4 Video Marketing Strategies to Help You Get Better Results Right Now

Whether you’re just dipping your toes into video marketing, or maybe you have hundred and hundreds of amazing videos on your YouTube page, or even better, in a video marketing platform. Either way, your priority isn’t video views, it’s about bringing in results to impress your leaders, generate leads, build pipeline and help close deals. Yes, you really can do all of that with video! If you’re feeling a little panicked or not in-the-know, don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Did you know that a lot of companies aren’t using video at their full potential? Each day businesses are missing out new leads, and new customers using video. The thing is, businesses all over the world believe in the power of video, but don’t quite understand how to translate video content into tangible results their executives will appreciate. The good news is: you don’t have to be one of them! Here are four strategies to help you drive real business results with your video marketing.

1. Map video content to your buyer journey and buyer personas

If you want to build video content that serves a purpose, it’s important to define what stages of your buyer journey are lacking in content. For instance, if you’re noticing a lot of prospects show a lot of interest and then become disengaged right before they would buy, an informative video at the bottom of the funnel, like a demo or tutorial on how to use your product, could be the solution. Mapping your content to the buyer journey is key to making sure you’re providing all the information your prospects (at any stage!) would want from you.

Same idea goes for your buyer personas. If you’re just starting out with video, it’s strongly recommended you allocate your production budget to the personas most likely to drive revenue and pipeline. Build videos for the decision-makers first (but don’t forget to build out videos for the rest of your audience, too, since they will help you generate leads as well)!

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2. Align Marketing and Sales for efficiency and stronger results

If you plan on making marketing videos, it’s important to keep the end goal in mind and collaborate with the people in your organization who are front and center with prospects. Typically your sales team knows more about your customers than anyone else in the company, and they’ll have some amazing ideas on how you can communicate value in your videos. If the video is later in the buyer journey, consider making a video that can be used by marketing and sales teams, for example a customer testimonial video that can live on your website, and also be sent by a sales rep to a qualified lead. Sharing is caring, and you’ll notice that videos serving multiple departments will perform much better than those that serve a singular goal. You will be able to generate leads from them and also be able to prove the impact of your video content on closed deals. Results like that are really impressive!

 3. Optimize your video content and social channels

Did you know that only 19% of businesses are properly optimizing their videos by A/B split testing their video splash screen (the thumbnail image) to select the most click-worthy image, “gating” their videos by asking for viewers’ emails, and adding strategic calls-to-action to drive conversion along a content journey. Optimizing your content is fundamental to making sure your video marketing strategies are a success. Your videos should never fade to black and leave your audience questioning “Now what?” These optimization techniques can help you achieve higher click-through rates, generate more leads, and nurture leads more effectively.

Don’t forget to optimize your social channels, too. Having your videos on a social channel such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube are an amazing opportunity to build awareness, but are these videos funneling back into your website content? All social media platforms have the ability to build clickable calls-to-action. It’s important to use these at their full potential and direct your prospects to the most relevant content at the time when they want it the most. Don’t forget about SEO either! Make sure you search your keywords, and insert them into your descriptions so you increase the likelihood of video discovery.

 4. Integrate video into your marketing technology

As we know as modern marketers, it’s important to know exactly how our campaigns are performing. The best way to build a return on investment for your video or content performance is by integrating your video marketing platform with your marketing automation platform (MAP), and customer relationship management software.

Once you do that, you’ll be able to discover exactly how your audience is responding to your videos, like what each person is watching, re-watching, or skipping. This behavior indicates their interest in you, and when it’s integrated with your MAP, you can lead-score these viewers to discover who isn’t interested, who needs to be nurtured (and with what content), and who you should follow up with immediately. The entire process, from an initial view, to a qualified lead, to a closed sale, can be tracked and monitored by connecting platforms such as Vidyard, Marketo, and Salesforce.

Want to learn more about these four strategies and get even more actionable insights? Come to Viewtopia, the Video Marketing Summit, to get benchmark research, and tangible advice on how to achieve amazing things with video!

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Trump vs Hillary rallies - What you DON'T see on TV

Video Marketing How-To: Creating Transparent Overlays for Videos

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Video Marketing How-To! Today I want to quickly show you how to create transparent overlays for your videos, like name keys, company logos, or any other static imagery you want to include in your video.

First, I take a screenshot of the scene I’m going to use the overlay on. This helps me understand where the overlay will fit into the larger scene.

Then I import that into my image editing tool. I use a cheap but powerful program called Pixelmator, but you can use Photoshop, GIMP, or any other image editing tool that allows you to create PNG images with transparent backgrounds.

I create my image as a layer, line it up where I want it to sit, and get rid of all the other layers so I have just the image and a transparent background. I export this as a transparent PNG.

From here, I add it as a media item to iMovie, and add it to the scene I want. iMovie will automatically apply the Ken Burns effect, so you’ll just need to remove this, and select Crop to Fill instead. If you’ve got the aspect ratio set up properly, then final touches will just be a matter of setting how long you want the image to run for, and clicking play.

And that’s it! There are many ways to create transparent overlays for your videos, but that’s just how I do it. It’s fast, and it makes use of the software products I already have. I hope you found this tip useful, and learn how we make fun transitions for your videos like the ones we use in our Meet the Team series!

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The Greatest Prospecting Campaign I’ve Ever Run

Mullets, rock ‘n roll, and bank robberies. No … this isn’t a Quentin Tarantino movie (though that sounds kind of awesome), this is the story behind the greatest prospecting campaign I’ve ever run.

For those that don’t know me, I’m Ryan O’Hara. I helped start the business development team at Dyn, one of the worldwide leaders in Internet Performance … yeah the guys that have raised over $90 Million in funding, and one of the fastest growing startups in New Hampshire.

Today I work for a software company called LeadIQ that helps make it really easy for sales teams to find lead data off the web, and get it into Salesforce.

But enough of the preamble. Let’s get to the meat of why you’re here: to read about why my prospecting campaign at Dyn was the best I’ve ever run.

When Cold Emails Just Don’t Work…

It was December of 2011, and I was working as a Business Development guy. You know the drill. I was sending cold emails, cold calling, trying to bring in opportunities for the sales team.

But bringing in new business is super tough, especially in December, during the dreaded Out Of Office Storm of 2011.  If you work in prospecting or sales, you know!

With that being said, management at Dyn knew I wanted to do some sort of pipedream, bats***, outside the box prospecting campaign, and they gave me the thumbs up to spend my time in December experimenting. And so it began.

Experiment with New Attention-Grabbing Methods

I went to every sales rep at the time. Back then, I think there were seven, and I asked them, “If you could have one account, who would it be?”

(Keep in mind this was before the account-based selling was the rage with the kids!)

The reps came back with one account each. The accounts were:

1. CareerBuilder.com
2. Hulu
3. Posterous
4. Funny or Die
5. Living Social
6. Expedia

*Note: One sales rep on the team never got back to me. Too bad for them.

This campaign was designed to solve one simple problem:

How do we get a small tech company in New Hampshire to start a relationship with all these companies?

Use Personalized Video Content

We used personalized content for each of the target accounts. This is an example of the incredible content we made for prospects:

If you want to learn about more of the process we used to get five of six of the companies to respond, join me on the upcoming webinar on October 20th at 8am PT/11am ET with Vidyard: How to Use Video to Wrap up 83% of Your Deals Before Year End.

We’re going to talk about the content creation, the plan, how we came up with it, how we assembled the team, how we promoted it, and how you can easily do this same thing to bring in more opportunities for your pipeline.

You don’t have to be Wes Anderson or Martin Scorcese to make videos to win customers over. You just need your brain, a little bit of time, and a little creativity.

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Why You Should Be Using Video to Strengthen Employee Engagement and Loyalty

Where do the most engaged, loyal employees come from?

Every company wants them. But where do engaged, passionate employees come from? Does HR hire them? Or does your company ‘make’ them? It has to be a combination of both, because as a company grows, it gets harder to find candidates who are super-hyped to make sure your company sells the most hornswaggles and snarfblatts than your competitors.

So if your company can ‘make’ engaged and loyal employees, how does it happen? If you offer catered lunches and foosball tables? Perks are nice, but employees need more than that to feel truly engaged. That’s why many people probably just count the minutes and shuffle papers around until they go home. In fact, one recent report even stated that 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. That’s about one in eight!

While it’s not the easiest thing to make employees feel engaged, it can be done if an organization is committed to its employees beyond a superficial level. And it should be done.

As long as they show up and do their work, why do you really need highly engaged employees?

Take it from Richard Branson, one of the most successful business people with a truly engaged workforce:

“What’s your business’s competitive advantage? I’m not talking about top secret, proprietary information – and neither am I thinking about award-winning products. No matter your industry, your employees are your company’s real competitive advantage. They’re the ones making the magic happen – so long as their needs are being met.”

It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? But it’s a challenge to create an engaging environment and build brand loyalty with your employees, so why bother? Well, if you’re in a communications role, engagement, and even helping employees become advocates, is probably an important part of your work. You know already know that just putting business communications out there and hoping people pay attention just isn’t enough anymore.

What kinds of rewards can companies reap from engaged employees?

You need to make sure your employees feel connected to you because of the incredible gains that come along with elevated engagement: It’s a fact that highly engaged employees are willing (and do) work much harder (one study saw a 12% in productivity from happy employees), they even go above and beyond their duties (with 25% higher job performance ratings in one study), call in sick less, stay at your company much longer, and advocate for you to their networks. Your organization, in turn, sees better job candidates and higher profits (one research report found companies with highly engaged employees outperform their peers by 147%!). Engaged employees really can drive success in all areas of your business, including talent acquisition, sales, and customer and public relations.

Convinced yet? If you weren’t already, think about it this way: one resource noted that unhappy employees cost US companies roughly $450 to $550 billion annually. Gulp. So if you’re in an employee communications or related role, you can prove your value and the return on investment in your team by strengthening your employees’ relationship with your organization.

So how do you go about turning an ordinary workforce into a loyal employees?

Sir Branson’s awesome advice continues:

“Luckily, understanding [employees’] needs is pretty straightforward: they want to feel that they belong and are important, that your organisation cares about them, and ultimately, that they have a grip on their lives.”

If you chat with any coworkers in marketing, this might sound quite similar to what your customers want from you. Consumers buy from those they like, and those who are the most relatable and human. It isn’t just about specific product features, but about something much deeper. They want to feel like you care about them, and they want to feel in control of their own decisions, like choosing you versus being forced to buy from you.

That’s a good reason why 87% of online marketers use video: it’s a powerful medium. It’s incredibly engaging and relatable. It helps your audience feel like you’re there with them because it’s the next best thing to being there in person. So if you want a highly engaged workforce, treat your employees the way you would treat your honored customers: meet and exceed their needs by giving them an incredible experience. Video is an exceptional way to do that.

If you aren’t using video in your internal communications strategy, here are 5 reasons why you need to start right now:

Reason #1: It’s the medium your workforce wants.

You know as well as anyone how busy your employees are. It seems like work life is getting more and more hectic, and people are relying so much on multi-tasking to get things done. One survey found that 92% of people multitask during meetings, and 41% do it often or all the time. If employees are barely paying attention in meetings, they probably feel like they don’t have time or desire to stop and pay attention to things outside their own job function, and that often includes reading company communications. Which is not a great thing – they can be missing some imperative, informative, or even simply fun content that will help them feel more connected and engaged with the company.

Video, on the other hand, engages audiences like no other medium. It offers a visual and audial experience, and demands attention, keeping viewers’ interest. If you offer video, you are providing access to content at any time and on any device, which millennials, for example, have proven they require – this demographic touches their smartphones 43 times per day, and 30% admit to touching more than four devices over the course of 24 hours. They want interactive content, and video provides that through calls-to-action and interactive elements like surveys baked right inside the video. Video is the medium that offers a unique, fast, distraction-free experience, and it always proves its worth: did you know that audiences spend 88% more time on sites with video? Imagine what video could do on your intranet!

Reason #2: Video is relatable, honest, and memorable.

When you create email communications, post to your Intranet, include information in collaboration channels, or other channels, you’re probably using some text format. And in doing so, you’re leaving out a fundamental aspect of human interaction and communication: body language and tone. Words can carry meaning, but tone can shift that meaning, and body language can determine whether your audience believes in you or questions your motivations.

That’s why video is relatable. When you see and hear people on camera, you make instant, even subconscious decisions and reactions, which can work perfectly in a communicator’s favour because the ambiguity that might occur through text is no longer present. If someone is sharing an exciting message or offering hope during a difficult situation, video offers an honesty and transparency that isn’t nearly as powerful in other mediums because though video, that person on screen is talking to you in ways that they can’t through text. This honesty helps build trust with your employees, strengthening their emotional connection and loyalty to the company.

Reason #3: Employees can hear messages straight from the horse’s (or CEO’s) mouth.

Imagine this: learning about who your company is, and why it does what it does, through a website or email or sent down the ranks until it finally reaches you. Not very motivating or inspiring, right? Even worse, when you don’t hear messages directly from the ‘horse’s mouth’, information may be misconstrued or missing. But that can be the very real situation for companies that don’t use video in their communications. Would you believe it if I told you that just 41% of employees in the United States know what their company stands for and what makes the brand different from competitors? It’s true.

When employees can get information straight from the source in an honest and relatable way, it’s easier for them to understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. One poll found that over 70% of employees felt more engaged in companies where company goals, objectives, and individual and company performance were clearly communicated.  Which supports what Richard Branson said: employees need to feel valued. They get that fulfillment by understanding that their work is contributing in a real way to the company’s own mission. That fulfillment at work leads to employees feeling proud about what they spend their days and years doing. This pride, in turn, leads to a stronger bond with the organization, a deep sense of engagement, and a willingness to advocate for the brand.

Communicators know that it’s a typical request from employees to have more direct and frequent contact with their leadership. They want transparency over secretive handling of the business. Video is perfect for providing it because the mutual honesty and connection between a leader and employee can’t be as effective through another medium – blog posts can be ghost written, and emails sent from an executive assistant. Video proves to your employees that leadership genuinely cares about them (which is exactly what they need to feel engaged!) because that leader took the time from their schedule to get on camera and speak directly and openly, on what feels like a on a one-on-one basis, to employees.

Reason 4: Video makes it easier for employees to advocate for your brand.

When employees feel valued and connected to their business, they want to talk about it to their family, friends, and team members. But sharing a web page or blog post or press release isn’t nearly as exciting as sharing video content. That’s why videos are shared 1,200% more times than links and text combined. So why not help you employees express their love of video and desire to share this engaging medium? When employees share video content, they can strengthen the relationship between your company and its current employees, as well as its future employees and customers, more quickly and easily than a brand itself can do – in fact, brand messages that are shared by employees are re-shared 24 times more frequently than those that are distributed by the brand. These re-shares aren’t meaningless; they can drive real results because, these days, an employee advocate is now trusted twice as much as a CEO.

Don’t worry – if you’re thinking that a lot of your content is confidential, you can lock down video content and limit it to certain audiences, like just your employees. That way, employees can access the best company-created content, but only content that is safe for external eyes and ears.

Reason 5: You can easily and accurately gauge employee response to your communications content so you can give them more of what they want.

If you’re using a powerful video platform, you can get analytics on your communications videos that tell you exactly how your employees are responding to your content. Find out information on your video content like how long people watched, where they dropped off, or if they rewatched or skipped any parts. You can even learn about what videos specific viewers are watching, and how engaged they are with the content.

How does this data drive employee engagement? Well, how do you measure the effectiveness of your communications now? You can’t tell if employees are reading your whole email communications or Intranet pages – only that they opened or landed on the content. And employee surveys are useful, but can be too infrequent to get real-time feedback. But with video data, you have the power to learn what content you should keep creating, what messages need refinement, and what isn’t working. When your content so effectively mirrors the interests of your employees, they will feel like you truly understand and value them.

How have you used video – or how are you considering using it – to engage your employees?

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Taking a Journalistic Approach to Content Marketing: Wise Words from Kristy Sharrow

Who do you think is the hardest group of people to sell to? And we’re not talking trying to sell laptops to Luddites. Picture the last person any sales person wants to get on the phone with. If you guessed other salespeople, you’d probably be right.

Marketing to sales people isn’t any easier — let alone marketing to their bosses. But that’s the kind of challenge that makes Kristy Sharrow tick. And it’s what has made LevelEleven so successful, in the midst of thousands of sales technologies hitting the market in the last 5 years.

LevelEleven is a simple-to-use sales activity management system for Salesforce that helps sales leaders see personalized scorecards for their sales people, and motivate their sales team with challenges to build a culture of performance. As the Director of Marketing, Sharrow is in charge of building pipeline and driving sales, and she proves that you don’t have to be a salesperson to have a big impact.

“I started at LevelEleven around three and a half years ago,” said Sharrow in our interview, “I was a reporter before I joined the team and I was looking for new assignments to take on. I saw an ad from LevelEleven looking for a freelance writer, so I figured I would talk to the CEO.” The offer turned out to be exactly what she was looking for, and Sharrow eventually moved from freelance to part-time, and from part-time to full-time Director of Marketing.

To help us understand what it takes to sell to salespeople (and market to their leadership) we sat down with Sharrow over Google Hangouts to hear how she succeeds in making LevelEleven stand out. Here’s what she had to say:

What are the challenges of marketing to sales leadership?

The greatest challenge now is that there are so many other sales technologies out there. There’s a stat from VentureBeat — and I hope I’m quoting this correctly — that 50% of the sales technologies that exist were launched in the last 5 years. So there’s a lot of noise out there for sales leaders, and it can be difficult to stand out. For us, we have a very clear ROI, and an instant ROI that comes with using LevelEleven and we focus on communicating that. That helps us stand out, prove that we’re a must-have, and separate ourselves from the noise.

How do you plan your episodic content?

We were thinking about how we could help our sales leadership team separate some of the things they were looking at, because obviously they have a seemingly infinite number of sales technologies to choose from. So we had this idea that we would get profiles of sales stack technology vendors — either solutions or services — anything that would help the modern sales stack. We asked the same questions of every one of the companies we chose to feature, edited them down so that we made sure you could read each one in under two minutes, and then launched them right away so once per week.

Does LevelEleven sponsor all the events featured on your blog?

The short answer is, you’d read more posts than we sponsor! In general, our content strategy is to serve up content to our audience, customers and prospects in the VP of Sales persona, and sometimes the most relevant content is an event that happened recently. So we’ll take a journalistic approach, and cover events that we’re attending or if we’re not sponsoring them but it’s a critical event for the industry, then we’ll interview people who were there or people who planned the event. We feel it’s important to help our readers to stay in the loop with industry trends, news and things like that. But we do sponsor quite a few events. A handful of Salesforce events, including Dreamforce, one or two industry conferences, and our own events.

What do you look for in the events you sponsor?

First and foremost, if we’ve been to this event in the past, it would be any ROI we’ve seen. We’re very metric-oriented here, so that’s number one. Beyond that, we’re looking at audience, and that can be pretty challenging for us. We’re looking for sales leadership, but our product is embedded in Salesforce so we’re selling only to Salesforce users. Often times, unless it’s a Salesforce event, a lot of conference teams don’t have CRM data, so that can be a little challenging. But, we’re trying to get estimated data on that, the roles of the people there, and the size of the companies. Other than that, we’ll look at agenda and layout; you can have an awesome conference with a crowd that’s perfect for us, but if there’s no reason for anyone to go into the sponsorship area then it might not make sense.

What is your favorite campaign that you have run?

This is really difficult! Since we’ve been talking about video, the first one that comes to mind is our conference follow-up videos. The very first time we did this was the Salesforce world tour, and my first event with the company just over three years ago. I remember sitting there in the keynote looking around at everyone and thinking “how in the heck are we going to follow up with these people in a way that they actually pay attention to?” So I started to try and brainstorm as the keynote was about to start, and I got this idea that I got really excited about, which was to create a follow up video that we would email to them. The video was kind of cheesy, and really fun to make.

It was our team members that were at the show, acting like they were speaking to one person. So if we talked to you there, we were saying “thank you for stopping by, we miss you a lot already!” and then each person spoke about how much they missed you. It was just this goofy little thing, and the quality was crappy as we were just testing it out. But we sent it out, and the first indicator of success was that people were actually taking the time to write us from the email to say thank you, or tell us it was a cute video. Ultimately, we still do this today, and open rates are around 55%, which for a situation where you’re facing off against so many other emails at the same time, is pretty strong for us. And click rates are always above average compared to our other emails, which again, when you’re going against those other emails for first-touch prospects, it’s exciting to see those kind of metrics!

Any resources you can share with our audience that make you a better marketer?

The two biggest ones for me externally are HubSpot, and their Academy webinars in particular. The Inbound Certification especially. As soon as someone comes into this team, they’re taking the Inbound Certification test on the Marketing side. That is extremely valuable and has helped us build up a lot of our strategy at LevelEleven. I also love the KissMetrics blog for more of the scientific side of marketing. Those are the two main ones.

The other thing I think about constantly and I have to remind myself to spend more time with is our internal sales team. They are the absolute best resource. Sitting in on their meetings, meeting with customer success, even getting on the phone with customers, are critical, critical resources and it’s easy to forget about them when you’re in the day-to-day, marketing project mode.

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This Interview Was Derailed by Cliff Ravenscraft’s Enthusiasm

This Interview Was Derailed by Cliff Ravenscraft’s Enthusiasm

Episode: 281
Who: Cliff Ravenscraft
Blog / Website: Podcast Answer Man

Do you worry that your message isn’t valuable enough?

Do you want to change the world? Of course you do.

In this episode, I’m on the line with Cliff Ravenscraft a.k.a the Podcast Answer Man and host of the Cliff Ravenscraft show. His podcast is devoted to helping you take your message, your business and your life to the next level. He started podcasting as a hobby way back in December 2005 and has since created more than 30 different shows and an amazing 3,300 podcast episodes. He has personally helped thousands of people launch extremely successful podcasts through one-on-one coaching, consulting and his Podcasting A to Z online training course.

I brought him on here to talk about how to sell high-priced products from your blog and then… we got a little derailed. Instead, we’re talking about how podcasts change the world, and I gotta tell you, I think you’re going to get a LOT of value out of this episode!

Changing the World

Cliff started our interview by talking about an Apple commercial from a while back, where Steve Jobs said something like, “only the crazy people think they can change the world, and they’re the ones that do.” So I had to know: does Cliff really think that he can change the world? He said, “I have already.”

To explain, he went all the way back to his first podcast, which started in December 2005.

He says that there are people who are married today who would never have met if they hadn’t listened to Cliff’s podcast. They listened to the show, they came to a meetup, and the rest is history. There are successful business partners who met the same way.

Cliff has done over 30 different podcast shows in the last 11 years, for a total of 3,600 episodes. On average, his episodes are 1 hour each. So that’s 3,600 hours of his voice out on the airwaves that people are listening to and being influenced by.

He’s done 9 years of podcast consulting and coached over 1,000 students one on one. He has had 580 students on his Podcasting A to Z group course. That’s almost 2,000 people who have paid for him to teach them how to podcast. And that’s not counting the 25,000 people have made use of free materials and launched a podcast.

Cliff has helped tons of podcasters build their own podcasts.

So there are about 30,000 podcasters putting their content out there because of Cliff. He’s changing the world by enabling people to get their message out there.

But sometimes it’s smaller than that. Cliff says that even just sharing a smile can change the world, because if I can put a smile on your face today, and make you feel better about yourself, and you go out and create something like a podcast as a result of that good feeling instead of taking the day off, you might reach somebody who really needed to hear that content today.

Of those listening to this episode right now who want to build a podcast and don’t have one yet, Cliff estimates that at least 20 of them will learn to build a podcast from him over the next couple years. They will create content that will save people’s lives.

This is Where We Got Derailed

You Can Change the World with Podcasting

Now, as you know, my slogan here at Become a Blogger is “Changing the world one blog at a time,” so I was more than happy to dwell on changing the world instead of talking about how to make more money!

Here’s Cliff’s take-home message for you: “If you’re listening to this right now, and you’re holding back because you feel like you don’t have much to offer, you have been lied to.” As a Christian, Cliff believes we were all created for a purpose and that we all have extreme value in the world.

That doesn’t mean that every person out there has to have a blog or a podcast. We’re all uniquely gifted. But if you want to blog or podcast, then there’s no reason for you not to be out there doing it.

Whatever it is you want to do, whatever message you want to share, whatever industry, area, niche, or topic, you have a unique perspective to offer. It doesn’t matter if there are hundreds or thousands of other blogs or podcasts about that topic. Your lifetime of experience means that you will always bring something special to the table!

Cliff used an analogy to explain. If Cliff and I both read the same book, and we were both given the same podcast title, and we were both asked to give a podcast based on the same outline, Cliff guarantees that we would create vastly different podcast episodes. We would tell essentially the same story completely different ways because of our different life experiences.

Is My Niche “Life Changing”?

But what if the thing you want to podcast about isn’t “life changing”? What if you want to talk about Legos? How does that change the world?

Cliff says it doesn’t matter. And he should know, because his first blog, back in December 2005, was a podcast about a TV show. Cliff and his wife, Stephanie, just talked about Lost on their podcast.

Now, Cliff will be the first to admit that he went into podcasting for all the wrong reasons. It was an ego thing in the beginning. You can search for Cliff’s podcast on iTunes and read the 1-star reviews. Cliff would say that he pretty much earned them all.

But did he change the world with that podcast? YES.

How does he know? His listeners have told him so.

For example, Anne from Germany had a traumatic life. She had attempted suicide as a teenager, and after that event she really withdrew from society and became a recluse. Watching TV was one of the only things she could do, and she loved Lost. Anne found Cliff and Stephanie’s weekly Lost podcast, and she says that it changed her life.

Cliff and Stephanie’s Weekly Lost Podcast

She started meeting people through that community and, eventually, started travelling to meet people and coming to conferences. She went from never leaving her bedroom to crossing international borders just to meet new friends.

Cliff and Stephanie’s podcast inspired her to create a personal blog about her struggle with anorexia. She started blogging through her treatment experience. Lots of people told her that she should keep her experience private. But Anne knew that sharing her story would have a profound and positive impact on people’s lives. She has been in recovery ever since.

Eventually, Anne decided to create a podcast about anorexia. She signed up for Cliff’s Podcasting A to Z course, and launched FightingAnorexia.com. She started a community online for other people in recovery, and now she is changing people’s lives.

It’s an amazing story! So I ask Cliff, “What kinds of things can you do in a podcast to make that kind of impact possible?” Let’s say you really do want to podcast about Lego.

Cliff says that you have to start by figuring out why you want to talk about Legos. What does Lego mean to you? What does Lego spark inside you? What do you create with your Lego?

Your impact might be as simple as giving people the freedom to say, “Hey, it’s okay to have a hobby as an adult around Lego. There are others like me.”

It isn’t really about Lego at all. It’s about a shared passion. If you are deeply passionate about Lego, and there are other people out there who are also deeply passionate about Lego, and you build a relationship with those people, then you have the opportunity to have a positive impact in their lives.

Cliff gave an example: suppose that he meets a guy named Joe for the first time, in person, at an event, and they don’t know each other at all. Let’s say Joe works for Planned Parenthood, and he believes very differently from how Cliff believes. There’s already a barrier between them if they meet in that way, and they may not be able to get past it to find out what they have in common.

But what if Joe loves Lego, and Cliff meets him through a Lego community online? In that case, he gets to know Joe through their shared passion and build a relationship that way. And maybe, through interacting online, Cliff finds out that Joe lives close by, and they get together to build Lego and develop a wonderful friendship.

In that case, they would already have something in common and a strong connection before they found out that they had a difference of beliefs with regard to Joe’s job at Planned Parenthood. So they can be a positive influence in each others’ lives, and they can see what they have in common.

Embracing Your Purpose

That all sounds great, but I want to know: what made Cliff’s podcast so effective in terms of having an impact on people’s lives?

“Who am I to create a podcast?” Your unique experiences and perspectives make your message worth sharing.

Cliff says that he and Stephanie always brought their “humanness,” their day-to-day selves onto the show. You might think that you’re just a boring, average person, but Cliff and Stephanie found out that lots of people don’t think they’re boring at all!

You might be thinking to yourself, “Who am I to create a podcast? What makes me so special?” Your life experiences and your unique perspective make your message worth sharing.

Now, Cliff says he sometimes borders on narcissism too much, but maybe that’s because so many people have written in over the years to say that he’s special and has had an impact on their lives. From his religious point of view, he accepts that this is what God has put him on earth to do. And you can check out the testimonials on http://ift.tt/2dvB9zP to hear some of what people have to say about Cliff and Stephanie.

Ultimately, Cliff’s a “regular person” just sharing his perspectives. Even if he’s “wrong” he’s still sharing his humanity with his audience, and that is really powerful. With the Lost podcast, he didn’t know all the ins and outs of how the show was created or what the writers intended. There were about 5 other Lost podcasts out there before Cliff’s, and he says that the quality of his content was a 2 out of 10 compared to the others. But people still wanted to listen to him and still felt connected to him.

Some people, myself included, can be a little bit uncomfortable with the message of embracing your purpose in life. Don’t we need to have humility about the gifts we have? Or does that only hold us back from fully expressing ourselves and being all that we can be?

Are Podcasters Narcissists?

Cliff struggled with this from a long time. If you want to know more about his journey in this respect, you can hear about it at http://ift.tt/2dWP6tX. He did a bit of a rant about it. The episode, “Are Podcasters Narcissists?”, was inspired by a commenter who said that he had “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”.

Sometimes Cliff gets so passionate and fired up that he crosses the line, and it comes across as arrogance. But anyone who knows “the real Cliff” knows that it’s genuine confidence, not arrogance behind his message.

So what’s the difference?

Arrogance is boastful, and overly proud. Arrogance is thinking that you did it all by yourself and didn’t have help from anyone. It’s the belief that you have not made too many mistakes, and that most of the time you make the right call. Cliff always acknowledges that he makes a lot of mistakes, gives credit where it’s due, and shares who inspired him and who taught him. He also knows that some of his success is down to luck, or being in the right place at the right time.

He also freely admits that he started podcasting for all the wrong reasons. He just wanted to get famous online when he started his Lost podcast. He was arrogant and boastful in the beginning, but he discovered his true calling and purpose through podcasting. What’s his purpose? It’s becoming a better version of himself every day and creating and promoting products and services that will help change the world.

Owning Your Accomplishments

This is something that I personally struggle with. Recently, I was talking to a friend about a service that I want to pitch to someone. And my friend kept insisting that I was charging too little for that service, and he started listing all of my accomplishments. He reminded me how much I’ve done for my clients. And I was so uncomfortable! I was pacing around the room and sweating…I just couldn’t handle it.

We all have the ability to speak to one person

So I ask Cliff: is this something he struggles with, too?

He says that he used to, but he doesn’t now. When Cliff says that he has changed the world, he has proof. It’s not an exaggeration or a boast. People tell him that he’s changed their lives. Three people have said that they decided not to commit suicide because of Cliff’s podcasts.

And from a spiritual point of view, Cliff says, “I am not me; I am Christ in me.” He believes that what he has achieved in his life is through the power of Christ.

Regardless of your religious beliefs, we all have value to give to world, because we all have the ability to speak to one person. And when we help that one person, we change the world. And we enable them to go out and change the world.

Cliff used another example to help illustrate this point. He started talking about my son, Noah. Now, I’m really proud of Noah, and I love him very, very much. When Noah is struggling to accomplish something, of course I help him.

Sometimes, Noah really, really struggles to learn a new skill, and it takes a long time for him to “get it.” I help him every time, show him the right way to do it, and he gets better slowly but surely, with my help.

And when he finally can do it, he is so proud of what he has achieved. Cliff asked me: do you say to Noah, “No, you shouldn’t be proud of this. You should be giving me credit”? Well, of course I don’t. Do I think that my son is arrogant for being proud of his accomplishments? Obviously not!

So Cliff says, “Do you think you’re a better father than God?”

Of course I don’t.

Final Thoughts

Cliff had two final points to share in this episode:

1. Think about why you create whatever content you’re creating.

Look for the opportunity to create and establish relationships that would never happen otherwise. Start out from shared passions, because this is most effective way to establish a relationship. You have the ability to positively impact each other’s lives regardless of how much you don’t have in common.

2. You should start a podcast.

If you need help getting started and you don’t mind spending some money, you can go to Cliff’s 4-week coaching course, Podcasting A to Z, at podcastingatoz.com.

If you want a free course, check out Learn How to Podcast. It needs an update, but there’s still a lot of good content there, and it’s a great place to get started.

If you want to hear more from Cliff, you can listen to his podcast over on podcastanswerman.com.

Resources Mentioned

• Podcast Answer Man – Cliff’s blog
• Cliff Ravenscraft show – Cliff’s podcast
• Podcasting A to Z online course – Group training and coaching service offered by Cliff.
• Weekly Lost podcast – where Cliff and his wife, Stephanie, started a blog which focused on their thoughts about Lost episodes. This basically paved their way to their podcasting journey that started way back 2005.
• Generally Speaking Production Network – an online media production company founded by Cliff and wife, Stephanie.
  • GSPN Testimonials – hear what people have to say about Cliff and Stephanie’s company and their podcast shows
• “Are Podcasters Narcissists?” – where Cliff tackled the topic about crossing the borders of narcissism for podcasters sharing their journey online.

Infographic

Changing the World with Podcasting

The post This Interview Was Derailed by Cliff Ravenscraft’s Enthusiasm appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

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