A lot of people still don’t realize just how easy it is to put out decent enough videos, so I want to use this week’s article to share my quick workflow for it.
It’s not uncommon that it will be 1 AM, I will have come home from some event, I’m tired, I still have to put out a daily social media video (I haven’t missed a day since starting Nov 1, 2022 – 1,274 days ago), I make the video in 15 minutes without thinking, I post it, I wake up to it with 500,000 views. This exact thing happened with this video:
The goal is to remove as much friction between having an idea and turning that idea into a video that contains value.
Here’s what I do
Super simple:
- Record with the back camera of my phone (not the selfie-camera).
- AirDrop it onto my laptop.
- You need an easy way to get the video onto your computer.
- Drag the video into Descript, my editor of choice.
- Click Underlord > Shorten word gaps > Gaps more than 0.25 seconds, shorten to 0 seconds.
- Click Underlord > Remove retakes > Submit > I can selectively remove bad takes or just remove all of them at once with “Remove ignored text from script.”
- Go through the transcript. Remove anything I don’t like. Rearrange sentences. If I change it in the transcript, that changes it in the video.
- Correct the transcript for any typos made by the AI (every video is transcribed automatically by Descript’s AI).
- Click Captions > Choose a style.
- I styled my own captions. I can copy the captions layer from other videos and paste it into this video, so I get the same captions look for each video.
- Click Export. Export the video in 4K with Quality set to High.
- AirDrop back onto my phone.
- Follow these instructions to post the video across socials.
This is an SEO superpower
The most clicked and easiest things to rank on Google are social media videos.
YouTube is the most popular citation source for AI search.
I’m an easy example.
A LOT of discovery happens with my brand from people searching, learning SEO.
My video descriptions are: an introductory sentence with my keyword in it followed by the entire transcript for my video.
The result: somebody is searching Google trying to learn about link ghosts in SEO. My videos come up. They watch, then binge on more of my videos, follow me, and eventually purchase my SEO course, Compact Keywords.
Or – somebody is in the consideration stage with Compact Keywords. They search Google for reviews. I’m trying to make a habit of sharing my video reviews to my social media channels so my audience will see them. But these videos also show on Google and get referenced by LLMs. The result: doing this both gets my audience into my funnel, eases conversions with my existing audience, and eases conversions with people in the consideration stage who are searching.
Here’s an awesome Compact Keywords review I got a few days ago by the way: https://edwardsturm.com/compact-keywords/#kris-ott
Compact Keywords has been crucial to the growth of our business.
We spent nearly $18,000 in the last year and a half on marketing and SEO through different agencies locally and that did nothing, nothing happened.
Decided to take the leap on the Compact Keywords class…
We are now outranking the local SEO agency.
We’re getting about six to eight calls per day on a good day which is just unheard of.
Get in the habit of making videos every day
Optimizing my video creation flow and having the forcing function of coming out with a video every day is incredible.
Some of my best videos come when I least expect them.
Like this one:
That was one of those days where you have a million things to do and no time to do them.
It was 7 PM. I didn’t have any time or brainpower to think of new subject matter so I just shared a podcast-matching service I had shared several times before. I used this to go on 30 podcasts in 3 months back in Fall 2022, before starting social media videos and my own podcast.
I made the video sharing it FAST using the method above.
Whereas in prior videos, I shared the podcast-matching service with different creative angles, this time I shared it in the most straightforward way I could, only to save time. I didn’t have time to be creative.
I thought the video was so lazy and so bad, I almost didn’t post it. In fact, I made a second video that was more thought out because I thought this first video was so rushed and so bad.
Here’s what happened.
The second, more-thoughtful video flopped.
The first video went viral and made me that podcast-matching service’s biggest affiliate BY FAR and gave me a viral asset that I’ve been able to repost (and get sales from) for years.
It’s extremely easy to make decent enough videos and you’d be surprised just how many of them rank on Google, influence LLMs, and actually turn out GREAT.
