@tjrobertson52

If you're a business owner, you should be making videos like this. I'm gonna explain why and then I'll tell you exactly how to do it. Videos, by far the most effective form of marketing.

Videos like this are the easiest ones to make and the most impactful. People don't connect with brands, people connect with people. You're doing it the way I'm gonna show you.

You can make a video like this in less than 20 minutes, that one video can be repurposed into 10 pieces of high quality content. This is not only the best way to get customers from the video platforms like TikTok and YouTube, it's also the best way to rank in Google and be recommended by large language models. It's the only form of marketing we do at our agency, and we've consistently had more leads than we can handle.

I'm hiring and training people as fast as I can, and we still have to turn down a lot of work. And these are people who already know me because they watch my video content. I don't have to try to sell them on my services.

I've already built that trust. This is also the No. 1 thing we recommend each of our clients do, and the ones that do it have had good success.

However, most of them still don't do it. So I'm gonna try to make this as easy as possible. I'm actually making this video primarily for my Clients, but I figured I'd share it with everyone so hopefully you find it useful as well.

First of all, just to be clear, I'm talking about short form video. These are videos where you're holding your phone out in front of you, recording yourself talking. Long form horizontal videos can be effective, but short form is typically much easier and all the platforms are pushing it right now.

The biggest mistake people make when they decide they're gonna start recording videos is they put way too much effort into it. I mean like 10 or 20 times as much effort as they should be putting in. And the real tragedy is that this effort actually makes their videos less effective.

Nowadays, professional polished videos fall flat. What you're trying to create are real authentic videos that respect the viewer's time. So don't worry about fancy equipment or professional setting.

Just pull your phone out and record wherever you are or wherever you're comfortable walking around, sitting in your car, laying in your bed. The more organic it feels, the easier it is to gain the viewers trust. And also you're busy, find a way to work this naturally into your day.

I walk my dog every morning and so that's the easiest time for me to record videos. The No. 1 objection I get to creating videos though is people telling me, but TJ, I'm not like you.

I can't just talk naturally into the camera for minutes on end. So first of all, yes, you can. You almost certainly already do probably already going on zoom calls or doing Facetime.

You know how to talk naturally into a camera. You're just getting in your own head and the cure is to just start recording videos. Yeah, the first 10 are probably gonna be a little cringe, but eventually it'll feel natural and second, I'm not talking for minutes on end.

If you look at how often my videos cut, I'm rarely talking for more than five seconds at a time. You don't need to know everything you're gonna say before you start recording. You just need to know what the next sentence is gonna be or sometimes just the next half a sentence and that's how I recommend recording these videos one phrase at a time.

Give yourself plenty of time to think and then if it doesn't come out right, record it again. I often do two or three takes of a line before I get it right and now you're probably thinking, but TJ, that's gonna take forever to edit no, it's not modern video editors like the script use AI to automatically remove retakes and shorten word gaps so even with all the pauses and retakes, the average video only takes us about 10 minutes to edit.

The next thing I hear is alright, we'll create the videos but you gotta tell us what to talk about and if you're a client, we absolutely Will, we'll give you a big list of topics and hook ideas, but often the best ideas come from you. My advice is the same thing I do myself. Try to think of the message that feels the most important for your audience to hear right now, something that they would actually care about where you can offer real value.

Now to do this, it's important that you have an audience in mind. Some businesses have multiple audiences. I recommend picking one.

If you consistently create content that's interesting to the same audience, the algorithms will get really good at showing your content to those people. However, if different pieces of content target different audiences, you'll confuse the algorithm and your videos will tend to fall flat.

Common sources of inspiration are questions you were recently asked by a customer, advice you found yourself recently giving to a potential customer or a team member, something new you're doing at your business or something new in your industry. Also, don't fall into the trap of thinking that you can only use each topic once. You can and absolutely should use your most important topics over and over again.

Just think of your favourite creators. I bet you can think of a few things that they're always talking about and you're probably not getting sick of hearing it cause those are the most important things and every time they talk about it, they talk about it a little bit differently. Also, no one's gonna watch all of your videos.

Now I wanna talk about the most important part of short form video, the hook. The hook is the first 1 to 2 seconds of the video. These are the first few sentences where the viewer is deciding if they're gonna watch the video or swipe away.

It's important to understand why the hook is so important. All these video platforms care about is keeping users on the platform. So when their algorithm decides which video to show a user, it's looking for the video that is most likely to keep them engaged on the platform.

The primary metric the algorithm cares about is viewer retention. How much of your video does the average person watch before swiping away? And you have to remember that right below your video are a million other videos that are perfectly tuned for this user.

You only have a few seconds to convince them to watch your video. So in the seconds you need to do two things. 1, you need to assure them that this video is of interest to them.

Find some way of signalling the topic of the video and 2, you need to somehow promise them some value coming at the end of the video. The goal is to make them feel like they're going to miss out if they swipe away. So there are a lot of ways to do this.

For our clients, we'll recommend a bunch of hook structures. That might work well for them, but I urge you, as you're watching short form content yourself, just pay attention to the first few seconds and you'll see almost every successful creator is following this hook structure by promising them some kind of value that's coming later in the video. You're creating what's called a curiosity gap.

In order to keep the viewer engaged with your video, you need to have at least one open curiosity gap. So in the simplest form of this, you're going to open that curiosity gap with the hook and then you'll close it at the end of the video. If you feel like you have more to say after you close that gap, just make sure you're opening a second curiosity gap before closing the first one.

And at this point, I probably scared you off. You're probably thinking, oh, never mind, this is way too hard. I don't wanna worry about all of this.

Please don't let this scare you. Keep in mind that no one's doing this perfectly and most creators aren't doing it at all. More important than following the best structure is just doing it in a way that feels authentic to you and that you actually enjoy.

You started this business because you wanted to help people solve a specific problem. This is just one more to help those people. Once you have your hook and you've opened your curiosity gap, the most important thing to remember is to respect the viewer's time.

Your viewers will forgive you for a lot of things, but they won't forgive you for being boring. Try to pack the video with as much value as possible. And now I'm gonna ask you to forget all of that and just go record a video and just assume it's gonna be terrible.

You don't even have to post it if you don't want to, but commit to making 10 or 20 terrible videos. The good news is if it really sucks, the algorithm is not gonna show it to anyone anyways.