Video Marketing With YouTube: Your Competition is Already Doing it!

If you write a blog and want to expand your audience, or a business that needs more customers (who doesn’t want that?) you need to create videos for your business and get them online for your customers to see!

If you aren’t doing this and your competitors are, then they are taking customers from you that don’t even know you exist. If they aren’t producing video for YouTube or their own sites then you need to make sure you get those customers they are missing.

Compete.com lists YouTube with 85 million unique visits in July of 2009! Just imagine what it could do for your site if you happened to create a viral video that got 100,000 views… 200,000 views…. 1 million views! A certain percentage of those people would visit your site and a percentage of those would sign up for your newsletter or buy something from you.

Now if my math is right, and you get 1 million views for a video and only 3% of those viewers visit your site that is 30 thousand visitors! If 3% of those signed up or bought something, that is 900 signups or sales! Sound good to you?

I know it’s very difficult to get a video with 1 million views, but take a look at YouTube and see what videos are that popular. Why do they become popular? What is great about them? It’s not the production value, it’s not because they have celebrities or cost a large amount of money to create.

These videos are crazy popular because they are extremely funny, or cool, or amazing for some reason. The videos can be planned out, but wildly popular vidoes are not outwardly selling anything, there is no pitch. If you want a video to have a chance at going viral, you can’t be selling in the video; you must let the video sell for you!

In door-to-door sales years ago we had a saying that you should “sell the sizzle, not the steak”. What does this mean to you? If I want to sell plant food, do I talk about the chemical composition and the different nutrients that are in it? NO! I am not selling them fertilizer, I am selling them BIG TOMATOES, that’s the sizzle!

Give for free something of value in your video. We are a digital camera repair shop and can’t make videos about how to repair every camera, but your customers are looking for something regarding your business, so find out what it is and give it to them!

Teach them something, give them information they are looking for, entertain them. [If you become an authority on your subject your customers will happily tell others about you].

No need to spend thousands on professional video production, but they must be easy to watch and understand.

• Make sure your camcorder or digital camera records good quality video, and no it doesn’t have to be HD quality for YouTube!
• Make sure to have a good quality microphone. If your audio is awful then nobody is going to stick around and watch.
• Use a solid backdrop, don’t show your cluttered basement or office or bedroom unless this is part of your presentation
• Write a script or at least notes regarding what you want to say
• Practice and view your results before publishing it. Make sure to ask for opinions and feedback from others!
• Everyone hates the sound of their own voice; but that is how we hear you so don’t worry, you sound fine.

Just go for it, things will get better as you go!

Now I’m off to try and figure out what my customers are looking for regarding digital camera repair for their Sony, Canon and Nikon cameras and then just give it to them.