I’m a big fan of YouTube for small business marketing. Almost everything I do in my online marketing starts with one, and I want to explain why, and how you can get going even if the thought of being on camera fills you with dread.
Set up your YouTube channel properly
First off, make sure you fill in all the details on your YouTube channel, including your About section, with links back to your website and your social channels. There are videos on YouTube showing you how to do this, so just do a search.
Make sure it’s fully branded. It needs to say all the right things about who you are and what you do, and that branding needs to be consistent with your other social channels, your website, your business card and so on. That’s effectively what branding is all about.
You don’t have to stand in front of a camera
Just remember, you don’t necessarily have to stand in front of a camera and talk. You can talk over a slideshow, which is exactly what I did for the video this post comes from. If you don’t really want your face on camera, it’s a great way of getting started and getting something out there.
I know not everybody is comfortable being recorded. Interestingly enough, a lot of people are fine standing up and doing 60 seconds at a networking event in front of a bunch of strangers, but struggle with sitting in front of their phone, talking to a little dot. It doesn’t matter. The key thing is to make a start, work out what works for you and get going.
Why YouTube is so good for SEO
YouTube videos are incredibly good for SEO when you embed them into your website. Google owns YouTube, Google likes YouTube, and Google looks favourably on websites that have YouTube videos embedded.
My website design business did incredibly well in the search engines. We were usually in the top three for our target phrases, even above much bigger agencies who could spend a lot more time and money on SEO. The difference was that we did video and they didn’t. We had YouTube videos all over our website, including the homepage, and almost every single blog post had a video in it in some way, shape or form. We just did loads with it.
What a lot of people seem to misunderstand is that YouTube for small business is free. You don’t have to pay for the premium version. You can get all of this done without having to stump up any money.
I can’t emphasise this enough. YouTube is an unsung hero of SEO, but hardly anybody uses it properly. That includes a lot of marketing agencies and web designers who know video is important but still don’t do it, and in some cases won’t. Which gives you a great opportunity to stand out.
Want more simple ways to get found on Google?
Read next: Simple SEO Strategies to Boost Your Website Rankings
Create once, use it everywhere
Now, this is where a lot of people underappreciate the value of creating videos first.
You can strip the audio out of a video and turn it into a podcast. I’m relaunching my podcast at the moment, and episode one is the audio from a video, which is embedded in a blog post and then shared out onto social media.
The good thing about turning a video into a blog post is you can splinter chunks of that text out into mini posts for social media. A three to five minute video gives you hundreds of words once it’s transcribed, and there’s an almost endless number of social posts you can pull out of that, each with a link pointing back to the blog post, the video itself or a podcast episode.
And you don’t have to share your blog post or your video just once. You can wait a while and share it again, and again, and again. So if you’ve built up a body of work, say 15 or more videos, you can share one a week and just keep recycling them. To be honest, very few people remember what you shared on social media yesterday. They’re certainly not going to remember what you shared three months ago.
Almost all the emails I send out are repurposed YouTube videos too, usually via a blog post with links pointing back to it. Sometimes I point people to the podcast, but almost always it starts with the video.
I love repurposing video. You’ve only created one piece of content and you’ve reused it for lots of other things. Yes, I’ve had to do the work to get it all created in the first place. But now I don’t have to go looking for content for social media. I don’t have to think. I just pick a blog post or a video and share it.
Related reading:
Read: The Importance of Joined-Up Marketing for Small Businesses
Just make a start
If you’ve not done video before, just make a start. It doesn’t matter what your business does, there’s a YouTube video in it somewhere. Record yourself, or have a go at talking over a PowerPoint presentation. It won’t be great to begin with.
I did my first videos for my website design business in something like 2011, and when I look back now, they make me cringe. They genuinely do. But since then I’ve done hundreds of videos, I’ve got better at it and my editing has improved. The same will happen for you.
I promise you, you’re not going to like the way you look, and you’re certainly not going to like the way you sound to begin with. Do it anyway. You don’t even have to share your first videos. Just get into the hang of talking to your camera or your phone. If you never make a start, you’ll never get good at it.
You don’t need fancy software either. Shotcut is a free video editor, and if you’ve got a Mac, you’ve already got iMovie.
So get on with it. Don’t come up with excuses. Get started and give it a whirl.
And remember, do some marketing every day. Being consistent is the key to marketing success.
Got questions, or want some help putting your first videos together?
Drop me a line on help@smashingselfemployment.com and we’ll arrange a call.
