Making Money With Video Production: Business Owners

Part 2: Grow your business with video

Making Money With Video Production: Freelancers

My last article (see above) was for people looking to break into video production for their full time work or as a side income stream. For this article we’re going to get into how a business owner can approach video production to grow their business, using mostly organic content.

If you’re already in the video business and work with companies often, this should help you see things from their side and help guide them.

But the main focus today is situations where the primary business is not video.

This is more for people with some kind of business that might be looking at hiring Influencers or User-Generated Content (UGC) people for marketing purposes alongside their internal content efforts.

Making video isn’t your primary activity. You make money doing some other thing, but know how powerful visual content can be. You might have an eCommerce store, a brick and mortar store, or have a local service business.

You also know how much of a pain in the ass visual content can be. It takes up a ton of your time, requires learning a bunch of unfamiliar stuff, or hiring people who do all that for you, but cost a big chunk of money because it’s a pain in the ass.

Monke Business

For the perspective on how video fits into the ecosystem of the rest of your business, go read

WiFi Money

by BowTiedOpossum. He has great content around both online business as well as setting up service and consulting businesses.

One theme you need to take from there and apply here is getting out of your own way enough to sit down and do the right kind of work. Not things you think you’re supposed to do or ego massaging activities.

A lot of this article is inspired by people I’ve worked with who get an idea in their head that they can’t let go of for some reason, which ultimately wastes time. They ask for advice, then they don’t take it because THEY are the boss with the big ideas.

They think they need cinema quality video from day 1.

They think they need to be on every platform from day 1.

They want to be internet famous and the content becomes too about them.

Or their quality standards are too low from day 1 and they don’t improve.

Or they think their cousin Charlie is the funniest person ever and Charlie needs to write all the scripts, etc.

Tell Charlie To Go To Hell. Maybe.

There is an extremely low probability you will make the perfect type of video from the start with your big ideas and totally hilarious cousin Charlie.

All your ideas are valid, but they are just ideas.

I promise you will be surprised at the stuff that resonates vs. the stuff that flops. Recently I had some videos that I thought flopped 3-4 years ago, but came back from the dead because something in the YouTube algorithm changed. Content is good, but just wasn’t getting traction at the time for whatever reason.

Try a lot of stuff and make your goal to improve something with every video. The Mr. Beast advice here is simple to say, hard to actually do, but holds up.

Maybe it turns out with a little instruction, Charlie actually is kind of funny. You don’t know until you try some variations and see what catches.

Improving production quality is the EASIEST part

Your first videos will be trash. Probably. This is fine. What’s not fine is not finding ways to improve things.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably smart enough to go learn how to shoot, how to edit, how a lens works, how to color grade, etc. It’s just time. This is not brain surgery.

To a point, better looking videos will probably help you. People like nice things and view it as a sign that you know what you’re doing.

What is actually hard? Figuring out why the throwaway selfie video you shot at a noisy cafe got 50,000 views in a day. It’s counter intuitive. Something about the messaging resonated.

Sometimes “improving” doesn’t mean you’re making things look better, just doing more of what works.

Video is an SEO activity

The more I learn about SEO, the more I see video is the same thing but with moving pictures.