Oh No, Not More TikTok Talk

New TikTok Videos

This week I posted a couple more videos on TikTok. It’s not ideal; I’d like to post more often. Three times a day is well beyond my reach but if I could do one per day, I’d be very happy. The trouble is I’m not very inventive, so I struggle to come up with ideas for content.

I had an idea for a video when I was in my backyard the other day. I could hear the sound of a chainsaw. I thought, “Is it my neighbour again?”. But no. On the other side of the fence, I could see there was a guy on a cherry picker using a chainsaw to lop off the dead branches of a rather tall tree that backed onto the property of one of my neighbours.

Now, There’s Something You Don’t See Everyday

It’s not something you see every day and I thought, “this is interesting. I might just video this for TikTok.”.  So, I shot a couple of minutes of video and sat down with my trusty phone to do the editing. It took me over two hours to edit it because I was practising with the various facilities you get with the TikTok editor. And yes, I was quite pleased with it.

I’d cut it down to about 40 seconds or so, so it wasn’t too long. I plastered it with text saying, “please keep watching” and this kind of thing. Anyway, it started out with a shot of my backyard with the pool in it. It then pans across to this guy in the cherry picker doing his work. I videoed my self doing a kind of superimposed voice over and was saying a few words about it. Essentially, this is our taxpayer’s money at work; the council lopping off dead tree branches, etc. It was just a bit of fun and a bit of practice for myself.

Let’s Make It More Interesting

And I thought, “What can I do at the end of it, to make it a little bit more interesting or funny?”. So, I envisioned the guy falling out of the cherry-picker and into a muddy puddle. I searched TikTok for something suitable and found one. If you played the whole thing, you could see that the person falling came to no harm. I used less than two seconds of it and then found a still shot of a guy falling into a muddy puddle.

Anyway, I put it all together and included a sound effect drum roll and cymbal crash as the guy hits the puddle. All up, it was about 45 seconds, something like that. I put in a mention of my website and titled the video with, “What’s this got to do with affiliate marketing?”  Nothing really, truth be told, it was just a bit of practice for me.

I’ve Breached What and It’s Banned?

I published it and started getting a couple of views. A couple more, then 10 or so and suddenly, a message pops up from TikTok, saying, “you’ve breached safety rules” or something, “so we’re blocking your video”. What’s going on? It would seem, as far as I can tell, that it was just the two second clip of somebody falling out of a tree that they didn’t like. In the actual video that I borrowed, you could see that they fell onto soft ground and were not injured. According to TikTok, it was encouraging people to do dangerous things.

Anyway, it was banned from the “Just For You” views. (Side note: This explains why, on other people’s pages, you sometimes see videos with very few or even zero views.)

Don’t Forget That Draft

The video was still on my page, but I couldn’t edit it, so I had no choice except to delete the thing. I hadn’t saved a draft version (note to self, do this is future before publishing), so that was two and a half hours wasted. Anyway, the following day I thought I would give this another go. Fortunately, I had saved all the videos of myself doing the voiceover, etc. and managed to put it back together in a fairly short time. It probably took half an hour or so. But this time, I made it without the person falling out of the tree and published it, saving a draught version first.

How Did I Get Two Versions?

It started getting views. Great! I thought I would leave the draught version there until I was happy that it was not going to breach any guidelines and eventually delete it. So anyway, a couple hours go by and the next time I go in and have a look, the draft copy has been published, but not by me. So now I’ve got two versions of the same video.

I have seen this sometimes on other people’s TikTok channels where they have duplicate videos. Now I know why. So, I thought, shall I delete the duplicate? By this time, both versions had a hundred or so views each, so I decided to just leave them there and I could amalgamate the view numbers. Today, they have a combined total of around 450 views. Nothing spectacular but at least together they are not in the “200 jail”.

I know this hasn’t been the most riveting of posts, but for me, anyway, I have learned a bit more about TikTok.

Jury Duty Update; The Last One

A final update on the jury duty. I received a message from the court letting me know that I am no longer required for duty. They have let me off the last week. I am very pleased and can breathe that massive sigh of relief.

Facebook Lead Ads

I have spent some time this week learning about FB Lead Ads. I have completed Week 15 of the Beginners Advantage training and have watched the training video on “Facebook Lead Ads for Traffic” in section 9 of the Blueprint Steps in the Internet Profits Hub. Unfortunately, I missed out on joining Sophie’s intense training program so I’m trying to get my head around this subject unaided.

It is something I am keen to do but I need to devote more time to really get to grips with it before I start sharing my new-found knowledge with you, dear reader. So, I will leave this subject for a future blog.

I would be honoured (or honored, for my American and Canadian friends) if you could leave a comment to let me know if you found it useful. If you have any questions, you can pop them in there too. I’ll be happy to answer them if I can.

Until next time.

Take care.