For Coaches: Create Your Online Video

You finally like the way your website looks, and you keep your blog updated. You’ve got a Facebook fan page and yes, you even tweet. But web video?

For some coaches, that’s the final frontier.

“I just finished adding video to my website a few months ago and it was torture,” said Terry Hoffmann, who owns her own coaching firm in Florida. “For me the two most challenging aspects (in retrospect) were my own presentation style, i.e. staying calm, appearing friendly and competent–and having a clear focus on what content I wanted to make sure was brought out.”

The very things that make video so powerful–it’s immediacy and intimacy–can be the most difficult and intimidating hurdles when a coach sits down in front of a camera and prepares to tell their own story.

So why bother?

According to marketing gurus and social media titans, video can work wonders in building a business. According to research by Nielsen, 137 million people watched online video in December 2009, a ten percent increase from the same month in 2008. And few expect the clicks to go anywhere but up. People have come to expect video online, and they enjoy watching it, whether it’s a cat on a treadmill or a coach using a short video as an introduction to their website and the services they offer.

From candidates for public office to startup entrepreneurs, producing a good video can be a career maker–at ultra low (or no) cost. And as internet marketers have found, having video on a website can lead to better rankings in Google searches, since Google weighs video heavily as something consumers are looking for.

But of course, the logic of adding video is not the issue for most coaches. They get that.

It’s making video–and starring in videos–that’s the problem.

As Terry Hoffmann found, it’s not the technical side of things that tends to be the big barrier. The days of prohibitively expensive cameras and lighting equipment being the price of entry into videomaking are long gone. Apple’s just-released iPhone 4 doesn’t just come with the ability to shoot high definition video, but the software to edit it as well–right in the phone.

The real challenge, then, is getting comfortable in front of the camera and using it to tell your story–your way.

As many of the most successful users of web video can attest, people are hungry for information and content, and will be extremely forgiving of the quality of camera work, audio and set design.

Just take a look at massively successful internet entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck, who turned a series of decidedly low tech basement wine videos into a multi-million dollar wine shipping business and a six book publishing deal.

For coaches, video opens up endless possibilities, from online video coaching to webinars, video blogs and perhaps going viral, just like those cats on the treadmill.

Coach Reporter Mark Joyella, who’s made every mistake imaginable in front of a television camera, has also learned a lot about coaching awkward, nervous clients and students into camera savvy “naturals.”

In the video below, Mark offers some of the starting point advice he gives his students about taking the mystery–and the fear–out of turning on the camera and starting to speak.

Have you experimented with web video? What worked for you and what didn’t?  What would you like to do better?

CoachReporter: Video Coaching for Coaches from Mark Joyella on Vimeo.