Asten Regis gives great tutorials for Adobe Premiere Pro where he wants to help marketers and editors tell their story through video. He also recently produced 100 tutorials in one week. Asten also has a channel that focuses on Martial Arts Films and Pop Culture.
GUEST: Asten Regis | Adobe Premiere Pro Tutorials Channel | Twitter announcement about 104 videos in one week | The Flipside |Â Twitter
HOSTS: The Video Marketing Value Podcast is hosted by:
– Dane Golden of VidiUp.tv and VidTarget.io | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube
– Renee Teeley of VideoExplained and ReneeTeeley.com | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
SPONSORS: This episode is brought to you by our affiliate partners, including: TubeBuddy, VidIQ, MorningFame, Rev.com, and other products and services we recommend.
PRODUCER: Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios
TRANSCRIPT
Asten Regis:
The norm is you have to put in the work and you have to serve the audience. That was the main thing that got me inspired to even start this, because I realized that I have to serve an actual audience instead of thinking about myself and what I want, subscriber numbers. It’s more about the actual number of videos that I needed to create.
Dane Golden:
It’s time for the Video Marketing Value Podcast. This is the podcast where we help marketers and business owners just like get more value out of your video marketing efforts. My name is Dane Golden from VidiUp.tv, where we help you to up your game on YouTube for business and transform your viewers into loyal customers, and I’ve started a new business with two partners called “VidTarget.io,” where we help you save time and money through more targeted YouTube ads, along with my cohost, she’s the powerhouse video marketer from San Francisco. It’s R-E-N-E-E T-E-E-L-E-Y, Renee Teeley from Video Explained. Hello, Renee.
Renee Teeley:
Hello, Dane. Today, I am having a whale of a time co-hosting this podcast with you.
Dane Golden:
But are you thrilled?
Renee Teeley:
I’m thrilled. I’m delighted. I am all of the things.
Dane Golden:
She’s all the things, and Renee, what do you do at Video Explained?
Renee Teeley:
At Video Explained, I offer video production and consulting services to help companies use video to build credibility, generate leads, and convert leads into paying customers.
Dane Golden:
Okay, and for you, the listener, you should know that as always, you can follow along in your podcast app with the transcript and links, and send us a message on social media to let us know how you liked the show. Today, we have a special guest. His name is Asten Regis. Welcome, Asten.
Asten Regis:
Hello, Dane. Hello, Renee. Thanks for having me on the podcast.
Dane Golden:
Yes, and we were saying before the show, A-S-T-E-N is your first name, R-E-G-I-S, it’s Asten like Aston Martin, not Austin like Austin Powers, but spelled like neither.
Asten Regis:
Hey, yeah, exactly. That’s the best way to put it.
Dane Golden:
Okay, and Asten, we asked you on to the video marketing value podcast today for two reasons: The first is that you give great tutorials for Adobe Premiere Pro and marketers and editors should always be upping their game with that tool. However, there’s another even more superseding reason, and that is because you decided to record more than a hundred Premiere Pro tutorials in just one week and you actually did this. For any business that’s hung up and saying, “Oh, we can’t put out one video a week,” we wanted to find out how you can do that to get to a hundred, because if you can do a hundred, you can do one. Does this topic work for you today?
Asten Regis:
Absolutely. Let’s get into it.
Renee Teeley:
To kick things off, first off, I am super impressed that you were able to create 100 videos in just one week. That is astounding to me and I have so many questions for you, so let’s just get into it. For this marathon of video production that you did, how many tutorials did you actually record and was it over seven days or five days? How many days and how many hours did it take to record all of this, including scripting and editing and all of the other things outside of just production?
Asten Regis:
Okay. Well, the actual production took seven days and it was actually 104 videos that I recorded.
Dane Golden:
Wow.
Renee Teeley:
That’s amazing.
Asten Regis:
Thank you. Well, the 104 videos was basically, there’s a guy called Roberto Blake that I follow on YouTube.
Dane Golden:
Yay, we follow him. We love Roberto.
Renee Teeley:
Yeah, we’ve both done videos with Roberto. He’s amazing.
Asten Regis:
Ah, you know. He’s definitely… I’ve been following him for a few years now. I don’t think you guys have seen the video he’s done about make a hundred videos on YouTube where he talks-
Dane Golden:
No.
Asten Regis:
… It’s really good, it’s really inspiring, and it talks about creators and how they’re expecting a lot of results without actually putting in the work and actually how much work it takes to be successful on YouTube and he talks about Marques Brownlee, who’s got over 11 million subscribers, but he uploaded 100 videos to get his first 74 subscribers on YouTube, MrBeast, who’s got like 37 million subscribers now, and he’s absolutely popular on YouTube, he uploaded a hundred videos to get 789 subscribers, and PewDiePie, who’s one of the biggest YouTubers of all time with over a hundred million subscribers where he uploaded a hundred videos to get 2,500 subscribers.
Asten Regis:
Now, most people, they see success stories of people who might upload 10 videos, like there was a guy who I think in April started his YouTube journey, it’s a channel called “Dad, how do I?” and I believe he’s got two million subscribers in a matter of few months and I think a lot of people will look at that as a metrics of success, but those are really anomalies, they’re not the norm. The norm is you have to put in the work and you have to serve the audience, so that was the main thing that got me inspired to even start this because I realized that I have to serve an actual audience instead of thinking about myself and what I want, subscriber numbers, it’s more about the actual number of videos that I needed to create, so I did spend a couple of weeks in pre-production, planning this out.
Asten Regis:
Just a bit of advice: If you ever are stuck on what to create, YouTube tells you in the search bar, so if you put your subject and then type in, “How do you edit in Adobe Premiere Pro?” it will come up with a list of what people were searching, so I literally spent a couple of weeks just doing that and using the TubeBuddy app to do some keyword research and then I began the production stage and actually filmed those videos over seven days, so I filmed 10 videos in each day and it was already planned, I already had the titles planned, already had the descriptions, thumbnails as well. Some of the thumbnails were sorted out, although I’m still working on some thumbnails and adapting some of the thumbnail strategies that I have, but it all came from what the viewers are looking for, so that’s how I planned it out and how I was able to literally start from… I started on the first day and finished on the Friday.
Dane Golden:
Did that include the editing?
Asten Regis:
No.
Dane Golden:
Okay.
Asten Regis:
I’m in the editing process at the moment, that was just strictly production. The way I work, I come up with the ideas in… I work very much like a traditional television show would work because I come from a video editing background, so I’m used to creating videos for companies and on working on television shows, so there’s a pre-production, a production, and the post-production stage, and before you even distribute your content, you have the content ready and it’s scheduled out, so I’m in those stages at the moment, even though I’ve started posting some of these 104 videos, so I’ll go through that stage first. That seven days was purely to film and I filmed roughly about 10 videos a day.
Dane Golden:
And so you have a few channels, you have your Asten Regis channel mostly about Adobe Premier video editing, but you also have a martial arts channel about film and pop culture and even though we’re mostly focused on marketers and business owners with this channel, I think it’s interesting because I’m curious, do you use your study of martial arts on film to use any choreography with your editing? Because there is a very special way of editing martial arts films.
Asten Regis:
Well, it’s funny you asked that, Dane, because I started uploading content to YouTube back in 2010 and what I’d do is I got some of my fellow martial artists together and every three months, we’d meet up and do some martial arts fight choreography and film little highlight videos on YouTube and put them on YouTube. They got a lot of interest, but we weren’t very consistent with that.
Asten Regis:
But from that process, that really started my career in editing, so from there, I started to meet people and I got into the industry, started working professionally as an editor, so the editing process, it’s really intense when you’re doing martial arts, because it’s all about the edit, it’s all about the rhythm, the timing of the moves, and also the camera angles to sell the actual moves, so you do learn a lot about editing through doing martial arts choreography or fright scenes, so I did learn a lot from that process, so it’s ironic that you ask that question.
Renee Teeley:
How interesting, getting editing inspiration from martial arts. It’s interesting, most people have a hard time keeping up with creating content for one YouTube channel, and here you are creating massive amounts of content for more than one YouTube channel, which is pretty nuts.
Renee Teeley:
Going back to your main channel, your channel’s motto is “Helping you tell your story through video,” so what does story mean to you when it comes to YouTube videos and what are some of the tips that you would give marketers for telling their story through video?
Asten Regis:
I think with story, it’s all about communicating to your audience a message, so obviously, with a story, you have a beginning, middle, and end, whether it’s a feature film or a television show or a YouTube video. With marketers or business owners, because I do, for work, I professionally work in an environment where I’m creating videos for businesses, and the whole thing is about them take taking their message, creating a piece of content that actually tells a story and communicates a specific message to a specific audience member, so from my experience, the whole thing in terms of making video content and telling your story through video, it’s about what is my message, who am I actually trying to tell this message to, and how can I do it in a succinct way that is digestible for that particular person?
Asten Regis:
With my YouTube channel, that message, that value proposition, helping you tell your story through video, it really came from the situation that we’re in right now with the whole global pandemic. A lot of people have struggled and they want to now go online and [inaudible 00:12:37] and communicate via video, whether it be via Zoom or via creating podcasts or creating video content for YouTube, and with my 10 years experience, I just wanted to pass down my personal knowledge to people in how they can do that in specific areas.
Asten Regis:
With the Premiere Pro videos, that’s obviously targeted towards video editing, but I also do unboxings to feature gear, camera gear, and help them make purchasing decisions regarding that, and I’ll be doing a whole series of other videos around storytelling and around just communicating on video, so it is very much about what is the message of a specific business and why should the audience care, who is that person that they’re trying to target, and just getting that on film.
Dane Golden:
Marketers can use a video tutorial structure to bring in customers searching for what they’re teaching on YouTube. What is the structure you use in your Premiere Pro video tutorials?
Asten Regis:
Well, with these tutorials, what I do is I have a very short introduction that just reinforces the title, so if it’s how to color grade in Premiere Pro or how to fix audio, I’ll do an introduction and say, “In this video, I’m going to show you how to color grade in Premiere Pro,” and maybe have a little bit of a demonstration in that intro if I can. Sometimes I won’t, it’ll just be a talking head video, and then I get straight into the actual tutorial and try not to waste any time because I don’t want to waste the audience’s time. I want them to be reassured in that intro that they’re on the right video and that they’ve clicked on what they wanted to actually watch and the reason for that.
Asten Regis:
The middle structure of the video will be the meat of the content. This is the middle of the story, so this is where they’re getting the information they need and it’s solving their problem. It’s solving the problem of what the video title is.
Asten Regis:
And then the end is the call to action, so that will be very short and snappy and that will literally be trying to get them to watch another video, so it’s promoting another video that might be related.
Asten Regis:
When I was organizing the content, the first maybe 20 videos or so, I was just promoting the previous video that I had recorded, but as the process went on, what I started to do, because I knew that I had about 20, 30 videos already that would already be uploaded when it’s scheduled, I knew that I had done a variety of different topics around Premiere Pro, so I knew, “Okay, this current tutorial that I’m doing is based on audio, so I know that there’s another audio video that I did, so let me point them to that, because that might help them out because it’s related.”
Asten Regis:
That call to action is the end of the video and what it does is you’re trying to promote more of your content because YouTube values watch time, but also, the viewer values solving more problems, so this is something that they might be likely to watch, so let me point them to that. Then I use another call to action to say, “Or if not, here’s another video you might be interested in,” and YouTube has a feature that says “Best for viewer,” so it knows what the viewer’s interested in and what they’ve watched, so if they’ve already watched the video I’m pointing to, then YouTube will point them to another video that might be more relevant for them, so that’s the structure in which I made the videos in.
Renee Teeley:
Yeah, I really like the strategy that you’re putting in place for that call to action and getting people to a relevant video next and that does increase your watch time, which is great, especially if you know in advance what topics are going to be released. In terms of topics, you mentioned that you’re using TubeBuddy to help you figure out different search terms. Are there other things that you do to help you decide what topics you should focus on for your videos and then also, in what order do you release them?
Asten Regis:
Well, I didn’t have a specific order in terms of the actual videos to release, I went through… What I did was I, again, typed in the search bar what topics people were searching for, why I did it, and then I’d use TubeBuddy’s SEO tool to go through the SEO process and look at the other thumbnails, et cetera, but one of the things I did do, when using TubeBuddy’s SEO tool, it shows you the other videos in your niche, in this actual topic, and what they’ve done, so I would watch those videos, see what they did well, what they didn’t do well, or what I think maybe I would have liked to have seen, not necessarily what they didn’t do well, but maybe what I would have liked to have seen if I was watching the video or creating the video.
Asten Regis:
I’d also read comments because that’s where you get your market research is from the actual audience, so just see what they enjoyed or what they wanted to know more of and maybe just try to see if I could answer those questions in my videos, so it’s a lot of looking at what the audience wants. It’s all about putting the audience first, so I based my whole strategy on that. It’s just: What does the audience want? Who am I targeting? What do they want to see? How can I solve their problem?
Dane Golden:
When you structure both a video recording and a whole day of video recording, how do you plan that out? Do you just say, “Well, I don’t know. This one seems to be on the next list, let’s just start recording,” or is there a little bit more structure to your approach?
Asten Regis:
Oh, no, there’s definitely structure. I knew each day what I was filming, so the night before, I would go over the list. I had written the list before I even started production, so I’d write that on a notepad. In the Notes app in Apple, there’s a note. I’d actually just list the hundred videos that I wanted to do and then I would take the 10 videos that I was working on and then put them in the order that I thought was relevant in that sense, so I knew beforehand, like “Monday, I’m going to be working on this, Tuesday, I’m going to be working on these 10 videos,” so I was mentally already prepared for the video tutorial itself and what I was going to demonstrate. Then I would set up a project in Premiere Pro with the tutorial example in that project so that when it comes to the day, that it’s actually ready and I’m not wasting time trying to set that up, “Okay, what am I going to demonstrate?” So, it was already done ahead of time.
Renee Teeley:
You mentioned that you’re still in the editing phase with a lot of those videos. I mean, that’s a lot of videos to edit. Are you already planning to do another series of a hundred videos in a week?
Asten Regis:
I don’t think I’m going to do a hundred in a week again. Well, I might do it again, but not anytime soon, but I am planning on doing a few different series around video creation because again, the channel’s umbrella is helping you tell your story through videos, so I’m planning on doing some tutorials on other editing softwares, on camera gear, on filming on your mobile phone, filming with DSLR cameras, lighting, sound, so I’ve got some ideas jotted down, but at the moment, again, I’m very deep in the post-production process of the Adobe Premiere Pro tutorials. I’ve currently uploaded, scheduled, and they’re absolutely ready on my channel. There’s 13 videos I’ve done so far, worked on two more today, and tomorrow I’ll probably do another four videos, maybe. I’ve got a few things to do tomorrow, so maybe I’ll do another four, so hopefully I’ll get through this process, maybe in the next month.
Renee Teeley:
I’m just going to throw this out there as a suggestion, but you might want to consider actually doing a video about your production process for creating 100 videos because that in and of itself is pretty crazy.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, wow.
Asten Regis:
You know what? I really wish I had got the GoPro out and actually just filmed the process. I actually thought about it afterwards and I was like, “Oh, why didn’t I do that?” Because it’s a brilliant idea, Renee, and I really should have done that, but yeah, I might actually do a little video about this process and maybe how other people can do it.
Asten Regis:
Maybe not, because I think you don’t necessarily need to go crazy like I didn’t do 104 videos in a week, but if you at least set up a day where you film, say, four videos, and if you post once a week, that’s a month worth of content that you filmed and then you can spend a couple of days or a week editing those videos and then schedule the upload and then at least you’ve got that content prepared, so you don’t have to worry about, “Oh, I’m busy,” if you’ve got children or you’ve got work and you don’t have time to film videos that month, at least you know that you’ve already got those videos ready and YouTube can work for you by scheduling it to your audience so they don’t miss out and you don’t miss out.
Dane Golden:
Can you offer any words of inspiration for marketers or any little funny things that happened along the way?
Asten Regis:
Just you know your audience, go after them. You have to serve the audience first because what I would say for me when I was going through this process, I had so many voices in my head saying, “You’ve done enough. You’ve done enough,” when I got to 52 videos, it’s like, “That’s enough for a year, once a week, you can stop now,” but the only reason I carried on going was because of my overall value proposition. I kept hearing that in my head, “Helping you tell your story through video.” It’s not about me, it’s about my audience.
Asten Regis:
For all of us, if you’re a YouTuber or you’re a marketer, you want a big audience, you want customers, and that’s fine. You obviously have to have your own personal goals and personal desires, but you have to know the steps to get those goals and what are you prepared to do to get there? That was my whole thought process, was just taking myself out of the picture and making it about the audience because there was days where I just didn’t want to get up and press Record, I didn’t want to film, but thinking about your audience first or your customer first is everything.
Asten Regis:
That’s why companies like Amazon are so successful because Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, he’s so customer-focused and you see how much success that has brought him personally and financially and his company and the people that work there. It’s all because he thinks about the customer first, so think about the audience and think about your customer first and you can do amazing things, you know?
Dane Golden:
Yeah, we agree, don’t we, Renee, on this? I mean, I always tell my clients that “The most important person in a video is the viewer.”
Renee Teeley:
Yeah, definitely, and I feel like at, even separate of my own business, at every company that I’ve worked at, I’ve always been lobbying for the customer of how is this going to help them, how does this benefit them, and it just makes you a more successful marketer, but also just a better company.
Dane Golden:
Fantastic. Asten Regis, how can people find out more about what you’re up to, your 104-video journey, and all of the stuff that goes along with it?
Asten Regis:
You can find me on all the social media handles @astenregis. On YouTube, if you type in “Asten Regis,” you’ll see the channels. It’s the one with the blue-background avatar is the one with a hundred videos and it’s just called “Asten Regis.”
Dane Golden:
Excellent. Thank you, Asten Regis.
Asten Regis:
Thank you for having me on board. Appreciate it.
Dane Golden:
Excellent. My name is Dane Golden with my cohost, she’s R-E-N-E-E T-E-E-L-E-Y, Renee Teeley, and we want to thank you, the listener, for joining us today, right, Renee?
Renee Teeley:
Yes, absolutely, and today, I want to leave you with a quote, as I once told my good friend, Mr. Rogers, “It’s the little quiet moments in the midst of life that seem to give the rest extra-special meaning, so make sure you’re taking some time to reflect and appreciate all that you have.”
Dane Golden:
He was a sweet man and I want to invite you, the listener, to review us on Apple Podcasts and if you can’t find that little review button on your podcast app, click the Share button instead and let your friends know that we’d also like to help them with video marketing advice via this podcast. Renee and I do this podcast and our various other YouTube videos and projects because we love helping marketers and business owners, just like you do YouTube and video marketing better and thanks to our special guest, Asten Regis.
Asten Regis:
Thank you.
Dane Golden:
Thank you. Until next week, here’s to helping you help your customers through video.