How To Create Video To Promote Your Practice

 How To Create Video To Promote Your Practice

A video blog is a great way for you to show your client-to-be what you’re like, as well as de-mystifying homeopathy and showing how your practice can help them. We are constantly bombarded by information on the web and this is where video blogging comes in handy; just by making a few short videos you can catch more clients’ eyes and inform them. Cisco, the IT mega-corporate predicts that by 2018, an amazing 84% of web traffic will be video content!

 

 

On a personal level video often brings up our insecurities; issues around appearance and visibility are very likely to show up when we think about being seen by so may people. But therapists that incorporate video into their overall marketing strategy can see higher engagement rates on social media and more eyes on their websites, so it is well worth holding the tension and getting on with making a few videos!

 

 

Tips for Overcoming the Fear

 

• Heal yourself! Talk to your homeopath about appropriate remedies.

 

• Hero pose – A few minutes standing like Wonder Woman will increase your testosterone and reduce cortisol. Check out Amy Cuddy’s Ted Talk  for more information on how posture changes body chemistry.

 

• Blow a raspberry – to loosen your jaw

 

• Practice – have a few goes with no expectation of sharing them, it’ll help you get the lighting and eye contact right

 

• Engage – imagine you are talking to a real person

 

• Keep it short – 30 seconds is enough!

 

• Reminders – bullet point what you want to say

 

• Buzzing – only film when you are at your most relational and full of beans

 

• Feel the fear – and do it anyway; Susan Jeffers was right!

 

How to use video

 

When you think ‘video blog’ you’re probably imagining people on YouTube that post frequently, talk about video games, or post makeup tutorials. A video blog that supports your practice is a different beast, which can be used in a number of ways to support your practice on your blog or main pages of your site, for example –

 

1. As a short welcome video – a sort of verbal menu to tell visitors to your website where to get the info they need.

 

2.  About me – a video for your about page where you share your passion and explain the amazing benefits of homeopathy.

 

3. Walk through a session with clients’ eyes – take them through the consult forms, show them the chair where you’ll chat, what your room looks like, explain what happens and how much it all costs, based on the sort of questions your clients usually ask.

 

4. A ‘how to’ video – giving clients remedies for specific issues. An A to Z series could get you through a whole year!

 

5. A day in the life – sharing how your working day is structured and what issues your clients brought and how you solved them.

 

6. Video testimonials from clients.

 

7. Get a colleague to interview you on a specific passion, she can also return the favor!

 

8. Reporting ‘live’ from a conference or workshop – capturing the vibe and showing how you keep your skills up to date.

 

9. Anniversaries – 5, 10, 20 years in business or 1,000th patient!

 

10. Skype interviews: take a colleague, a client, someone in a comparable business and explore issues and solutions beyond your niche.

 

11. Tell your story about why you do the work you do, your passion will shine through.

 

12. Build your email list – a short video describing your freebie and how it will help your clients.

 

13. Case studies – tell the story of how your current ideal client came with her issues, and how they benefited from your sessions. (With permission and names changed of course).

 

14. A short video explaining why your viewer should go check out your informative written blog post.

 

15. Bare in mind that videos on the main pages of your site, like the about and home pages, will need to be more professional looking to represent you best. When you are starting out, experiment with brief ‘top tips’-type videos which can be informal and perfectly imperfect.

 

 

(Inexpensive) Equipment

 

There are a few bits of the gear that are useful to create a successful video.

 

Camera

 

Pretty much everyone walks around with a camera in their smart phone. Most models made in the last few years will have high enough resolution to work well-enough on your website. If you’re not sure, take a bit of film and upload it to YouTube as ‘unlisted’ and check the quality. You can find out how to do that here.

 

Background

 

Keep it plain and simple, sitting or standing 1m away from a plain wall works well.

 

Lighting

 

Allow natural light to fall on your face wherever possible, or if not, have a standard lamp or table light or two directed at your face. Some paper taped over it will soften the glare.

 

Edit Your Video

 

In these days of live streaming on Periscope and Facebook Live, there is no requirement that you have the polish of a breakfast telly program. This means that your editing should be kept to a minimum; if you can do one take and ‘trim’ it at either end, that is easiest, but it’s straight forward to edit together clips with these phone apps.

 

iMovie for iPhone is a paid app

Splice for iPhone if free

Power Director for Android is free

Movie Edit Touch for Windows is free

 

You can also edit in YouTube itself; ever since YouTube was purchased by Google, its onboard editing tools have become more user friendly. Sign in with your Google credentials and play around with the editing tools that are available to you there.

 

 

Top Tips for YouTube

 

When creating your video, keep the following in mind:

 

• If it’s a blog post, give it the same title as that of your blog post title.

 

• All SEO Rules of writing an attractive title applies to video blogs as well (learn more about seo here)

 

• Keep your video title length short – at most 60-70 characters

 

• Add at least a 100 word description for each of your videos

 

• Leave a link to your website post under the video description

 

• Add no more than 10 short phrased and related tags

 

The Purpose of your video should be to grab the attention of your visitors, eventually bringing them to your website.

 

Always leave one question unanswered in your videos so that the viewer may be forced to search for it at your blog.

 

I’ve created a video for you that will take you step-by-step through the process of creating a video, with all the equipment, how to upload it and embed it on your website. You can access it here . There’s also a checklist you can download so you never miss a step!

 

 

 

 

About the author:

Kate Codrington. If you want more help with promoting your practice with blogging, you can join us at Blogging for Therapists Online where I offer a step-by-step process which will show you how to create a website your clients will love. No time to do it? Then download The Fast Blog Cheat sheet; it’s a crib sheet to get the word out, about your amazing work! Pronto!

Kate’s online courses, which teach therapists how to love promoting themselves, are enrolling until 16^th October 2016, the next launch will be spring 2017. Kate has been in practice offering massage for women’s health for more than 20 years and also runs ‘Love your Belly’ workshops sharing natural self-care for women’s health.