We have been discussing video a lot this week across all of our social media. We all know that video content is king however so many small businesses don’t utilise it. We put blockers up in a bid to strive for perfection. We use excuses of not having anything to say, not having the best backdrop or not having the right equipment and its just not true. Today we are going to talk all about how simple it can be to get started and how you can make videos on youtube with your phone and nothing more. Stop gunning for perfection and start talking to your audience!!
One of the key tips we can offer you is to ensure that your phone is stable. So where possible try and use a tripod or a selfie stick where you can control the amount of movement as much as you can. You don’t want to give your viewers a headache keeping up with sudden movements! If you can’t get hold of a tripod then get creative. stack up books, lean it against a chair, or whatever you need to do to try and go handsfree.
With the evolution in smartphone technology there is absolutely nothing wrong with using the inbuilt microphone on your phone or webcam to create content. However that being said, if you’re filming in an area where there might be lots of background noise or you want to uplevel the quality of the sound you are recording its definitely worth investing in an external mic. They are relatively inexpensive on Amazon and a really worthwhile investment if you are intending on creating lots of content moving forward.
Once again its so easy to get hung up on things like lighting. Yes soft boxes and ring lights are fabulous but actually you need one thing and one thing only when recording. Whats that you ask? Well quite simply you need an external window. Sit yourself next to a window and let the natural light bounce off your face.
Where are you going to film? Whats your backdrop going to be? Is there going to be anything distinguishable in your background for every video you make or are your videos on an ad hoc basis? We film the majority of our videos in our home office. Its REALLY not perfect, our office is literally our dumping ground, its really crowded, its full of the kids toys etc however its comfy, it feels familiar for us and ultimately your audience is listening to you first and foremost. They are not there to judge your taste in wallpaper.
Yes fancy transitions are fun and yes multishot videos are super cool and inspirational but if editing isnt in your zone of genius keep it simple! Think about your message and what you want to say. If you need prompt cards write them. Nobody will judge you for taking a second to make sure you are on track if you need some visual prompts. The ultimate goal for you when starting video based content marketing is to engage with your audience. We all know the “know, like, trust” routine by now. You may not be a natural “presenter” but your customers will still buy into you so let them see your face!
To find out about these points in more depth be sure to click and watch our video. And if you haven’t yet done so why don’t you subscribe to our Yellow Tuxedo YouTube channel to stay up to date with all of our latest video training.
As always if you have any questions do be sure to chat to a member of our team, we’re always happy to talk things through with you!
Have a tip top day and be sure to tag us in your next video so that we can see how fab you are!!
Emily x
If you are a business looking to be found on local search then its quite simple. You need to get yourself on Google My Business! In todays blog I’m going to give you our top tips for your Google My Business listing to ensure you get the most out of the tool but before we start I just want to tell you WHY you should be using Google My Business…
To find out about these points in more depth be sure to click and watch our video below. And if you haven’t yet done so why don’t you subscribe to our Yellow Tuxedo YouTube channel to stay up to date with all of our latest video training.
As always if you have any questions do be sure to chat to a member of our team, we’re always happy to talk things through with you!
Have a tip top day and be sure to start using Google My Business to its full potential.
Emily x
In part two our guide to using Pinterest for business we are going to give you five tips for pinning on Pinterest. If you haven’t yet watched part one we highly recommend watching it as it discusses how to optimise your Pinterest profile for keywords to be more discoverable. Part two of our video series can be found below.
Pinterest is such an incredible tool for driving traffic to your website and if you’re not using it then you could be seriously missing out!
Within the video we discuss the importance of Rich Pins and why you should set them up for your account. We have created a really handy document that walks you through how to set them up depending on what kind of web builder you have used for your website.
Get access to your free guide to setting up rich pins here.
As always if you have any questions do be sure to chat to a member of our team, we’re always happy to talk things through with you!
Have a tip top day and be sure to get pinning…
Emily x
Pinterest by far has to be one of the most powerful visibility tools that you have in your arsenal yet time and time again we work with businesses who haven’t yet discovered how or why its so important! The truth is that Pinterest isn’t just a social media platform for people to share pretty pictures on. Pinterest is a social search engine and people are searching in their millions for businesses just like you each and every day. In the first part of our mini Pinterest series we’re going to talk to you all about how to optimise keywords for Pinterest to ensure more people are getting eyes on your content AND clicking through to your website!
You might think that here at Yellow Tuxedo we bang on about keyword research a lot but the truth is that it really is the backbone of everything you will ever do on the internet. Understanding how your clients are searching for you and what they are typing in the search bar to explore products and services is key. If you are not sure how to go about searching relevant keywords in your niche do be sure to search out our previous blog post all about how to conduct keyword research using Google Keyword Planner.
Once you’ve created your list of keywords there are five main places on Pinterest that you can place them to really help improve your Pinterest SEO. How many of the following have you currently completed on your own profile? If you haven’t done so yet we strongly advise you go in and fill them out…
Don’t be too obscure with your profile name. This is the first opportunity on your profile that can be optimised. By all means use your brand name but if you can expand on what it is you do with a keyword then all the better.
Tell your audience exactly what it is you do and what your profile will be sharing with them. You have 160 characters here so make them count!
Think about the content you’ll be sharing on each of your boards and BE SPECIFIC with your board titles. You may think that being abstract and funny with your board titles makes them stand out but if people aren’t searching them you won’t seen by anyone!! Use keywords within your board titles as much as possible.
By now you’ll be starting to see a common theme. Fill out your board descriptions, explain what your board is about and, you’v guessed it, USE A SPECIFIC KEYWORD!!!!!!
With each and every pin you create you get up to 500 glorious characters to play with and to tell your audience what your pin is about. Just be careful not to keyword stuff!
To learn more about optimising keywords for Pinterest in more detail watch the video below so you can see a practical example of how to do all of the above.
As always if you have any questions do be sure to chat to a member of our team, we’re always happy to talk things through with you!
Have a tip top day and be sure to get pinning…
Emily x
The wonderful world of FB Live video. Love them or hate them they are an amazing way of engaging with your audience. However we’ve all been there, you’ve spent ages planning out what you want to say, or creating an epic presentation or workshop only for that live to slip down the FB feed never to be seen again. Well today we are going to show you how to download a FB live video and repurpose it essentially turning that live into evergreen content that will get more eyes on you!
We should say at this point that we’re not suggesting that each and every FB LIVE you do should be repurposed. The very nature of live video often means that they can be more conversational and relaxed so if you are only picking up the camera to talk about your day this might not be suitable. However if you are talking about a product launch or presenting some training or giving a review by all means give this a go. Its super simple to do and well worth the effort.
So once you’ve downloaded the video file from Facebook what should you do with it next??
Well the world really is your oyster. Once you have uploaded it to YouTube you could embed your video into a blog post much like we have in this post that you’re reading right now. You could extract the audio and upload to a podcasting platform, you can upload to IGTV, you could share to your other social media platforms, embed into an email or even edit it down to create smaller snippets to use in your marketing. Your really do have a plethora of options that will give you content for days and days to share out.
So without further ado here is the link to our tutorial which shows you exactly how to download a FB Live and repurpose it. Alan even goes on to show you how to get your FB video ready for a YouTube audience.
And of course do be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date with all of our weekly tips and advice on making sure that your business stands out from the crowd with an amazing online presence.
Have a tip top day…
Emily x
For lots of business owners the idea of podcasting can be fairly daunting. When things our out of our comfort zone its often quite easy to let great opportunities slip by! Thats why Alan really wanted to create a video by why of an introduction to setting up a podcast that actually shows you how to record a podcast and a YouTube video at the same time! This simple method is actually a great way of creating not one but TWO amazing, chunky pieces of macro content to share out on social media and use within your content strategy.
Obviously we will always advocate using the best equipment that you can afford within your business however we also recognise that sometimes you just need to get started. With this in mind starting a podcast is simple providing you have a smart phone as a bare minimum that you can talk into. In todays video Alan shows you how to get started by recording a podcast on your iPhone. He uses an external rode microphone to help with the sound quality.
However if you do want to invest in some basic equipment to ensure that your videos and podcasts are looking and sounding beautiful and shiny here is a list of some of the products we use on a daily basis..
Røde boom mic :- https://amzn.to/2sgTSuV
Røde lapel mic :- https://amzn.to/2E5ji1k
Amazon tripod :- https://amzn.to/38nPyeb
Phone holder with hot shoe :- https://amzn.to/2RDYWEC
Box lighting :- https://amzn.to/2P8Ah9x
Phone / selfie / vlogging stick :- https://amzn.to/2PzoAYx
Ring light :- https://amzn.to/36nQ0qK
We do hope you find todays video useful and that it encourages you to consider podcasting for your own business. As always if you would like to talk to us about this in more detail our team is more than happy to help both on a consultation and a practical basis too. Just head over to our Get in Touch page to send us a message!
Have a tip top day
Its estimated that by 2022 over 55% of households worldwide will own some sort of smart speaker device in their home and currently over 20% of google searches are conducted by voice. With this in mind if you’re not optimising your content for voice search you are missing out on a ridiculous opportunity!!! In todays video we give you five simple voice search SEO hints and tips to get you thinking about how you can optimise your website for voice.
It may sound a little daunting but actually optimising your website for voice search really isn’t as difficult you might think and lets face it, if you’re using best practice to optimise your site for mobile then you’re half way there!
As with most things we talk about here at Yellow Tuxedo, the key to nailing voice search is starting with nailing your keyword strategy and understanding how your audience is searching out your content. With voice search this might vary slightly from how someone would type into the google search bar. Usually if someone is asking Alexa or Siri something its for a quick answer to a relevant question rather than to trawl pages of content for inspiration. With voice search there are three defined keyword intentions…
1) Informational intent- The user is looking to LEARN something from the search to solve a specific problem.
2) Directional intent- The user is looking to GO somewhere or find out a geographic location.
3) Transactional intent- The user intends to DO something, often with regards to a purchase or activity.
By curating your content to ensure that these intentions are met in everything you put out to the world you will really start to improve your chances of being pulled up in the voice search…
Once you have spent time researching your audiences search intention a good piece of advice would be to create a really juicy and informative FAQ’s page on your website. Use those high volume, long tail search terms as your question base and answer them in a short and concise response. Not only is this good for voice search SEO but this will also improve your chances of being featured as a snippet on the SERPS.
A high percentage of voice search commands are local search based. With this in mind it will serve you well if you stay up to date with optimising your website for local SEO. Ensure that any relevant data like address, phone number, opening hours and such like are visible to be crawled on your site. Even more importantly make sure that this data is mirrored EXACTLY on your Google My Business page.
Schema markup is a type of structured data that lets Google know exactly what your content is about. If you are not sure how to implement this we will be doing a video on this soon. Schema is code that you can put on your website that informs the search engines about your content. It could be a recipe, a review, a product line you are promoting, information about your shop front…this is a powerful tool that will improve your chances of getting your content shown as a snippet or as a voice response.
A really good voice search SEO hint is to make sure that you work on your website page load speed to get it as fast as possible. Research has found that on average a voice search will try and pull up data in around 0.54 seconds as opposed to a desktop load time of 2.1 seconds. Time is money [ well your money!] and Alexa just hasn’t got the time to hang around and wait for your website to load! If your site is running slow, Google is just going to favour another piece of content over yours! Work on getting your pages to load as fast as possible without compromising the quality of your website.
Do be sure to watch the full video below where I talk about our 5 voice search SEO hints and tips in more detail and don’t forget if you want to stay up to date with our content do subscribe to our YouTube channel as each week we bring you a fresh new video all about digital skills and online presence!
Of course if you have any questions do be sure to chat to a member of our team, we’re always happy to talk things through with you!
Emily x
Do you know how to repurpose content for social media? With a million and one platforms that we could be posting to the idea of creating fresh and new content for each one can be ridiculously daunting. So why would you not start to be smarter with how we post to our channels?
When you spend time and effort creating macro content you’ll know how annoying it is when your content doesnt get the views it deserves. You owe it to yourself to share your content as far and wide as possible and in todays video Alan shows you 19 places that you can share that content today!
Repurposing content is a sure fire way of giving you days and days of content across the web and will allow new and fresh eyes to get eyes on your business with the click of a button…
So without further ado be sure to click on the video below where Alan is going to give you 19 ways of how to repurpose content for social media! He doesnt even touch on some of the more exciting ones like podcasting in this video but it does open your eyes a little to how a little effort can propel you ahead with your online visibility…
If you haven’t yet done so we do thoroughly recommend that you subscribe to our YouTube Channel as each week we”ll be delivering a brand new video all about how to maximise your online presence in a simple and jargon free way!
You can also download our free checklist for all of the places you can repurpose your content by clicking here.
Of course if you have any questions do be sure to chat to a member of our team, we’re always happy to talk things through with you!
Have a tip top day…
Emily x
If you’ve never done a Facebook Live, then you should. However, it’s not about your doing one for your confidence, or wanting to engage with your audience or just trying to beat the latest algorithm changes. Although, all of those reasons do count!
It’s because that one piece of content, known as ‘macro content’, will give you a plethora of other content to share around all over your platforms.
With our The Outside Bride wedding blog business, we did exactly that.
When you do your Live, what usually happens is that you’ll get some of your followers watching, it may get shared out and hopefully you’re get lots of interaction with it. All of that is amazing, but what happens with it after that? Well, after about 24hrs, it just sits under the videos section of your group or page, waiting for someone to find it.
Every Wednesday at 8pm we would go LIVE with Ask an Expert for our The Outside Bride Facebook group members. We’d answer lots of their questions and share our outdoor wedding and events expertise and experiences with them. This LIVE always lasted about 30 minutes and we’d finish around 830pm.
It’s what we did within the next hour that was really important.
A couple of notes here are that all of the content was fully keyword optimised, otherwise that content is doing nothing for you. Well it does less than your original Live did.
The podcast stream was then published and shared out across multiple podcast platforms including iTunes, Spotify and more.
Of course, we’d also now publish it to IGTV as well.
So, the next time you do a Facebook LIVE, ask yourself are you letting it disappear into the ether or are you making it truly work for you, by spreading it around the web as optimised evergreen content to be found by your potential clients?
We’d love for you to let us know what you’d do your LIVEs on in the comments below!
If you do want to start repurposing your content, then our free training is for you..
Head over to the link below to sign up and get started as there’s no time like the presence to start.
Click here for our free Digital Skills Training Course
Thank you and fun always.
Alan xx
PS.. If you’d like to know more about us, then just click right here.
This post isn’t just about one of our other businesses Baylily Bell Tents, it’s really all about how we ended up on ITVs This Morning with our 7m bell tent and I got to meet Rylan [picture below]. There are great PR examples everywhere and we wanted to share this one specifically with you.
You see, we’ve always been about building our legacy, not just our own personal legacy, but also that of our businesses! None of our businesses have been designed to be short term, money making flash in the pan businesses. They’ve all been built to be here for a long time, with us tweaking and adjusting them to stay ahead or at least with the flow and that’s why we’ve concentrated on growing our online presence for all of them!
When we started Baylily Bell Tents, we decided to not spend money on ads [although we did explore using them a little bit], but to spend time building our online presence to bring the traffic to our website from all corners of the web, as that’s what needs to be done as our ‘ideal client’ doesn’t just live on one social media platform!
We started to share out content far and wide, always making sure it was 100% optimised. We had text, picture, video and voice content everywhere.
Then, the traffic started to visit our site and the busines grew and grew and grew..
Now, this is where it gets exciting. This is the grey area in amongst the black and white. This is where all of the effort into a huge online presence pays off. Basically, you never know who is Googling you, but as you’ll be at the top of Google for your optimised content, when they do, they’ll be looking at your site. This is why we’ve had celebrity clients book us, we’ve been on This Morning multiple times and we’re regulars contributors to the BBC to answer questions on weddings..
More importantly though, I did get to meet Rylan on one of the occasions.. Which was a proper fan boy moment for me.
Legacy is so important and growing your online presence is a must when building your legacy. Who knows who’ll then be Googling you.
We’d love you to share some fab PR examples of your own or if you fancy getting your business onto This Morning, then do leave a comment below..
If you do want to start building your businesses legacy, then our free training is for you..
Head over to the link below to sign up and get started as you never know who’s Googling what you do.
Click here for our free Digital Skills Training Course
Thank you and fun always.
Alan xx
PS.. If you’d like to know more about us, then just click right here.
