do it well, but even people who are really familiar with popular video aggregating sites usually don’t do it like this, so I’ll share that with you too. Here’s what to do, and it won’t cost you ONE red penny.
Set up a “channel” for your niche on Splashcast.net, which is a very powerful free video service that will not only host your videos, but put them in a beautiful player that you can easily embed on your site. also add all videos for your market FOR you, simply by searching public media sources (like YouTube for example) for media tagged with your keywords. Let’s say you’re starting a fishing site – you’d just create an account and upload your own stuff to their servers, or much more likely for a novice marketer, you’d do a search for ALL media on YouTube tagged “fishing”.
It will shoot you a long series of thumbnail video images that you can review and check which ones you want to include in your presentation. You can also embed your own html, pdf, power point and text files, for an endless number of ways to make your particular channel unique (and monetized – think store affiliate links, free reports, redirects and much more!) from within the player himself). Each player has an rss feed so other viewers of their videos can embed them on their own pages and even email the video link to their friends and subscribers. Speaking of viral, wow! Or, what I like to do is just create unique shows within my channel, so using our fishing analogy, we could have individual shows on “deep-sea fishing,” “fly-fishing,” etc… This offers a lot of targeting possibilities that will not only attract more viewers, but also allow for unique advertiser approaches if you plan to monetize your site through direct ads. (Instead of Google, Yahoo, etc.)
I leave you with this thought. If you don’t know how to take the next step to get your online business off the ground, you can have a one page site, with a big media channel right in the middle with videos from OTHER PEOPLE, and do it in about 3-4 hours. People will visit your site, see your stuff and click on your ads, sign up for your list (if you include one) and you’ll be in business, out the door, and you can realistically do that from halftime of a bad football game, until the final whistle of the fourth quarter, and be making money for the ESPN Sunday night recap. I know because I’ve done just that, and more than once. No excuses, get going, you can do it, I promise!
