Every year I attend a massive sci-fi and pop culture expo called Supanova. There are events all around Australia and for anyone who is even slightly geeky, such as myself (well maybe more than slightly), they are awesome.
Whether you are into comics or anime or science fiction or superhereos or video games or card games or fantasy art or books or whatever geeky thing you like, Supanova has it.
One of the best parts of the expo is cosplay, which is where people (and that means kids AND adults) get dressed up as characters from whatever tv series or comic or movie or video game you like.
I haven’t been game enough to do cosplay myself (I’m thinking about it for next year), but I have to say that the costumes is what makes the event special. There’s a competition at the end of each day where cosplayers show off their hard work creating often hand-made costumes, and sometimes act out prepared skits. It’s quite hilarious sometimes, cringe-worthy other times, but always done in a spirit of sharing in a safe and geeky environment.
This year as I was at the Brisbane Supanova expo I found myself walking behind a red-headed girl who looked very familiar. Initially I thought she was just another attendee, but as I continued to follow her she was led off into the autographs area.
It was then that I realised she was probably a “somebody”, and I had a hunch who it might be.
Felicia Day, one of the modern day icons of geekdom, attended the event and I’m pretty sure she is a red head. Felicia is the creator of a web series called The Guild, which I had heard about several times but had never taken the time to watch.
That night after Supernova I had to confirm whether it was Felicia or not, so I went to www.watchtheguild.com and started watching her show.
I think I ended up watching the first two seasons that night. It was brilliant, incredibly funny especially if you are geeky, and yes I was certain that it was Felicia who I saw that day.
The Guild is about a group of geeks who play an online video game (the game is a type of MMORPG – Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game – I have no idea how that title actually stuck!). These people have never met in person, but throughout the series they form real life relationships and it’s hilarious, one of the funniest geek shows I have seen since Big Bang Theory.
Each episode of the Guild is about five to ten minutes long, so a season only tops out at just over an hour. You can watch entire seasons as one video at The Guild YouTube Channel.
YouTube As A Platform For Fame
Felicia has become a mainstream celebrity of sorts. She’s landed a lot of work, including movies, TV series, voice overs for characters in movies and video games and a whole lot more. She’s basically become a “proper” celebrity and I bet she would say The Guild has a lot to do it with.
As a result of watching The Guild I started to explore again what’s going on at YouTube. Since video is a part of my strategy for next year as I repurpose my blog content for consumption as audio and video, YouTube will play a massive part.
I’ve actually been creating videos on YouTube since 2007, but very sporadically. There’s some shocking old stuff on there from my long hair days, with poor quality video and audio, and also clips from my travels around the world in 2008.
While The Guild is a proper show with enough of a budget for all the things you would expect on a TV series like make-up, lighting, sound, script, etc, it’s pretty clear you don’t need all of that to become popular on YouTube.
I’ve always found it fascinating that people can simply power up their webcam, hit record, have a rant about their life or whatever they want and build up a following. I’ve seen channels where each video gets about 20,000+ views when all the person does is talk about their day in a “talking head” recording from their bed room. They do this every day and build up a fan-base.
The Yaro.TV Daily
As I sat there watching all these youtube videos of random people talking about random things I started wondering…
I have this new macbook pro, I wonder how good the built in camera and microphone are.
I opened up Quicktime, hit the record new video button and did a short test. The video wasn’t super high quality, but a lot better than previous webcam vids I have done with other computers.
It was right then that I decided why not follow in the footsteps of all these YouTubers, fire up my webcam again and start my own daily talking head show.
I put my laptop on a couple of boxes, sat on a chair, and recorded this, the first Yaro.TV Daily –
Since then I’ve been doing one each day and you can find them all at Yaro.TV, my YouTube channel.
These videos are raw. I hit record, ramble for a few minutes about what I have been doing that day, mostly talking about what I worked on for my business, but also some personal life things since that’s what YouTube is all about, and then upload the file directly to my channel.
There’s no editing, no adding intros or outtros or music, just me and the camera.
It Didn’t Stop There
I don’t want my channel to be just me rambling in quick talking head videos, I want to fill it with all kinds of interesting content.
I’m currently building the team that will turn my blog posts into video content, but I thought why not have a little fun with Screenflow myself since I know how to use it, and put up a few clips from other things I have done.
I’ve wanted to put up slices from some of the speaking gigs I have done in the past. Since I have the raw files for a couple of them, I decided to start there.
I opened up a presentation I did with Liz and Matt Raad about buying and selling websites for profit. It’s the most recent presentation recording I have, the only one that features short-hair Yaro. I have a few from some other events and I have to say I cringe a little looking at my hair and choice of clothes, but that won’t stop me from putting them online!
I did a little bit of editing, found some nice segments I could slice out, added some intro and outtro splasheos (thanks Gideon!) and then uploaded them to YouTube.
You can see one of them here –
Unfortunately the audio is not great. I boosted it as much as I could in Screenflow, but my original source file is very quiet. If you turn up the audio on your computer you should hear it fine.
Subscribe To My YouTube Channel
For the last few days I’ve been uploading two videos a day. A short Yaro.TV Daily recap and a clip from a live presentation. It takes me about an hour all up get both videos online and it’s actually a lot of fun, so I’ll no doubt have a lot more coming soon as I go through my back catalogue and keep doing dailies.
It’s because of this that I invite you to subscribe to my YouTube channel to keep up to date with all the content I will publish there.
I’m not going to post every single video I do to this blog, it will be too much content, so subscribing to my YouTube is the only way to keep on top of my video content.
To end this post and just for a laugh, here’s the first ever video I published to YouTube. It was in 2007 and I was in the eye-of-the-storm for my first ever product launch.
Talk to you soon,
Yaro
Videoing
Online video is something that I’m definitely late to the party on. Mostly because I read faster than I watch, so I almost never take the time to watch things. I’ve actually not purchased a few programs simply because of the fact that they were delivered via video instead of PDF.
I have been seeing how others have gotten into it, and how it has helped their business, though, so it’s probably only a matter of time. Hopefully it works out for you. If you get crazy results from it I might have to take the plunge.
You might ask Gideon Shalwick for help as well. My investment in his Rapid Video Blogging Course helped me survived the later painful impact of Panda&Penguin joined forces.
Although the course is out stock there have been still some evergreen elements in it.
P.S.
My main niche is not “make money online business” and videos are not likely to go viral. But good audio is a must.
Hi Yaro,
This Philippines staff disappearing is a regular experience for me – they get sick (dengue fever was the latest story!), they take on a full time job then decide that they need one week in every four off as they have to go home to the Chocolate Hills, family issues is a regular one…..so I’ve given up largely on outsourcing to the Philippines.
However, the issues with communicating with many of the guys in India are harder than the Philippines (where their English is great), culturally they seem to have a problem with saying “no, we don’t know how to do that”…..so it’s a challenge for sure.
However, I’ve found great people on Elance, a graphic designer who ironically lives just down the road from me here in the UK and who puts together our online magazine Digital Marketing Insider from blog posts (and it looks great!), I have an amazing VA in Portugal (same time zone as UK) and a team of developers in India, who, as long as you give them very good clear step by step instructions, do a good job.
Another Indian guy who will install and design a WP website for $200 start to finish with my preferred plugins, but you have to tell him exactly what you want it to look like…so there are gems out there! Testing them on a small job is essential.
It’s the way forward for sure, but finding a great project manager who can communicate with entrepreneurs and turn our mindmaps into project plans to manage, is another matter! So many project managements softwares too, how do you choose?
Love the videos, keep up the good work, makes it easy to engage, although I like Kevin prefer to read, I think I’ll watch yours!
Cheers, Nicola
Hi Yaro:
I have tried videos and found that they work well. In my opinion using videos may be one of the better ways to go get better results. Many people would sooner watch a video then read a PDF, maybe there reading skills are not that great. I find watching a video is in most cases more helpful if you want to learn hands on. I also would sooner watch things like the news or a review then read about it. Maybe it’s just me but there is news on TV every night so there must be some truth to it.
Good Luck with your videos and I’ll waiting for them.
Great post Yaro,
Yeah the word is out on how valuable a YouTube video can be.
It’s where justin bieber got his start.
I also think we can confirm that YouTube killed the television sit com star.
Why watch their laugh track voice over boring humor when you can watch something really cool that was actually produced by the people in the freaking video. Example Nardwar.
Haha… really enjoyed that “Bad hair product launch” video.
I think you should shave your beard before presenting your next video. The beard make you too old Yaro!
YouTube and blogging have the exactly the same parallels with publishing content while also having top influencers, the bar is also much higher now with regards to video editing something I have little experience doing which is probably my biggest mental block to producing videos.
Felicia Day is awesome! I first saw her in “Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog” which you can still watch on Youtube many years later. If you’re a fan of Serenity or Firefly you’ll love Dr. Horrible. I’m always impressed by actors and actresses that leverage their film experience into creating their own tv shows or movies.
Also, Yaro, I heard birds in the background of your video. You should make a video about them. Always nice to have pet cameos! I used to have a few parakeets myself.
Hey Scott, Those birds are from the trees outside my house, not pets. I only have a moody cat named Ramses as a house mate right now. He’s had a few cameos on my videos before.