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Future Self-Published blog entries will be available on my website charmbaker.com

Friday, February 5, 2016

Video Marketing: Learn to Optimize Your Writing Activities by Utilizing All Your Skills

Your writing can benefit from utilizing skills that seem unrelated.


Optimizing your writing activities through the use of other skills is something that Entrepreneur.com should know a little bit about.  They did a recent article about a particular marketing tool that many writers and entrepreneurs are fully taking advantage of.  Video marketing is a highly effective resource these days, but it is just one among many areas that you may be skilled in but not really utilizing.

If you’re a new (or existing) writer or online entrepreneur, you probably stay on the lookout for effective ways to optimize your online activities.  Writers usually catch on quickly, how to use their diverse writing skills, while trying to turn a profit online.  But what about all those seemingly unrelated skills that you may actually possess?  Just how do you go about utilizing all your skills so that they begin to benefit your writing?  This post will help you consider some smart ways to determine how to benefit more from what you already know and do.

Online Video Marketing

Making videos like the ones found on YouTube may not be a skill that you consider yourself possessing.  In fact, if you’re as camera shy as I am, you may have never given videos another thought.  But this is 2016.  If you’re a serious new or existing writer, author, or online entrepreneur, you may have to give video marketing some thought.  If you don’t, you’ll be missing out on one of the most valuable  marketing tools online.

The Entrepreneur website mentioned in the earlier paragraph is specifically in business to provide informative marketing strategies for online entrepreneurs (writers included).  In their article:  Video marketing:  How to Stretch Your Dollars”, they make a point of emphasizing the value of using video marketing to promote your online activities.  The site also does a pretty good job of listing some very useful tips.  For instance, they offer some suggestions on where to go for music and images to create a simple slideshow video.   They also touch on three different types of simple videos that you can produce and ultimately generate a nice following for. 

According to Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO of Author Marketing Experts, Inc:  “Incorporating video can be a fantastic enhancement to any business and, if done right, can really help to drive more traffic and sales to your product or service!”  Whatever your online goals and pursuits happen to be, you will still need to engage in effective marketing activities on a regular basis.  This calls for thinking outside the box, and every asset you possess is an advantage.  Are you sure you don’t have hidden talents and skills that can be utilized with video marketing?

Just think about it.  The idea of creating videos for book trailers, relationship advice and how-to demos is right on point!  Marketing and promoting a newly published book is an endless activity for an author (Believe me - I discovered this the hard way).  Creating a simple book trailer and using it in all your marketing is a very strategic move.  The same is true for simple, yet informative relationship advice and how-to videos.  No matter who we are or what point we are at in life, there are things that we are good at, things that we excel in, and knowledge that we have picked up along the way.  This is the stuff that good videos are made of! 

Consider this information for more about developing good video marketing skills:





Everything is Relative

Don’t be fooled and think that certain skills you possess are unrelated to whatever you are trying to achieve online.  When it comes to marketing activities, everything is related.  For example, I enjoy writing poetry on occasion, and I find that I’m pretty good at it.  In spite of my poetic skills, I hardly consider myself a poet, nor does it seem to have anything to do with promoting my non-fiction writing.  I am totally comfortable writing for and about non-fiction markets, but I’m learning to incorporate my creative side more and more. 

Today, I posted a poem on Tumblr, in honor of Black History Month.  I also created a video slideshow with me reciting the poem in the background.  The poem:  Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me” is something that I wrote roughly twenty years ago before I was even sure that I wanted to be a writer.  It fits right into the Black History theme, and provides a great opportunity for me to gain more visibility.  I don’t think there is anything wrong with building a list of followers who see me as a writer instead of just a non-fiction writer.  When you’re a working writer, you soon discover that everything is relative.

Making Simple Videos

Are you starting to understand the value of video recording?  Are you thinking about what talents and skills that you could be utilizing, in order to help your online activities succeed?   Now is the time to start taking advantage of what a powerful marketing tool using videos can be.  I’m talking about simple slideshow-type videos that you can even put together quickly in Microsoft movie creator, which is similar to Apple’s iMovie program.  You don’t have to be a pro and the more you do it, the better you get. 

I’m not really shy, but I’m the kind of person who is self-conscious in front of the camera.  I do, however, have the gift of gab.  So I figured out a way to take that gift and use it with video marketing.  I simply do voiceovers.  This allows me to present my message onscreen via text or images, while you hear me speak in the background.  All I do is uniformly size the ad images that I create, and organize them in a logical way.  Then, after recording the audio on my phone or PC, I combine it with the images and save everything into a video slide presentation.  They’re easy to upload on YouTube, and they are a great way to get traffic back to your blog, website, book sales page, or some other product, or service.     

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