Video ideas for fishing guides

Most guides run out of video ideas within a fortnight, and the reason is that they started from the wrong question. Asking what would make a good video produces a blank page. Asking what a client asked you last Tuesday produces a year of them. The second question also produces videos with facts in them, which is the difference between a clip that fills a slot and one somebody sends to a friend, because the facts a guide has access to are public, checkable and almost nobody has bothered to look them up. Water gauges, accident reports, species listings: all published, all free, all specific to your water. Where the finished clips go is set out under the getting-booked hub.

Where do the ideas actually come from?

A list you already have, in your text messages.

Every enquiry a guide receives contains a question, and the same twenty questions recur for years.

What do I need to bring. Do I need a licence. What if it rains. Is my son old enough. Will I be sick. What is actually biting.

Each of those is a video, and the person asking is telling you both the topic and the words they used to search for it.

Keep a note on your phone and add to it every time somebody asks something, which takes ten seconds and produces the whole plan.

Within a season that list will be longer than you can film, at which point you are choosing rather than inventing.

The questions clients are too polite to ask are worth adding too, since those are the ones nobody has answered.

Which questions those are is set out in the welcome sequence piece.

MarshOnTheFly, LA

What makes a clip worth sending on?

One fact somebody did not know.

A video of a fish being caught is enjoyable and forgettable, because it contains nothing the viewer can repeat to anybody.

A video explaining what a particular gauge reading means for a particular stretch of river gives the viewer something to say, which is the mechanism by which anything travels.

The facts available to a guide are unusually good, because the federal agencies publish enormous amounts of specific, local, checkable data that nobody reads.

Streamflow, water level, tides, weather, species listings, boating accident patterns: all of it is free, all of it is specific to somewhere, and almost none of it appears in fishing content.

That is a genuine opening, and it does not require being better at video than anybody else.

It requires spending twenty minutes looking something up before you press record.

How to shoot it once you know what you are saying is covered in the boat video piece.

What can you get from a water gauge?

Recent and historical readings, free, from a browser.

The instantaneous values service returns recent and historical values for streamflow and other regular time-series parameters, and its documentation describes it as a service that is URL accessible and can be run from a browser.

It returns data in several formats, and one request can cover one or more sites and reach back to 1 October 2007.

There are limits worth knowing. Certain operational data that is not quality assured, typically including temperature and precipitation, is limited to 120 days or less by the local water science centre responsible for it.

The documentation also asks users to be considerate, noting that with thousands of sites monitored and most carrying more than one type of data, no single user may download everything in one call, and encouraging queries that specify the minimum amount of data needed.

For a guide the practical use is one station near your launch, one parameter, and a plain explanation of what a given reading means for a trip.

That video is thirty seconds long, takes a morning to learn once, and can be remade every week for years.

The service is documented by the United States Geological Survey.

Legit Fish Sportfishing, MA

Is safety content worth making?

Yes, and the underlying data is published annually.

The Coast Guard compiles statistics every year on reported recreational boating accidents, derived from accident reports filed by the owners and operators of the vessels involved.

Those reports come in from the fifty states, five territories and the District of Columbia, which is why the compilation is national rather than partial.

The same organisation publishes material on life jacket wear, carbon monoxide, float planning, boating under the influence and vessel safety checks, alongside an observational study of national life jacket wear rates.

A guide explaining one of those honestly, on their own boat, in ninety seconds, is doing something almost nobody in this trade does.

It also positions the operation as the competent one, which is precisely what a nervous first-time client is trying to determine.

Do not fabricate a number from memory: read the current compilation and quote it, or describe the pattern without a figure.

The statistics are published at the Coast Guard's boating safety site.

What about species and regulations?

Good content, and the place where accuracy matters most.

The fisheries service maintains a species directory covering the species it manages, which is the reference behind a great deal of what clients half-know.

An explainer on what a species actually is, where it sits in the season, and what governs it is useful precisely because the folk version is usually wrong.

The rule for this kind of video is strict: state the source, state the date you read it, and tell the viewer to check the current position themselves before acting.

Rules change between seasons and differ by region, so a video that was accurate in March may be misleading by August without anybody editing it.

Put the date on screen, and re-record rather than leaving an old one up when something changes.

Where you are unsure, say so, since a guide who says they will check is more credible than one who never does.

Confirm the exact current rules with the managing agency before you rely on anything you say in one of these.

The directory is published by NOAA Fisheries.

How long should a video be?

As long as the answer takes, and no longer.

A question with a one-sentence answer is a fifteen-second video, and padding it to two minutes makes it worse rather than more substantial.

A question needing a demonstration is a two-minute video, and cutting it to fifteen seconds removes the thing that made it useful.

What ruins both is the introduction, since nobody has ever watched a fishing video for the part where somebody explains who they are.

Start with the answer, then explain it, then stop, which is the opposite of how most people instinctively record.

The test is whether somebody who watched only the first five seconds would have learned the main thing, and if not, restructure.

That structure also survives being cut down for a short-form platform, which is the second use of every clip.

How to make those cut-downs is covered in the shorts piece.

Should you film clients?

Sparingly, and never as the main plan.

Client footage is the most tempting and the least reliable source of video, because it depends on the day, on the person and on their willingness.

It is also the footage most likely to make somebody feel like content on a trip they paid for.

The workable version is a small amount, taken with permission, of moments that would have happened anyway.

The unworkable version is planning a season of content around whether clients cooperate, which puts your marketing at the mercy of strangers' moods.

Build the plan from things you control, meaning the questions, the water and your own hands, and treat client footage as a bonus.

Where a client is genuinely happy to be filmed, that clip is worth more than ten of yours, which is an argument for asking rather than for relying on it.

The permission conversation is set out in the photo permission piece.

What should you never film?

Spots, and anything you would not want quoted back.

Filming a recognisable spot puts it on the internet permanently, and a guide who does that once will hear about it for years.

Frame tight, or frame at the horizon, or film somewhere you do not mind sharing, and be conscious that a background gives away more than people think.

The second category is anything that reads as a promise: a video implying a particular catch is typical becomes an expectation you have to meet.

The third is anything about another operation, however justified it feels at the time.

And the fourth is a fish being handled in a way you would not want a client copying, since the video teaches the handling whether you meant it to or not.

Each of those is a decision made before recording rather than in the edit, which is where they are expensive to fix.

What a video is implicitly claiming is discussed in the testimonials piece.

How do you keep a series going?

Make the format boring and the content specific.

A series survives when the shape of each episode is decided in advance, because then the only decision left is the topic.

The gauge reading each week, the question of the month, the same three shots in the same order: all of that is deliberately dull and it is what makes the series repeatable.

Guides who reinvent the format each time stop within a month, because every clip becomes a project.

Pick a format you can execute on a bad morning, and accept that the ninth episode looking like the first is a feature.

Number them, since a numbered series gives a viewer a reason to look for the next one.

And film two at once whenever the weather is right, so a bad week does not break the run.

How that fits the wider publishing rhythm is covered in the content calendar piece.

What are the twenty questions, roughly?

The same ones, in every market, with local answers.

What should I wear, and what happens if I get it wrong.

How early is early, and what happens if I am late.

Do I need my own gear, and will yours suit somebody my size.

What does the day cost, and what is not included in that.

What happens if the weather turns, and who decides.

Am I going to be sick, and what can I do about it beforehand.

Is my child old enough, and what does the day look like for them.

Every one of those has a local answer only you can give, which is exactly why the video works.

The generic version of each is already on the internet a thousand times, and none of those versions knows your water.

How do you film an answer well?

Answer it to one person, not to an audience.

The difference between a clip that lands and one that does not is usually the address: talking to a camera produces a presenter, and talking to a person produces a guide.

Imagine the specific client who asked the question, and answer them, using the words you would use on the phone.

That removes the introduction, the sign-off and the manner, all of which are things people do when addressing nobody in particular.

Film it where the answer lives: the question about gear at the rod rack, the question about the ramp at the ramp.

Do it in one take and accept the stumble, because a clean stumble reads as real and a smooth read reads as an advertisement.

If it takes four attempts, the answer is not clear enough yet, and the fix is thinking rather than filming.

Watch one back at the end of a season and you will hear yourself getting better, which is the only feedback that matters.

How the same discipline applies on other platforms is covered in the reels piece.

When should you film them?

In the off-season, in batches, on land.

The question videos are the ones that do not depend on conditions, which makes them the perfect winter job.

Film ten in a morning with the same setup, the same clothes and the same background, and you have most of a year.

Doing it that way also means the fishing season is spent fishing rather than filming, which is what the season is for.

Keep the conditions clips for the season, since those are the ones that have to be current.

Publish the batch across months rather than all at once, so the operation looks alive rather than briefly busy.

Anything that dates, meaning prices and rules, gets filmed separately so it can be replaced without redoing the set.

An operation with a filmed batch in February stops worrying about content for the rest of the year.

What else the off-season is for is set out in the winter campaign piece.

Which habits stall a video plan?

Seven, and the first is starting from a blank page.

Asking what would make a good video instead of what somebody asked you last week.

Opening with an introduction, so the answer arrives after everybody has left.

Making every clip a different shape, so each one is a project.

Building the season's plan around client footage you cannot control.

Quoting a number from memory rather than reading the current source.

Leaving an old regulation video up after the rules moved.

And filming a recognisable spot, which is the one mistake you cannot undo.

Where those clips end up is covered in the video strategy piece.

What surprises operators here?

How much publishable data is free and local.

The water service returns readings back to October 2007 from a browser, with no key and no account, and the documentation says so plainly.

The second surprise is that the national boating accident compilation is built from reports filed by the operators themselves, across fifty states, five territories and the District of Columbia.

The third is that a species directory exists covering the managed species most clients half-know something about.

The fourth is that the best video ideas were already written down, by clients, in your messages.

The fifth is that a boring repeatable format outlasts an ambitious one every time.

Taken together, the constraint on video is research rather than talent.

What to do with the footage afterwards is covered in the video testimonials piece.

The plan, in order

List the questions, then film the answers.

Write down every question a client asks, starting today, and keep adding to it.

Pick one station and one parameter on your water, and learn to read it well enough to explain in thirty seconds.

Choose one repeatable format you can execute badly on a bad day, and number the episodes.

Open every clip with the answer, then the explanation, then stop.

Read the current source before quoting any number, and put the date on screen where rules are involved.

Keep client footage as a bonus rather than as the plan.

Never film a recognisable spot, and think about backgrounds before pressing record.

And film two whenever conditions allow, so a week of weather does not end the series.