Those of you who know me well, know that I have been dancing salsa for the better part of the last decade. What those formative years taught me is that doing is super important and what you focus your attention on is equally important.
Doing is More Important than Practice (Dancing or Film-making)
Speaking from personal experience, doing is more important than understanding (at least at first). Embarrassingly enough to admit, towards the end of my first year of Latin dancing I still struggled to tell the difference between Salsa, Merengue, and Bachata (three different Latin music styles). However, and you can ask any close friend who witnessed this, it did not stop me from having the confidence to step back on to the dance floor night after night to practice each move or pattern that I had recently added to my repertoire.
Ok. So, what does this have to do with film-making?
The key take away to learning any new skill is that doing it over and over is much more important than just practicing in a classroom setting or watching other people do it. All these things will help you in your development, but actually stepping into the art, in a real-life setting, is what will separate you from the talkers and watchers. It is what will make you the doer or professional. Sure I sucked at first, but trying and failing time after time is what made me grow as a dancer and is what is making me grow now as a filmmaker. Just scroll back through some of my work and you will the development.
There are Three Parts to Every Good Score (Dancing or Film-making)
Just like salsa dancing, film-making has a rhythm, a flow, a dance.
If you are a dancer and are interested in getting into film-making then you may have a huge advantage over others because you understand the concept of musicality already. As in life, everything has a flow or a rhythm. All you have to do is capture it and make the motion picture flow, just like a dance. But don’t forget, to practice. Hitting the record button is the same as stepping on to the social dance floor.
Another great practice, whether you are learning to dance or learning to make movies, is to document what you’re doing in order for you to see what you have done and critique yourself and your own work.
You Get to Choose What You Focus On (Dancing or Film-making)
Focus…
This is a challenge for a lot of people in dance and in film-making. You have to remember that you are there to learn and grow yourself. If you want to be a movie critique or a dance judge, go and be those things. However, without having that hands-on experience, your opinions will not mean much in the dance or film-making world.
So, get your ass out there and practice, practice, practice. And practice what you preach.
Something that people may not know about me is that I am not actually a great communicator in most cases. I sometimes struggle to manage the difference between both professional working relationships and personal ones.
Here are 3 important things that I have learned about recognizing the best ways to communicate with other people who are trying to give you an important message.
Listening is More Important than Explaining (Managing Work & Personal Relationships)
If you actually just listen to the advice of all of your friends and family, you will realize that everyone really does have your best interest in their hearts. Seriously, just shut up (as much as you as it pains you) and LISTEN to what your friends are trying to tell you. You have to listen to the needs of your clients and business partners in order to effectively communicate your words, thoughts, and ideas into executable and actionable items or tasks.
Once you have listened to the person fully, it is time to ask more engaging questions to your audience, and then you get to listen and learn more about the person’s business ideas or business plan.
YOU Don’t Have All the Answers (Even If It Sometimes Seems That You Do)
Once you’re done listening (which doesn’t actually happen until Scene 16.8) you have to then, listen some more. But make sure the per
son that you’re listening to is more knowledgeable on the subject matter. It’s obvious that your client or business owner knows more about their business operations than you do. So, just keep listening and learning from everyone around you. You never want to be the smartest person in the room.
So, to be super clear, you can’t give away all the answers up front, otherwise your audience will not perceive your value. You have to leave some of what you do behind the scenes up to mystery. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t help show other people what you feel is right, I am saying that if you feel it’s right… you should share that with your client and then let them make up their own mind on how they should proceed with your business.
I, myself am historically guilty of thinking that I have all the answers and that everyone should shut up and listen to me. But the fact of the matter is that I do not have all of the answers. So, when I chose what I share with friends, family, a potential client, future customers, or anyone else for that matter…
…You have to make sure that you are someone that people can always come back to for answers, be interviewed, and be shown that there is another side to this story. So, keep your eye on the prize and make sure you are always doing the right thing. If you are, then you literally cannot go wrong. Also, get new friends if you can’t trust the old ones.
Offer Them Something and Explain the Purpose In Your Offer (Managing Work & Personal Relationships)
Ok. This is the trickiest part of the sales process. You definitely want to provide some value up front but when you make an offering you should offer your solution and then let your audience decide how they want to proceed.
One Sales Method that has always worked for me when presenting is the following:
Benefit – What is the value for the client or customer.
Application – How does this product/service HELP the end user or business owner.
Analogy – You have to draw a very easy comparison for the person you are presenting to.
Testimonial – Give them a testimonial or just show them your reviews, so they know that they are also working with a good person.
Have Faith that People Do Have YOUR Best Interest In Mind (Managing Work & Personal Relationships)
Finally, and lastly. You have to continue to serve others in a positive, more meaningful way. You have to make the determination of what is more important in your business. Is it more important to show off all of your talents at once or is it more important to earn the trust of your business clients or potential customers. This is probably one of the biggest challenges for most people but if you keep having faith in humanity, you know that you will do the right thing.
I wrote this with professional business people in mind.
If you have any questions or need any support, feel free to reach out for a FREE 15-minute interview about how I can help YOUR business today.
From small-business owners to well-established public relations professionals, when deciding on how to grow our brands or appeal to a wider audience we are always having to ask our selves tough marketing questions like “Should we invest more in our SEO Vs Video?”, “where should we spend our marketing dollars and time?” or “What is going to give us the best return on our investment?” The real question we should be asking ourselves is what our audience needs, how our product/service may best benefit time, or how can I best engage and convert a site visitor. No matter the platform, the quality of the content that you put out will have a direct impact on the reach and engagement that you will get among your audience.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, according to a quick google search, is “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.”
With the increase of video content and the amount of SEO content that has saturated the digital marketplace, it is sometimes hard to decide between the two. So, what should you do? Short answer: Both, if possible. Long answer: it really depends on your goals and purpose of creating the content.
SEO and video serve two separate purposes which often crossover into one another. One’s primary purpose is to get your site to show up at the top of search results and the other is to engage the visitor once they are on already on your site. Now, that does not mean that good SEO or video content on its own can’t be used in creative ways to both attract and keep the attention of visitors. Video content can actually impact your SEO rankings Here are three main things to consider when you are trying to decide on investing one or the other and why you should, whenever possible, consider both. The most important thing to consider when investing energy into organically producing site traffic is now and will always be CONTENT.
Why SEO is Important (vs Video)
At the end of the day, people are still using google or other search engine sites to find what they are looking for. Google uses a series of complex algorithms in order to determine how your site ranks as compared to other sites using similar search terms.
Good quality SEO will combine the right keywords, great writing, properly titled/embedded media and many other components. If you’re telling yourself “well, I’m only good at one of those things”, the great thing is that you can outsource the rest to freelancers at a reasonable cost to ensure your are capitalizing on your strengths while outsourcing anything that wont be the best use of your time. For example, these two articles, 5 Pieces of Yogi Wisdom for New Yoga Students and Building You Yoga Wardrobe: The Essential Sportwear, where written by a professional writer but the SEO, images, uploading and releasing where all done by someone specializing in SEO, content creation, and web design. It is all about collaboration and capitalizing on the strengths of others.
Three easy things that will immediately improve your SEO results, if you are not doing them already, are linking other relevant sites, placing keywords into your photo text/alternative text (make sure to title the picture with Keyword before uploading), and having continuously fresh content that your audience or clients can look forward to on a regular schedule.
You have to look at SEO as a marathon and not a sprint.
Why Video is Important (vs SEO)
You can sum up the importance of using video in one word. “ENGAGEMENT”.
For proof or a more in depth read on why video is crucial to engage with your audience check out this article from Medium.com.
Video is such an exciting platform for small-business owners today because recent technology has made it much easier to create it at minimal costs as explained in this article 3 Ways to Make a Halfway-Decent YouTube Video without Spending a Dime. There are countless ways to use video to help your business grow, like what we did for this brand, Giovanna Barrios, who just opened their doors on Park Ave in Winter Park, FL this past. Her video, which will hopefully better engage her audience to the brand she represents, is already on the first page of google when doing a simple search of the name of her business with an already perfect store front.
Paying for sponsored, targeted ad campaigns is one of the more effective ways and is now becoming much easier through user-friendliness of social media platforms. Another way is to continue to push out relevant video content that will be useful to your audience and use keywords in the videos you upload to YouTube, Vimeo, other Video Platforms, or hosting on your own site. Nowadays, when people do a search they are often clicking Google’s “video search tab” or on the first link they see that contains a video thumbnail in search results because they know the information will be easier to absorb.
How to Combine Both SEO & Video
In truth, video and SEO are not direct competitors of one another. In fact, they can and should be used to compliment each other.
You want to combine both SEO and Video because the combination will yield more results. One of the ways that google will rank your SEO content is by how long users visit and stay on your site. If google sees that people are leaving your site in less than 10 – 15 seconds, it will assume that your site is not what the end-user was looking for, thereby lowering your ranking in their complex algorithm. Since videos are more engaging, it is smart to have a plan or campaign to continuously push out videos or other content.
Having video in combination with solid SEO will allow increase the likely-hood of your client to be more engaged with and stay on your site longer, which in turn improves your google rankings, and gets more people to your site.
The way that you can easily combine the two yourself is, when you have thought of your idea, blogpost, or message that you want to share with your audience, either write it up with a few focus key words you would like to use or record your thoughts that you want to share. Depending on which method you decided on, recap the same message in a blogpost or video and upload them all to the same place, site, or platform.
When you upload your videos, image, or other content use the same keywords in the titles and/or ALT textbefore uploading to the hosing site and clicking the publish button.
Also, never forget to be authentic.
Don’t forget to donate to a good cause. 🙂
Check out our work and if you have any ideas, want to collaborate on a project, or leave feedback, feel free to leave us a comment below, call, send us a message, or shoot us an email.
I am writing this post to encourage you all to tell your stories. The moment I spoke the words “we are all directors” aloud to realized to myself, “Wow. We are all directors, aren’t we?” I mean, without a doubt (or hopefully) we are all directing our own lives in order to manifest the things we want or need more of in life.
Anyway, this video of the RipTide E-Skateboard First thoughts is not a paid endorsement for RipTide. These are just my opinions on the product.
RipTide R1 E-Skateboard and Equipment Overall Review
The gear is very solid and durable. Not a lot of give on the flexibility of the board, however the maneuverability more than makes up for it, not to mention the torque and sound. The sound of the electric motors with belt-driven hubs is like music to the ears for any gear head or Casey Neistat fan.
The remote is a bit plasticky (is that an a word?) but it is durable and very easy to figure out. I literally showed a 3 or 4 year old Neigbor’s child how to master it in only a couple of minutes. But one thing to note if you are getting this for a child… This is not a child’s toy. It does go 20 mph and it gets there in seconds. The remote can get too far away from the board and potentially cause the board to continue to accelerate forward after loosing the remote’s connection to the board… in which case, hope for the best.
But if you practice common sense and practice safely on this board, it has 3-settings… with speeds low enough for a 4 – 6 year old to learn and master in a week or two (well the right 4 year old)… ALTHOUGH I AM NOT SUGGESTING YOU TRY IT.
peaking from personal experience, doing is more important than understanding (at least at first). Embarrassingly enough to admit, towards the end of my first year of Latin dancing I still struggled to tell the difference between Salsa, Merengue, and Bachata (three different Latin music styles). However, and you can ask any close friend who witnessed this, it did not stop me from having the confidence to step back on to the dance floor night after night to practice each move or pattern that I had recently added to my repertoire.
