New Years Resolution: Your Goals For 2012

The New Years resolution – it’s that time of year to make them, although it’s something I do on a regular basis, not just once a year. I love to then go back and see how I did. I have found that the fact of writing them down or publicly stating them like we did last year, spurs me on to take action.

Before we get to 2012, how did we do in 2011 after we sat in front of a camera and publicly stated to you and the world what we had planned?

I had to watch last year’s video to prepare for this post and it actually was a good message and is still relevant now.

Our goals in 2011 were:

• To market our business more regularly and more consistently

This was one goal we accomplished by sending out more email campaigns. We decided to increase our contact with one of our core lists by doing a weekly email up until the 5 weeks before Christmas when we beefed it up to twice a week, then once a day the week before Christmas. Upshot? Our November and December sales were above last years to the tune of 16%.

We also started sending out broadcasts when we post on this blog. I always appreciate email reminders about new posts from other blogs I subscribe to and thought, hmmm, you may like that as well. I think you did because our readership and traffic is up which feels good. When you spend time researching and writing or making a video, you’d like to have someone read it or view it!

The other great result is that we now have a 4/10 Alexa ranking and have caught the eye of some big names in our industry and have been invited to write for some powerful publications.

• To get more involved with social media

While Facebook and YouTube are important sites to have a business presence on, Twitter is a bit more mysterious and a site I hear pooh-poohed all the time. Well we are now in the process of writing our book, Shoot To Sell: Make Money Producing And Selling Special Interest Videos, [Focal Press, June 2012] as a direct result of Twitter. But we don’t just post in Twitter…we also converse as it is in conversations that you build relationships. We also have established relationships with some businesses that now want to advertise on our site. So tweeting can generate serious income too.

Google+ looks to be a new player in the social media arena and we’ve started to get active there as well.

• To sharpen our axe 

In 2011, we attended a number of  video conferences and weekend bootcamps and joined a mastermind group. It was through those activities that we not only learned and were exposed to some powerful techniques, we also connected with a great new joint venture partner, Dave Sheahan. The result is a new video series entitled Dave Sheahan Home Workout System. Rick and I just completed it last month and we’ve totally changed our bodies and our fitness levels for the better. Rick’s bad cholesterol dropped 30 points and his good cholesterol increased dramatically. Not only am I braving baring my midriff now, my blood pressure is the lowest it’s been in years! (If you’re interested in checking out the program and our videos, you can get access to a free ones here.) Good health is vital to your business success and we highly recommend this program as a way to quickly build strength and stamina and to lose weight. This program has our highest recommendation.

So we not only sharpened our business axe this past year, we gained muscles we never thought we had! Hey, if little ol’ weakling me can dead lift 60 pounds, I can do anything.

•  To learn to delegate and DO IT

Last year we put this as one of our goals because we found that we had reached a point in our business where we were not going to be  as profitable if we didn’t give up the duties that took up a lot of time without a great return in profit. Well, we didn’t do as well with this goal and did see more of a stagnation in our business during the middle of the year.

We started off the year well with handing over our duplicating business which did free up a lot of time. However, there were other areas we weren’t really able to pass on, one being the editing for the 41 videos we shot for the Dave Sheahan Home Workout System.

We haven’t been able to launch our SIV Academy yet, although we’ve been madly planning and working on it and will have our charter program live the middle of January 2012. That was in part because we joint ventured with Dave which has been a great decision. However, planning, shooting and editing all of the videos in that series took about five months. This is still an area where we struggle and will continue to work on.

• Take downtime from business.

It’s really important for us to carve out unconnected time especially because we have a publishing deadline LOOMING. It isn’t every day that you get a book deal from one of the largest publishers in the world and you want to do it right.

Again this is an area we need to work on but we’ve gotten better. Last year we even went on a two week trip WITHOUT a computer.

What has worked well for us is to dedicate the time to our exercise program and to step away from the computer after 6pm and for one day on the weekend.

New Years Resolution 2012

So taking last year into consideration and looking at our projects in 2012, we decided to do something different for this year.

This year, we’re choosing one word to be the guiding principle for the year. (Thanks to social media guru, Mari Smith for this idea.)

For Rick it is FOCUS. His goal is to work on the most important projects without being sidetracked and distracted by less important issues that pop up. He really wants to avoid the “shiny object syndrome.”

For me, it’s also POSSIBILITIES – as in EXPECTING them to happen in our lives and businesses. But you do need a filtering system which comes down to focus.

Possibilities is what made us joint venture with Dave to make an incredible product that is changing lives. It’s changed ours.

Possibilities is how we came to be having a book out the middle of 2012. I was able to check one more thing off that goal list I wrote back in 1990.

So there you have it: a cold, hard look at how we did in achieving our 2011 resolutions and what we want to accomplish in 2012. By stating them publicly like this it holds our feet to the fire and increases our chances of achieving them. We want to report back to you at the end of 2012 that we made great progress.

How about you? How did you do in 2011? What are your goals in 2012? Be optimistic and dream big. Shoot for the stars – you just might surprise yourself.

Share below and let us know how we can help you in 2012.

Video Archiving: How Do YOU Archive Your Digital Productions?

Video archiving is crucial as the amount of digital video increases and accessing your files becomes harder. The need for long-term storage solutions is also vital to maintaining your video assets.

Just this year I ditched all but one of my tape based video cameras, just before I shot and am now editing a project that consists of nearly 3 TB of files. This footage is invaluable and I don’t have any videotapes to go back to should my editing drive fail. Having had more than my share of hard drive failures, I’m paranoid of that happening to this project. Right now I’m backing up to a number of large hard drives, but what about long term storage?

I’ve known about tape backup systems for years but they always sounded complicated and, well, mysterious. At DV Expo in Pasadena this past September, I met with Mark, Bruce and Whitney, the folks representing LTO Ultrium 5, a mid-level linear tape file system, and I immediately saw that this is a smart solution for many video production companies, as well as other organizations with large amounts of digital data that need to be either archived or shared.

So, what would you do with one? Obviously,what I’m thinking of is a medium for long-term storage of my vast collection of video files. It doesn’t care if you are on a PC, MAC, or Linux operating system, it takes everything in.

Sharing large files is another use. For example, that 3 TB project I’m working on – I could have outsourced it to an editor elsewhere, say India for example. How could I safely send that much data?

With the LTO Ultrium 5 of course.

The tapes are robust and far less prone to damage than a hard drive, as well as much smaller and lighter. The editor could take my data, edit it, and send the finished program and all related files back to me on tape. Can you imagine sending a hard drive loaded with your precious content, around the world? What are the chances of it being damaged along the way? Pretty good, I’d say.

The LTO Ultrium 5 can store up to 3 TB (assuming 2:1 compression) to help reduce storage costs.  The tapes can be formatted into two partitions, which can be independently accessed for faster access. One partition can be the description (the index, if you will) and the other holds the data. Think of the convenience of that for long term storage and easy retrieval.

The biggest expense is in the drive, which ranges in price from under $3,000 to around $5,000, but can also be affordably leased. Once you have the drive, the tapes are relatively inexpensive, so you can afford to create multiple copies and store them in remote locations in the event of a natural disaster at your primary location.

The LTO Program was formed in 1997 and three companies — HP, IBM and Quantum — jointly oversee the development and roadmap of Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology. The three gentlemen I met with at DV Expo were from these companies. They told me that the LTO technology has a 98% penetration in the mid-range market, so this isn’t technology that is here today and gone tomorrow.

Is this for everyone?  No, but for many people it is worth a long, hard look.

What do you think? What solutions have you come up with for video archiving? Please leave your comments below.

Reliable Hosting: 5 Considerations When Shopping For A Web Hosting Provider

Choosing a reliable hosting service is a critical decision if you are setting up an eCommerce site to sell your videos (and we recommend that you do sell them this way).

As in most things in life, you get what you pay for. You can find hosting accounts that range from free to $4.99 per month on the low end and up to $20 or more on the high end, so the cost is so small it’s not worth cutting corners in this area.

When you first start your business you may be tempted to use one of the so-called free web site hosting companies available. However, keep in mind that free will probably have strings attached. They may place branding on your site or limit your bandwidth, and they’ll certainly try to upsell you.

Paid hosting services are not all the same either. You should carefully evaluate any web hosting service before signing on. Here are some things to consider when comparing and shopping for web hosting providers:

Bandwidth

The amount of bandwidth you have in your account is important for several reasons.

One of my best friends, Joe Clokey, whose dad created Gumby, has a website that is about to be hit – this is reliable information and I’ll tell you the story after it breaks – with as many as a million hits in one day.

Bandwidth is like a regulator on the hose of digital information flowing from his site. If it is too small, he’ll lose many of those valuable hits, which he intends to capture through an opt-in box. They’ll simply not be able to reach his site and it is unlikely that they’ll come back later. He has chosen a more expensive site with tons of bandwidth and the promised ability to handle that kind of traffic.

Even if your cheapo account says you have unlimited bandwidth, they probably would not be able to handle millions of hits on one day, and maybe not even thousands.  They often promise unlimited bandwidth knowing full well that your traffic will never be that great, but in reality they are not prepared for traffic like my friend is expecting.

My friend’s big event will last only one day, so you can imagine how critical it is that he has a very robust hosting service to meet that sudden spike in traffic. It is really a once in a lifetime opportunity and he’s planning accordingly.

Secondly, if you are selling videos, you’ll want enough bandwidth and server capacity to show video samples on your site. You don’t want to rely on free video hosting services for these types of videos. (They are a must for driving traffic to your site though.)

Online Storage

This is an area where you’ll see wild promises of 20 gigabytes of storage or even unlimited storage. The hosting companies use this as bait, but in reality the majority of businesses will not create websites that even require one gigabyte of space, that is unless they don’t know how to do it correctly. The hosting companies know this, so in a way it is an empty promise. Don’t be suckered in by these kinds of promotions.

Another key concept is the kind of storage you get. You can have shared storage or a dedicated server. Shared storage is exactly that: you and dozens or even hundreds of other customers share one server. If you have one real bandwidth hog on your server it can affect your response time, and if the server gets really close to being full it can cause problems.

A dedicated server is a single server (and that is a specialized kind of standalone computer) that is all yours. These are considerably more expensive than shared servers. I would not start out with a dedicated server, but if you have a seriously big business then this is a good choice.

Reliability

Reliable hosting is crucial for an online store. If you site goes down, your shop is closed and potential customers may never return. Before you sign up with a web hosting company, do some research online and find out if they have a lot of complaints. If so, that’s a red flag and I’d keep looking.

Customer service is also key.

When I first got started, I used a really inexpensive site and had a horrible time communicating with them. I don’t think the tech support team really understood English, either that or they were being intentionally vague so as to avoid addressing my concerns. That was frustrating and drove me away.

Unwanted Ads

Whatever you do, make sure your web site hosting service doesn’t place unwanted ads on your site. Many free services do this. Your visitors will be bombarded with pop-ups and other annoying advertisements that do not relate to your business, that you get no revenue from and that you can’t remove. Think about it…you want them to stay on your site. Not only is there a chance they will get incredibly irritated by these, if they click through, they’ve left your site! And they may not come back!

Other Limitations To Consider

Another reason not to use a free service is that some of these services place limitations on what you can and can’t do. If you want to build web sites that include pictures, icons, videos and large amounts of text, you may be barred from doing that. Or you can’t have more than a five page web site. You’ll probably be amazed at how quickly your site expands.

So what do I do?

At this point you’re probably wondering who I use, right?

I’ve been using HostGator for about six years and have had great service from them. In fact, I resell hosting with them and have many satisfied customers. I’ve also signed up to be an affiliate because I highly recommend them.

The few times I’ve needed to contact tech support they have been very prompt, professional and accurate in solving my problem. Their live chat is incredible and they have a very active forum.

There are other good companies and if you do your research you’ll find a handful of names that repeatedly come to the top of the list. With the information I just provided, you’ll be able to find a reliable hosting company that is worth your investment.

Recommended Resources

HostGator – This is the one use and trust.

BlueHost – Another affordable and reliable hosting service we’ve heard good things about. I’m an affiliate based on the recommendations of other highly successful internet marketers.

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