Give Us A Break With Your Web Conference Recordings

I mean, literally, give us a break

Break that 45-minute video up into shorter clips that give us an incentive to watch the whole thing.

If you interview someone, find a section of the interview where they share something particularly useful or interesting and make a clip out of it.

Those short clips (five minutes, or less...much less is better) are how you entice people to check out the entire interview.

With a teaser clip, in one minute, I’ve helped you figure out whether or not there’s any value for you in watching the entire interview (it’s at the bottom of this article).

That’s how you respect your viewer’s time and earn the trust of strangers.

It’s also how you increase the viewership of your videos.

You went through all the trouble to do an interview. Finish the job by editing the video so you get the maximum return on the time and effort you’ve already invested.

Welcome to the world of video editing

It's a huge time vacuum because somebody has to watch the entire recording to pull out the really interesting clips.

This just goes with making videos.

What I've been seeing lately is people uploading really long web interviews (sometimes, over an hour) with no editing for content.

I'm a huge proponent of long-format interviews, but you have to know what you're doing.

That starts with being an efficient interviewer

You can't just talk to people until you each run out of gas.

It's much better to go into a conversation with the intent of keeping it within a time limit.

That will cause you to plan out your questions so you don't just meander through the conversation.

The better you do at planning the conversation, the easier your editing task will be.

And you do have to edit

You can and should publish a conversation in its entirety.

But if you talk to someone for more than 10 or 15 minutes, you have to publish shorter clips, as well.

The longer you go past 10 minutes, the more important it is for you to publish clips.

Nobody is going to watch you (a random person on the internet) talk to your guest (another random person on the internet) for an hour to see if either of you deliver any value.

Presumably, you're publishing videos as a marketing activity

That means you're trying to reach people who don't already know you, in addition to the people who already do.

To the people who do not already know you, you're just a random person on the internet.

How many random people on the internet are you giving an hour or more of your time to?

Think about it: If you can't find time to watch your own video to pull out a few highlights, why would anyone else?

Keep that in mind the next time you upload a long-ass video.

Editing is a huge part of making videos

Of course, you don't have to do any of this.

There's no right and wrong, just levels to the game, just like anything else.

The level at which you want to compete in your industry will determine the amount of effort you have to put into your video strategy.

Compete at whatever level works for you.