Hey guys, welcome to Shama.tv. I want to talk to you guys today about something that I get asked a lot. And it’s about marketing and, if you could sum up marketing, what would it be? And I call this Marketing 911, or Marketing EMS if you will.

And so marketing has to do three things all the time, and whenever I see somebody’s marketing that’s not working, they’re missing out on one of these three things, and I’ll tell you what they are. So EMS stands for “Educate, Market and Sell.” Your marketing has to do all three. It has to educate, market and sell. And I realize sometimes ‘sell’ can fall into one other category by itself of selling, but your marketing is pretty much… it’s great if your marketing can close the sale before it even, you know, before the purchase order is even put in.

So I want you to always remember this: Educate, Market, Sell. Any marketing material you put out there, I want you to ask yourself: “Am I educating? Am I providing value? Am I marketing? Am I sharing what I know? Am I doing a good job getting the product or service out there? And am I selling? Am I telling them to say, “Hey, you know what, if this is a good fit for you, buy.”

So three things: Educate, Market, Sell and remember this as Marketing 911.

Hi, I’m Dave Kaminski of Web Video University, and Shama asked if I could share some web video tips with the viewers of Shama.tv and I was more than happy to help, so here we are. But before we can get into a lot of the tips, we have to make our videos first. So in this video, I’m going to cover some of the nuts and bolts behind making a video like this one.

Cameras are first, and what you need to know about cameras is that virtually any camera you buy these days will produce good enough video for the web. Now the more money you spend on a camera, the better image quality you’re going to get. For example, a $100 Flip camera will give you good enough video for the web, but a $1,000 camera will give you significantly better image quality, so with cameras, it’s really a matter of how important image quality is to you.

Now one of the choices you’ll have to make is Standard Definition or High Definition. This video here was shot in Standard Definition, but High Definition is becoming more common on the web and honestly, there’s not any real advantage or disadvantage between them. However, to work with High Definition video, you do need a lot of computer horsepower, and with High Definition, it can take up to five times longer to prepare a video for the web than the same video would take in Standard Definition.

Now quality is becoming more and more important with web video as the lines between TV and web video continue to blur and two ways that you can instantly improve the quality of any web video is through lighting and audio. With lighting, you want as much light as you can get in your videos. This will really help your camera do the job that it’s been designed to do and with web video, I recommend using soft light. Soft light is clean, even lighting that creates no shadows. An overcast day is soft light. A bright sunny day is hard light.

Now, a cheap way to get soft light for videos is to use party lanterns or China balls. If you’re shooting a lot of videos, it’s best to invest in a soft box light kit. These kits do cost several hundred dollars, but you’ll always have great portable lighting that you can rely on for years and years.

To improve audio, you’ll ideally have a camera with an external microphone jack. Then you’ll use that jack with a Lavalier microphone that clips to your shirt. This will give you significantly better audio than you’ll get from your camera’s built-in microphone. For example, I’m using a Lavalier microphone right now. Shama uses one in her videos, too. And this is what the audio sounds like using only my camera’s built-in microphone.

Finally, we have video editing software. This is the software that allows us to piece our videos together so we can put them on the web. Now if you’re a Windows user, I recommend you use a product called Sony Vegas, and if you’re a Mac user, I recommend a product called Final Cut Express. Why these two products in particular? Well, it’s because with both, you can start out with inexpensive versions and as your skills increase, you can upgrade to professional versions and when you do, you don’t have to relearn the software. Everything stays the same. With nearly all other packages out there, particularly the inexpensive ones, that’s not always the case, and what will happen is that sooner or later you’ll find yourself wanting to do something with web video that simply can’t be done with these inexpensive packages. Then there will be nothing you can upgrade to, and then you’ll be forced to buy software like Final Cut or Sony Vegas where you’ll have to relearn everything and do it all over again. And trust me; you don’t want to have that happen.

So that is going to wrap up this video on the nuts and bolts of web video. In the next lesson, I’m going to cover the Do’s and Don’ts of web video. I’ll talk to you then.

Hey guys, welcome to Shama.tv. So I’ve just come back from an excellent all-day training by friend and colleague Jim Fortin, who used to actually represent The Learning Annex in New York and LA and did a lot of stuff with them. And now he’s back in Dallas, lucky for us, and he did a full-day seminar on sales. And I’ve got to tell you, I loved the stuff. It was zero-effort selling, just fabulous. I’m totally blown away. And I do a lot of trainings and I go to a lot of these things, so I can definitely tell you how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and this was great stuff.

One of the things that really stood out to me today in the training I wanted to share with you guys, and Jim was talking about what is the most powerful, powerful skill set in sales and marketing, and you know, we all had our different answers, thought different things, and it really boiled down to this, and when I thought about it, it totally clicked. And it’s imagination.

If you can get the person that you are trying to sell to, to imagine – to imagine what their future would look like, how their problems can be solved – if you can leverage the power of imagination ethically, because you want to make sure that if you are setting them up for this then you can deliver on that, because otherwise you’ve just set yourself up and them for huge disappointment. And that’s really not the field that you want to play in.

But imagination as a skill set is so powerful. Web sites that can give you a visual of what they’re trying to do. You know, the things that we buy, it’s often on emotion, so imagination leads to emotions, which generally gets us to buy. So we buy with emotion and we rationalize analytically. But imagination is probably the strongest skill set in marketing.

So it’s something I wanted you guys to think about and I wanted with you, and again, I learned so many cool things at this sales training that I will be sharing nuggets with you guys in future episodes.