MIKE: Hi there everyone welcome to episode 96 of the Mike from Maine Show the place where we do daily interviews with successful entrepreneurs; this is your host Mike Thomas. And today on the show I have Bertram Heath Sr. on to talk about making videos specifically for marketing. He has a unique background in the fact that he actually was a plumber and didn’t have any experience about making a video making online. And he has come up with a product that is completely all encompassing. And it’s just so huge when it comes to talking about all the different aspects of making videos for internet. So I have him on today to talk about that I hope you enjoy it. So I am here with Bertram Heath Sr., Bertram welcome to the show!

 

BERTRAM: Hi Mike. Thanks for having me.

 

MIKE: Let’s start right off by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

 

BETRAM: All right, well thank you. Well I am an internet marketer. I consider myself a product creator more than a marketer. But I love video so most of what I teach online is either video related or video creation/video marketing. But I have created some other products and of course they were video related as well. I don’t, well it’s a long story because I don’t have a video background. To be quite honest I don’t know a lot about what people call real video or real life video meaning television and movies. There are a lot of guys out there that do have a real life video background. My experience is marketing video. My experience is online video, which is totally different and I am sure you know because you do a lot of video. But even live video like we are doing now is quite different than television or studio quality video. I was actually a plumber for 23 years, people laugh when I say that. And that was not long ago because as you can see I am not 80 right! So I don’t have 40 years of video experience. I actually got my start out of, well before high school as a stone mason. My dad’s best friend was a fifth generation stone mason in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He was the only stone mason who was qualified to do the historical work in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. As most people know is America’s home town. It’s one of the oldest towns and has the oldest stone work in the country. But I learned a lot from him and I absolutely loved stone work. When I was in my early twenties I hurt my back really bad. I was already working for myself and wasn’t working for this guy anymore. He actually helped me start my first business. So I was “gung-ho”, thought I was young, I was invincible and then I was in the hospital. I hurt my back bad and I ended up being out of commission for eight months. I had to rethink my entire life. I went to school for plumbing once I was able to get up and move. I went to school for plumbing and quickly realized I just had a knack for it. And my teachers were surprised at the some of the things I knew and I didn’t even know how I knew. It just made sense to me. So I took that and I ran with it. I did very well with plumbing and owned my own business, had ten employees. In 2007 I was up to ten employees. By the beginning of 2008 I relocated from Massachusetts to Upstate, New York. I live in a very rural area. I’ve lived here 12 years now and I found when the economy started to suffer, this area, because it’s so rural really affected my business, the most the fastest, more than others I noticed.

 

MIKE: Ten thousand! Did you say ten thousand dollars a day?

 

BERTRAM: Ten thousand dollars a day, you know gross. I had 10 guys, plumbers on the road and I would go out and do estimates and you know handle things others couldn’t or people got stuck on and I would go out and help them. But each vehicle averaged a thousand dollars income a day, generated income. So of course I didn’t pocket that. I wish I could say I did, but no. But still, to me, that was a very successful plumbing business. But it got to the point of about eight months where I started to see my customers drop off which was at the end of 2007. By the beginning of 2008 I was already down to just myself. I was letting guys go one after another. I was pushing and investing money in as much advertising as I could. But if I knew then what I know now about marketing and video; I would be very successful, still, I believe. But at any rate that’s how I started looking online. I actually got to the point where after letting guys go, selling equipment, investing money in marketing and still not being able to pick it up; I ended up looking online for work. I hadn’t worked for anybody in 15 years. I was my own boss of the 23 years as a plumber. I was my own boss for 15 years.

 

MIKE: That must have been a bad feeling when you had to go and look for an employer.

 

BERTRAM: It was horrible. (Phone rings in background) I apologize for the phone; I have so many phones I forgot to unplug one. But it was not only frustrating but kind of humbling. It was a humbling experience. I would go in front of these guys and start talking and actually try to hold back what I actually knew and a lot of these guys would say, “You know I can’t afford you. Why are you here?”

 

MIKE: You were over qualified for them.

 

BETRAM: Yeah. Overqualified is there any such thing? I never turned away a man because he was overqualified. I mean, to me that is just so outrageously backwards. But it happened over and over and I was travelling as far as an hour and half. I actually took a job that was two hours drive each way.

 

MIKE: Wow.

 

BERTRAM: And I drove that every day for several months until I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was just so exhausted because the hours, the shifts were 12 hour shifts anyway. And then you get stuck on the job and it can turn into a 16 hour shift. By the time I got home I have to lay my head down, jump right back up into my clothes and out the door for the next day’s shift. So I couldn’t keep it up I mean I’m not a spring chicken anymore. I hate to admit that but we all age right.

 

MIKE: True.

 

BERTRAM: So I started looking around online and started dabbling a bit in eBay. I made a little money here and there but didn’t see a way to scale it up. I knew it wasn’t going to cut it. And of course my savings was dwindling fast. I ended up losing my home. Lots of things that have happened to so many people, we hear these stories all the time. I really didn’t know what to do. I knew I had to learn something new and I had to learn it quickly. So I did get my start in internet marketing buying small products like everybody does. I was learning bit and pieces of the puzzle together but I quickly knew I did need to choose a niche right. I couldn’t keep just dabbling and learning. I had to choose a niche and had to put what I was learning into effect in order to generate an income. So I looked at video as a middle-age guy, it was very cool to me that as I grew up watching television we could now ourselves online. And I thought, well this is really cool right, so let me see what I can do with this.  I was also interested in social media because social media was the big buzz and of course still is. It’s only going to keep getting bigger. But I was also realizing video was being used on social media and video was being used to teach social media. So, hey if I am going to teach anything online then I’m going to need to create video. And if I want to do social media I am going to need to create video. And if I want traffic I am going to need to create video and it just kept going back to video. So I started buying everything that looked half decent that I could find out about video, studying and experimenting and finding ways to do things with video. And I just fell in love with video. So I’ve done pretty much nothing but video for the last four years.

nto effect d had to putwhat I was learning ut I quickly knew I did need to chose a niche and put what I was leanrn  I was in th

MIKE: Wow.

 

BERTRAM: So I’ve come a long way. My first video was so bad my six year old daughter would admit to creating it. But the greatest thing about video, and it took me awhile to learn this, was the great thing about video is that no matter how bad you think you look in front of the camera, how bad you think your voice/voice over is or your graphics; create it anyway. So I did, but I was scared to put it out there. But see that’s the great thing about video, you don’t have to put it out there until you think its good enough. So I did put some crappy videos out there and I think everybody that has ever…

 

MIKE: So have I.

 

BERTRAM: Yeah, we have all put some pretty bad videos out there. So my first product was “Video Marketing for Newbies.” I think I put that out for sale in the spring of 2009 that was my first real product. And I couldn’t write sales copy or at least I didn’t think I could. So I wrote a good sales video script, I created the video and I put the video up. The first script, it was to teach people about video, why it’s important and how it can help them. Then they had a little button to click to go to the second video. And I actually think I used a viral button so it would collect their data. Well they would have to log in to Facebook so I also struck real leads. So that video was actually converting at 38% which I was told was high.

 

MIKE: Yeah, very high.

 

BERTRAM: Yeah and the second video was the sales video. To tell you what to get, the guarantee, cost and what the investment would be. I didn’t do very well because I didn’t know how to buy traffic. I was scared to invest money because my savings was dwindling that I was living off right. So then I started to learn how to create video to drive traffic.

 

MIKE: Hmm.

 

BERTRAM: And I eventually did get traffic to it and I made some sales. But I quickly moved onto another product. Because my video skills got better and I realized that product was probably an average product and I didn’t want to be an average guy you know. I like to put out good quality stuff. So my next product I used the first product as a give-away. That product consisted of 19 videos and 58 page eBook. So needless to say that went over very well and people were scrambling to get that. So I quickly built over a 1,000 likes on my fan page for the new product and I started making sales on that product. And so it’s been one product after another since then pretty much. I started building membership sites shortly after that and realized that was a better way deliver the product. Whether it was a monthly payment or not, it didn’t really matter. What mattered to me was I had a place where people can go and can watch the video. Some people were having trouble downloading video or big files. So they could go and the watch the video and I could constantly change the welcome video. So I could stay in touch and keep them up date.

 

MIKE: What were you using for the membership site?

 

BERTRAM: I used Optimize Press as a theme then, now I use Optimize Press and Soft Professional.

 

MIKE: Okay.

 

BERTRAM:  I did purchase PROFIT for the member site but I never actually installed it and used it. But it’s very similar to Optimize Press.

 

MIKE: You didn’t use Wish List?

 

BERTRAM: I sued Wish List, yes, to secure the member site, yes. My first member site I used S2 member (Softwares2 member).

 

MIKE: I’ve heard of that.

 

BERTRAM: Yes, that’s the pre-membership script. It actually is very good but its a little time consuming because it’s got a lot more options.  It doesn’t have the easy user interface that Wish List member has. But it still works very well and it’s free. I suggest that to people all the time who are just getting started.

 

MIKE: So what I am getting from you Bertram is you tackled the video. You really tried to learn how to really make videos from home. Not necessarily super professional videos you see on television, but videos for marketing and normal purposes people are going to need on the internet. Is there any other way that you use videos yourself to sell products or do local SEO or is your business completely to be the video guy?

 

BERTRAM: Funny that you say that and you ask that. Originally I didn’t set out to be any guy. I just wanted to learn a way to build a business and generate an income. Build up a lasting business obviously. An income that would allow me to pay my bills like everybody else when I wasn’t able to get a local job. Now there are other jobs that I could have taken. But really, do I want to go from 23 years as a licensed master plumber, 15 years working for myself, other men working for me to pumping gas or bagging at the local grocery store? No, I didn’t want to do that and that wouldn’t have saved my home and allowed me to continue like an adult, a parent right. So I wouldn’t have been able to do that, if I wanted to I couldn’t have. So really I just wanted to build a decent income and solid business. So originally when I started learning the online marketing stuff I actually did purchase a package from one of the gurus for a few thousand dollar to learn to do the offline marketing stuff. But I had already been learning video for probably eight months or so. And so I used my video skills on the offline marketing and I was getting first page rankings in some of the bigger cities in Massachusetts very quickly.  I’ve had them appear as fast on the top as fast as four hours and stay there for months. So I did learn how to use video to generate leads for my local clients. Of course I only worked with other plumbers.

 

MIKE: Well it’s what you do. You knew how to talk to them. You knew the market. You knew what they were looking for; so that makes sense.

 

BERTRAM: Exactly! I could have turned that to work with other contracting businesses as well. I just never needed to as I just had a few plumbers who kept me busy and I kept them happy. So it just worked out well. It gave me time to continue my online video adventure I should say as I did go on to create quite few products. Now I am almost all online and still have a couple clients I do a little bit more for, I like them, we’ve built a relationship and I don’t want to cut them off. But I don’t try to grow the offline part of it at all either. I’ve used video to promote other products and I used video to promote my own products. So I used video for lead generation. Think about it right. This is the part that gets me and this is the part that excites me about the business. I talk to other guys who I know in this business, you know family and friends as well when they ask. And I know totally lose them sometimes but I try not to. The way I like to tell them is look when I was a plumber, the way I was raised, I was a blue collar worker. Always worked with my hands, always loved working with my hands. If I built a stone wall or I built a bathroom in somebody’s home, okay I have to have the skills which mean I have to pay for that education which I did. You know four years education is not cheap right. But becoming a plumber I never thought I had to worry about an income in my lifetime. Plumbers were just well paid and known for being able to make good money. So I never thought I’d have to worry about money but I had to pay for the education. I had to pay for the tools. I had to pay for the materials. I had to pay for my insurance and all the other business expenses that go with that type of business. Then I take all the material, tools, education and I can create one thing. And once I create the one thing I sell that one thing, it’s sold. I have to take part of my profit; if a tool breaks I have to buy another tool. But when I create a video that teaches people or video product that teaches people how to do something. I can put that video product online and people say push button, this and that is an overnight success and ATMs. Well to a degree that is true, I don’t like all that hype, but if you boil it down, that’s true. Once you put a video online and set up your automated systems, your email and your payment processor that digital product can sell unlimited amount of copies. And you never have to touch it again unless it becomes outdated and you want to update the information. Other than that you create it once and it just continues to sell. What’s better than that?

 

MIKE: Especially like what you were talking about before when you create a membership site and you’ve created videos explaining things. And no matter what you do, whether you’re good at it offline, whether you are good at Twitter, Facebook or whatever. Even if we get away from internet marketing niche and say you are plumbers you actually could make courses for plumbers about different things. For plumbing there are so many different niches that people can do. I think a lot of times being in the internet market we forget about that there is a real world out there. And it’s not just people selling or how to make money online. There are actually real people out there. Well, I can think of my girlfriend, she would love to learn how to do different knitting things. Like if you make a video of how to do a certain stich in knitting and you have a whole website about that that can be a membership site with video if you know how to do it. So just like you said, you are making money over and over again. It’s a passive income.

 

BETRAM: Exactly, for me traditionally a blue collar guy. Which, by the way I have to add this part because a lot of people get a kick out of it. You always hear a lot of people say, “Oh, I didn’t know anything when I started. That’s probably true in many cases but I know because of my personal experiences. When I had my plumbers business, before I ever got online, I only owned a computer because everyone said I had to. I was the guy that hesitated, kind of resisted buying a cell phone. I know most of the people watching this video probably don’t remember those times actually existed. Technology has just grown so fast and changing so fast but all I could do was turn my computer on and off with the power button. If you don’t save programs and shut your video, computer or MAC down through the start menu if you don’t shut it down properly you scramble things and you lose things. You are just making a mess out of your hard drive and that’s what I did. I turned it on and off with the power button because that’s the only way I knew how. And I did have somebody show me how to set up an email account and I used it for my business. But I think I got half a dozen emails a month at best. So I fumbled my way through that eventually after about four to five years of having the computer for my business. I had people who would run my programs, you know I had a secretary who would put all the information in, I had an accountant and people who would do these things. So I didn’t have to and I didn’t want to. I liked the old school of writing everything down on paper.

 

MIKE: I still like that by the way.

 

BERTRAM: Yeah, it’s good to have a back-up copy, a physical copy and I do still keep notebooks like crazy. So eventually I got to the point where I could actually order parts from a website when I had a job that say needed a few more thousand dollars’ worth of parts or more I would order it. I wouldn’t have a guy go pick it up. So they would bring a trailer truck and dump all my parts right off at my shop. But that was a big success for me with the computer. It was really the biggest extent of my online experience was AOL and email.

 

MIKE: You are really dating yourself right now.

 

BERTRAM: All right, I’m okay with that. You are only as old as feel, doesn’t matter how old you look or how old you act, you are only as old as you feel right. You know I love what I do. I love that I learned this, that I was able to learn it. I wasn’t convinced that I was going to be able to do this even though everybody I saw online said, “Oh, anybody can learn this.” Well now I believe that because I learned it right. I don’ think I’m a genius. I’m nobody special anybody can learn this. It’s one of the things I love about it with video I really feel bad for people who have a slow internet connection, dial up even, there are people out there who have it still. I don’t know how they do anything online but I feel bad for them, they have to read everything, in my opinion, the slow, it’s the slower harder way. And if it were not for video I would not have been able to learn video. Because I can see something, I can watch somebody do something and not have to have a clue about it and if they are doing it right I can learn to do it right.

 

MIKE: You know different people learn in different ways. Like there are some people out there that will definitely prefer a PDF version of this interview, they would prefer to read it. There are some people out there who are listening now to us through my iTunes Pod Pad so they are not actually even looking at us. They prefer the auditory experience then there are people like you and I. I prefer video.  I like watching video. It’s just another way of communicating with people, that’s a way of connecting, a way of sharing an idea.

 

BERTRAM: I agree and I love iTunes. I do and I listen to lots and lots of different shows but there are certain things that I believe you should not try to learn this way. For example using a piece of software. If I read a PDF, first of all it’s going to have to have a lot of screen shots in it. My opinion is that’s still more consuming than watching a video. Seeing what he just did, you pause it, see what she just did, you pause it. You go do that, you play it and rewind. A PDF, sure you can leave it open, you can follow it and see step by step. Personally I love to read, I just don’t love to read instructions that need to show me how to do something right. So when people say, “Can I get the MP3 of that?” sure I provide that. I provide the MP3s as I know, like you said, there are lots of people who prefer to listen, or want to listen on their drive to work.

 

MIKE: A lot of people do that, yeah.

 

BERTRAM: Right. But again nobody is going to learn how to edit video or how to do most of anything with video through text or through listening to an MP3 because there are things you need to see. When I make a mistake in my videos I don’t edit it out because I want to show them that look this is something that happens frequently; I just did it and it’s an easy mistake to make. But if you do that it’s okay, you just go ahead and do this, and you fix it.

 

MIKE: That’s true.

 

BERTRAM: You know that’s how I learned. I learned through trial and error.

 

MIKE: Okay Bertram. So we talked about how you kind of, from a non-techy background, you’ve been able to learn about how to use video. Let’s say you mastered it. You created this thing called “The Video Slayer”, what is it?

 

BETRAM: The “Video Slayer” actually started out under a different name but it was supposed to be my flagship product. It actually turned out to be much bigger and better than I expected. But “The Video Slayer” was my way of trying to take, well cut out a lot of the time, the learning curve, the time and the expense of learning video for other people that come behind me. I found that pretty much everything I wanted to learn about video, whether I wanted to create a specific type of video or I wanted to learn how to create certain effects in a video or I wanted to learn how to write a scripts that would convert for sales or write a scripts for a different purpose; like maybe an option page, all this and learning how to create better training videos. All these things were scattered all over the place. I could not find one central location. Then “The Video Boss” came out. Andy Jenkins, absolutely love the guy, I think he’s hilarious, funny guy. But again, he has that Hollywood training, he’s got that Hollywood movie background also television background. Of course his videos are phenomenal and I could never, and would never try to compete with him; okay. But what I am doing is more online video and when I say that, again it’s not to put Andy down because he is video is online and his stuff is great. But I have a different style, everybody has a different style right. Everybody has a different background and everybody has different strengths and weaknesses. So I tried to take my strengths in marketing videos, my experiences with ranking videos, my strengths with learning and struggling to create video and I put all that into “Video Slayer”. I started out with 13 modules, it’s now 16 modules. But this year I have at least six more modules to add to it. However, I’ve had some suggestions and requests for other material that I will probably get to this year; I’m hoping to. Right now, “The Video Slayer” is about 220, last count the video was 200 training videos.

 

MIKE: Wow.

 

BERTRAM: They all have MP3s. Every module has templates or checklists or flow charts or PDFs. I’ve got bonus material in there and I’ve got, like I said, more coming. But I never expected it to be quite that big and some people get overwhelmed. So what I did was I decided to take the first three modules when people first join and give them that. That’s basically the introduction to video and preparing for video, writing a script for video and using story boards for video. That gives you the foundation then after five days new videos start to become available. So it’s kind of an easy transition into those 220 videos that most people would be overwhelmed. So I keep my all my video training, well I try to keep them all under 10 minutes. Majority of them are probably five to six minutes length. A lot of people say, “Yeah, of course you have so many training videos, they’re so short.” Well, yes they are short because I try to dig down deep and narrow down the topic so that I have a very little topic. So when you read the title of the video you know exactly what you’re going to learn in that video. There are no questions as to whether you are going to find out what it is that you want at that moment.

 

MIKE: You condensed it down to the specific topics. What the video is going to be exactly about. It’s going to be short and it’s going to be to the point.

 

BERTRAM: Right, exactly.

 

MIKE: It’s not going to waste a person’s time.

 

BERTRAM: Yes and I’ll tell you the reason I did it that way is because I actually did join a video training product once that had  multiple videos, four or five, and they were over an hour long. So when I learn something, and of course it’s my first time ever hearing it, I go, “Oh, that’s a great idea.” Then I take a note and then after I watch the rest of the video I go try to do that one thing. Then if I have any questions on it I have to go scrub through an hour long video trying to find that something I was looking for. So I found by breaking it up into small bite sized pieces it was easier for people to consume.

 

MIKE: Now it’s such a large course and so much to cover in it. I’m going to ask you a hard question.

 

BERTRAM: Good I love those.

 

MIKE: And that’s going to be – What will people learn from this?

 

BERTRAM:  Wow. And I have to say that in one breath?

 

MIKE: Well you have to cut it down a little bit. Like what’s the overall thing that people will learn from the course?

 

BETRAM: Well I would say the two most important things that I believe that everybody should walk away with is the ability to create multiple different types of video that will convert. In other words if you are trying to drive traffic you will achieve that. If you are trying to make sales, you will achieve that. If you are trying to create a guru launch video, you will achieve that. I you are trying to get people to OPT it, no matter what you are trying to get people to do; you should be able to do that and do it well. The other thing is you should be able trying to do is marketing with video. In other words you have the video creation side then you got the video marketing side. The side that actually builds your brand that drives your traffic and lets people know what you are, who you are, what you have and why they should care.

 

MIKE: So, okay from what I am getting- you’re going to get both the technical part of it and the marketing part of it.

 

BERTRAM: Yeah but the technical par is not really that technical.

 

MIKE: It’s not technical for you anymore. But it’s…

 

BETRAM: Well, that’s true.

 

MIKE: It’s a bit technical for a lot of people I think.

 

BERTRAM: That’s true. There’s a degree of…well when I say it’s not so technical, what I mean is …obviously you are right. I do teach people how to use software. That considered a technical thing but what I don’t do is talk about all different…I only talk about framing, coding and thing like that for just a minute when you need it. Not before you need it and not after you need it. Just when you to know basically just when you install your software and setting it up and you are getting ready to create or record a video. Then you need to know what the settings are.

 

MIKE: Sorry to interrupt you. I think what a lot of people experience…Like when I first started putting these videos together, these interviews together I would have to learn some new program. Like when I used Stream Flow on my map. I had to learn how big a frame to use, what the rates, the speed rates were and how big the files should be. It was – what kind of file should I be using – those things. I think a lot of people can get so bogged down with learning about that technical kind of stuff that they try to learn too much. The learn stuff that they really didn’t need to learn for what they are doing and they waste a lot of time. Like if I try to learn everything that I could with the Screenflow program I would still be back at episode one of the show.

 

BERTRAM: You probably would never create a video.

 

MIKE: I would have created…

 

BERTRAM: You would still be learning it.

 

MIKE: Yeah. People take university classes to learn programs like Photoshop. I mean that’s a huge one. That’s one you definitely need to take a course for. What I am trying to say here is, like what you said, you tell them the information here when they need it. You don’t bog them down with all the technical stuff so that they are just going to get confused and they are just going to give up.

 

BERTRAM: Right. What happens is …and it’s happened to me, so I know firsthand how fast it can happen and how easy it is for you to not even realize it’s happening.

 

MIKE: Yeah.

 

BERTRAM: But you get paralyzed. I think that what happens and you’re right. A lot of people get in trouble with the technical part of it and can’t get past that. And I have students that contact me occasionally and say, “Hey what about this? And I can’t find that and what if I can’t set it the way you set it?” You know what, turn it on and use it, if it works keep using it. That’s what I tell people. I don’t know all the settings in my cameras. I don’t know cameras well at all. And I don’t have a problem admitting it. You know why? Because I turn it on and if it works I use it. And if it’s doing something that  I don’t understand then I find out why.

 

MIKE: How many people will buy like super expensive cameras and then they just put it on the auto selection.

 

BERTRAM: Yeah, that me. Yeah, that’s me.

 

MIKE: Me too unfortunately.

 

BERTRAM: Yeah. If it doesn’t give me the end result I want then I start looking into the alternate settings. That’s when I start looking at – okay is it my lighting? Or is it my camera? Or is it me? I have a radio face so sometimes cameras go buggy when I get in front of them. What can I say?  See that’s the other thing I see a lot of people don’t want to get in front of the camera. So that’s where I excel I think because I don’t have a camera background. I don’t have an offline video or television back ground. I don’t have to be in front of the camera and neither do you. There are many, many good marketing videos out there and there are many different styles of marketing videos you can create. And you never have to be in front of the camera. I do suggest, unless you are a big company or corporation, I always do suggest that smaller, especially us online folk, just start now. Use your voice and just let people feel like they know you. And by hearing your voice that’s the first step. If they see your face obviously that’s going to work better, but you don’t have to.

 

MIKE: Tell me about some success stories from people that have brought your product.

 

BERTRAM: Well I have a gentleman right now who is building a membership site – even though it’s not a part of my “Video Slayer” that another one of my products. I am helping him build his membership site and create his product. He has an online video background and he actually bought “The Video Slayer” at well…I can’t even mention price, I don’t like to, but  he bought it at full price and not as WSO. He found it after we launched our first WSO he bought it. He contacted me and he said, “You know I have a video background and I actually purchased, I shouldn’t say the name, I actually purchased another video course that was four times the price and I cancelled that one because I find your training to be better and I am learning to do online video I am learning how to take offline video and create a digital product out of it and I never knew that and I wasn’t learning  that from the other training so he’s actually created his first video product. I mean he has a membership site built and we’re working on the whole lead generation funnel and the sales funnel now. And I actually about four or five guys who are video guys and they tell me things about cameras and equipment and lighting that I don’t know but they tell me they learn more from me than they learn from any other video program. So that makes me feel good, because I do my homework, I put the time in. I can tell you that the first that eighteen months at least, probably over two years though that I started my online business. I was working 16 to 20 hours a day, literally, 16-20 hours a day and six days a week. So I’ve done my due diligence, I have put my time in but I love it so I continue. I don’t put that much time in anymore I just can’t. I actually have to go back to having a life like everyone else. So I’ve back off and I only work 12-14 hours a day now I ‘m kind of lazy guy now.

 

MIKE: 12-14 hours a day. Yeah you are kind of lazy. Yeah. Bertram before we wrap it up here today is there anything else that we didn’t touch on that you would like to mention?

 

BERTRAM: Well, really the biggest thing that I would like to mention, that I would like to say, is that every chance I get is that you know if you think you can’t do this or you think video is too technical or you think video won’t help your business; then I was you so I get that. However, when I first stepped out, believe it or not the first videos I was creating I didn’t even put my own voice on. I couldn’t even stand my own voice long enough to edit it. And I am not an actor so of course I couldn’t just memorize it so of course I had to read from a script and it sounded like I was reading from a script so it takes practice. But just do it because once I actually started doing what I learned how to do I saw things happen and I started making money. Then I started putting my voice on the videos and it got better. I made a little more and then I started to out my face on the video and I broke a lot of cameras but eventually I started seeing more success. And actually no, when I put my face on the camera and I started getting my videos out there, even though I thought they were less than perfect, because if you wait for perfection you’ll never do anything. I know that’s why it took me four, well, three or three and half years long to actually start actually seeing any real success because it took me that long to get out and start operating outside of the box, put my face on the video put the video out there, do what I learned. Use what I do and that’s when things just took off and it happens pretty quickly.

 

MIKE: When you get outside of your comfort zone.

 

BERTRAM: Yeah exactly. That’s when things really start to happen for you.

 

MIKE: Thank you Bertram. I really appreciate you coming on.

 

BERTRAM: Thank you Mike. I appreciate it.

 

MIKE: I hope you enjoyed the interview today with Bertram. If you are interested in checking out his “Video Slayer” product it’s only going to be available at the discount until Friday at noon it says on the page here. So if you are interested in buying check it out now you can go to

Mikefrommaine.com/slayer and or course it’s on the page at mikefrommaine.com. Thank you for watching and I will see you all tomorrow.