James Schramko and Clay Collins Discuss The Success Of LeadPlayer -

Posted by James in Apps, Interview, News, Podcast, Video

Podcast: Play in new window

LeadPlayer sets itself apart from other video players by working with most plugins and offering an effective, unobtrusive way of building contact lists and generating revenue through video.

In this discussion James Schramko and LeadPlayer co-founder Clay Collins discuss the some of the secrets behind the software’s success.

James Schramko and Clay Collins

Highlights of this episode:

00:30 – Continual upgrades to LeadPlayer

01:51 – A new version of LeadPlayer is released about every 2 weeks

02:08 – Developers take into account multiple devices, browsers and plugins

04:50 – Constant updates are the reason LeadPlayer continues to work

06:49 – YouTube modifications to video all work in LeadPlayer

07:59 – LeadPlayer conveniently builds contact databases and is easy to update

09:01 – Video metadata submission through Schema markup

10:48 – Using LeadPlayer to optimize videos for SEO

13:32 – Levaraging a single video with different descriptions and titles

15:13 – What’s next for LeadPlayer

16:17 – Developers aiming to stay ahead of the competitiion

17:00 – The LeadPlayer vision

20:41 – Get LeadPlayer from BuyWithBonus.com for your bonus

 Transcription

James:        James Schramko here, I’m just having a chat with Clay Collins. I’m about to ask him some questions about a video that I watched last night. He made some great points. Are you there on the line Clay?

Clay:           Yup I’m here. How’s it going James?

James:        Good. You’ve been very busy since the last time we spoke. It seems that you’re continually making upgrades to LeadPlayer. I watched your video yesterday and you made some really good points that I thought are worth sharing. One of them in particular is that a lot of software suppliers see an opportunity. They go out there and they create a solution but then they don’t support it or it stops working later. So you had some expression, I think you’re talking about how LeadPlayer gets on better with these crazy plugins that people have created. Is this like a frustration of yours?

Clay:           Yeah, you know I think one thing that’s happened is that a lot of people see software as sort of this opportunity and they’ll see some need and they’ll kind of find an inexpensive development shop that has a good deal and they think it’s a matter of releasing something one time and then making a bunch of sales, then maybe having a new version of that software created a year later or something like that.

                   What we found is that’s nothing to be further from the truth in terms of the way the software business works. I mean here at LeadPlayer we are constantly learning from new AB split tests and those results go into the next version of LeadPlayer that we release about every 2 weeks. We’re releasing new features and updates based on the latest of what’s working in marketing in AB split testing but also what a lot of people don’t realize is that when you’re developing for the web, you aren’t just developing for your end user.

You have to accommodate for the fact that people are viewing this on multiple browsers. They’re viewing it on multiple versions of the Android operating system, they’re viewing it on multiple versions of iOS devices and then you’ve got Internet Explorer 5, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 which all render HTML and CSS and Java script in different ways and then the various versions of Chrome and Safari and then adding on top of that is when you develop for the WordPress ecosystem, which we do, you are constantly not just dealing with changes that happen in all these different devices, mobile devices and then also all these different browsers but you’re also playing defence against a whole arsenal of crappy plugins that people could have developed.

The WordPress market place is filled with WordPress plugins that were developed 3 years ago and were since abandoned by some part time developer and it seems like a good idea to download that plugin at the time but meanwhile it wreaks havoc on sort of that WordPress ecosystem. So a bunch of the time that we spend is doing stuff that people don’t even know about. Like adapting to changes in YouTube for LeadPlayer, staying completely on top of the latest things that they add. So if they add a new feature to YouTube, we want to make sure that LeadPlayer users get all of that. We want to make sure that no other plugin can take down someone’s WordPress install just because they installed something else. LeadPlayer’s actually playing defence.

WordPress is kind of like a home and LeadPlayer could be a new refrigerator that you’ve installed and it’s got the best and the latest refrigeration technologies. Its energy efficient and things like that. But if you have a crappy toaster, that sets off the breaker in your home, you could lose power to this refrigerator and it’s not the refrigerator’s fault and what we like to do is make that refrigerator a smart refrigerator that has an energy back up, I don’t even know what the metaphor is but that crappy toaster can’t take down our refrigerator. So there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes like literally on a day to day basis that we’re adding and updating to LeadPlayer and it’s why LeadPlayer still works. It’s still current, it’s still up to date and most of the other WordPress plugins for video that came out around when LeadPlayer came out literally are not working in half or more of the WordPress installations that they’re installing. That’s something that we’re proud of.

James:        I love it. I love the fact that you can now squish the video size around to fit the device. That’s a cool feature. And you also have added this new thing that sort of pops out of the video which I thought was pretty handy.

Clay:           Yeah, so what we found was that more and more sites were mobile responsive. So if someone designs a version of the website that fits on any size browser no matter how small, people are designing websites where the entire website adapts to that but YouTube videos natively don’t resize and we wanted LeadPlayer videos, even if they were using a YouTube video, we wanted the whole thing to resize and we made the call to action pop out over the video and the reason why we did that was… in one sense it was more disruptive in that it made the player sort of bleed on to the rest of the page but we did it in a way where it’s transparent, it’s translucent, I mean you’ll have to see the video to just kind of see how it works but call to actions are better, the click through rates tend to be higher but also it means that if someone’s doing something that’s fancy with YouTube, like they’re using annotated links or they’ve got closed captioning going on. That literally, anything that you put in that video, or any way that you sort of modify that video with YouTube, it’s all going to work because we’re not touching the video area. So YouTube is free to work in any way that it can.

                   We’re the only video player that I know of that has calls to action that at once increased the click through rate on calls to action and don’t disrupt anything that’s going on inside the video area. We’re really proud of that.

James:        I love it. YouTube must like you guys. From my point of view, a lot of my students have been applying the training from Own the Racecourse which is my news blogging authority platform independent training course. They’re putting out regular videos like I do, they’re putting LeadPlayer on the videos, they’re building their database and I just spent a whole month away travelling overseas with the family but the whole time I was overseas, every single day people are joining my database after watching a video.

                   I’m earning all these new customers I guess and people who are interested in finding out what I’ve got. So I love the idea or it but even more than that I love that we don’t have to chop and change and make adjustments. We just update the plugin when it says there’s a new update and there’s this whole raft of new stuff and you’ve also got some new SEO stuff going on.

Catch Emails With LeadPlayer

Clay:           Yeah, one thing that we added and again we really believe that part of customer service isn’t what most people think of as customer service. Yes, you know, we respond extremely quickly often in less than an hour to customer support request but also part of customer service is making sure that whatever tool you bought continues to stay relevant even as the web changes. And the web changes incredibly fast.

                   YouTube came out and announced that the #1 way they encourage people to give metadata about video to Google is through something called Schema.org. There’s this Schema.org mark-up. So the old way of doing things used to involve creating a video XML sitemaps. And they still work. We’re not in any way trashing or saying that video XMLs don’t work but the current way to do this sort of what we recommend people do and sort of what is best practice right now is to have a traditional just sort of HTML sitemap, well it’s an XML sitemap but it indexes and lists all of the HTML pages on your site. Those HTML pages have Schema.org mark-up that tell Google the title of the video. The keywords for the video, the description for the video and what it allows you to do essentially is rewrite the information that Google has indexed for that YouTube video.

Let’s say that you have a competitor who is creating videos that are actually kind of useful, they’re educational videos but they don’t know anything about SEO and they don’t know anything about sort of marketing, well you can take that YouTube video and you can use LeadPlayer to play that video and you can use LeadPlayer to sort of capture email addresses using that video so you’re leveraging someone else’s educational content in your market place. You’re capturing email addresses using that video and when you use LeadPlayer, you can retitle that video and redescribe that video in the eyes of Google so that Google indexes sort of a keyword rich and a SEO optimized version of that video and what’s even cooler is that when Google indexes that video, it indexes it to your page. Not to YouTube but to your page. So when someone sees that video thumbnail in the Google search results, it means that when someone clicks on that thumbnail that it actually takes them to your site.

With that video thumbnail, a lot of people are finding that they can be at position 3 or position 5 or position 7 on a page of search results and get more clicks than the top result because that video thumbnail being there in the search result is just that much more compelling. So we are constantly updating the product in light of all the changes that are going on in the web. You’re not buying the video player that you bought sort of that day that you clicked add to cart and then entered in your credit card information and bought it. You’re buying the video player that we continue to update on a weekly basis in light of marketing best practices and our relationship with Google.

James:        Wow! Yeah, I mean that is cool. You’ve got such an exciting product. Look, LeadPlayer has been such a winner for me because it makes so much sense. I replaced my lightbox opt-ins on my news site. I’m not providing really good content and getting all these rankings. What we do is we actually take the same video and put it on up to 12 or so websites with rewritten descriptions on the page and we can make each of the videos appear different as well with the description of them so you can leverage even your own content on multiple sites if you have that scenario. Clay, if I would look forward in a few months’ time, what sort of things could I expect that the landscape will look like for the video player market in particular? Have you got some things you’re cooking up in your scientific labs there?

Clay:           Yeah, I’ll tell you about them in just a second but first you know I want to just bring up how, just so how we haven’t really talked about this. But you obviously are the top marketer so of course you caught on to this but yeah the way we’ve written LeadPlayer is that you can actually do exactly what you say which is take 1 YouTube video and create several versions of that video that have different descriptions and different title tags. You can leverage for one video to rank for multiple keywords and you can do that without making multiple copies of that YouTube video.

                   The way that people used to do this is they’d make 12 different videos or they’d make one video and they’d upload it to YouTube 12 different times with 12 different title tags and 12 different descriptions so that they can rank for a bunch of different things and the problem with that was that Google would end up either deleting accounts that did that because they don’t want multiple copies of the same video or people would find that their views of that video would be distributed among 10 different videos. So you’d have 1 video about a topic but it would rank for 1 keyword here and another video would rank for something else. You might have 10,000 views of that video but it looks like each of those individual videos is only like having 500 or 1000 views. So doing it this way now, you can actually take one video and have Google see that one video 10 different ways in a way that Google’s totally cool with. Like they’re completely fine with doing it this way.

I’m glad that you did that. You’re the first person to actually come to me and say, “This is what we’re going to do it for.” The whole time we were building it, that’s what we’re thinking about. In terms of what’s coming next, for LeadPlayer, I’d say that we’re continuing to always add features in response to what people are asking us for. So if your community, if the FastWebFormula community has any feature request, I’m happy to entertain them, have conversations about them, get to the core of the outcome that folks wants and we’re more than happy to add those features.

So we’re going to continue to adapt the player, it’s going to continue to improve with the marketing landscape. It’s also going to be a web app very soon. So people can continue to use it as they do inside of WordPress but it’s just going to be hosted in the cloud. As opposed to in your WordPress install. In terms of specifics, there’s some stuff that’s under wraps that I don’t really want to release just yet because we’re trying to stay leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. Right now I’d say we’re 6 months to a year ahead of the competition. We want to take that to be 2 to 3 years ahead of the competition. So there’s some stuff we want to keep under wraps but all I can say is that we’re coming out literally with major updates every 2 weeks or so and that we don’t see that pace ever slowing down. So we expect this product to get better and better and better.

James:        So Clay, what is your vision with LeadPlayer? What’s it all about?

Clay:           We really believe that the company with the most focus wins. We’d rather be Evernote than Google Docs or Microsoft Office. What I mean by that is that I think Evernote has incredible focus. It’s been a note taking application but its damn good at taking notes. The purpose of LeadPlayer isn’t to have the most protected membership site videos, it’s not to do everything for everyone, it is to capture more leads and to create more clicks on that call to action button. And so we really like the focus that we have and we’d rather spend all our focuses, all our energy on doing a couple of things well than doing a whole bunch of things and being everything to everyone and that’s sort of our philosophy with this.

James:        I love it. As long as you can maintain the product even as it is now, it’s a fantastic product. After the last interview we did I was inundated from the marketers you’re talking about that see opportunity and they wanted me to promote their product which looked like a clone of your product but had different features or whatever. But I know exactly how many updates would be put out for those sort of products. As soon as the money runs out they’re gone. I love your approach to software, I love your enthusiasm and I’m especially appreciative you could hop on a quick chat and share some of these ideas with us Clay. If someone’s listening carefully, they will really pick up the idea that you can take 1 video and you can syndicate it broadly as a, and I call this concept veneering by the way, I taught it at my FastWebFormula 3 workshop, and you can veneer that video across multiple blogs and get yourself distribution. We are now at the age where anyone can create content and publish it and build a database and create that relationship. The thing I love about your plugin is that you respect the viewer and the audience and it still does the job without being offensive and I love it for that. Clay thanks very much for hanging out with me today.

Clay:           Absolutely James, you’re a huge inspiration and just for everyone listening to this, the extent to which James has impacted the direction of LeadPlayer has been absolutely huge. I think we’re getting at an era in for example with radio where the DJ start influencing the way that music is produced both in the clubs and on the radio stations. It’s the same with software. I mean James and 3 to 4 other people have had more influence on this product and I’m just so grateful every time you have a suggestion James, I think we’ve done our best to implement that within a couple of weeks and we’re just so grateful for your feedback. So thanks for the role you’ve had in cocreating this product with me. Thank you.

James:        That’s alright. Now you’re Steve Jobsing me when you’re coming out with stuff and when I see I go, “Yeah, I should’ve asked for that too.” Now if you’re listening to this and you don’t have LeadPlayer, I have to say “Are you serious?” It’s like the greatest piece of software to build your database and to get yourself out there. Now you can go along and get LeadPlayer from my site called BuyWithBonus.com and when you buy LeadPlayer there I will give you one of my other products. You can choose from a whole bunch of products, you’ll get that absolutely free, it’s no extra charge to you but you’ll get a great piece of video software plus one of my products and I’m happy to make it an easy decision for you. So anyway I’m going to catch up with you soon Clay, I’ll let you go away and get into making the next amazing version. Just keep doing what you’re doing, we love it.

Clay:           Awesome. Thanks so much James.

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