As my virtual marketing journey continues with ALTru Solution, Cooking with Kelbob, Podcasting, and weekly blogs, my thoughts this week turn to YouTube and how it fits our Optimized Sales Strategy. I have been uploading personal home videos to my private YouTube Channel for years and I previously only had one email address for 27 years so my business and personal YouTube were one in the same. I didn’t own the business, and when the business world started digital marketing, I ran into some embarrassment. A marketing professional who was trying to sell us service found me and my companies’ channel and commented, “Did you know that you have a video about how to clean a beaver and process a trapped beaver pelt on your companies YouTube channel?!” I quickly took it down, opened a personal channel and started posting various home videos. While bootstrapping ALTru Solutions, we created a new channel and migrated pertinent content to the business. Well, some may not call it “pertinent” because Cooking with Kelbob is a bizarre twist on a somewhat disruptive marketing strategy. It’s fun and is drawing a small bit of traffic, mainly on Facebook. I decided to learn more about YouTube marketing and how it may fit. Stick with me as I summarize my findings.
Can you guess where the best place to start research about YouTube is? Big surprise, It’s Youtube! The first hit and highest spot for “how to get more hits on YouTube” is Sean Cannell and his page Think Media. In this brief tutorial, Sean quotes Michael Jordon, “Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.” As an old athlete and 16 handicap golfer, how well I appreciate this quote.
To better appreciate the fundamentals, one must first understand how YouTube (owned by Google) works. You may think its about views but it’s not. It’s all about watch time or minutes viewed. Sean says every YouTube video must have a good Thumbnail, Title, Hook, and Content. It has to happen in this order because of the logical order of operations to click on a viewable video.
1. Thumbnail – Make the thumbnail eye catching with only two to four words. Use words that are different from the title to increase the SEO. If you understand Google bots and SEO, then you totally get YouTube. Make your thumbnails provocative!
2. Title - After you grabbed their eyes with graphics that pop, make the title more descriptive but still keep it short. With our page, we may use Slow Cooker Apples for a thumbnail then draw them in further with, How to Impress with Slow Cooker Apple Butter.
3. Hook – Here is where the rubber meets the road! The Hook has to happen in the first 5 to 10 seconds. When scripting and videoing a segment, spend a good amount of time thinking through this. When test marketing Cooking with Kelbob, Grill Dog Sherman accidentally became the hook! Our 116 lb. German shepherd is always around when anything that has to do with food is in play. He is a natural fit and is now our trusted pet AND business partner who works for scraps! (Shhh- Don’t tell the IRS because he isn’t on the payroll!)
4. Content – Once you have them hooked, it’s important to provide content with some value. It can be funny, informative, spiritual, you name it! The experienced channels such as Think Media have years of experience and held my attention through several fifteen to twenty-minute tutorials. Why? I was interested to learn and they knew it. They positioned their channel exactly where they knew I would find it during my quest for knowledge, success, and service to others.
At the end of his video, Sean Cannell quotes Jim Rohn. “Success is neither magical or mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.”
I’ll summarize with a few notes from a second YouTube video that not so coincidentally came up after the first. LearnLIve.com, and another of Sean’s videos, how to start and grow your YouTube channel from zero – 7 Tips.
1. Start posting video. Don’t get hung up on perfection. Everyone’s original videos are weak compared to where they are today.
2. Tell people you are starting. Social networks of friends and family is a great place to engage others and follow leads from trusted friends, family, and business associates.
3. Create some sort of value proposition. A must for any sales organization who promotes a culture of sales!
4. Engage with your audience before, during, and after. I always post “Cooking with Kelbob” a day early on YouTube and then on Facebook at 12:15 each Wednesday. I also post our Blog on Wednesday morning with our mailing list. The clever folks or those who don’t use Facebook can see the feature before anyone!
5. Focus on the fundamentals. Everything mentioned previously applies here. I am committed to get better and listed this as a strategic goal to close 2018.
6. Provide consistent content. Keep the content relevant, timely, and current. We put so much time into our videos, blogs, and podcasts that we sometimes fail to remember that our audience will only have a three to eight minute attention span.
7. Make your YouTube videos searchable. This involves all of our SEO skills by using tags and keywords. Sunny Lenarduzzi gives a good tip about using a Google extension, Keywords Everywhere to find long tailed words and try to narrow a title and thumb nail. With this extension, you can take a video that only gets 100 searches to 1000 searches per month. If you pre-script a video in the beginning to include key words and topics, you have a much better chance of gaining minutes viewed by ranking higher. Sunny says, “People want to be inspired, entertained, and educated!
Here at ALTru Solution, we are constantly trying to learn and provide value. We hope those who don’t follow us on Facebook will use this opportunity to subscribe to our YouTube Channel. It’s raw but as I mentioned previously, we are committed to working on the fundamentals and improving. Our family thanks you for all of the support!
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