AP 0488: How Do I Share Private Videos with My Email Subscribers?

Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 488 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

Today, we have a great question from Jenna, but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com. One of my favorite companies, making it super easy for me and over three million other small business owners keep track of our finances from the income to the expenses, and even invoicing too. They make invoicing really, really easy and very professional so you can get paid now and continue doing what you do to crush it online. If you want to check out FreshBooks for free for 30 days, get a 30 day free trial by going to GetFreshBooks.com and by entering “Ask Pat” in the ‘How did you hear about us?' section. Again, that's GetFreshBooks.com, enter “Ask Pat.” All right, here's today's question from Jenna.

Jenna: Hi there, Pat. My name is Jenna Pop and I'm launching a new blog based on my journey to leading a healthier lifestyle. The blog name is “Fit Pigs” and my website is FitPigs.com. I'm currently using AWeber for my email subscription and my question to you is what is the best way to share video messages to my subscribers and my subscribers only? Thanks so much and I look forward to your response. Cheers.

Pat Flynn: Hey Jenna, what's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it. I think it's really interesting that you are going to be sharing video messages with your subscribers. I think that's a really cool way to engage your audience in a different way and I think it's really smart. I think there are a lot of ways that all of us can better engage with our audience and if you have people who have given you permission to send them stuff, a video's a cool way to do it. It's different and something that people are gonna watch. I know a lot of people who do this and there's a lot of different ways that you can do this.

There's two ways that come to mind. I can mention a whole bunch more but it would be involving a lot more tools and things like that. One of the things that comes to mind is using Periscope. You can actually set up private Periscope channels for your audience, and that would help build your audience on Periscope too if that's something you're interested in or are doing already. That wasn't one of the two I was going to mention, just came to mind, but again, showing you that there's a lot of other ways that you could send videos to only people who subscribe to you.

The two ways that I would do it, there's one way, which is sending people to an unlisted video on YouTube directly. Now, you could do that by simply uploading a video to YouTube and making sure it's marked as unlisted. That means that people won't be able to find it through search on YouTube and your subscribers on YouTube, if you have any, they won't get it. It is only available to those who you send directly to that particular YouTube URL. You create the video, you upload it as an unlisted video and you just grab that link and put it in your email. The only thing with that is there is a potential that somebody could share that video or send it to somebody else and there's nothing you could do to stop that if you're doing that on YouTube. That is one way you could do it.

You could also send people to a landing page. This is kind of this version 1.5 or tactic 1.5, which is you send them to a landing page. You're not sending them to YouTube where they could potentially get lost in some of the other related videos on the site or anything like that, or the search bar on YouTube. You create a landing page, maybe you're using Leadpages or you set up a page on your own site, and you embed that unlisted video there. That would potentially decrease the chances of people sharing it because it's kind of a hidden page and they're on your website. You could even mention, “Please don't share this, this is just for you,” on that email or on that landing page, too. Now, if you do send people directly to YouTube it actually does say somewhere on that page: “As a reminder, this is unlisted so make sure to only share it with permission,” that sort of thing, but that doesn't always stop people. Version 1.5 is you can send people to an embed of that unlisted video on a particular page. That's cool because you can continue to control that experience, people are coming back to your website, which is always great, and you can have them take action from there. Maybe there's a call to action you have in that video and you want people to click a button, that's something you could do.

The other method I want to share is using something like Vimeo. Vimeo is another video hosting company and they have a way where you can create password access to that video. You can create a video and send people directly to it or put it, like I said before, on a particular landing page, but it's hosted through Vimeo. If you set it in the settings for that particular video, you can create a unique password. Not one for each and every individual person, although there might be ways to do that using something like Wistia, but Vimeo—actually, Vimeo or Wistia, which are video hosting companies other than YouTube, they'll allow you to create password-protected videos. You just send the video link or the landing page link to your subscribers and then the password to go along with it. The cool thing about that is it seems a little bit more secretive, you know? It's a little bit more high value, I guess you could say, because it's not just a YouTube video which is “low quality,” it's a higher quality thing with a password so it's legit. It's like, “Oh my gosh, Jenna sent me a password so I'm gonna enter it in because I want to see what this is all about.” You could try that method too.

I wanted to share that with you and hopefully that helps, Jenna. Yeah, so we won't keep it too complicated and we'll just end it from there. Hopefully that helps. Thank you so much, Jenna, for the question. I think this is gonna help a lot of people to at least expand their brains on what they could do to share messages with their email subscribers in a different way other than text. There's probably ways to do this with just audio too, which would be cool if you have a podcast because that's how people are used to consuming your content, just like you guys are listening to me right now. Jenna, we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show.

For those of you who are listening, if you'd like a question on the show … Sorry, I lost my train of thought. If you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. Just hit the record button and ask your question, and we'll potentially answer it here on the show. I also want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks. They are serving over three million small business owners, including me, helping manage finances and you can use them too. They also help with invoicing so if you have any clients or coaching students or you're working with any other companies and you're a freelancer for example, FreshBooks makes it really easy for you to send an invoice, a bill, to your client and get paid much sooner. It's very professional looking. You get to put your logo on it and everything. Go ahead and check that out because they're a great company. I love Fresh Books and you will love them to. Head on over to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the ‘How did you hear about us?' section. Again, that's GetFreshBooks.com, enter “Ask Pat.”

Thanks so much. I appreciate you. Here's a quote to finish off the day. This quote is from Shawn Gardner. He said, “Social media is not just an activity. It is an investment of valuable time and resources. Surround yourself with people who not just support you and stay with you, but inform your thinking about ways to wow your online presence.”

Take care and I'll see you the next episode of AskPat. Thanks everybody.