5 Ways to Avoid Overwhelm in Your Video Business in 2023.

Episode Transcription

 It’s very normal to start January and feel like you wanna just chuck in your video business altogether. You’ve just had a really good break over Christmas and your calendar may not be looking quite as full as you’d like in January.

And that’s perfectly normal because we’re humans and as creatives, I think we have a particularly sensitive. Disposition When it comes to how we feel about things we’re doing in the creative world, we are always looking for ways to be stimulated, to come up with fresh ideas.

But in business, we need to be more measured. We need to be more deliberate. So if you are worried about your business or you’re thinking about quitting and doing something else, I want you to stop today and just pause and think about this for a second. Do you really want to go and work for someone? , do you really wanna be told when to show up for work, when to leave work when you can go for your lunch?

The answer’s probably gonna be, no, you don’t really want to go back to that.

The fact is you have all the abilities and skills to go and get work.

The chances are though you may not have been implementing those skills regularly or as regularly as perhaps the more creative pursuits. One of the areas where this can start to really play up in your subconscious is social media and comparing yourself to others on social media.

It’s actually super unhealthy and as hard as it is, I strongly recommend you limit your time on social media because people are often posting.  kind of, you know, front end, glossy, slightly curated, if not heavily curated vision of their life. The truth is, in January for the majority of filmmakers, it’s a quiet time of year.

But what this gives you is a huge opportunity to start thinking about how you can do this year differently. So how can you do 2023 differently in your video production? . Well, the chances are you’re very focused on the gear, the technique, the process, but probably not quite as focused on lead generation.

Being clear on who you want to target as a niche, being clear on your marketing message and ensuring that marketing message actually talks to your target market and not just a kind of generic set of, um, marketing.  that you hope will talk to a wide audience. One of the greatest challenges that face a video production business is having a single voice and talking to one particular customer at a time.

There’s a saying in marketing that if you try and talk to everyone, , you end up talking to no one. And this is a common problem I see in videographers is the can-do videos across a broad range of topics and genres. But that doesn’t mean you should, because what we’ve found is that. When you specialize, when you niche down, when you become known for a particular type of content, you get passed around that in person’s network a lot more easily, and it’s a much more easy way to generate inquiries.

So how can you break this habit? So here’s how I do it. First of all, I’m a member of a couple of different masterminds. Now, a mastermind is a group of business owners who get together virtually or physically at certain periods, either weekly or monthly or quarterly to I guess, sit around a virtual boardroom table and discuss their business challenges, discuss their anxieties around mindset.

What’s working, what’s not working. . And really one of the greatest benefits of that is that when you sit around the table with others in the same field, you get to understand how they’re doing things. They might be a few steps ahead of you. You might be a few steps ahead of someone else. You can share your knowledge with someone who’s a bit farther behind you.

You can. Ask for help from people who are farther ahead on the journey, and it’s a very powerful environment to help you to think better and more healthily about your business growth. They say that your net worth is the. Sum of the parts of your network. So what do you mean by that? Well, you are the sum of the five people who are closest to you.

Now, in terms of like practicalities, what does that mean? Well, it means if you were to take the salaries or income of the five people closest to you in your network and divided them by five, there’s a very good chance your income will be in that percentage. So if you are taking advice from your partner, from your friends, from people you go and play football with, they may not be actually acting in your best interests.

And so a mastermind group has people who are objective in giving you feedback on your business. And so that’s the thing that I find to be the most important thing in my. The second thing I do is I create a vision board for the year ahead. That vision board is purely images of things that I would like to see happen in my life.

I’ve run these vision boards for a number of years, and they always come true and fact they come true faster and faster and faster. So having a clear vision for the year ahead is a really practical and helpful way to start your. . The third thing I do is I convert that vision into a big picture plan. Now, the big picture plan is a way of laying out, you know, where is my traffic gonna come from in my business?

What are my landing pages and webpages gonna look like? What is my marketing look like? What are my products and services, and what is my capacity for delivering those products and services? And therefore, what is. Retail value of them and how many can I realistically service, therefore, can I reach my financial goals for the year?

And I found that these tools, the vision board really taps into my creativity. The big picture plan helps me kind of use that other side of my brain to really tap into logic and planning. And I use a couple of. Uh, a new app that I’m using is called Todoist, and Todoist helps me just kind of understand where things are going and in what order.

So one of the things I’m doing this year is really making a bigger commitment to this YouTube channel. You can see here we’ve improved the studio. Look, we did 25 YouTube videos last year. Tested a lot of different things and learned a lot of. And so this year, one of my big focuses is gonna be to grow this YouTube channel.

I wanna get it to a hundred thousand subscribers by the end of the year. And as I’m building a, a strategy for that into Doist as we speak. So this is Todoist, and what you can see here is I’ve got goals, which are to hit a hundred K followers by the end of 2023. And my current stats, which is eight and a half thousand subs, I’ve got, what’s what I’m working on right now?

Uh, work in progress, things that have to happen regularly, things that are done, things that are ready. Then I’ve got a content column here where things like hiring a video editor and create a regular schedule for production. Find the top YouTubers and follow. Create a channel trailer, create playlists of relevant keyword topics.

As you can see, this just the single goal of growing My YouTube channel for the next year has 2, 4 60, like 20 different tasks already, and I’m not finished. So if I were to try and figure that out, In one go, it would become massively overwhelming. And so by using to Doist here, I’m able to break those tasks down, and then I’m only ever working on one thing at a time.

So if I decided today eight ones record YouTube video, I’m actually doing that now. So I’m actually recording this YouTube video now, so I’m only thinking about one thing at a time. Your brain is like ram, there’s only so many things that can handle it one time. So if you give it too much to do, you’ll just get over.

And then the fourth thing that I do that’s really important is I diarize times in my calendar to get certain tasks done. I find if I don’t put things in a weekly calendar, they just don’t happen. Now, when I talk about diarizing, I work to what I call a default diary where I do certain things on certain days at certain times, and what I’ve found is that’s been.

Integral in me being able to push through all of the tasks that need to be done. I think it was Tony Robbins that said, we all overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in five years. And so I found that this process of taking off weekly goals, Inside of my calendar really helps me to achieve a lot more in less time.

And then the fifth thing I’m doing is I’m really committing to my health. This year. I have been a member of a gym for a few months and I’m now committing to going to the gym on a Monday, a Thursday and a Friday to do weight training. And a Tuesday night and a Saturday morning, I’m gonna do Pilates Now, I started doing Pilates last week and I thought, It was for girls and how wrong I was.

It is the most challenging and demanding thing I’ve ever done. So I’m doing something new as well. So what I want you to do is think about these tips and ask yourself, what are you doing that is an old habit, and what can you do to build a new habit? So let me know in the comment. What you think of these strategies and what are your strategies for getting this year kicked off?

And if you wanna learn about how to create a vision board, go and check this video out now cause it’ll really help you.