Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 184 - Showing up on Camera: Short-form, Long-Form & Written Content hacks for travel advisors
Transcript
- Rachel: It's day one eighty-four of the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I used to rehearse like a fifteen second video for forty-five minutes. ⁓ there are times it still you can tell when I'm stressed out, 'cause like when I just finished creating this really awesome lead magnet for all of you. And I had to refilm all of it 'cause I was like, I don't like it even though you listen to these episodes. They aren't perfectly curated. I don't have some kind of weird intro outro music. I don't have like a stage set. You know, I don't ever I I am the producer, the writer, the director, the host. It's not anything fantabulous. But I used to rehearse like a fifteen second like TikTok would take me sometimes forty five minutes. And like I said yesterday, my very first TikTok from start to finish, because I was an not smart person, I'm not gonna call myself an idiot, took three and a half hours because I was like, I'm not gonna use the app, I'll do it on my desktop. That was mistake number one. Okay. Three and a half hours, forty-five minutes for a fifteen second video. If that's you right now, I see you and today's episode hopefully will save you a lot of time. Short form content. What is short form content? Great question, Rachel. Let me answer for you. Reels, TikToks, shorts. Their one job is to get them to stop the scroll and make someone think, wait, this person, I need this person. They're interesting. It's not the place for your full sales pitch. It's the trailer, not the movie, okay? So things that like consistently work, get a little creative from this. Please don't copy pasta what everyone else is doing. You don't need a travel agent. You can just book it yourself and then show exactly what that assumption costs someone. that was super trending. You could probably be I mean, that's a content I d like you can do it, just don't make it like a main point of your content, right? And I remember so many people back when the world was starting to reopen from the COVID travel bans. So many people were like I didn't realize I needed a passport or like something really stupid. And so many travel advisors on TikTok would just stitch this content and be like, this is why you hire someone like me. And that's all you had to do. Like, you would stitch the ding dong who didn't realize they needed something vital like a passport. And then they'd be like, I'm stuck here forever. And then you'd be like, that's why you hire someone like me. That freaking killed it for a lot of advisors. ⁓ you could probably still do that today. ⁓ obviously, there's like a behind the scenes. You can always do like B roll with a voiceover. And this one was hard for me when it's like not like going through like resort site inspections. because you I don't I was like, I don't wanna show proprietary information. But I remember one time I did the budget tracker that I give to my wedding couples and like and I I think the estimated costs that I share for like their events and I showed them that and I didn't have the right equ like it didn't matter. I used my phone and I recorded the monitor of my computer and it looked terrible, but I was like, look, I do this. ⁓ you wanna be careful if there's any proprietary information. But that is something that you can do. Another one, if you're like out of ideas, you just want some filler content, that's what this stuff is for. The here's what I would book list. You could do a piece of content like, ⁓ you only have five thousand dollars for your honeymoon. Here's what I'd book. Top three resorts in blah blah blah country that I would recommend for your honeymoon that can get you a full week under 5k with air. You could do that real quick. maybe here's what I'd book for multi-gen family group trip. Be very specific, be very opinion opinionated. And be useful. I did a whole series of like Best and worst destination wedding resorts based on my experience. And I was like using terrible like I was a potato on a plate for a lot of them. Cause I was just like, I don't want to deal with lighting or anything. And I was like, this resort sucks, in my opinion, and here's why. But that series that I did, like, got me so much business. It was crazy. I think I got I did that series in like June or July of twenty twenty three, like end of June, early July of twenty three. And I like, I'm just gonna do this series. And it's probably only like fifteen or twenty real short videos that I just do in my spare time. And I think I got like ten or twelve weddings just from like that specifically referenced the potato on a plate, hilariousness, and like the information I provided. Alright, so if you haven't figured out yet how to do content, there's always the basic formula, which is the hook, about two to three seconds, like grab their attention, one clear idea, the caption that can do some more explaining, so that your video doesn't have to carry everything. And the batch content. Batching is what makes this sustainable, not your talent, not your motivation, not your production buzz budget. Batching. Batch, batch, batch. Here is a quick and dirty batching. If you haven't listened to the episode all about content batching, do it task by task, not film by film. You have your plan from yesterday, if you did it, for your overall quarterly marketing strategy, right? That's the overall plan. Then what you're gonna do if you're like, okay, I'm making a commitment to posting three reels a week, right? You just need to make three reels a week. So all you need to do is sit down for like 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. It's gonna take longer at first, and write out your three pieces of content. You're gonna work on your hook, the one clear idea, the call to action, and the captions. And you can do this on a monthly basis too. But if you're brand new to this podcast and you aren't in the success circle and you haven't Been in any of our other courses with the live QAs, which is over at elevatewithrachelk.com, by the way. ⁓ quick and dirty right here. This is your first episode you've ever caught of us. Of us, it's me. It's me. Okay. Write all that out. Get as far in advance as you can in 30 minutes. You could be three weeks ahead, because you've got your quarter, right? You could be all the entire quarter that's all written. Whatever, however long it takes. You could only have like two posts. Who cares? Do more than one or just do one in that first thirty minutes, all right? But get the written part down. Step two, quick and dirty content batching. Make sure you got good lighting. Make sure you're facing a window with good sunlight. That's the easiest one. You don't have to worry about a ring light. You don't have to put on filters or wear ten of main like maybe if you want to feel more confident, great. Play around with them. It is fun to play with filters on the short form videos, but just nobody. There's so little content that I see where I'm like, ew, that person's weird looking. Like literally, like t I don't even Well, there's one that's hilarious. There's one guy I remember that was hilarious because the comments were really funny. But I don't remember anyone that was like not perfect. Now, statistically, if you are a woman, the algorithm favors makeup. Unfortunately, for short form video content. ⁓ so you if you don't want to wear makeup, throw in a little filter that looks natural, right? Anyway, have your space where you consistently can create this stuff. And you can do it outside, you can do it inside, you can do a little bit of both, but just like know you need to have good lighting, right? Then You already have your captions. You already have what you need to say, essentially, and you just film it. Film it and film every single piece for like another 30 minutes the next day or something. Film everything, then write all the captions and hashtags, and then you can schedule it all out. Task by task is far more efficient than doing one reel all the way through, then in the next reel. And then the next reel. And I'm sorry, that's I'm on a rant here. But that's what batching is, not going from start to finish with one video, task by task. I started doing this back with my cleaning business and everyone in that industry was like, How are you guys so fast? How is your team so much faster? And I'm like, Task by task, baby. You don't clean the whole freaking kitchen. No, you do all the dusting on the floor and all the disinfecting and all like just task by task is so much more efficient. Alright, that was a long rant about the batching. Long form video content is where you build authorities. This is like your YouTube video. If you want to do a podcast, go do a podcast. Your lives, if you want to go live, five to fifteen minutes where you actually teach something. I know my goal with this podcast originally, I was like, no more than fifteen minutes a day. Now the episodes lately are just like twice as long. It's fine. So good long form topics for TAs could be like how I planned ⁓ I don't know, a two week itinerary for a family of five, kids aged seven, ten, and thirteen. And you could just walk them through that process. Okay. Every question you need to ask before booking an all inclusive. Here's how to narrow down the right all inclusive resort for you. That's I don't know. Here's how to narrow down the and you could even create a lead magnet that's kind of tied to that video and create this whole funnel series. I'm not gonna get into that right now. We're just talking about long form video. And then here's the repurposing math that makes it worth your time. One fifteen-minute long form video can become five short form clips, three written posts, and one section of your newsletter. You're not creating all five times the content. You're creating it once. And I've talked about this in past episodes too. And you're slicing it up five different ways. Why I say one piece of content seven ways. And now with the advent of AI in recent years, and it's like an agentic AI, the possibilities are freaking amazing with how much faster you can edit this stuff. So fun fact I this is a long episode and I don't care. I personally use Riverside for my podcasting production. I like it and I think it's a great tool that travel advisors should invest in for your short and long form video content. If you do not have like someone from Upwork or Fiber to edit your videos. Okay. And also they rolled out with their 2.0 short like right I just got the email like today or something. So they've got a two point ⁓ so you can ⁓ like this podcast episode that I'm recording right now, it already does magic clips for you, which I don't post because I've got three hundred and sixty five episodes to film people. Like I'm a little plus a travel agency to run And travel advisors that I mentor. I've got a lot going on right now. And I have a goal this month, by the way, of actually posting some short form content and written content. But what's really cool about the new version of the software is like the it already comes with like magic clips for like short three-minute episodes or like shorts or TikToks or whatever. But now they're planner. thing like you can take those clips and schedule it on Instagram like pretty much like everything except Facebook like Instagram, shorts, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, all of it. And you can get like transcripts of the episode, which they've already done before. And this is something I teach about like one piece of content seven ways. But you can train like their AI to rewrite it as like a newsletter or a blog post and or a blog post. And it's wait listing. They're gonna be integrating like Claude and Chat GBT. So if you already have like a paid Claude account that you've been using to like really build up your business and help keep you organized because AI is wonderful and also don't it's a tool. It's not something, it's not a crutch, right? But you can integrate that whatever AI agent you use right into the Riverside program. It's crazy. And it doesn't you don't have to have a podcast. You can just I mean you can make a podcast, screw it, but you can also just post to other platforms if you wanted to. All right, that's enough of that. Okay. I know I've been talking about short form and long form video, but written content. Don't skip out on it. Video is trendy. A blog on your website is always gonna be something that can be found. ⁓ but like Reddit, I love me some Reddit. I like to just sit and read because my brain is like overwhelmed from the Doomy scrollies sometimes, and I'm like, that's too much noise and too much content. But all of the like LinkedIn, Facebook posts, blogs, they can get found in searches and get shared by people who are never gonna comment on a video. ⁓ and you can s communicate differently with more nuance that a video doesn't always allow. So ⁓ with written posts, you want again, the hook. Same three things, the hook, which should be a specific, kind of surprising opening line that gets their attention. Storytelling is very on trend right now. And like if you really pay attention because here's why, because of short form video, by the way, so many UGC like content creators made all their money through storytelling. So now when you're marketing, like they are now like marketing with brand deals, but they're still telling a story and they just do it so seamlessly. And now I've noticed a lot of business owners like integrating the storytelling. They're using the same thing as content creators. They're doing the exact same method, slightly more salesy. But anyway, short story, an example of something. ⁓ one takeaway that the person reading it can use. And so like a good hook, sorry I'm yawning. A good hook could be something like I told a client not to book the trip that she wanted, and here's why. Like, if you start off with something negative like that, that's a hook people are gonna click into be like, why? Because you're a bitch? Or what did this client what was this client doing that was so stupid? Maybe I'm that stupid. So Daily action step. Pick one long form idea for the entire month. Film or just write it this week. Then block like fifteen minutes to slice it into three smaller pieces once it's filmed, or hire someone on Upwork or Fiverr and be like, hey, edit this video. Also, I want the three best short form pieces of content and it it'll probably cost you like thirty, forty bucks. But you can also DIY it. But then that's your whole content engine for an entire week just from one video. And it'll take you about an hour. Tomorrow we're gonna go over the cold and the Zavom outreach and why is the word cold is scarier than the actual conversation. Thank you for joining me today. It is tr I'm like falling asleep in the video. Sorry. I'm trying this new thing. Thanks for joining me today, by the way, you can stop. But I'm trying this new thing where I don't have it written on my notebook. I have it like on the screen so I'm not like looking down so much in the episodes if you do watch it on YouTube. But now I'm like not paying attention to what I'm doing in front of the camera. So I'm like, ⁓ let's just snuggle up here. Alright, have a great day. Day 184. See you tomorrow.