Episode 034 - Connecting through Video with Dale L. Roberts
July 7, 2020
Video content creator Dale L. Roberts shares tips on how to reach readers and followers, and how to monetize your efforts, through video. He discusses how to maintain your content over time to ensure your viewers continue to get value from it, how to ensure engagement through discussion, and ideas for how fiction as well as non-fiction authors can use video to establish a brand and an online presence.
Dale L. Roberts is an indie author and host of Self-Publishing with Dale on YouTube, which was voted by Feedspot among the Top 100 websites and Top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing. Since 2014, Dale has pursued a full-time career in self-publishing and now shares his experience on his YouTube channel devoted to building a successful self-publishing business. His specialties include book publishing, video production, public speaking, and networking. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife Kelli and cat Izzie.
"You notice <that fiction author> didn't go to this thinking, 'I'm going to go teach other fiction authors how to write.' He said, 'I'm going to leverage the content that I have right now to entice people to come over and take a look at my fiction books.'" -Dale L. Roberts
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast today. My guest is Dale Roberts. Hey, Dale, how are you doing?
[00:00:07] Dale: Hey, Matty. I'm doing fantastic. I'm just jazzed up to be here, starting out my day with your podcast interview.
[00:00:13] Matty: Excellent. I want to give our listeners a little bit of background on you before we start our conversation.
[00:00:18] Dale L. Roberts is an indy author and host of Self-publishing with Dale on YouTube, which was voted by Feedspot among the top 100 websites and top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing. Since 2014, Dale has pursued a full-time career in self-publishing, and now shares his experience on his YouTube channel devoted to building a successful self publishing business. His specialties include book publishing, video production, public speaking, and networking, and he lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife, Kelly, and his cat, Izzy.
[00:00:51] I have been a frequent beneficiary of Dale's expertise on his YouTube channel, and more recently, I saw him in a conversation with Mark Lefebvre on the Draft2Digital Spotlight event, which at one point became a solo show when Mark had some technical problems and dropped out.
[00:01:07] That was a very wide-ranging conversation and I highly recommend everyone listen to that. I'm going to provide a link to that in the show notes, but there was one topic that came up that I really wanted to delve into in more detail, and the fact that Dale signs off on his bio on his website with Dale L. Roberts, Indie Author and YouTube Video Content Creator means that he is the perfect person to talk about our topic for today, which is the importance of a video presence.
[00:01:33] Dale, before we dive in into some of the nitty gritty, just talk generally about what role video has played in your self-publishing career.
[00:00:07] Dale: Hey, Matty. I'm doing fantastic. I'm just jazzed up to be here, starting out my day with your podcast interview.
[00:00:13] Matty: Excellent. I want to give our listeners a little bit of background on you before we start our conversation.
[00:00:18] Dale L. Roberts is an indy author and host of Self-publishing with Dale on YouTube, which was voted by Feedspot among the top 100 websites and top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing. Since 2014, Dale has pursued a full-time career in self-publishing, and now shares his experience on his YouTube channel devoted to building a successful self publishing business. His specialties include book publishing, video production, public speaking, and networking, and he lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife, Kelly, and his cat, Izzy.
[00:00:51] I have been a frequent beneficiary of Dale's expertise on his YouTube channel, and more recently, I saw him in a conversation with Mark Lefebvre on the Draft2Digital Spotlight event, which at one point became a solo show when Mark had some technical problems and dropped out.
[00:01:07] That was a very wide-ranging conversation and I highly recommend everyone listen to that. I'm going to provide a link to that in the show notes, but there was one topic that came up that I really wanted to delve into in more detail, and the fact that Dale signs off on his bio on his website with Dale L. Roberts, Indie Author and YouTube Video Content Creator means that he is the perfect person to talk about our topic for today, which is the importance of a video presence.
[00:01:33] Dale, before we dive in into some of the nitty gritty, just talk generally about what role video has played in your self-publishing career.
read more ...
[00:01:41] Dale: It's kind of crazy. I stumbled into this, much like I did stumble into self-publishing. I started self-publishing roughly 2013 to 2014 when I first published my very first book. You fast forward a couple years later, April of 2016, I decided to launch this YouTube channel because I was inundated with questions through email and through Messenger and various DMs on social media. A lot of people are like, "Hey, what's your key to success?" The problem was, it was taking me away from what I loved to do, and that is writing and publishing books. So I said, "Okay, why don't I just shoot some videos and anytime someone has a question, I'll just send them over to those videos?"
[00:02:22] You fast forward over four years later and everything I've done with YouTube has eclipsed everything I've done with publishing books, which is pretty incredible. So the reach of video has absolutely changed my life in so many ways.
[00:02:41] Matty: I would imagine if people were getting in touch with you about detailed things about self-publishing, like, "Can I use CreateSpace for my print?" or something like that, do you have to go back and fix things that over time become out of date? How do you manage the version control?
[00:02:58] Dale: Yeah, it's so funny because a lot of our business is not evergreen, so it can be so tough. There are rare situations where I have to pull something down. For instance, you remember Pronoun publishing? It was a Macmillan publishing company. It was an aggregate publisher, worked kind of like what Draft2Digital and Smashwords does.
[00:03:17] They went out of business a couple of years ago. So it actually had maybe about a half dozen yeah videos. The only one I left up of Pronoun publishing was the one saying, "Hey, they're closed." That way if for some reason someone was looking, they could stumble on my channel. And in that video, I gave some suggestions and recommendations of where else they needed to go.
[00:03:38] Something I learned from a very large YouTuber, his name's Nick Nimmin, and he has well over a half a million subscribers. We'd had a private conversation and I told him how I used to just pull videos and he's like, "No, no, no, no. Don't do that." I'm like, "Why not? Can't it be misleading?" He's like, "Here's the deal. What you have to do is first of all, put a pinned comment expressing to people, 'Hey, this is no longer relevant, but go over and check out this video," and do the same thing in your description. And then those cards, which are the little white things that pop up out of the top of the window when you're on your desktop or on mobile, also put something in all caps redirecting people, because that asset that you have there, though may not be as relevant anymore, there are still going to be people that aren't informed. So what you'll want to do is redirect them over to the right assets and they will appreciate you for that."
[00:04:36] And, that really changed a lot because I'm going to tell you, you probably let me see, I've got about 450 videos on my channel. Believe it or not, I've purged 300 videos to date because I thought for the longest time, well, it's no longer relevant, let me just go ahead and pull it off my channel. And now I'm kicking myself because some of them, I clearly didn't have to do that.
[00:05:00] Matty: I have all sorts of very detailed questions, but I want to pull myself back a little bit and give a little bit more context for this because a lot of the people who are going to be listening to this podcast are going to be fiction writers. And I think that with a nonfiction writer, the importance of video is a little clearer because you're trying to establish expertise, you're trying to establish that presence, but if you're a fiction writer, can you talk a little bit about how important or unimportant video is for that kind of writer?
[00:05:31] Dale: It is a bit more challenging for the fiction author because nonfiction authors it's cut and dry. If you have a solution to someone's problem, done. Shoot the video, you got it going. It's easy for me as a nonfiction author to put together a YouTube channel. It's going to be a bit more challenging for the fiction authors, but here's the deal. Fiction authors, you folks are more creative than the nonfiction--sorry, nonfiction authors, please don't stone me for this one--but your creativity is what you're going to have to leverage. You're going to have to figure out how can I utilize the vehicle, a video, to grow my brand, to grow my online presence.
[00:06:13] I want to point out a couple of really good names. For one Michael La Ronne of Author Level Up, highly recommended, check out his channel. He is just a great resource and just tons of knowledge and a wellspring of ideas. Michael is actually a fiction and nonfiction author, so one of the things that he does is he leverages his knowledge of writing to give advice to those that want to become a fiction writer themselves. Sometimes he gives insights on how he develops characters and story arcs, things like that.
[00:06:47] We have an even larger person on YouTube. Her name is Jenna Moreci. I think Jenna is somewhere north of 200,000 subscribers or right around that neighborhood. Again, she's a fiction author, not a nonfiction author whatsoever. And sometimes she just goes and reveals how she writes these things and it builds that audience and it builds that awareness. And the nice thing is maybe she's pivoted herself into a utility resource, but it has also built relevance and awareness of her brand as a fiction author.
[00:07:23] There is also another one, last example, I promise you, his name is, actually called Scully's House of Thrillers. Now Scully actually is a fiction author and he does something very interesting. He actually reads his thriller books to people in his videos and he'll just go through chapters and though his presence isn't as large as say a Jenna Moreci or a Michael La Ronn or a Dale L. Roberts, he has enough of a following, in the thousands, that it builds awareness and relevance to him as a fiction author. You notice Scully didn't go to this thinking, "I'm going to go teach other fiction authors how to write." He said, "I'm going to leverage the content that I have right now to entice people to come over and take a look at my fiction books."
[00:08:13] Matty: Yeah. One of the things that I've been trying to do is remind people that they can do the Look Inside on Amazon or the equivalent on the other sites to get a taste, if they haven't read my books or my short stories yet, to get a flavor of it. But I think that reading an excerpt would be more engaging because then they connect with you personally. In addition to connecting with the material, they're connecting with you as an author. Do you have any tips or best practices for an author who wants to use that kind of approach to get their work in front of people that otherwise might miss it?
[00:08:46] Dale: The good example I just gave you of Scully is one great example. It's not enough though that you just post a video and hope for the best. You're going to need to try to create some type of engagement, and unfortunately there's no dead simple answer or exact way that's going to get you to do that. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of trial and error and that's why I've got 300 videos I pulled off because there was a lot of trial and error when I first got into it to figure out what would create engagement.
[00:09:17] The most important thing is to first of all, do it. Don't be afraid. Okay. Let me rephrase that it's okay to be afraid. Just do it. That's going to be the most important thing is get in front of that camera and start to do it and maybe study a few people.
[00:09:34] Maybe some of the names that I mentioned, you can also look through any kind of authortubers. You can look up #authortube on YouTube and find a ton of authors that also do this. And a lot of them are fiction authors, believe it or not. Figure out what it is that they're doing. Try to analyze what's the number of views that they have on this? How many subscribers do they have on it? How many comments do they have on it? What are they saying in the comments and figure out, "Okay, hmm, this worked, but maybe this didn't work," and then try to implement it yourself on your own channel.
[00:10:06] Now, the key when it comes to getting engagement and keeping engagement is going to be you have to keep the conversation going. It is absolutely critical. If you want to build it community, you've got to be a human being. You actually have to give back. So whenever someone says a comment over on one of my videos, I will respond back, but I also want to keep the conversation going.
[00:10:34] You're probably saying, why do I want to keep the conversation going? Why don't I just say, thanks for commenting and just deuce out? That's all well and good. That's good. That's fine. If you want to do that, have just one exchange and be done with it, that's okay. But if you're starting on YouTube, one of the ways to trigger the YouTube algorithm is through engagement and activity, and the more that you can get people to engage, whether it's through a comment, a subscribe, or even a share, the better. So I will keep a conversation going. I've had some that had like a thread of 24 different comments on it and sometimes people start to contribute to it. And the nice thing is the more they contribute to this, the more YouTube goes, "Huh. There's something to this video. I'm going to go ahead and serve this over to other people that might like it."
[00:11:25] And that's what really helps grow your presence there. At first, it's going to seem like you're talking to nobody and chances are very likely, you might end up talking to nobody, but I would recommend that if nobody's showing up, then bring people to the party, get ahold of Matty and be like, "Hey Matty, I need you to check out my latest video." "Hey Dale, what's going on? Hey, check out this latest video. Let me know what your thoughts are." Get more people watching because above all else, when it comes to YouTube, engagement is key but watch time is king. If people watch all the way to the end, YouTube loves that. They want people to watch from beginning to end and as much as possible and stay on the platform as long as possible.
[00:12:11] Matty: I can tell I'm going to be taking a lot of to do's out of this because I've been posting the video of the interviews we're doing like we're doing here for the podcast, but after a couple of episodes, I turned off the comments because I was only getting those clearly canned comments. I don't know how they're just finding new videos, and they say, "Hi, I want to be your friend," or "I want to sell you some real estate."
[00:12:34] Dale: You have to get those ones for sure. If you do run into things like that, definitely what you need to do is you'll go into your YouTube dashboard and you're going to block the user from your channel. That way they can never comment again. I have probably thousands of people I've blocked. I wouldn't block anybody says, "Thanks" or "I enjoyed this," but when you start to get someone like, "Come check out my page" or "Sub for sub!" and you're like, "Oh no, no, let's not do that," I just block from page and I keep it off. So that way, kind of like what you're saying, I'm not managing a bunch of ding dongs that are just sending out their botted traffic over towards my direction.
[00:13:14] Matty: We've been talking a little bit about YouTube because obviously that's very central to your business plan. Do the same rules apply if people are posting, for example, on Facebook?
[00:13:24] Dale: YouTube and Facebook share a lot alike, but one of the things that Facebook is a little different is the audience and the expectations of the audience. I'm not an expert by any stretch with Facebook videos, but I do know a number of people that have been very successful through Facebook. It's interesting in that views are not the same as views are over on YouTube. For instance, YouTube views means you clicked on the page, you watched the video in some capacity, whether one second or five hours. With Facebook, sometimes if someone's just scrolling through their feed and your video just happens to pop up, they consider that a view, which is kind of weird, right? So you might look can a video be like, "Oh my gosh, I got 10,000 views on Facebook." But in reality, maybe only a thousand of the people stopped and actually watched.
[00:14:14] And the other thing is, too, YouTube, really a lot of the best stuff functions around short form to semi long form content, meaning videos that are about five minutes to 15 minutes typically perform really well on YouTube because people are used to that. Whereas on Facebook, you're lucky if you can keep someone longer than a minute to three minutes. In fact, they actually have a Facebook Creator Program and in order to qualify for being a partner, if you will, for that program, you actually have to have an average of one-minute watch time on a three minute video ... I think maybe a hundred videos or a thousand videos, it's eluding my mind right now.
[00:14:58] So the expectations are so much different when it comes to the audiences, because you've got to really try to capture someone's attention on Facebook, but the engagement rules absolutely, that is exactly the same. So if you have people commenting on your video, it behooves you to take time out of your day to keep the conversation going. That way it really builds awareness and relevance in the Facebook algorithm for your video.
[00:15:27] Matty: Do you have other tips in addition to engaging people in the comments about what will make a video engaging or what things people should steer away from?
[00:15:37] Dale: Yeah. Excellent question. Because I've got quite a few, I'm going to limit to only a couple of things. The very first thing is going to be is get the first comment and be the first commenter. Seems kind of weird, but what it's going to do is just help out a little bit in starting the conversation. On YouTube, we have what's called a pinned comment, and I think to a certain extent you can still do it with Facebook as well. Get a pinned comment. What you'll do is you'll write in a comment and then there's a feature in the three little dots. You're going to left click on that. It'll say pin comment. You're going to pin it--pin it to the very top.
[00:16:07] Now what I'll typically do is lead with an interesting question, something relevant to the video that I shared. Let's just say, for instance, it's a video about, I don't know, car repair, "Have you ever repaired a Honda Accord? If so, what year was the one that you did? What was your experience? And while I've got your attention, check out this way that I fixed the Honda's automatic transmission," and it would be linked to another video. Because remember I said watch time is king. We want to make sure they continue to go and watch more videos.
[00:16:41] That was just a crude idea of how you start out the conversation with a pinned comment. Get it to where you're asking a question, because if you just simply go, "Hey, go check out this other video," most people are going to go meh, but when you ask someone their opinion, they're more apt to actually say, "Okay, let me go check this out."
[00:16:57] Now, the other way that you can get engagement going is ask for it inside the video. Just a simple thing of saying, "What did you think of today's video?" or "Today's question of the day is going to be X Y Z." I know Roberto Blake does that. He's got roughly 400,000 subscribers. He always has a question of the day he saves towards the end. And a lot of his devoted followers will go and drop their thoughts on it because he really takes some time to think about that question.
[00:17:25] So those are just two ways that you can get that conversation going. And then some topics ... it really depends a lot on your topic. Every now and then you're going to strike a nerve. I had a video, for instance, that was about IngramSpark getting rid of no content books and low content books. And I put out a video about it. I didn't have to say a single thing. It was a Dumpster fire right from the start. There were people that wanted to tell me their opinion.
[00:17:52] And so every now and then you're going to be like, what the heck did I do? It might be the topic. Because every now and then you might strike a nerve and it'll get people going without you even having to try.
[00:18:02] Matty: One of the things that surprised me very much is people who evidently consume audio-only content on YouTube. So I already post the video of the interview of the podcast episodes on YouTube, but I've also gotten the recommendation to post the full episode with all the intro and outro material as audio only. So how does that work? I can't even imagine how people are doing that.
[00:18:27] Dale: In my opinion, repurposing content is definitely a great idea, but if it already exists in video form to just strip the video form, doesn't really make too much sense. So for instance, if this interview was available as video, like we're watching right now, or if it was audio without the video, I would be like, I'd just rather listen to this one. And also just a heads up if anybody ever does try to do duplicate content, please be careful because YouTube actually will close down accounts for publishing duplicate content.
[00:19:00] I knew a creator, he was near a hundred thousand subscribers, and somehow inadvertently had his account shut down. He got suspended because of duplicate content. And the funny thing is he was only using snippets from some of his videos in his current videos and that flagged enough that YouTube goes, "No, no, no, no, you can't do that."
[00:19:21] That was an extreme case and it should never have happened. For instance, Joe Rogan's a great example. Joe Rogan has his podcast. He also has another channel called the Joe Rogan Experience where he takes sound bites, maybe five, 10 minutes segments from his two-hour show. Those are exceptions to the rule, to where it will work. Because some people want to have shorter bite-sized pieces. They don't want to see a full two-hour video.
[00:19:48] Matty: And YouTube is unlikely to take down Joe Rogan.
[00:19:51] Dale: No, I don't think so. He's bringing in millions of dollars in ad revenue.
[00:19:56] Matty: What I had in mind, and this was totally a selfish reason for wanting to do this, is that I record intro and outro, including things like solicitations for Patreon support, as audio only. So ideally I would like someone who's listening on YouTube, I'll say, to be hearing that material as well. And I also make references to previous episodes. It's a little bit of extra content around the interview itself. And so the people who are just watching the interview video are getting good information, but they're missing some of the material that the audio listener would get.
[00:20:30] I hate to discontinue posting the videos because I think people do like seeing Dale L. Roberts there with the fabulous background and it's engaging in a different way than audio, is I think, but it's not as portable or flexible the way podcasts are.
[00:20:45] Dale: Yeah. Podcasts are great. Don't get me wrong. It is a good idea that you do repurpose over to another platform, but what you probably don't want to do is take the audio version of your video and post it again over on YouTube. So if you're looking for like Patreon supporters or you're pushing maybe a sponsorship of some sort, I would say, just do it on your regular video because here's the fun fact is YouTube premium, I actually have that, I can listen to it and I've actually done it quite a bit where like, podcasts like this, I will just go ahead and turn it on while I'm working out and I don't need to see the video aspect of things. If anything, it'll get it to where you're creating less work for yourself--instead of doing two separate videos, but same audio, you can have one thing so it's one resource and it's less work for you to have to do in the long term.
[00:21:32] Matty: Less work is always good.
[00:21:34] Dale: Agreed. Thinking about the whole Joe Rogan Experience-type thing where bite-sized bits, maybe you ask a specific question. You're like, "Oh, that's great. That's a juicy bit." Break it down. My video editor, Dan Norton, a shameless plug here, he's not paying me to say this, he actually has a service for repurposing videos. He actually works with podcasters and he works with one very large influencer and that's all he does is he repurposes the videos and he just goes and finds the nuggets, chops it up to a few minute segments, and then he uploads it over onto YouTube. Pretty cool, right?
[00:22:08] Matty: Yeah. Very cool. I think one thing that would make video easier for some introverted writers is to be able to do it with someone else. And I know that you can do two person videos on Facebook, I think, but from a private timeline, not from a business page. Are there options on YouTube to facilitate a two-person conversation? Would you just recommend they do it the way we're doing it here on Zoom or similar, and then post that.
[00:22:37] Dale: Yeah, oddly enough, you can actually stream directly to YouTube from Zoom. Actually, I have another channel on YouTube called Live Streaming Tech and my brother and I actually talk about some of the business of live streaming online and doing video. And there is an app and they just announced it yesterday, it's called Streamyard. Streamyard's been out for a while. It's a browser-based plugin. It's easier to use than Zoom. I'm just kind of used to Zoom, I've always used it, but with Streamyard, you can have up to 10 people on screen. Yeah. Ten. They just announced it yesterday. They had put it out in beta a couple of weeks ago, and I guess it's official. They just rolled it out.
[00:23:16] By the way, Streamyard's not paying me to say this, but they're a great example of how you can bring in multiple people. And it's so much easier, right, Matty? You just talking in front of a camera and having nobody to have an exchange with, it's hard, but you have another person to do this with, you have somebody to rap with, it becomes so much easier. Collaborating is an excellent idea.
[00:23:38] Matty: And I think it's easier to get people excited about a live event too. The recorded events are great resources, but it's not an event the way a live event can be.
[00:23:46] Dale: Yeah. And here's the fun thing about live events too. Whether you're doing it on Facebook or even on YouTube or even one of my favorite platforms, Twitch, when you go live on those platforms and you have people watching, there's more people that are going to engage with you. And again, remember I said, engagement is key. That works as well for live viewers. That's going to send little signals to the algorithm, whatever platform you're working on, that there's relevance to this video and it'll send more traffic to it. Works really good for YouTube. For instance, this past Saturday, I did an 11 hour write-in. I was going for a challenge of writing a book in 24 hours. It was a 20 to 30,000-word book and I'm like, "Okay, you can do this in 24 hours."
[00:24:31] It's crazy. I didn't think anybody would show up, but because the people that showed up were very active--there was about 40, 42 live concurrent viewers at one point. And I'm like, "Just to watch me write?" But it's because of the engagement that it really built relevance through the YouTube algorithm.
[00:24:51] Matty: Yeah, it's a real community builder. And I think that people are especially realizing that now. We're recording at the end of June 2020, and still dealing with the results of COVID, so a lot of things that otherwise would have been live events have moved online.
[00:25:05] I know I've mentioned in other podcast episodes, but I'll mention again because I'm finding it so useful, that at two o'clock every day two author friends and I get on Zoom and we writing-sprint for an hour and a half. It's been great. It is fun. And we take little breaks, we sprint for like 20 minutes and then we chat for a few minutes, and it's really nice.
[00:25:24] I think that there are a lot of things like that, that people are being able to engage in that even a year ago, they wouldn't have been able to, because if it meant packing up their stuff and going to a coffee house to meet some friends, sometimes it just logistically wasn't possible.
[00:25:38] Dale: There's one tip would love to give this one to you. You're going to love it. Next time you do one of your writing sprints, try out, Streamyard--again, they're not paying me to say this. The really cool thing is if somebody comments, you can highlight a comment and it'll pop up on screen. It's dead simple to use. There's not a lot of coding or anything else like that you need to worry about. It's very intuitive.
[00:25:59] Matty: I think that Streamyard is what Draft2Digital uses for the Spotlight events, and so if people are curious to see that in action, they can go to the link that I'll provide to your Draft2Digital Spotlight, and they can see how that works.
[00:26:12] Do you have any tips? You had talked about some of the best practices. What are some of the things you see in video that people are doing that they shouldn't be doing?
[00:26:20] Dale: I would say that sometimes it's doesn't even come down to what somebody does in video so much as not doing the video at all. But I would say that probably common mistakes typically is get a good microphone. You don't need to go broke getting a microphone, for instance, I think Boya has a lavalier microphone for mobile. Don't go broke on something like this, but at least get something that's passable. I would not recommend using the microphones that are on the headsets for gamers. It's really horrible. One of the things that'll turn people off is bad audio.
[00:26:56] Next thing is going to be bad video. Now use what you have at your disposal. Probably one of the biggest issues I see when it comes to video is that there's not enough lighting. For instance, your audio listeners are probably not going to be able to appreciate this, but when I shut off my light, you see, it made a huge difference, right? Of course, this is not terrible by any stretch, but you notice that as soon as I turn it back on, the color saturation looks good. It's more crisp. So try to get as much ambient light as possible, outdoor light if you can. But if you are in a basement or a room with very few windows, good lights can go a long way. This light that I have here ran me about maybe $20 and it can run upwards of two to four hours at a time.
[00:27:44] Matty: I want whatever light you're using. People who are watching on video can compare Dale's lovely video to my okay but not great video and will understand what I'm saying. But, yeah, the lighting is something I've struggled with a lot. I would love to know what your tips are for that.
[00:28:06] Do you have any tips for people who are buying into the idea of the importance of video but they're uncomfortable with the idea of getting in front of a camera.
[00:28:14] Dale: Everybody gets uncomfortable. Everyone does. So just get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Now let's just say that you break out in hives, you start having anxiety attacks. That's when you probably should pump the brakes. Let me give a good example. I love being able to raise awareness of all these different authors, this is a lot of fun, and actually this person is an author and artist as well. Her name's Anne Manera. I'm actually currently working on a video collaboration with her and Anne is brilliant. She has built a massive community on Facebook. She's one of the ones that I've actually seen grow her Facebook video business. She just nails it over there. It's amazing, her tribe that comes around.
[00:28:57] Here's the funny thing is no one ever sees her, at all, ever, because most of her broadcasts, she has her coloring books set out. She has a camera angled down at her book as she's drawing and she's talking as she goes along. The funny thing is she told me one time she turned the camera on herself and started talking and her viewers were like, "What's going on. What's happening?" No one had ever seen her before, so it threw them off. So she was like, "And ... I'm turning it back down to there."
[00:29:29] Matty: That's so funny.
[00:29:31] Dale: Yeah. You can see that there's so much that you can do. Now let's just say, for instance, that freaks you out even more--like, "Oh no, no, I can't put that above there. I don't have any coloring books to write. I don't want to be writing by hand. I don't want anybody to see me whatsoever."
[00:29:45] Totally cool. I get it. Then at this point there are PowerPoint slides. It's not the sexiest thing, and it can be very boring, but at least it gets you to where you're recording and producing content that people can consume. So you've got PowerPoint slides you can do. You can do some screen shares. You can stay off camera. The thing that's going to be challenging is if you don't want to talk, that's going to be tough. It's going to be so much harder at that point. You may have to hire out professionals and that's going to get pretty expensive. So I would recommend starting out if you are very scared of video, start out with podcasting. Podcasting is probably one of the best ways to start out and it's one of the easiest ways to do it.
[00:30:30] Matty: And it's nice because it's recorded, too, because I think that the difference between recorded video and live video, live video is sort of the most stressful and recorded video is a little bit less because, you can always just delete or have some alternatives there if it wasn't the effect that you were looking for.
[00:30:50] Dale: Yeah, I still freak out on live video. I'm not going to lie to you. Like right now, I'm Cool Hand Luke, because I know that you're just recording it and it's going to be done later on. I get on live, though, there is a certain bit of anxiety that I do get going into it. So if anybody's ever scared of going live, I'm along with you, and I'm going to tell you this, that I've easily done I would say 200, 300 live broadcasts. It's been a lot.
[00:31:15] Matty: Well, I'll refer again to the interview you did with Mark, where Mark in the Draft2Digital Spotlight, dropped off. It was a live conversation like we're having here except live and he had some technical problem and he disappeared. And there you were, the guest, on your own. I thought you handled that so nicely because you acknowledged that there was an issue and you kept going along with what you had been talking about, and then pretty soon Mark resolved his technical issue and was back on the show.
[00:31:44] I just think that the fact that you were willing to go with it made it seamless and made it actually more fun because I bet more people are going to go watch that video now that they hear that they get to watch you be the solo guy on the Draft2Digital Spotlight than they would if it was just a completely normal event.
[00:32:01] Dale: Believe it or not, I was sweating bullets.
[00:32:04] Matty: It just looked like you were having fun with it. And then when Mark showed up, you caught him up on what had happened while he was gone, and it was great. That's going to be a great video for people to watch for all sorts of reasons.
[00:32:17] If people are looking to monetize video, what advice do you have on that front? Is that a realistic possibility?
[00:32:24] Dale: I love talking about this. This is one of my favorite things to talk about is monetizing your content through video, because you're going to put all this effort in. Obviously, ultimately you want to leverage any video platform to build awareness and sell more books. Ultimately, that's really what it's going to be about, or, hear me out on this, leverage that platform to monetize yourself in other ways. Because let's face it. Most indy authors barely make it by. They barely have enough money to scrape by. So now you have to actually be resourceful with every step that you do.
[00:32:59] You could either: A) continue to write book after book after book. You can be someone as prolific as say a Craig Martelle and not have to be on camera. That's great. But I think in most instances, Craig Martelle is probably more of the exception than the rule.Most people will try to keep pumping out and may not see that much success.
[00:33:17] So might I recommend is when you do break out into video, there are a variety of ways you can do it. Now, first of all, let's get the easy one out the way. It's the YouTube Partner Program. And I already told you about the Facebook Creator Program. By the way, not too many people realize about that one. The YouTube Partner Program, if you get 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch time hours in the course of a year, you can qualify for the YouTube Partner Program. Now how this works is you would then allow YouTube to place ads on your video, whether it be beginning, the middle, or the end or all the above.
[00:33:53] And you get paid for it. That's kind of nice. I'm going to say this. Most people don't make very much. You probably make enough to go cover your next book cover over the course of the month. But beyond that, it's not going to pay the bills.
[00:34:09] The next way that you're going to do is leverage video for affiliate marketing. Now, let me go ahead and just summarize affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when you like a product, you contact that product's company and you say, "Hey, I like your product. If I send people over towards your direction, would you give me a percentage of sales?" And they usually say yes. For instance, I am a huge fan of Draft2Digital, they have a referral program. So when I send somebody through my referral link, I get x amount of dollars per sale or something like that. All that to say that affiliate marketing is one of the ways to go.
[00:34:45] If you're stuck with ideas on how to do affiliate marketing like, "Oh, but Dale, I don't know. I feel sleazy." Well, you're already selling your books, so one of the things I'd recommend is if your book's on Amazon, get into what's called the Amazon Associates Program. Amazon Associates is legit, complete white hat tactics. In fact, even Author Central recommends that you use the Amazon Associates Program to send people to your books.
[00:35:11] Here's the beauty of it. You're already sending them over to your book. Just go ahead and use an affiliate link through the Amazon Associates Program, and you can get paid 4% more on every sale. Crazy, right? You get 70% of any ebook. You gets 60% of any print book, and you get the additional 4% on top of what you're already doing, which is pretty freaking crazy.
[00:35:31] Matty: The other nice thing about the Amazon program, and I hope I'm getting this right--if I'm not, I'll clip this out of the interview--is that you get a percentage of everything the customer buys on that visit to the page. So if I give a link to my first book, The Sense of Death, and they go put The Sense of Death in their shopping cart and then they also put their month's supply of toilet paper and three other books and a sweater, I'm getting credit for all of that. Do you know that to be true?
[00:36:02] Dale: You're correct in that actually. Here's the funny thing is, if somebody clicks on that link and they go over to Amazon, they don't even have to buy your book. They can go and buy Bounty paper towels and their month of toilet paper supplies, and hand sanitizer, and everything else like that. And you will get credit. The nice thing is, books are just 4% and it starts to tier up after a while, just read Amazon Associate's Program, but other products actually will give you different percentages. So I think electronics, you get upwards of like 8%, 9% of all that. It really varies per category. The nice thing is it starts out at 4% for eBooks and print books. I don't want to get it too muddied.
[00:36:41] The nice thing is, you're right, you send somebody to that link. They don't even have to buy your book. They can buy your book. That'd be great. But they buy something else ... I'm going to tell you, I've seen some of the darndest things on my Amazon associate. I'm like, "Exactly what is this?" I'm going to keep this PG family-friendly here, folks, so don't get too dirty on this one, thinking about it, but I've seen some crazy things and I'm like, "Where did this come from?" I'm just not going to even question it. But, yeah, it's great program to think about.
[00:37:09] There's other affiliate marketing programs. If you're kind of stuck for ways to find good affiliate marketing programs, think about some of your favorite things that tie into you as an author and are appropriate to you as an author. And all you 've got to do is Google search away. Let's just say, for instance, you love using ProWritingAid. So you go prowritingaid affiliate program, Google it up. "Hey, there's ProWriting Aid. They've got an affiliate program. I'm going to go ahead and sign up for them." It's not sexy. A lot of people always, whenever they get, how do you sign up for these things? I'm like, Google it's really just Google.
[00:37:40] Matty: The other tip I'll offer, this is not related to video, but related to monetization is that I had seen that an ebook of an author that I really like, a traditionally published author, was on sale. And so I put on my author page, "Sale alert: This person's great book, you can get it for 99 cents," and I flagged the author in the post and she saw it. She evidently didn't know that she was on a BookBub deal, and so she shared it on her Facebook page, and I got more sales. That was my glory day on Amazon Associates, when this very well-known author shared my post out to her followers, and they all bought their toilet paper and their supplies--
[00:38:24] Dale: --and their random things there. There are other ways that we can monetize the program and I'm just going to very briefly summarize. You have courses or even short video series that you can send people to. Coaching and consulting is huge. And then last but not least, one of the largest things, and this is no matter the size of your channel, a lot of people always think you have to have thousands of subscribers: sponsorship deals.
[00:38:49] I landed quite a few sponsorships over the past year and not just on my channel, but also on my other smaller channel, Live Streaming Tech. I've landed some pretty good-sized deals and it's not a very large channel. You just reach out to the company and say, "Hey, would you like to do a sponsorship?" And they're usually like, "Okay, let's talk."
[00:39:08] Matty: Do you have any tips about proposing the terms of the sponsorship to the person you're approaching, or should you just propose the idea of a sponsorship and assuming the person you're reaching out to is a bigger fish in the pond than you are, let them propose the terms?
[00:39:24] Dale: I'm very fortunate that I'm a networker at heart. You even read it inside my bio. I love to network and talk with people and get to know people. So one of the easiest ways to do it is you're already having conversations with people and let's say they're not part of a brand or a service. Maybe they mention a brand or service, and they know somebody within there. Get that opportunity to actually meet that other person and start to build awareness of what you have as a person, a video content creator.
[00:39:53] Don't go into it like, "Hey, you want a sponsorship? Hey, how are we going to sponsor?" They're going to say no, the automatic next thing's going to be no, but what I've always found that works for me is I try to put together, say a 15 minute chat that I sit down and I speak with the person that's part of the company, the brand and service. I try to figure out their mission.
[00:40:10] And there's going to be some times where I'm like, it's not going to be a good fit. And I usually won't bring up a sponsorship. But in the same instance, when I'm having a conversation, I say, okay, this makes sense. That's when I bring it up and I say, "Hey, Matty, I I've got this channel, it's called Live Streaming Tech. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, and on that channel, we teach all about live streaming online through various platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and beyond. And I think that your product and your service would just be an excellent, excellent solution to a lot of my viewers' needs. Have you guys ever considered doing any kind of sponsorships with brands like myself?"
[00:40:47] And it starts off that conversation. Now, it's going to come down to negotiating. If you like to haggle, that might be one of the best ways to do it. Always know your value though, when you go into it. I can't tell you how many times that I see a lot of people that are just willing to just barter where they're like, "Oh, you're just going to give me a free month and then I do a video." No, no, no, no, no. If you're creating video, it's not as simple as just shooting it and uploading it. You and I both know. We've got to put a title together. We've got to promote it. We've got to manage the comments that come in from all the spam bots, things like that. It's so much more involved.
[00:41:23] So I would always recommend that think of your value and be ready to be flexible. Let's say for instance, Matty, I say to you, "I'll go ahead and I'm going to plug your podcast on each one of my broadcasts for the next month. I'm going to charge you $50 for 30-second placement on each one of those." And you wait, pause, just wait, wait for Matty to come back with something. It could be yes or it could be no. If they come back with no, say I'm more than willing to work with you based on your budget needs. So is it too expensive? We can walk it back a little bit and maybe do less videos or we can do one central video.
[00:42:06] So, that's what I found. And I've gotten better at doing the sponsorships as time has gone on, but just know this: you're going to get a lot of no's at first, a lot of no's because you're not going to be great at it. But in due time, it's a numbers game. You talk to 10 different brands and you get one conversion. Then you got a 10% conversion rate. So talk to 10 more brands on a regular basis or a hundred more brands, and you could get more sponsorships.
[00:42:30] Matty: Maybe don't start out with your goal sponsor, maybe start out with some smaller people so that you can hone your pitch on them. And then by the time you get to the person you really, really want, you'll be more comfortable with the whole process.
[00:42:44] Dale: Right. Yeah. So see, I haven't I've yet to actually approach Kellogg's. I'm working on a cereal sponsorship eventually here. But in the meantime, yeah, just be realistic because there are some smaller brands and companies that want to have the exposure that you're providing through video, and they're willing to pay sometimes top dollar to you because you're relatable. You're not a commercial, you're not an advertisement. So when they place their sponsorship on your video, more people are going to trust it, versus say, for instance, a random ad that's put over top on YouTube, like, "Oh, here's a teeth whitening thing. Oh, well, that's kind of weird," you know? No one's going to trust that.
[00:43:25] Whereas with a sponsorship, that's why I say make sure it makes sense for your brand. One of the worst things that could probably happen, and I've seen this happen with some creators before, is they take some sponsorships. It's like, energy gum. I'm like, "Energy ... what?"
[00:43:41] I was kidding about the Kellogg thing, by the way, I'm not getting a cereal sponsorship. It doesn't make sense because my viewers would be thrown off. But what does make sense is when I get sponsorship say through companies like Fiverr, I've worked with them. Findaway Voices makes total sense with them. Thinkific. Those things make sense for my brand.
[00:43:58] So sponsorships are definitely the way to go and don't wait for you to get a thousand viewers, 2000 viewers. Start right away.
[00:44:07] Matty: Great advice. Well, Dale, I could spend the rest of the day asking you questions about video and associated topics. I don't want to impinge on your time more than I already have, but for people who have been intrigued by what they've heard so far, let them know where they can go online to find out more about you.
[00:44:26] Dale: It's simple. I'm going to keep it really easy. You just go to selfpublishingwithdale.com and it'll show you all the podcasts and the YouTube channel, where I'm out in Instagram, Facebook, things like that. So again, self publishingwithdale.com. I try to drill that in so everybody remembers that.
[00:44:45] Matty: Another excellent tip. Thank you so much, Dale. This has been great.
[00:44:49] Dale: Thank you, Matty. I appreciate it.
[00:02:22] You fast forward over four years later and everything I've done with YouTube has eclipsed everything I've done with publishing books, which is pretty incredible. So the reach of video has absolutely changed my life in so many ways.
[00:02:41] Matty: I would imagine if people were getting in touch with you about detailed things about self-publishing, like, "Can I use CreateSpace for my print?" or something like that, do you have to go back and fix things that over time become out of date? How do you manage the version control?
[00:02:58] Dale: Yeah, it's so funny because a lot of our business is not evergreen, so it can be so tough. There are rare situations where I have to pull something down. For instance, you remember Pronoun publishing? It was a Macmillan publishing company. It was an aggregate publisher, worked kind of like what Draft2Digital and Smashwords does.
[00:03:17] They went out of business a couple of years ago. So it actually had maybe about a half dozen yeah videos. The only one I left up of Pronoun publishing was the one saying, "Hey, they're closed." That way if for some reason someone was looking, they could stumble on my channel. And in that video, I gave some suggestions and recommendations of where else they needed to go.
[00:03:38] Something I learned from a very large YouTuber, his name's Nick Nimmin, and he has well over a half a million subscribers. We'd had a private conversation and I told him how I used to just pull videos and he's like, "No, no, no, no. Don't do that." I'm like, "Why not? Can't it be misleading?" He's like, "Here's the deal. What you have to do is first of all, put a pinned comment expressing to people, 'Hey, this is no longer relevant, but go over and check out this video," and do the same thing in your description. And then those cards, which are the little white things that pop up out of the top of the window when you're on your desktop or on mobile, also put something in all caps redirecting people, because that asset that you have there, though may not be as relevant anymore, there are still going to be people that aren't informed. So what you'll want to do is redirect them over to the right assets and they will appreciate you for that."
[00:04:36] And, that really changed a lot because I'm going to tell you, you probably let me see, I've got about 450 videos on my channel. Believe it or not, I've purged 300 videos to date because I thought for the longest time, well, it's no longer relevant, let me just go ahead and pull it off my channel. And now I'm kicking myself because some of them, I clearly didn't have to do that.
[00:05:00] Matty: I have all sorts of very detailed questions, but I want to pull myself back a little bit and give a little bit more context for this because a lot of the people who are going to be listening to this podcast are going to be fiction writers. And I think that with a nonfiction writer, the importance of video is a little clearer because you're trying to establish expertise, you're trying to establish that presence, but if you're a fiction writer, can you talk a little bit about how important or unimportant video is for that kind of writer?
[00:05:31] Dale: It is a bit more challenging for the fiction author because nonfiction authors it's cut and dry. If you have a solution to someone's problem, done. Shoot the video, you got it going. It's easy for me as a nonfiction author to put together a YouTube channel. It's going to be a bit more challenging for the fiction authors, but here's the deal. Fiction authors, you folks are more creative than the nonfiction--sorry, nonfiction authors, please don't stone me for this one--but your creativity is what you're going to have to leverage. You're going to have to figure out how can I utilize the vehicle, a video, to grow my brand, to grow my online presence.
[00:06:13] I want to point out a couple of really good names. For one Michael La Ronne of Author Level Up, highly recommended, check out his channel. He is just a great resource and just tons of knowledge and a wellspring of ideas. Michael is actually a fiction and nonfiction author, so one of the things that he does is he leverages his knowledge of writing to give advice to those that want to become a fiction writer themselves. Sometimes he gives insights on how he develops characters and story arcs, things like that.
[00:06:47] We have an even larger person on YouTube. Her name is Jenna Moreci. I think Jenna is somewhere north of 200,000 subscribers or right around that neighborhood. Again, she's a fiction author, not a nonfiction author whatsoever. And sometimes she just goes and reveals how she writes these things and it builds that audience and it builds that awareness. And the nice thing is maybe she's pivoted herself into a utility resource, but it has also built relevance and awareness of her brand as a fiction author.
[00:07:23] There is also another one, last example, I promise you, his name is, actually called Scully's House of Thrillers. Now Scully actually is a fiction author and he does something very interesting. He actually reads his thriller books to people in his videos and he'll just go through chapters and though his presence isn't as large as say a Jenna Moreci or a Michael La Ronn or a Dale L. Roberts, he has enough of a following, in the thousands, that it builds awareness and relevance to him as a fiction author. You notice Scully didn't go to this thinking, "I'm going to go teach other fiction authors how to write." He said, "I'm going to leverage the content that I have right now to entice people to come over and take a look at my fiction books."
[00:08:13] Matty: Yeah. One of the things that I've been trying to do is remind people that they can do the Look Inside on Amazon or the equivalent on the other sites to get a taste, if they haven't read my books or my short stories yet, to get a flavor of it. But I think that reading an excerpt would be more engaging because then they connect with you personally. In addition to connecting with the material, they're connecting with you as an author. Do you have any tips or best practices for an author who wants to use that kind of approach to get their work in front of people that otherwise might miss it?
[00:08:46] Dale: The good example I just gave you of Scully is one great example. It's not enough though that you just post a video and hope for the best. You're going to need to try to create some type of engagement, and unfortunately there's no dead simple answer or exact way that's going to get you to do that. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of trial and error and that's why I've got 300 videos I pulled off because there was a lot of trial and error when I first got into it to figure out what would create engagement.
[00:09:17] The most important thing is to first of all, do it. Don't be afraid. Okay. Let me rephrase that it's okay to be afraid. Just do it. That's going to be the most important thing is get in front of that camera and start to do it and maybe study a few people.
[00:09:34] Maybe some of the names that I mentioned, you can also look through any kind of authortubers. You can look up #authortube on YouTube and find a ton of authors that also do this. And a lot of them are fiction authors, believe it or not. Figure out what it is that they're doing. Try to analyze what's the number of views that they have on this? How many subscribers do they have on it? How many comments do they have on it? What are they saying in the comments and figure out, "Okay, hmm, this worked, but maybe this didn't work," and then try to implement it yourself on your own channel.
[00:10:06] Now, the key when it comes to getting engagement and keeping engagement is going to be you have to keep the conversation going. It is absolutely critical. If you want to build it community, you've got to be a human being. You actually have to give back. So whenever someone says a comment over on one of my videos, I will respond back, but I also want to keep the conversation going.
[00:10:34] You're probably saying, why do I want to keep the conversation going? Why don't I just say, thanks for commenting and just deuce out? That's all well and good. That's good. That's fine. If you want to do that, have just one exchange and be done with it, that's okay. But if you're starting on YouTube, one of the ways to trigger the YouTube algorithm is through engagement and activity, and the more that you can get people to engage, whether it's through a comment, a subscribe, or even a share, the better. So I will keep a conversation going. I've had some that had like a thread of 24 different comments on it and sometimes people start to contribute to it. And the nice thing is the more they contribute to this, the more YouTube goes, "Huh. There's something to this video. I'm going to go ahead and serve this over to other people that might like it."
[00:11:25] And that's what really helps grow your presence there. At first, it's going to seem like you're talking to nobody and chances are very likely, you might end up talking to nobody, but I would recommend that if nobody's showing up, then bring people to the party, get ahold of Matty and be like, "Hey Matty, I need you to check out my latest video." "Hey Dale, what's going on? Hey, check out this latest video. Let me know what your thoughts are." Get more people watching because above all else, when it comes to YouTube, engagement is key but watch time is king. If people watch all the way to the end, YouTube loves that. They want people to watch from beginning to end and as much as possible and stay on the platform as long as possible.
[00:12:11] Matty: I can tell I'm going to be taking a lot of to do's out of this because I've been posting the video of the interviews we're doing like we're doing here for the podcast, but after a couple of episodes, I turned off the comments because I was only getting those clearly canned comments. I don't know how they're just finding new videos, and they say, "Hi, I want to be your friend," or "I want to sell you some real estate."
[00:12:34] Dale: You have to get those ones for sure. If you do run into things like that, definitely what you need to do is you'll go into your YouTube dashboard and you're going to block the user from your channel. That way they can never comment again. I have probably thousands of people I've blocked. I wouldn't block anybody says, "Thanks" or "I enjoyed this," but when you start to get someone like, "Come check out my page" or "Sub for sub!" and you're like, "Oh no, no, let's not do that," I just block from page and I keep it off. So that way, kind of like what you're saying, I'm not managing a bunch of ding dongs that are just sending out their botted traffic over towards my direction.
[00:13:14] Matty: We've been talking a little bit about YouTube because obviously that's very central to your business plan. Do the same rules apply if people are posting, for example, on Facebook?
[00:13:24] Dale: YouTube and Facebook share a lot alike, but one of the things that Facebook is a little different is the audience and the expectations of the audience. I'm not an expert by any stretch with Facebook videos, but I do know a number of people that have been very successful through Facebook. It's interesting in that views are not the same as views are over on YouTube. For instance, YouTube views means you clicked on the page, you watched the video in some capacity, whether one second or five hours. With Facebook, sometimes if someone's just scrolling through their feed and your video just happens to pop up, they consider that a view, which is kind of weird, right? So you might look can a video be like, "Oh my gosh, I got 10,000 views on Facebook." But in reality, maybe only a thousand of the people stopped and actually watched.
[00:14:14] And the other thing is, too, YouTube, really a lot of the best stuff functions around short form to semi long form content, meaning videos that are about five minutes to 15 minutes typically perform really well on YouTube because people are used to that. Whereas on Facebook, you're lucky if you can keep someone longer than a minute to three minutes. In fact, they actually have a Facebook Creator Program and in order to qualify for being a partner, if you will, for that program, you actually have to have an average of one-minute watch time on a three minute video ... I think maybe a hundred videos or a thousand videos, it's eluding my mind right now.
[00:14:58] So the expectations are so much different when it comes to the audiences, because you've got to really try to capture someone's attention on Facebook, but the engagement rules absolutely, that is exactly the same. So if you have people commenting on your video, it behooves you to take time out of your day to keep the conversation going. That way it really builds awareness and relevance in the Facebook algorithm for your video.
[00:15:27] Matty: Do you have other tips in addition to engaging people in the comments about what will make a video engaging or what things people should steer away from?
[00:15:37] Dale: Yeah. Excellent question. Because I've got quite a few, I'm going to limit to only a couple of things. The very first thing is going to be is get the first comment and be the first commenter. Seems kind of weird, but what it's going to do is just help out a little bit in starting the conversation. On YouTube, we have what's called a pinned comment, and I think to a certain extent you can still do it with Facebook as well. Get a pinned comment. What you'll do is you'll write in a comment and then there's a feature in the three little dots. You're going to left click on that. It'll say pin comment. You're going to pin it--pin it to the very top.
[00:16:07] Now what I'll typically do is lead with an interesting question, something relevant to the video that I shared. Let's just say, for instance, it's a video about, I don't know, car repair, "Have you ever repaired a Honda Accord? If so, what year was the one that you did? What was your experience? And while I've got your attention, check out this way that I fixed the Honda's automatic transmission," and it would be linked to another video. Because remember I said watch time is king. We want to make sure they continue to go and watch more videos.
[00:16:41] That was just a crude idea of how you start out the conversation with a pinned comment. Get it to where you're asking a question, because if you just simply go, "Hey, go check out this other video," most people are going to go meh, but when you ask someone their opinion, they're more apt to actually say, "Okay, let me go check this out."
[00:16:57] Now, the other way that you can get engagement going is ask for it inside the video. Just a simple thing of saying, "What did you think of today's video?" or "Today's question of the day is going to be X Y Z." I know Roberto Blake does that. He's got roughly 400,000 subscribers. He always has a question of the day he saves towards the end. And a lot of his devoted followers will go and drop their thoughts on it because he really takes some time to think about that question.
[00:17:25] So those are just two ways that you can get that conversation going. And then some topics ... it really depends a lot on your topic. Every now and then you're going to strike a nerve. I had a video, for instance, that was about IngramSpark getting rid of no content books and low content books. And I put out a video about it. I didn't have to say a single thing. It was a Dumpster fire right from the start. There were people that wanted to tell me their opinion.
[00:17:52] And so every now and then you're going to be like, what the heck did I do? It might be the topic. Because every now and then you might strike a nerve and it'll get people going without you even having to try.
[00:18:02] Matty: One of the things that surprised me very much is people who evidently consume audio-only content on YouTube. So I already post the video of the interview of the podcast episodes on YouTube, but I've also gotten the recommendation to post the full episode with all the intro and outro material as audio only. So how does that work? I can't even imagine how people are doing that.
[00:18:27] Dale: In my opinion, repurposing content is definitely a great idea, but if it already exists in video form to just strip the video form, doesn't really make too much sense. So for instance, if this interview was available as video, like we're watching right now, or if it was audio without the video, I would be like, I'd just rather listen to this one. And also just a heads up if anybody ever does try to do duplicate content, please be careful because YouTube actually will close down accounts for publishing duplicate content.
[00:19:00] I knew a creator, he was near a hundred thousand subscribers, and somehow inadvertently had his account shut down. He got suspended because of duplicate content. And the funny thing is he was only using snippets from some of his videos in his current videos and that flagged enough that YouTube goes, "No, no, no, no, you can't do that."
[00:19:21] That was an extreme case and it should never have happened. For instance, Joe Rogan's a great example. Joe Rogan has his podcast. He also has another channel called the Joe Rogan Experience where he takes sound bites, maybe five, 10 minutes segments from his two-hour show. Those are exceptions to the rule, to where it will work. Because some people want to have shorter bite-sized pieces. They don't want to see a full two-hour video.
[00:19:48] Matty: And YouTube is unlikely to take down Joe Rogan.
[00:19:51] Dale: No, I don't think so. He's bringing in millions of dollars in ad revenue.
[00:19:56] Matty: What I had in mind, and this was totally a selfish reason for wanting to do this, is that I record intro and outro, including things like solicitations for Patreon support, as audio only. So ideally I would like someone who's listening on YouTube, I'll say, to be hearing that material as well. And I also make references to previous episodes. It's a little bit of extra content around the interview itself. And so the people who are just watching the interview video are getting good information, but they're missing some of the material that the audio listener would get.
[00:20:30] I hate to discontinue posting the videos because I think people do like seeing Dale L. Roberts there with the fabulous background and it's engaging in a different way than audio, is I think, but it's not as portable or flexible the way podcasts are.
[00:20:45] Dale: Yeah. Podcasts are great. Don't get me wrong. It is a good idea that you do repurpose over to another platform, but what you probably don't want to do is take the audio version of your video and post it again over on YouTube. So if you're looking for like Patreon supporters or you're pushing maybe a sponsorship of some sort, I would say, just do it on your regular video because here's the fun fact is YouTube premium, I actually have that, I can listen to it and I've actually done it quite a bit where like, podcasts like this, I will just go ahead and turn it on while I'm working out and I don't need to see the video aspect of things. If anything, it'll get it to where you're creating less work for yourself--instead of doing two separate videos, but same audio, you can have one thing so it's one resource and it's less work for you to have to do in the long term.
[00:21:32] Matty: Less work is always good.
[00:21:34] Dale: Agreed. Thinking about the whole Joe Rogan Experience-type thing where bite-sized bits, maybe you ask a specific question. You're like, "Oh, that's great. That's a juicy bit." Break it down. My video editor, Dan Norton, a shameless plug here, he's not paying me to say this, he actually has a service for repurposing videos. He actually works with podcasters and he works with one very large influencer and that's all he does is he repurposes the videos and he just goes and finds the nuggets, chops it up to a few minute segments, and then he uploads it over onto YouTube. Pretty cool, right?
[00:22:08] Matty: Yeah. Very cool. I think one thing that would make video easier for some introverted writers is to be able to do it with someone else. And I know that you can do two person videos on Facebook, I think, but from a private timeline, not from a business page. Are there options on YouTube to facilitate a two-person conversation? Would you just recommend they do it the way we're doing it here on Zoom or similar, and then post that.
[00:22:37] Dale: Yeah, oddly enough, you can actually stream directly to YouTube from Zoom. Actually, I have another channel on YouTube called Live Streaming Tech and my brother and I actually talk about some of the business of live streaming online and doing video. And there is an app and they just announced it yesterday, it's called Streamyard. Streamyard's been out for a while. It's a browser-based plugin. It's easier to use than Zoom. I'm just kind of used to Zoom, I've always used it, but with Streamyard, you can have up to 10 people on screen. Yeah. Ten. They just announced it yesterday. They had put it out in beta a couple of weeks ago, and I guess it's official. They just rolled it out.
[00:23:16] By the way, Streamyard's not paying me to say this, but they're a great example of how you can bring in multiple people. And it's so much easier, right, Matty? You just talking in front of a camera and having nobody to have an exchange with, it's hard, but you have another person to do this with, you have somebody to rap with, it becomes so much easier. Collaborating is an excellent idea.
[00:23:38] Matty: And I think it's easier to get people excited about a live event too. The recorded events are great resources, but it's not an event the way a live event can be.
[00:23:46] Dale: Yeah. And here's the fun thing about live events too. Whether you're doing it on Facebook or even on YouTube or even one of my favorite platforms, Twitch, when you go live on those platforms and you have people watching, there's more people that are going to engage with you. And again, remember I said, engagement is key. That works as well for live viewers. That's going to send little signals to the algorithm, whatever platform you're working on, that there's relevance to this video and it'll send more traffic to it. Works really good for YouTube. For instance, this past Saturday, I did an 11 hour write-in. I was going for a challenge of writing a book in 24 hours. It was a 20 to 30,000-word book and I'm like, "Okay, you can do this in 24 hours."
[00:24:31] It's crazy. I didn't think anybody would show up, but because the people that showed up were very active--there was about 40, 42 live concurrent viewers at one point. And I'm like, "Just to watch me write?" But it's because of the engagement that it really built relevance through the YouTube algorithm.
[00:24:51] Matty: Yeah, it's a real community builder. And I think that people are especially realizing that now. We're recording at the end of June 2020, and still dealing with the results of COVID, so a lot of things that otherwise would have been live events have moved online.
[00:25:05] I know I've mentioned in other podcast episodes, but I'll mention again because I'm finding it so useful, that at two o'clock every day two author friends and I get on Zoom and we writing-sprint for an hour and a half. It's been great. It is fun. And we take little breaks, we sprint for like 20 minutes and then we chat for a few minutes, and it's really nice.
[00:25:24] I think that there are a lot of things like that, that people are being able to engage in that even a year ago, they wouldn't have been able to, because if it meant packing up their stuff and going to a coffee house to meet some friends, sometimes it just logistically wasn't possible.
[00:25:38] Dale: There's one tip would love to give this one to you. You're going to love it. Next time you do one of your writing sprints, try out, Streamyard--again, they're not paying me to say this. The really cool thing is if somebody comments, you can highlight a comment and it'll pop up on screen. It's dead simple to use. There's not a lot of coding or anything else like that you need to worry about. It's very intuitive.
[00:25:59] Matty: I think that Streamyard is what Draft2Digital uses for the Spotlight events, and so if people are curious to see that in action, they can go to the link that I'll provide to your Draft2Digital Spotlight, and they can see how that works.
[00:26:12] Do you have any tips? You had talked about some of the best practices. What are some of the things you see in video that people are doing that they shouldn't be doing?
[00:26:20] Dale: I would say that sometimes it's doesn't even come down to what somebody does in video so much as not doing the video at all. But I would say that probably common mistakes typically is get a good microphone. You don't need to go broke getting a microphone, for instance, I think Boya has a lavalier microphone for mobile. Don't go broke on something like this, but at least get something that's passable. I would not recommend using the microphones that are on the headsets for gamers. It's really horrible. One of the things that'll turn people off is bad audio.
[00:26:56] Next thing is going to be bad video. Now use what you have at your disposal. Probably one of the biggest issues I see when it comes to video is that there's not enough lighting. For instance, your audio listeners are probably not going to be able to appreciate this, but when I shut off my light, you see, it made a huge difference, right? Of course, this is not terrible by any stretch, but you notice that as soon as I turn it back on, the color saturation looks good. It's more crisp. So try to get as much ambient light as possible, outdoor light if you can. But if you are in a basement or a room with very few windows, good lights can go a long way. This light that I have here ran me about maybe $20 and it can run upwards of two to four hours at a time.
[00:27:44] Matty: I want whatever light you're using. People who are watching on video can compare Dale's lovely video to my okay but not great video and will understand what I'm saying. But, yeah, the lighting is something I've struggled with a lot. I would love to know what your tips are for that.
[00:28:06] Do you have any tips for people who are buying into the idea of the importance of video but they're uncomfortable with the idea of getting in front of a camera.
[00:28:14] Dale: Everybody gets uncomfortable. Everyone does. So just get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Now let's just say that you break out in hives, you start having anxiety attacks. That's when you probably should pump the brakes. Let me give a good example. I love being able to raise awareness of all these different authors, this is a lot of fun, and actually this person is an author and artist as well. Her name's Anne Manera. I'm actually currently working on a video collaboration with her and Anne is brilliant. She has built a massive community on Facebook. She's one of the ones that I've actually seen grow her Facebook video business. She just nails it over there. It's amazing, her tribe that comes around.
[00:28:57] Here's the funny thing is no one ever sees her, at all, ever, because most of her broadcasts, she has her coloring books set out. She has a camera angled down at her book as she's drawing and she's talking as she goes along. The funny thing is she told me one time she turned the camera on herself and started talking and her viewers were like, "What's going on. What's happening?" No one had ever seen her before, so it threw them off. So she was like, "And ... I'm turning it back down to there."
[00:29:29] Matty: That's so funny.
[00:29:31] Dale: Yeah. You can see that there's so much that you can do. Now let's just say, for instance, that freaks you out even more--like, "Oh no, no, I can't put that above there. I don't have any coloring books to write. I don't want to be writing by hand. I don't want anybody to see me whatsoever."
[00:29:45] Totally cool. I get it. Then at this point there are PowerPoint slides. It's not the sexiest thing, and it can be very boring, but at least it gets you to where you're recording and producing content that people can consume. So you've got PowerPoint slides you can do. You can do some screen shares. You can stay off camera. The thing that's going to be challenging is if you don't want to talk, that's going to be tough. It's going to be so much harder at that point. You may have to hire out professionals and that's going to get pretty expensive. So I would recommend starting out if you are very scared of video, start out with podcasting. Podcasting is probably one of the best ways to start out and it's one of the easiest ways to do it.
[00:30:30] Matty: And it's nice because it's recorded, too, because I think that the difference between recorded video and live video, live video is sort of the most stressful and recorded video is a little bit less because, you can always just delete or have some alternatives there if it wasn't the effect that you were looking for.
[00:30:50] Dale: Yeah, I still freak out on live video. I'm not going to lie to you. Like right now, I'm Cool Hand Luke, because I know that you're just recording it and it's going to be done later on. I get on live, though, there is a certain bit of anxiety that I do get going into it. So if anybody's ever scared of going live, I'm along with you, and I'm going to tell you this, that I've easily done I would say 200, 300 live broadcasts. It's been a lot.
[00:31:15] Matty: Well, I'll refer again to the interview you did with Mark, where Mark in the Draft2Digital Spotlight, dropped off. It was a live conversation like we're having here except live and he had some technical problem and he disappeared. And there you were, the guest, on your own. I thought you handled that so nicely because you acknowledged that there was an issue and you kept going along with what you had been talking about, and then pretty soon Mark resolved his technical issue and was back on the show.
[00:31:44] I just think that the fact that you were willing to go with it made it seamless and made it actually more fun because I bet more people are going to go watch that video now that they hear that they get to watch you be the solo guy on the Draft2Digital Spotlight than they would if it was just a completely normal event.
[00:32:01] Dale: Believe it or not, I was sweating bullets.
[00:32:04] Matty: It just looked like you were having fun with it. And then when Mark showed up, you caught him up on what had happened while he was gone, and it was great. That's going to be a great video for people to watch for all sorts of reasons.
[00:32:17] If people are looking to monetize video, what advice do you have on that front? Is that a realistic possibility?
[00:32:24] Dale: I love talking about this. This is one of my favorite things to talk about is monetizing your content through video, because you're going to put all this effort in. Obviously, ultimately you want to leverage any video platform to build awareness and sell more books. Ultimately, that's really what it's going to be about, or, hear me out on this, leverage that platform to monetize yourself in other ways. Because let's face it. Most indy authors barely make it by. They barely have enough money to scrape by. So now you have to actually be resourceful with every step that you do.
[00:32:59] You could either: A) continue to write book after book after book. You can be someone as prolific as say a Craig Martelle and not have to be on camera. That's great. But I think in most instances, Craig Martelle is probably more of the exception than the rule.Most people will try to keep pumping out and may not see that much success.
[00:33:17] So might I recommend is when you do break out into video, there are a variety of ways you can do it. Now, first of all, let's get the easy one out the way. It's the YouTube Partner Program. And I already told you about the Facebook Creator Program. By the way, not too many people realize about that one. The YouTube Partner Program, if you get 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch time hours in the course of a year, you can qualify for the YouTube Partner Program. Now how this works is you would then allow YouTube to place ads on your video, whether it be beginning, the middle, or the end or all the above.
[00:33:53] And you get paid for it. That's kind of nice. I'm going to say this. Most people don't make very much. You probably make enough to go cover your next book cover over the course of the month. But beyond that, it's not going to pay the bills.
[00:34:09] The next way that you're going to do is leverage video for affiliate marketing. Now, let me go ahead and just summarize affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when you like a product, you contact that product's company and you say, "Hey, I like your product. If I send people over towards your direction, would you give me a percentage of sales?" And they usually say yes. For instance, I am a huge fan of Draft2Digital, they have a referral program. So when I send somebody through my referral link, I get x amount of dollars per sale or something like that. All that to say that affiliate marketing is one of the ways to go.
[00:34:45] If you're stuck with ideas on how to do affiliate marketing like, "Oh, but Dale, I don't know. I feel sleazy." Well, you're already selling your books, so one of the things I'd recommend is if your book's on Amazon, get into what's called the Amazon Associates Program. Amazon Associates is legit, complete white hat tactics. In fact, even Author Central recommends that you use the Amazon Associates Program to send people to your books.
[00:35:11] Here's the beauty of it. You're already sending them over to your book. Just go ahead and use an affiliate link through the Amazon Associates Program, and you can get paid 4% more on every sale. Crazy, right? You get 70% of any ebook. You gets 60% of any print book, and you get the additional 4% on top of what you're already doing, which is pretty freaking crazy.
[00:35:31] Matty: The other nice thing about the Amazon program, and I hope I'm getting this right--if I'm not, I'll clip this out of the interview--is that you get a percentage of everything the customer buys on that visit to the page. So if I give a link to my first book, The Sense of Death, and they go put The Sense of Death in their shopping cart and then they also put their month's supply of toilet paper and three other books and a sweater, I'm getting credit for all of that. Do you know that to be true?
[00:36:02] Dale: You're correct in that actually. Here's the funny thing is, if somebody clicks on that link and they go over to Amazon, they don't even have to buy your book. They can go and buy Bounty paper towels and their month of toilet paper supplies, and hand sanitizer, and everything else like that. And you will get credit. The nice thing is, books are just 4% and it starts to tier up after a while, just read Amazon Associate's Program, but other products actually will give you different percentages. So I think electronics, you get upwards of like 8%, 9% of all that. It really varies per category. The nice thing is it starts out at 4% for eBooks and print books. I don't want to get it too muddied.
[00:36:41] The nice thing is, you're right, you send somebody to that link. They don't even have to buy your book. They can buy your book. That'd be great. But they buy something else ... I'm going to tell you, I've seen some of the darndest things on my Amazon associate. I'm like, "Exactly what is this?" I'm going to keep this PG family-friendly here, folks, so don't get too dirty on this one, thinking about it, but I've seen some crazy things and I'm like, "Where did this come from?" I'm just not going to even question it. But, yeah, it's great program to think about.
[00:37:09] There's other affiliate marketing programs. If you're kind of stuck for ways to find good affiliate marketing programs, think about some of your favorite things that tie into you as an author and are appropriate to you as an author. And all you 've got to do is Google search away. Let's just say, for instance, you love using ProWritingAid. So you go prowritingaid affiliate program, Google it up. "Hey, there's ProWriting Aid. They've got an affiliate program. I'm going to go ahead and sign up for them." It's not sexy. A lot of people always, whenever they get, how do you sign up for these things? I'm like, Google it's really just Google.
[00:37:40] Matty: The other tip I'll offer, this is not related to video, but related to monetization is that I had seen that an ebook of an author that I really like, a traditionally published author, was on sale. And so I put on my author page, "Sale alert: This person's great book, you can get it for 99 cents," and I flagged the author in the post and she saw it. She evidently didn't know that she was on a BookBub deal, and so she shared it on her Facebook page, and I got more sales. That was my glory day on Amazon Associates, when this very well-known author shared my post out to her followers, and they all bought their toilet paper and their supplies--
[00:38:24] Dale: --and their random things there. There are other ways that we can monetize the program and I'm just going to very briefly summarize. You have courses or even short video series that you can send people to. Coaching and consulting is huge. And then last but not least, one of the largest things, and this is no matter the size of your channel, a lot of people always think you have to have thousands of subscribers: sponsorship deals.
[00:38:49] I landed quite a few sponsorships over the past year and not just on my channel, but also on my other smaller channel, Live Streaming Tech. I've landed some pretty good-sized deals and it's not a very large channel. You just reach out to the company and say, "Hey, would you like to do a sponsorship?" And they're usually like, "Okay, let's talk."
[00:39:08] Matty: Do you have any tips about proposing the terms of the sponsorship to the person you're approaching, or should you just propose the idea of a sponsorship and assuming the person you're reaching out to is a bigger fish in the pond than you are, let them propose the terms?
[00:39:24] Dale: I'm very fortunate that I'm a networker at heart. You even read it inside my bio. I love to network and talk with people and get to know people. So one of the easiest ways to do it is you're already having conversations with people and let's say they're not part of a brand or a service. Maybe they mention a brand or service, and they know somebody within there. Get that opportunity to actually meet that other person and start to build awareness of what you have as a person, a video content creator.
[00:39:53] Don't go into it like, "Hey, you want a sponsorship? Hey, how are we going to sponsor?" They're going to say no, the automatic next thing's going to be no, but what I've always found that works for me is I try to put together, say a 15 minute chat that I sit down and I speak with the person that's part of the company, the brand and service. I try to figure out their mission.
[00:40:10] And there's going to be some times where I'm like, it's not going to be a good fit. And I usually won't bring up a sponsorship. But in the same instance, when I'm having a conversation, I say, okay, this makes sense. That's when I bring it up and I say, "Hey, Matty, I I've got this channel, it's called Live Streaming Tech. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, and on that channel, we teach all about live streaming online through various platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and beyond. And I think that your product and your service would just be an excellent, excellent solution to a lot of my viewers' needs. Have you guys ever considered doing any kind of sponsorships with brands like myself?"
[00:40:47] And it starts off that conversation. Now, it's going to come down to negotiating. If you like to haggle, that might be one of the best ways to do it. Always know your value though, when you go into it. I can't tell you how many times that I see a lot of people that are just willing to just barter where they're like, "Oh, you're just going to give me a free month and then I do a video." No, no, no, no, no. If you're creating video, it's not as simple as just shooting it and uploading it. You and I both know. We've got to put a title together. We've got to promote it. We've got to manage the comments that come in from all the spam bots, things like that. It's so much more involved.
[00:41:23] So I would always recommend that think of your value and be ready to be flexible. Let's say for instance, Matty, I say to you, "I'll go ahead and I'm going to plug your podcast on each one of my broadcasts for the next month. I'm going to charge you $50 for 30-second placement on each one of those." And you wait, pause, just wait, wait for Matty to come back with something. It could be yes or it could be no. If they come back with no, say I'm more than willing to work with you based on your budget needs. So is it too expensive? We can walk it back a little bit and maybe do less videos or we can do one central video.
[00:42:06] So, that's what I found. And I've gotten better at doing the sponsorships as time has gone on, but just know this: you're going to get a lot of no's at first, a lot of no's because you're not going to be great at it. But in due time, it's a numbers game. You talk to 10 different brands and you get one conversion. Then you got a 10% conversion rate. So talk to 10 more brands on a regular basis or a hundred more brands, and you could get more sponsorships.
[00:42:30] Matty: Maybe don't start out with your goal sponsor, maybe start out with some smaller people so that you can hone your pitch on them. And then by the time you get to the person you really, really want, you'll be more comfortable with the whole process.
[00:42:44] Dale: Right. Yeah. So see, I haven't I've yet to actually approach Kellogg's. I'm working on a cereal sponsorship eventually here. But in the meantime, yeah, just be realistic because there are some smaller brands and companies that want to have the exposure that you're providing through video, and they're willing to pay sometimes top dollar to you because you're relatable. You're not a commercial, you're not an advertisement. So when they place their sponsorship on your video, more people are going to trust it, versus say, for instance, a random ad that's put over top on YouTube, like, "Oh, here's a teeth whitening thing. Oh, well, that's kind of weird," you know? No one's going to trust that.
[00:43:25] Whereas with a sponsorship, that's why I say make sure it makes sense for your brand. One of the worst things that could probably happen, and I've seen this happen with some creators before, is they take some sponsorships. It's like, energy gum. I'm like, "Energy ... what?"
[00:43:41] I was kidding about the Kellogg thing, by the way, I'm not getting a cereal sponsorship. It doesn't make sense because my viewers would be thrown off. But what does make sense is when I get sponsorship say through companies like Fiverr, I've worked with them. Findaway Voices makes total sense with them. Thinkific. Those things make sense for my brand.
[00:43:58] So sponsorships are definitely the way to go and don't wait for you to get a thousand viewers, 2000 viewers. Start right away.
[00:44:07] Matty: Great advice. Well, Dale, I could spend the rest of the day asking you questions about video and associated topics. I don't want to impinge on your time more than I already have, but for people who have been intrigued by what they've heard so far, let them know where they can go online to find out more about you.
[00:44:26] Dale: It's simple. I'm going to keep it really easy. You just go to selfpublishingwithdale.com and it'll show you all the podcasts and the YouTube channel, where I'm out in Instagram, Facebook, things like that. So again, self publishingwithdale.com. I try to drill that in so everybody remembers that.
[00:44:45] Matty: Another excellent tip. Thank you so much, Dale. This has been great.
[00:44:49] Dale: Thank you, Matty. I appreciate it.
Links
selfpublishingwithdale.com
Self-publishing with Dale YouTube Channel
Dale's Publishing Start-up Guide course
Live Streaming Tech YouTube Channel
Draft2Digital Spotlight event with Dale and Mark Leslie Lefebvre
Other author / publishing YouTube Channels to check out: Michael La Ronne of Author Level Up / Jenna Moreci / Roberto Blake / Anne Manera
Dale's video editor Dan Norton - repurposing audio
Streamyard - live streaming studio in your browser
Boya lavalier microphone for mobile (Dale's Amazon affiliate link)
Video playlist of monetization opportunities
And for a fee ...
People of Video online conference made for online video creators by online video creators from YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and beyond
Self-publishing with Dale YouTube Channel
Dale's Publishing Start-up Guide course
Live Streaming Tech YouTube Channel
Draft2Digital Spotlight event with Dale and Mark Leslie Lefebvre
Other author / publishing YouTube Channels to check out: Michael La Ronne of Author Level Up / Jenna Moreci / Roberto Blake / Anne Manera
Dale's video editor Dan Norton - repurposing audio
Streamyard - live streaming studio in your browser
Boya lavalier microphone for mobile (Dale's Amazon affiliate link)
Video playlist of monetization opportunities
And for a fee ...
People of Video online conference made for online video creators by online video creators from YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and beyond
Dale inspired me to extend my use of YouTube to support my Indy Author business plan--for example, by engaging more actively with people who comment on an episode. Did you get an idea from Dale that you plan to put into action? Please share your plans, and any other thoughts you have about the episode, below!
