Pump up the sales volume on your e-book with a product video Part III: Creating content for your product video

Generating ideas for your product video is one thing, creating content is quite another. To begin with, your content must align with your vision of what you want your product video to say about your e-book. In other words, what do you want your viewers to take away from watching your product video?

Product videos are as much about giving as they are about selling. In this case ‘the giving’ is all about giving someone a feel good and must have a factor when it comes to your product. Remember – emotion and connection is what you want your product video to achieve.  

Promoting a food product and forging a connection with potential buyers is relatively easy to achieve through video. After all, we all think about our stomach at some point during the day, so making an emotional connection with visual images of food is not that difficult. However, we are not talking about food; we are talking about your e-book. So, figuratively speaking, how do you make your e-book an edible product through visual imagery? The answer to that question is:  much in the same way that you would a food product – through a clean and attractive presentation.  In short, your video content should be clean and beautiful, enough to entice the buyer to take an emotional bite out of your product.

Staying with the food analogy for the moment, let’s look at a product video for an e-book on dieting for hypo-thyroid suffers. Hypothyroidism is a common illness affecting millions of people around the world. Basically, the affected person’s body doesn’t produce enough thyroxin and, as a consequence, he or she becomes lethargic and suffers from a range of physical and emotional problems including, but not limited to, overweight and depression.

To counter the effects of an underactive thyroid gland, the patient is typically given thyroxin tablets to compensate for the body’s inability to produce enough natural thyroxin. In a majority of cases, thyroxin tablets will help the patient overcome the side effects of his or her underactive thyroid, but only if the individual concerned follows a dietary and exercise regime that compliments and assists their thyroxin uptake, and herein lays the problem. Certain foods and drinks inhibit thyroxin uptake. For example, drinking coffee can reduce thyroxin uptake by as much as 30%, which is quite a lot if you are dependent on thyroxin tablets to stabilize your metabolism.

An e-book on diets for hypothyroid suffers will focus on the various types of food and drink that a hypothyroid can or cannot consume.  The topic of the e-book, therefore, lends itself to all kinds of visual imagery for a product video – the health benefits, or lack thereof, of certain types of food or drink. The video content can also include images of active and sporting people to illustrate the success of following the dietary advice in the e-book. Although the list of possible material for the product video is endless, the message and emotional connection between the product and buyer is unequivocal – this product can help you, the hypothyroid, to lead a healthy lifestyle. 

Pump up your e-book sales volume with a product video – Part II

Creating Ideas for your e-book product video

In Part I of Pump up your e-book sales, we discussed the option of creating a product video for an e-book. We also identified one of the main challenges of producing an e-book product video – that of budgetary constraint.

Few, if any, e-book authors have the financial resources to create a product video with high-end production values. Besides, would an e-book with a price tag of only $2.95 be worth the investment? In the short term, the answer would most certainly be no. However, over the lifespan of more than one e-book product, the answer would have to be a resounding yes.

Your initial e-book product video is not so much about drawing attention to a single e-book, but more about bringing audience attention to your brand of writing across a range of e-book subjects. The product video is about getting your name out there, and in this respect investing in a product, a video is well worth the effort.

Getting your name out there into the marketplace is the name of the game, and herein you will find the key to generating ideas for your product video.

The biggest seller of products is not glam or glitz. It is the buyer’s perception of a product’s relative value relative to his or her needs that will make the sale every time. You can wrap up a product in as much tinsel as you want, but, unless it has an emotional connection with your potential buyer, you are not going to make the sale. Emotion and connection (empathy) are what you need to demonstrate in your product video, and the only person who can do that is you. After all, you are the one who gave birth to your e-book, and you did so for a reason.

You might have written your e-book to earn extra cash. Alternatively, your e-book might have been motivated by a hobby or a passion. Whatever the reason for writing and publishing your e-book, it is the initial motivation that drove you to write in the first place that should be the inspiration behind your product video.

About fourteen months ago I wrote an e-book on ‘How to Succeed as a Newbie E-book Author.’ I had no high expectations for my e-book other than to say that I had actually become a published e-book author. I anticipated around three thousand readers for my modest tome if I was lucky. To my surprise, my e-book generated over 17,000 views, and that was with zero promotional effort.

At the time of publication, I had no intention of promoting my e-book beyond posting it on my blog. I was not looking to produce a best seller. Instead, my goal was to see if I could write and publish something that people were prepared to read. As it turned out, I got more readers than I originally anticipated.

Today, if I were looking to promote my first e-book, I would certainly consider putting together a product video based on my passion for writing and on my goal of acquiring three thousand like-minded readers/followers. The product video would not have been so much about the content of my e-book but about my passion for writing, the ability to articulate ideas using the written word. Such a thematic focus for a product video lends itself to an emotional connection between the viewer and the product that I want to sell.

Next article: Choosing content for your product video

Pump up your e-book sales volume with a product video

Pump up your e-book sales volume with a product video

Pump up your e-book sales volume with a product video on YouTube, and why not? Most companies selling tangible goods use video to promote their products. For example, in 2009 Samsung launched a product video featuring sheep wrapped up in the company’s latest LED technology.

To date, the Samsung sheep video on YouTube has received 14.5 million views and still counting. In short, Samsung’s product video has reached out and continues to reach out to its customer base with a tantalizingly effective marketing message which has translated into an overwhelming demand for its LED technology and other electronic products. So if Samsung can do it, why not the e-book author?

Creating a product video is not that difficult. There are plenty of software packages available that will allow you to produce a good quality video for distribution over the net. However, getting people to watch your product video is another matter.

One advantage that mainstream companies have over first-time e-book authors is worldwide brand awareness. Unless you are a very famous author, it is unlikely that you will have a global following. If you did, you wouldn’t need a product video.

So how do you overcome the problem of getting your product video noticed? The answer to that question is to create a video that is unique, funny or has novelty value, and which can carry your product message to the marketplace. Remember, the idea is to get as many people to watch your product video as possible. You want your product video to go viral!

Often as not, the most successful product videos are those which resonate with audiences. In other words, identify the audience’s problem and then offer a solution, but do it in such a way that is not contrived or comes across as chalk and talk. Don’t tell! Instead, your product video should entertain and inform.

One of the funniest and perhaps most entertaining series of product videos I have watched in recent years is the Budweiser ads, in particular, those ads where animal and human interaction takes place. Animals are cute and cuddly, but when they are employed to usurp the human intellect, the results can be extremely funny.

Unlike Budweiser, you probably don’t have millions to spend on video production and well trained animals, so capturing a funny moment between animals and humans is not an option for your product video. Ultimately, budgetary constraints will impact on what type of product video you create, but this does not mean you should limit your imagination.

In my next article, I will be looking at how to generate ideas for an e-book product video.