- How do you go from never getting paid to make a video,
to getting paid to make a video,
to actually working with companies you love
and making a great profit?
Today I wanna share with you some really actionable advice
and stuff that I think will help you out
wherever you are in your own journey.
(mellow music)
Hey friend, Levi here.
And I don't know about you
but whenever a year comes to an end
I start to feel this stress and pressure
that maybe I didn't do as well with my business in 2019
as I was supposed to,
and so I start to look to 2020 or the following year
and go, what can I improve on?
What can I do better?
And oftentimes what I end up doing
just out of stress reactions is busy work,
things that aren't actually gonna take me
where I want to go.
And the problem with this is
it feels like you're doing real work
but you're actually not making meaningful progress
towards where you're trying to go.
I'm gonna share three rules with you today,
and these are three rules that I think are applicable
to the person who's never gotten paid to make video
to the person who already does paid video work
but wants to level up what they're doing
and work with different clients.
These are all rules that I've kind of pulled and synthesized
out of a full workshop I did,
but I think they're gonna be really helpful
in a short and condensed format,
so let's just jump into it.
Rule number one: make the kind of work
that you actually wanna get hired for.
This is far too simple on the surface,
but it's actually really impactful for what you do.
Think of it on the simple of terms.
But if you were going to build a deck onto your house,
would you hire the guy who's never built a deck before,
or the guy who's built 20?
Now this is far too simple on the surface,
but it's really meaningful for what we do as creatives
because we get frustrated,
why aren't we getting hired for these ideal projects
that we envision in our head?
But we don't have any examples
that we could actually do the work
that we're trying to get hired for.
In the past, it might have been as simple
as just having a finished video at all.
It's like, I can make a video,
so therefore I can make another one in any category.
But these days, a lot of people make video,
and that's not a bad thing,
but it means you need to be a little bit more strategic
about what you're putting out there
to try signal to the businesses
or other people that might hire you
when they encounter your work that you can do this again.
So how do you start from zero and go all the way
to finished products that you're really proud of
if you don't have anybody reaching out to you?
Well, that's where a lot of people end up making the mistake
where someone might reach out to them and go,
"Hey, can you do this project for me?
"We don't have a lot of budget,
"would you do it for a really low cost or for free?"
And oftentimes we might question, well,
I'm not doing any work,
so is this more meaningful than doing nothing?
But I wanna flip that on its head,
and how much more powerful would it be
if you actually took charge about going out
and approaching to do work?
So instead having people come to you and say,
"Hey, do this thing for me at a low cost or free,"
what if you actually sat back and said,
what is my ideal project or client look like?
Think about that and use that head space
to go approach a business that you'd love to work with
and just be honest.
Say, hey, I've never made a video in this category.
I'd love to make an example video for you for my portfolio.
Would you be willing to enter into my process
to make you a fantastic video,
a video that can make you money,
a video that you'd be proud to have
and you'd love to pay me again to make another one?
Now this is a very nuanced process here
because you can definitely do this the wrong way
where it just backfires on you
and you end up doing 50 rounds of revisions
on a video that is completely no charge,
and you're wondering,
why did I follow Levi's advice on this?
And that's where it's really critical
to operate as a professional.
And we should maybe do another follow-up video
on what it means to be a professional.
We unpack this in a lot of detail in my course.
But the key thing here is to think about video
as creating value for business.
So if you approach a business to make them a video,
you need to constantly be asking yourself,
how can this video make value for the company?
Because if it does, businesses love investing in things
that make them money.
If that's your approach to the project
and you use that as what your standard is for success on it,
then that will stand out to other businesses
because if they see a video that's working for someone,
they're gonna want that as well
and they're gonna ask who made that.
Tell people how you want to be remembered.
Now, again, this is way too simple on the surface.
But why do we leave it up to other people
to decide how they want to remember what it is that we do?
When they encounter our work online,
our Instagram pages, our websites, our portfolios,
why do we leave it up to them to try and guess
what they think we want to do more work of?
Why don't we actually put it boldly
out there into the world?
And the really powerful thing here is
that this is actually gonna allow someone
to be able to recall in their memory who you are.
Because if you're just in the generic middle,
that's already taken,
and there's a lot of people who occupy that space.
A little example here is called the conference test.
So if you go to a conference with some friends
and you end up in the situation
where you're meeting new people,
let your friends introduce who they think you are
and what you do.
Listen to the language that they're using,
and if that language doesn't align
with where you want to be going,
you need to be a lot louder
about who you want to be remembered as.
So this for me was a little bit challenging
at the beginning.
I remember being introduced as
the guy who made just biking films,
or the guy who made, yeah,
you made wedding films once, right?
You're a videographer?
And hearing those introductions of me made me realize
I really want to be remembered
as the guy who does adventure films,
and so I started to be a lot louder
about that being how I wanted people to remember me.
Third rule is also really practical,
and we're gonna get to that after I tell you
about the sponsor of this video.
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for building a website.
And a website is so critical in the process of getting hired
because you need a home base for people to go to
if they're gonna find out that they can hire you again.
If potentially clients come to my website,
they realize one thing really quickly,
and that is I want them to request a proposal,
I want them to ask me how we can work together,
and I wanna begin that conversation
so that way we can do more meaningful work.
So if you don't have a home base like this
where people can reach out and know how to contact you
and see examples of your previous work,
you're really losing out on work opportunities.
And so what I love about Squarespace
is they have a lot of really powerful tools
built right in,
things like being able to add contact forms,
being able to quickly update your images and your text,
that way you can keep up to date
the projects that you're working on.
So I recommend heading over and starting a free trial,
that way you can see what stuff can look like.
But when you're ready to commit,
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So our third rule has to do
with what areas could actually be profitable
to double down on and become the go-to person in.
I kinda think of this specifically as being your niche.
So this is where your personal filmmaking style,
the types of things you make
that have your fingerprints all over it,
where someone could say that's a Levi Allen video,
or that's a video made by you.
That's kind of your style,
and then it meets kind of the business category traction
area of real life.
So I like to think of it as the go-to person
in a certain category.
And oftentimes for getting remembered,
the more specific, the better.
And you might be surprised
what different niches you can find for the work that you do.
For me, a really strong niche that I operate in
is adventure sailing,
so working on these old wooden tall ships
and making videos about that.
I didn't know that that could be a profitable niche for me,
but because I've become a go-to person in that category,
I've really built a reputation among other sailing companies
that Levi is the great guy to hire
if you want an amazing adventure sailing video.
So that's a niche for me that I've worked hard
at becoming,
I've kind of climbed the mountain there
and I stand among only a few people in that area.
So how do you know what areas
are worth actually putting in the time
to try climb the mountain of?
Because you don't wanna put in all this effort
towards becoming the well-known person in a certain category
that isn't even gonna make you money.
So that's rule number three: markets that are spending money
will spend money again.
So this is actually something
that's really important to keep in mind
as you decide to narrow your focus.
Whatever category you're gonna try investing time into,
you need to ask yourself,
will these businesses spend money again in the future?
And a good evidence for that is
if they have spent money in the past.
And the problem here is that we can spend all this time
trying to break into a category
where not a lot of money is being spent
or that's just completely oversaturated.
So oftentimes if you take a top level,
let's say real estate videos,
you're gonna need to just
break down a smaller chunk of that, either geographically,
be the real estate guy in just an area
if there's not one there already,
or you're gonna have to get really specific
on a style of home you make videos about,
because that area is really busy,
there's a lot of people doing it.
But let's say you just ignore real estate altogether
and you go into your own area,
but you really wanna make sure
that businesses there do invest.
Because one thing that I've painfully had to learn
is that if the business
hasn't spent money on a video before,
it's a lot of work to convince them
from a zero to even a five or a six
to actually being willing to invest in a nice video.
So you're just fighting an uphill battle
if you're trying to convince someone of the value of video.
It's far more easy to work with someone
who already believes in the power of video,
because then you don't have to do that whole education work
of trying to get them to understand
why video works from a zero.
It's often way easier if someone has made
any kind of video before, seeing some traction with it,
and then they're positioned and already willing
to spend money again.
Because one thing you'll find out is
businesses don't like wasting money,
but they love investing in things that make them a return.
So if you position the whole way you think
about how you offer your services through that lens,
you realize that if you can position what you're doing
as an investment to the right kinds of businesses,
they will be happily willing to invest
in making a fantastic video.
And this prevents the teeth-pulling experience
of trying to convince a client to invest more in the video,
and they're always trying to cut corners.
But when they look at it as an investment,
it's a really powerful shift
where you can actually start to focus
on how do we make this the best that we can,
not just how can we cut corners
to make this as cheap as possible.
So I'd love to have you start to apply this stuff
in small compounding actions.
Instead of just doing busy work
like posting another Instagram post,
actually start to think through how can you take this stuff
to use it for where you're currently at,
'cause I think you'll be really surprised
how much those small little actions and improvements
compound over time.
I actually dove far deeper into this topic
in a free webinar that I did recently.
So if you'd like to listen to that,
I've got a replay of it available.
All that I ask is for your email address
so that way I can keep sharing with you
some of the education stuff that I'm working on
as we go into 2020.
You can also head over to Adventure Film Academy.
That's the education side of what I do.
We're gonna be looking to do
a lot more intentional things with that in 2020,
things like getting more workshops going.
We do these sailing workshops every year
but we're also gonna start adding more stuff to the calendar
and trying to get some more online training going
because I've really been lacking at that.
It's something that I'm passionate about
and I wanna be able to help more people
that were in the position where I was in
where it was just procrastination
and hard to know what to do next,
and I wanna help those people
actually make some sweet progress,
people like you, hopefully.
So that's gonna be it for this one.
Thanks for watching, I appreciate you.
And remember,
life's better when you make stuff, peace.