Last week I got Gideon Shalwick on the line and asked him to share with me in detail how his “Magic” video website business got over 3 million views within 12 months. It’s astounding in such a short period of time to achieve this level of views on YouTube. So inside you’ll learn how Gideon did this with his partner Jay Jay (the magician).
Tyrone: Hey everyone, it’s Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com. Today, I’ve got a special guest on the line today. His name is Gideon Shalwick. Hi Gideon!
Gideon: Hi Tyrone, how are you doing?
Tyrone: Good, good. I wanted to get Gideon on the call today because Gideon’s releasing brand new program called Rapid Video Blogging and I’m really excited because it’s something that I think there’s a huge demand for it. Particularly myself and a few other people I know out there, everyone’s using video nowadays so I thought Gideon would be the perfect person to speak to and also ask a lot more details and I thought because Gideon also has a very, very good website called Free Magic Live, it’d be a great case study to find out a little bit more information about how he’s done it and use video to do that on YouTube. So Gideon, thanks very much for coming onto the call today. The first thing I wanted to find out from you is just to show a little bit more with the audience if they don’t know what your case study and a little bit more about your staff, yourself I should say about the Free Magic Live website too?
Gideon: Sure thing. I guess just to get a bit of background on how I got into this whole video thing. It all started when you know, I got this idea in my head back in New Zealand, I had a job there but I wanted to start my own business and basically told my wife that we’re going to immigrate to Australia and start a new business. She thinks it’s pretty well. And, we go to Australia and I look at a bunch of businesses and the one that stood up to me was starting up an online business. But the biggest issue that I had as I was starting out was getting traffic to my sites. You know I had really cool product, the marketing was all set in terms of the sales letter and all this sort of stuff but finding traffic was a real nightmare. I mean, what key was for me to find traffic was just through joint venture partners and to me, that was really difficult because I had no credibility in the market, I didn’t know anybody and I’m trying to get those people’s attention, you actually have to have a list when you’re starting out, it’s extremely hard. And I…I had to find another way so…I actually started interviewing some of the world’s top Internet Marketers and I did it all on video. I’m not really realizing what I was doing but I was actually learning how to use online video and really getting nuts and bolts of it. And, through that I met Yaro Starak we did a project together that was really, really successful but in this whole process, I figured how to get traffic to my sites and really know some high quality targeted traffic so that I wouldn’t need to get the support for joint ventures for example, joint venture partners. I mean it’s still nice if you can get…
Tyrone: Definitely.
Gideon: to boost your numbers but certainly you can get a lot of traffic through online videos specifically what I’ve now started focusing on for the last year in particular is just looking at YouTube. I mean, YouTube…let’s just look at YouTube, that’s 2 billion vews a day, the second biggest search engine in the whole world. Something like 85% of people in the United States have actually watched YouTube videos, probably more now. That’s a huge number by the way.
Tyrone: Yes.
Gideon: And…you know the prediction of that you know, the mainstream of the US and UK will only beat only on YouTube by the year 2012. It’s now 2010 so what it’s saying is that we’re still on the growth curve and there’s still a lot of stuff that’s going to happen with this. But, just to give you a feel for the sort of results that I’ve been getting just from Free Magic Live because I wanted to use Free Magic Live as…you know, it was a combination of things you know. Jay Jay approached me and wanted to go project together. He did the magic, Jay Jay’s the magician on Free Magic Live and I did the Internet Marketing behind it. So I thought it was a great project as a case study in an area that’s non-how to make money niche on the Internet. It’s just been phenomenal, it’s been just over the year now and we’ve had over 3 million views on our YouTube channel…
Tyrone: That’s astounding.
Gideon: And getting about…wow, at the moment, it’s more like 150, 230-250 opt-ins a day for our newslette. It’s being read like 165 countries all over the world, and things are just starting to take off for us and it’s been a year. Some people might think it sounds like a long time but seriously the results…
Tyrone: No.
Gideon: The results we have been getting for how long it’s been added compared to how long it takes to other people, has been really, really cool. And, as I said, this is outrageous at the beginning.
Tyrone: It is. It’s really interesting. For 12 months, a lot of people will think yeah, it’s a long time but for us when we look at it, to start any business or to start any little project job, it takes at least a minimum of 12 to 24 months to even get in to something off the ground so what you’re doing is absolutely awesome.
Gideon: Very good point. And, you know there’s other thing to notice as well. We started from scratch with absolutely zero links in the industry in terms of networks. We didn’t know anybody in the industry when we started. I mean I knew Jay Jay…but in terms of the online world, we don’t know anybody in the magic industry and you know now, people are starting to notice. They go wow, Free Magic Live had like 30,000 followers, there’s someone to be reconed with.
Tyrone: You guys are absolutely crashing it from the sounds of things.
Gideon: It is and you know…you know we walked into 8 hottie store the other day. Just, I mean we bought Jay Jay some clothes for one of the shows we want him to do. And, people just start asking these questions and they found out what we’ve been doing. They’re like “Oh wow, you know here’s the business card of our promotions person, please give him a call. We want to be part of…part of your show.” And with all those sorts of stuff, we had a local…what I’m trying to say…probably a big shop there that’s approached us to do videos for them and…you know, paying us really good money for that and so…you know things are really taking off for us. It’s all really because of what we’ve been able to do on YouTube.
Tyrone: That’s awesome. Well, I think most people are really astounded by those numbers and myself I’m like wow, I’m blown away. I guess people want to find out as a case study where you started firstly and what kind of strategies did you implement to get to that level because as you said, you just start off from absolutely nothing and it’s really, really like an awesome story like rugs to a grow story.
Gideon: Yeah, rugs to international stardom.
Tyrone: Yeah.
Gideon: Yeah, and really it is getting like Jay Jay’s…it is…you know, we’ve just been approached by a publisher in New York who wants to put us on his book…
Tyrone: Wow.
Gideon: Because of what he’s seeing from us on YouTube. Like you’ve seen on Jay Jay, he’s on videos, I’m behind the scenes but I’m…
Tyrone: I should mention what your…your little nickname is. It’s Magic G isn’t it? So…
Gideon: Magical G that’s right. Jay Jay called me that one day and I just kind of stuck and well, it’s cool.
Tyrone: And now you know who’s behind the scenes. It’s Magical G!
Gideon: If you get an email from Magical G, I’m sure is. But, how do we get started? I think the first thing when we got started were this…when Jay Jay and I started talking about was at that point in time, I was online already for about three years. It’s been…it’s been just about four years now in total that I’ve been online full time. And for that time, I already knew the importance of providing value online and you know, the content being king basically. I saw this success that people had no text-based blogs for example, and you know people Yaro Starak, Darren Rowse, even other people like in the timely industry like Paris Hilton yeah, the main thing there for them was to provide value whereas through content, or entertainment, or education or newsworthy stuff, there was always value connected with whatever they were doing online. And so, when Jay Jay and I started, we…you know, that’s the primary thing we would be starting from. We wanted to provide massive value to the magic industry, to the magic world. And so, I go okay what do we do? Obviously with magic, a lot of people want to learn how to actually do magic. And, the need we saw on the market was that, especially on YouTube there’s a lot of magic videos but it was Jay Jay calls crotch magic when you watch them and only you see them, what if I can do this…you see them like this, he crotch magic where they play with the cards and that’s all you see in the videos. You don’t see the person’s face and it’s often very amateur and…not very well done.
Tyrone: Hmm, not professional.
Gideon: Yeah until we wanted to do really fun and good versions with Jay Jay actually. He goes on to the street and performs his little magic tricks. And…and then, blow people away with the reactions and being afterwards to teach people how to actually do the tricks so it wasn’t just the reactions and stuff but it was also…you know just combining both entertainment as well as education. I think that’s really, really good combination so we’re thinking on a YouTube channel. We think how we combine entertainment and education at the same time.
Tyrone: Yeah when I first saw his channel, I was blown away. Not because of the views and stuff but just by seeing Jay Jay, he’s like really like a book character, hops on there and just makes a few jokes. He’s really good with girls. I see that a lot of times with the viewers.
Gideon: Yep, he’s a master at it.
Tyrone: He’s a master at it but the thing is he’s got this really amazing fast way of being able to do and perform the tricks then once you’ve seen the trick, you go wow, I want to learn it. And, the beautiful thing I’ve seen about your videos is afterwards you show them exactly how to do and there’s no secrets no nothing. And that I think has captured with literally being able to see that because a lot of people just don’t know how it’s done.
Gideon: That’s right and that’s cool. You don’t always have…you don’t have to reveal everything but I mean…you know, you obviously want to save some stuff if you want to create a product for example and sell the product. So you want…you want to leave enough stuff behind as well that you can actually sell or give people to stay with you. So we don’t give everything away. So we often give away some…some easy tricks for example for beginners and they can join our courses and stuff and learn how to do more advanced magic for example.
Tyrone: Yeah, that’s awesome. Let’s come back to the strategy behind it then with regards to Free Magic Live. What are some of the strategies that you’ve implemented just to be able to get to where it is now like besides the really “content is king” which we’ve talked about, what are some really practical tips you can probably share on how you’ve done it too?
Gideon: I think one of the first things you get to do or what are the key and essential things you always have to do with your videos and think about when you upload them onto YouTube is…you know, given of course already that you’re providing value and you’re providing stuff that people want to watch, you need to make sure that people are going to find your videos. I mean, in terms because you upload your video to YouTube, it doesn’t mean people are going to find it. And so there are few things you need to do right to…you know to make sure that people can find it. And it’s…really it’s as simple as making sure you use the right Title for your video, the right Description and the righ Tags. And if you like, I can just quickly go through those…
Tyrone: Yeah.
Gideon: I talked about it inside my report as well but there’s…there are really critical elements. For your Title, what I always teach is really combination of two things. You’re going to please both human beings, people who watch your videos and the search engines. So what you get to do is find a combination of the two that works. But something that often works really, really well if you think about the Titles for your videos is to think…to think about your video and to be very clear on the content that your video is about, and then think if you were someone else on the Internet looking for that video, looking for content inside that video, what would you be likely to type into the search bar? For example, in the Magic One, there’s for example how to do a…a coin roll in and out of your fingers. So a keyword phrase that we decide to target there was “coin roll tutorial” which happens to be really nice phrase for human…both human beings as well as for search engines because we did a bit of keyword research and we’ve noticed that people were searching for coin roll tutorials. So that’s already kind of ranking and people were really searching for that and so that was a really good keyword phrase to use. So we’ve had “coin roll tutorials” as maybe the first few words in the title and remember that the first few words in the title are the most important ones for Google. So pick that ones carefully because that’s worked what you rank for inside Google and YouTube. You can add anything else that you think is needed if you still need to add it I think. So that’s the Title. Description area, always have your little URL link at the top, I mean I always say this but it’s so basic. You get to do it, it’s just…
Tyrone: But still some don’t do it.
Gideon: That’s right I mean that’s what I was saying. This is…YouTube and the whole…you know, using YouTube as a real marketing strategy is still at the beginning phases, there are so many videos on there that you don’t have a clue about. They don’t have a link to their site or if they even have a website. They’ve got millions of views in their videos but they don’t help to turn those views to cash which is really what it’s about. It’s getting views from YouTube, driving them to your site, building your list and turning those viewers into cash. So that’s easy way. You just have your link in there where people can click on to go straight to your website or your blog, or your opt-in page. Very, very important. Ah now, inside the Description area, this is something else and very few people do and it’s…I think the reason is most people are lazy and I’m lazy too. It’s a pain to do but it’s really worth it. It’s the best to treat the Description area as…like a blog post because you know, at the moment, Google still looks at that. Google still looks at the actual content you have in there. I mean they are able to…transcribe automatically your videos and that’s still minute and it’s not as accurate. There are some other ninja tricks that I teach inside my course that you can do for…actually getting picked up for specific words inside your videos. It’s…it’s very, very cool, I love this stuff.
Tyrone: Oh, I’m getting excited.
Gideon: And so, the key thing there once you get to provide value, not the keywords stuff, absolutely do not keyword stuff your Description area. I see so many like…people doing marketing videos and sales videos on YouTube and when you look at their Descriptions, it’s like full of…full crap. Full of keywords.
Tyrone: Particularly those ones that I’ve noticed right at the bottom of their YouTube description, they stuff it with keywords and just put it all in brackets and they just do a lot of it.
Gideon: I hate those. You know, if Google and YouTube is not penalizing those videos, I think it’s just a matter of time until they will because we think about Google and YouTube, they want to provide their users with enjoyable experience and if people do searches on YouTube and Google and the results are really bad, and it doesn’t relate to the content the people were searching for, all coming up were sales videos, you know…there are reasons they’re always going to leave. So with YouTube and Google, it’s absolutely critical that they there’s still relevant content so for all those people that keyword stuff just to get extra views and they’re not providing value, I think they will get penalized for the long term that’s for sure.
Tyrone: Yeah, so how long would you say the description should be in terms of words?
Gideon: Ah, basically as long as you can! I know there is a limit on how many words you can use on there but it’s…certainly I don’t ever since used all of the limit, or the words as with the characters.
Tyrone: Okay actually I’m curious because I get all my videos transcribed and would it be…do you think it’d be a good idea to insert your whole transcript into your description?
Gideon: You know it’s something that I haven’t tested and…ah, you know it’s kind of difficult because it’s a long term thing in what you actually compared it with. But it’s certainly something to…to test. What I do recommend always was that…at least what I prefered doing is to…if I do, do a transcribe on my video is to put it on my blog because that’s really what you want to end up or ranking for Google at the end of the day. I mean YouTube is amazing for getting traffic and for ranking, even on the search engines, Google search engines, but the trouble is you don’t actually own your YouTube channel. You don’t own it, YouTube owns it. So if you fool whatever do something that’s against terms and service or someone flags you as a spammer or whatever, you don’t know what could happen. You could lose your account and if you did all your work on… and on capturing that traffic on your blog and building your own blog audience, your video blog will…you know you could go from everything to zero very quickly, so a backup strategy to help you capture and garner that traffic that you get in from YouTube.
Tyrone: And what about the Tags down the bottom after Descriptions as well. How should we handle that or how would you approach that?
Gideon: Ah, same thing as the title. Very, very important. Well, it’s dependable, it depends on who you ask and how important they are. By far, apparently the most important is your title and the first key keywords you have in your title. But what I often do as well I’ve seen it does make a difference. If you have…say for example there’s a keyword phrase you want to rank for. Say in this example it’s coin roll tutorial. The first keyword is on my tags, keyword phrase is on my tags would be coin roll tutorial as well. So that’s like a double. You see you’ve got the title with the first keywords and inside your tags, there’s the first keyword phrase as well. And the way…by the way to create a keyword phrase in your tags in YouTube as opposed to individual little words, is when you enter it in is to write the whole phrase out so coin roll, coin space roll space tutorial. After that, have a comma and do the next keyword phrase. What it does is basically it helps YouTube recognize that as phrase, your keyword phrase as opposed to just the individual words. So that’s a nice little, cool little strategy that not too many people seem to know about.
Tyrone: Cool, there’s so many little tips and stuff there and I know it’s all in the report that’s really good just to be able to hear from yourself how to do it and outlining the details so thanks very much for these tips.
Gideon: That particular strategy there was not actually…so I can say you’re lucky
Tyrone: Oh thanks. I have to say that yeah, guys, pick that tip up. Don’t forget it. Awesome. All right well, there’s probably another question I wanted to ask you with regards to once you’ve uploaded these videos and say for example, you’ve just started out and you got zero views and you’re finding the traffic to your video. And obviously, unless people searching for it, it won’t happen within a day or few hours or so. You’ll need to hopefully get it out there. So I guess that comes down to the marketing side. We’ve talked about setting up site, getting a video up, how would you get traffic you’ll use onto your video from that step onwards?
Gideon: Well it…obviously at the beginning, it’d be more challenging to get a flood of traffic but it depends. If you kind of have a real good video and someone picks it up and gets onto the first page of YouTube, you can get like a million views a day. Ah…
Tyrone: I though a really good one. Charlie bit me…that baby one.
Gideon: That’s still the number one most viewed video in the world though.
Tyrone: Unbelievable.
Gideon: Yeah so who would have known that it would go viral? You don’t know whether your videos will go viral or not. There are some strategies that do teach it or kind of engineer it a little bit to help you make your videos viral. But ultimately you know like I said, there’s more than just the value thing like that’s the most important thing that I said at the beginning is to create value, to provide value but for YouTube, the second most important thing is…I guess you could call it community. And, what I mean by that is that YouTube, just like all the other social media sites, is a social media site, is a social site. In other words, you’re going to get social on there. I had an interview with Dave Powers and he gives like an RC…
Tyrone: Model plans, I’m in to that stuff.
Gideon: Oh yeah, it happened incredbly. They’ve had like 42 million views on YouTube…
Tyrone: Wow.
Gideon: And they just rock in your head you know so…and he runs a fully fledged business on remote control business off from that. You’ll see his website, it’s not even…it doesn’t even have an opt-in list or anything like that…
Tyrone: Oh, David, David you need it.
Gideon: But it’s amazing you know so…and what he told me which I really agree with and I thought he made a really good point there is that it’s like high school. You get to find the cool kids and hang out with them and make friends with them. Basically, the more friends, the more subscribers and the more popular you can become on YouTube, the most successful you’re going to get. And, and there’s the thing that most people don’t get. The things that I can just upload videos to YouTube and boom! They’ll know they’ll get traffic automatically but you know, YouTube is like a living organism and…it’s like your…it’s like a little baby, you have to nurture it, you have to get involved. And, you have to come part of it. It’s…it’s weird because it’s…it’s actually really hard to describe it in words but you actually have to come part of the organism itself and as you, as you start playing on YouTube, you start subscribing to all the videos, channels that you’re interested in, you become so part of them and you become engrossed and that’s good in your way. You get to watch yourself and you don’t become too addicted and don’t spend time on the value activities but the point is for you to get involved, to get to know your community there, the YouTube community and most specifically the people inside your niche on YouTube. Say for example on Magic One, which is a magic niche and they use their own specific kind of language, they upload their own kind of videos, they do their own kind of competitions and sorts of stuff, and you can’t figure out what that is unless you get involved. And so, the beauty of all these is that it’s certainly not hard work and trust me it isn’t. And a lot of them are fun things you would ever do and some people might think it’s a waste of time but it’s not because as you do it, you become part of this living organism, you become part of the community and you get known, you get to know other people who are in the field and once you start to get to know people, they start linking back to you. And, if they started once and they started linking back to you, and once people start subscribing to you, it can…it puts your channel in a bit of a snowball because…say for example if you have…I guess we got I think 5,000 subscribers on YouTube. Everytime we submit a video, those people get automatically notified that we get a new video on there. So automatically you’ll get, potentially 5,000 people that can instantly and that same day watch your videos. 5,000 views on day 1 like that. Ah, maybe not 5,000 or just one of the subscribers because obviously not everybody watches your videos on the first day but the point is that you’re going to build up this following. You can become friends with people and the more friends and following you have, the better.
Tyrone: Absolutely. Well, there’s a lot that you’ve covered in that part there. I also noticed you mentioned about competition as well. Is that something that’s common inside the magic industry or the magic niche?
Gideon: Absolutely. And it’s…it’s actually it’s I think it’s very under utilized in other niches and that it works like…it works like magic.
Tyrone: That’s all you need to say, it works like magic.
Gideon: Yeah, I guess we’ve seen competitions and stuff before but because there’s someone in particular, he’s channel is mismag822 if you want to check it out. He runs competitions all the time. He’s got something like…I think he’s got something like 50,000 YouTube subscribers. Now just to give you the power of that, we got 5,000 on our Free Magic Live channel but we have an email list and about 25,000 people. So, it seems to crawl, We can probably get about 5 times as many…what’s that 5 times 5 is 25 right? So, it seems like we can get about 5 times as many email subscribers as YouTube subscribers. So if you think about mismag’s channel, he’s got 50,000 YouTube subscribers, I think he’s just started the website but he doesn’t know anything about Internet Marketing or building his list. But imagine if he had proper list building strategy, he could have an email list of like 250,000 people and so that gives you an indication of how powerful it is on YouTube. Now, he runs this competition all the time. And seriously, all of it, he’s got the silliest little competitions where he gives away packs of cards, little plain cards, not even anything big. You know, it just costs him a few dollars on that. And…people just go nuts because it’s competition, they want to win, and so there are so many cool things you can do with competitions to get attention. So that helps you get more views, helps you get more interaction from your audience which YouTube looks at by the way. They want to see that you’re active on your channel, that your audience interact with you for example, writing comments, writing a video, actually watching your video, and running a competition is one of the best ways you could do that. And it’s…I think it’s think it’s the most fun way to help you get more views on YouTube. It’s awesome.
Tyrone: Absolutely, I’m pretty sure there are questions like one person is running through my head at the moment is if you’ve got no views and you’re just starting out. You started uploading your few videos and getting a little bit of maybe one or two views and you decided okay, let’s run a competition to see. How do you get the word out there? That’s something that people will probably be asking “How did you do it?”
Gideon: Once again, I mean you get to have some relationships. It does take time sometimes. I mean sometimes you can strike it lucky and get someone who immediately likes you and who immediately likes to link back to you, but once you’ve got to know the people in your niche on YouTube, you’ll know who the big players are. And, because it’s YouTube, it’s still undiscovered. You can get the attention of these guys pretty easy especially for one niche or sort of stuff. Given example, we approached someone on YouTube…I can’t remember the subscribers they had on YouTube but they have an email list of about 30,000 people…
Tyrone: Whew, huge.
Gideon: Yeah and in the Internet Marketing world, if someone has a 30,000 people email list, it becomes more tricky to get their attention and ask them to get an interview for example. Well we approached this guy from out of the blue and said “Hey, we love your stuff, we’ve been watching your videos. Would you be keen for an interview?” And…yeah it was really funny in his response because he came back to use and he said yeah pretty much “Yeah sure, I’d love to get an interview. It’s the first time anyone has ever asked me to do an interview.”
Tyrone: We all love interviews though.
Gideon: And so he loved it because we were appealing to his ego and we said you know we’ll put your video on our channel and we loved it because we got his attention and…you know so from that point onward, we could say “Hey, by the way we’ve got this competition. Do you want to tell your audience about it? Or do you want to link to our channel from your channel. Or would you send an email to help us get more exposure so…” that’s one…I’m so excited I can’t speak.
Tyrone: That’s okay.
Gideon: That’s one of the reasons why I’m still so excited about YouTube and that’s because it is still so undiscovered. It’s like…I guess it’s little bit like the walled twist, there are so many opportunities there that are still undiscovered. And, you know there are people on YouTube that are very successful but are extremely down to earth, they’re not realizing they’re successful. You’re able to get their attention much easier I believe that many, many other markets.
Tyrone: I totally, totally agree. It’s funny because I’ve been getting…since been doing and implementing your strategy, and I mean we’re talking about your case study with Free Magic Live but the amount of opportunities I’ve been getting from YouTube is astounding. Like the other day, this was something about sort of coming out because I did a tutorial on choosing which video hosting solutions because that was a very common question. Everybody can email me “Tyrone, what solution are you using right now to host your videos?” I said YouTube of course. Then they said what about for private hosting? I said well, Amazon, Amazon S3 of course and it was everything that you’ve recommended as well. But the interesting thing was that, this person because when I recommended to use Bucket Explorer, some of them you’ve recommended to me to use for a very, very long time now. I’ve got some guy come over to me and said, “Hey, I’ve got something very similar to Bucket Explorer. Would you like to review it? I’d be happy to give you a version of it and try it and promote it to your database?” So it was just…opportunities are coming because of that and people see you it’s all about branding, it’s people getting to know you. Like right now, you and me are just talking just like I’m talking to you literally in the room.
Gideon: You’ve made a really good point there just being on video. It is this something about video that is just incredible. Ah, you know in terms of building rapport and getting people to take action, we’ve got such an incredible interaction from our audience. Given an example, just couple weeks ago, we run a competition. Jay Jay, he did a magic trick with in front of couple of girls again…
Tyrone: Jay Jay…
Gideon: We said okay, if you can…we made it very easy. All you get to do is add a comment and tell us how the trick was done and…you know, we offered something in the video that we need on the spot or something they need to say on what it is, they need to send it on to their friends and give us a rating for example. Ah, with just that, we got over 3,000 comments on that…blog post that we had. There are awesome double-ups with people trying to enter in a comment more than once. But it just gives you an indication of…people they just…I mean they just go because they know us, they know Jay Jay in this case, they know me through Magical G, the do behind the scene, we’ve got this connection with them and so they want to when we tell them to and that’s extremely powerful. If…if you I mean, compare this to television for example, you got people sitting on the back sites, there’s an advertisement there, everything gets pushed to that, there’s no interaction so…the effect that you have on people, there’s no action that normally takes, all of it is kind of passive programming. Whereas with YouTube, you have this interactivity. People actually take action when we ask them to. If you’re an online marketer, that’s gold. That is just gold. Absolutely, you want people to take action so it’s very, very powerful.
Tyrone: Yeah, it’s a really good point there. I love the interaction online because when you start seeing comments and you start seeing feedback from people and they know that your videos are working, or other response you get are “I don’t like it…” and they’re going to put boo, you know you’re going to change something.
Gideon: That’s right, you’re right and you’re so right because it’s amazing because if you’re submitting crap stuff, people are going to tell you. You’re not going to get views. You know so, it’s an amazing way to become better at what you do because you get instant that feedback from people and you know, we’ve never seen anything like this on the planet. It’s only five years old, YouTube right? But…
Tyrone: You got that and I feel like it’s been around for a while.
Gideon: Yeah and you know it’s…it’s an amazing opportunity, I love it. I’m on YouTube every single days.
Tyrone: I see that. That’s why we’re back on the video cam with you too, we’re talking. Awesome. From all your successes, you’ve done extremely well for Free Magic Live with Jay Jay and what we’d like to probably know as well is has there been any times that things just haven’t worked. Like there are some strategies you tried implementing after trial and error, they didn’t work and you decided that’s not something that you can implement. Maybe you can sure some of those things too?
Gideon: Sure. Well Free Magic Live is a little bit unfair because it’s a really big showcase of I guess a collection of all my knowledge that I’ve built up leading to that point when I started that channel. You get to remember that before that point, I’ve been added for about three years you know thinking about the stuff, how to get traffic, what are the best ways to use online video to get exposure and so by the time that I started Free Magic Live, I already knew what I was doing. And…and so, with Free Magic Live, we didn’t have too many mistakes. But before that point, things…I started a number of other YouTube channels that didn’t work so I had to try stuff with trial and error before things started working for me. Now that I’ve got it, it seems that everytime I do it, you’ve seen it as well with some of my mentors, you get results from these now. But you know, it wasn’t always like this. I think one of the main things that I did wrong was…I already mentioned this but I didn’t realize that I had to get involved in the community. It’s critical, it’s absolutely key that you get involved. You’re going to get to know your audience, people watching your videos. The better you know them, the easier it is for you to create relevant content that they would like, and that they want to spread and that they would want to come back to so that’s absolutely critical. The other thing that I did wrong was that I didn’t realize the importance of regularly submitting videos to my YouTube channel and this is kind of…this is a big part of Rapid Video Blogging because there’s the word “rapid” in there but the whole point of it was to be able to create videos rapidly and easily so that you can get them onto YouTube as easy and quick as possible regularly. Probably should be rapid, regular…because you get to…some people think it sounds like hard work but seriously it’s not. It’s so much fun. In my view, it’s a lot easier to create video content now than it is to create text content.
Tyrone: Tell me about it, that’s the reason why I get you on the call instead.
Gideon: Look at us now, we’re just chatting and we’re creating content as we got. So that’s one of the things I did wrong, I didn’t realize the importance of submitting content regularly and you look at some of the top 10 YouTubers and all of them, without fail, have been submitting their videos like for the last three, four years, constantly and regularly like once…ah, sometimes once a day, for example this…what’s the name, Miranda…Miranda, I can’t remember her name but it’s a…she’s on the top 10 and she basically have these little videos about the word of the day.
Tyrone: Oh.
Gideon: She’s beautiful. She’s this European, from European…blonde. She’s stunning so it kind of helped her but but she has a video every single day about a new word. And…
Tyrone: How hard is that?
Gideon: Her beautiful name is hotfourwords.
Tyrone: How hard is that to put a new word everyday?
Gideon: She’s got…I don’t know, she gets millions of views for each of her videos within a day or so. I think she’s got a million subscribers or something supposed to be like that, she’s got a lot of subscribers anyway. Ah, but what I’m trying to make is that if you look at all those guys, they create videos regularly and submit them consistently regularly to the channels to build up that audience, to build that expectation, to build that relationship but very importantly, to get to know the audience and find out what it is that they like and what kind of videos they want to watch. So that’s one thing that they didn’t do with some other channels and they just go down — with some videos up, that will be it, that will be enough. But no, you’re going to keep going and…you keep creating fantastic content which why do I…it’s extremely easy to do now with the technologies that are available.
Tyrone: Yeah I mean I definitely find that it’s not hard to create videos at all because I do it all the time now. Thanks to your system, I just followed it and take it step by step and get the content up fast and easy. I remember when I first started, I had this HD camera which took me years just to import it but now with your method, it’s just like a snap.
Gideon: Yeah and you know Tyrone your videos are amazing. I’ve left comments on your blog before because I never used to read your blog but things changed when you put video, I can’t help myself to watch them. I spend like…if I go, I don’t…I try not to go there too often but now I spent like half an hour.
Tyrone: Sorry man.
Gideon: But I think it’s the power of video. What I want to say as well is that a lot of people…that’s one of the mistakes at the beginning as well. I thought my videos have to be perfect, like it has to be like Hollywood productions. And on YouTube, nothing can be further from the trick and in fact, that counts against you. Number one, it’s going to take you much longer to create those really professional type videos, you might have professional crew for that, as going to be more expensive, but number 2, people don’t want to see that. They want to see you. They want to see your personality, they want to interact with the real person and creating videos like that is easy because you’re just going to be yourself, you just get to be in front of the video camera and do your thing and make it interesting for people. And you know, as with both you and me also, at the beginning if you look at our beginning videos, it’s really crap.
Tyrone: I wish you shouldn’t mention that.
Gideon: But you get used to it, you get used to just being in front of camera and…and becoming more natural and just talking like you’re just talking to your mate like we’re doing right now.
Tyrone: That’s so crucial and everything you shared is just spot on. I can’t emphasize much more than what Gideon said because I totally agree with you, it’s awesome.
Gideon: And it’s right. I’ll have to add this because it’s so true. That is that when you create videos that are just you, it’s truly your own personality that’s shining through, people really make a connection with you. It’s like they get to know you and…it’s funny because when they see you on the street, they will approach you and it’s like you know each other for years. And you don’t know who they are and you’ll be like who the hell are you but for them, you’re like their friend. You’re almost like…you become their bestfriend because that bond becomes that strong. And that is really, really powerful, extremely powerful.
Tyrone: Absolutely. Unless you’re a movie star with different story, you couldn’t just approach any movie star and say “Hey Tom, Tom Cruise!” It’s a…
Gideon: You know this happens. And you know, if your audience are maybe familiar with Fran Kerr from HighOnHealth.org. When she was in Vancouver about a year ago which…and she doesn’t even know about all that famous thing with YouTube channel but back then, she had like several locations with people recognized her from her videos that she’s been doing in Australia and they walked up to her and said, “Hey Fran, I knew you from your YouTube channel.” She was really surprised but you’ve got a worldwide audience, it just points it out. It’s such a very vivid way.
Tyrone: Absolutely, awesome. Well, Gideon, I probably want to wrap it up for today. What I wanted to…I guess get the people on the call to also check out as well is your Rapid Video Blogging report which I’ve downloaded and I’ve read through many times over…
Gideon: There are better things to do.
Tyrone: I love your stuff man! So like, what I wanted to do is just to get you to give a little quick background over what’s on the report and what we could be expecting in the upcoming few days because I think you’ll having a launching next week so share a little bit more about it too?
Gideon: Well, the report, it’s an interesting one because if you look at my download page right where people can download the report, I’ve allowed people to make comments, these several comments from people saying “Gideon, are you kidding? Are you sure this is not supposed to be sold?” You know I may not supposed to earn money from this but there’s kind of good because that’s the effect that I was after. It’s 92 pages long, really full with a lot of stuff, it’s just, it’s basically a seven-way process that I teach so it’s systemized the whole thing to help you go from pretty much where we started with Free Magic Live at zero to building up your audience to where we are now. I mean I’m basically giving you the exact same strategies that we use inside the report. Of course, I don’t reveal everything because I’ll need to write like a 500-page book to do that but I’ve given you enough information to get started and to start getting results as soon as possible. And so it’s all in there. It’ll take you from selecting your own niche, the tools and technologies you need to creating your own videos really, really fast and easy, how to setup what you call your video domination hub, how to create content properly and the importance of that, what else do I teach…there’s a chapter on how to…yeah, how to streamline your process, there’s chapter on how my videos go viral and finding how to monetize the whole show. How to actually make money from all this stuff. So it’s all in there, it’s 92 pages with a lot of really useful information there. I’ve had…it’s only been a couple of days and I think there are…let me just check…there’s 418 comments on the page where people are downloading it. I think I’ve had at this point in time, it’s already plus to…yeah about six and a half thousand downloads of the report and people seem to be loving it. So, it’s already been couple of days.
Tyrone: That’s huge.
Gideon: Yeah, definitely get a copy and I’d love to hear your thoughts if you like it.
Tyrone: Awesome. Well you can download the copy just below here there’ll be a link below this video so you can download it and check it out. So, there’s a lot of awesome stuff inside there. And, what’s happening as well in the next few days as well after the report gets released?
Gideon: Well, what’s accompanying that report, I thought you know, it’s great having the text-based stuff that people can you know, read because it’s another medium for absorbing that information and it’s a really nice way to be very logical about the whole system and how it fits together. But I’m also including with that three accompanying videos, each of them about 20-25 minutes long that teaches you different aspect about what I’m doing. First video is basically about setting the scene, you know with…I’m talking about the whole opportunity and just opening up your eyes on what’s going on. The second video is about where I go behind the scenes, actually it’s just here on my home studio and showing you what I use and what you can use too just with really, really simple setup. Then, the third video is going to be a case study. In fact, that’s going to be with Fran, Fran from HighOnHealth that I mentioned before where she talks about a full-time income basically with what she’s doing, playing around with YouTube. And, soon after that, next week which is 18th of August I think, I’ll be opening doors to a program, to a coaching program that will get a lot more depth that teaches people in everything that I know about Rapid Video Blogging.
Tyrone: Okay, next, next Tuesday or Wednesday depending on which time you’re on? I think it’s the 12th or 18th did you say?
Gideon: Oh, hang on…sorry. It’s not the 18th. It’s the…
Tyrone: 12th.
Gideon: 18th is actually when I’m going to close the doors. Yeah, I don’t want to keep it out for about a week because you know, from the comments I’ve been getting, I think I’m just going to get flood. I don’t want to have too many people on the course. I want to…I want to save enough time for people to give enough attention to the members. So it’s actually sorry, the doors are going to open on the 11th, August, August 11th and I’m going to close it on the 18th.
Tyrone: Perfect. So it’s a whole week, nice. All right, that’s awesome then. Gideon, I just want to say big, big thank you for coming onto the call today and sharing a lot more about Free Magic Live which is an awesome case study there with what you’ve been doing. And, it’s just been an awesome chat today to be able to do this with you, this video interview, and I can’t wait to share more with my audience too. So, thanks again Gideon.
Gideon: That gives me fun Tyrone, and all the best. And, keep creating those videos, I’m going to keep watching them. Maybe not, because you know, I spend too much time watching your videos.
Tyrone: I’ll make sure I think there’s something a bit different for you Gideon, just specifically for you. All right guys well, if you want to hear more of these video interviews or any more of these podcasts, just simply visit TyroneShum.com on my blog and you can even search for my name on Google, Tyrone Shum. Thanks so much again and we’ll catch you soon. Bye for now.