I believe the written word is an essential, proven and timeless way to capture and share thoughts. But I’ve also learned, communicating via video also has an immeasurable impact with it being so visually engaging and digestible.

What is it they say? A picture is worth a thousand words… well, even more so for video! Just think about how much video content you consume each day vs the time you spend reading.

**Video makes a difference… But can you make a video? **

Goal / Reason

This post is to let you know that I’m going to start creating a simple, short intro / summary video for these blog posts each day.

My goal in doing that is to show you how easy it is to make a reasonable quality video, quickly and easily, using just your phone/computer and free or inexpensive software.

I hope my journey doing this helps you learn to amplify the messages you have to share, either for your business or personal endeavors, by using video.

Making Video Easy

I want to help you avoid the complexity, frustration and hassle of going overboard and feeling the pressure to overproduce things (which just slows you down and often stops you altogether from creating a video).

Video Drives Results

The lessons learned from the rise of social network platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok speak for themselves. All of them owe some degree of their success to short-form video and how much it drives user engagement.

Businesses know this… They get a 10x lift if they use video in their content creation strategies.

Video sells – it conveys emotion and drives action. But so often companies feel the unneeded pressure to ‘over-produce’ things and this often frustrates their content creation efforts.

We all consume video content daily

On the personal level not a day goes by where most of us watch at least one video on Youtube or one of our social networks.

One of the top careers that young kids seek today is to be a famous YouTuber with millions of subscribers. Hint – opportunities like that still come disguised as hard work.

Let’s learn to make short-form videos easily

So for all of these reasons, being able to quickly and easily create short-form video is a skill to be understood and mastered.

Whether for a business need or personal endeavor – being able to create a short form videos is an incredibly helpful skill to get your message heard in a noisy world.

We all have the tools

And it’s never been easier. The tools are ever present – any computer or phone can record video today. The software to edit / enhance your video is free or costs little or nothing. Distribution to everyone on planet Earth is also free via any social network with just a click.

You just have to THINK about what to say

All that is left for you to do really is think about what you want to say. Have something to say that people might want to hear. Think about it, write it out, and make your video.

The skills can be mastered by kids

Everything else you need is ready to go. You might need some tiny amount of skill – we’ll explore that as we journey together. But be assured, there is nothing that anyone – of any age – cannot master in short order.

My use case – an intro or summary of a post

So for these three reasons, I’ve decided, along with each day’s blog post – to share a very short ‘introduction’ or ‘summary’ video of that post.

Practice will make perfect (or good enough)

First and foremost, to put into real-world practice, the rubber-meets-the-road skill of making a short video and publishing it live for the world to see. I want to put myself on the hook to do it for real so you can see how it works firsthand.

Shipping ‘real work’ daily develops skills quickly

It’s not enough to ‘know’ how to do something… one must do it… these first videos will be simple, rough, authentic…

Over time they will improve

I can only imagine how they will evolve in 30, 60, 90 days … I’m sure when we look back and have iterated the process a dozen times, I hope they will start to be more polished, take less time to create, and be more thoughtful and effective, etc. I want to share with you these tips and tricks and learning along the way.

Doing it clarifies the process

Second I think it will illustrate clearly the process of thinking about how to craft and organize both written and video communication. I think writing and video creation go hand in hand together and complement each other.

Writing and creating a video go hand in hand

Writing with the intent that one’s message will be communicated via video and being able to record a video, having already being familiar with what one is speaking about. Both help the other be better.

Distribution is free, always changing – we will figure it out together

Third, becoming comfortable with the mechanics of distributing video on both YouTube, Facebook, your website and any other social networks. We’ll discover tips and tricks to get the most mileage out of each one of these and will explore them along the way.

What’s best? Sharing on Youtube? on Facebook? Both? I’m not sure – it’s always changing, but we’ll do it, test it and see what’s best.

First videos will be simple videos…

I’m going to start a very simple with just recording videos from my iPhone. Then will share some examples of how to do a simple screen cast, and then also demonstrate some of the more studio related skills with green screens, video editing, etc. again my driving principle is to keep things very simple and easy.

Don’t overthink it… Just do it…

So many people really overthink things and spend way too much time “getting ready versus just doing it” I want to demonstrate that this is very achievable for anyone at any level. And very viable for your business or for your personal endeavors.

Keep it Simple Silly

So KISS keep it simple stupid as a strategy. I want to use off-the-shelf tools that we all have. I want to do so where there’s minimal learning required on your part, so you feel comfortable that creating a short video for your business or personal endeavor is simple.

I’m going to avoid anything that takes a lot of time such as editing in post production to any large degree so that you can learn along with me, develop your own capacity to do this on your own and then take it to any level that you desire.

Time to make the video

So with this all written out now to introduce the idea of doing this each day – it’s time for me to go out and make a quick video intro/summary and post it up along with this article.

Here’s to Day002 of 2021!