Episode 84: YouTube
In this episode I talk to YouTube expert and online business expert Steve Dotto about how to use YouTube to promote a business or product. He comes from a TV background, having hosted a programme on Canadian television and has since become a speaker and online business man.
How effective is using YouTube to promote a product or business or as a business in itself?
While YouTube isn’t a great social network it is a great discovery engine. Steve states that videos work very well on mobile phones as opposed to blog posts. YouTube has tremendous credibility as people go there to find answers to problems. Views are intentional on YouTube unlike on most other social platforms where they tend to be accidental. It doesn’t play the SEO games that you have on other platforms – it tends to be based on how long people watch the video rather than keywords and content alone as in Google Search.
You famously created a channel charting your growth to 100,000 subscribers – what are the main lessons you learnt doing this?
You don’t have to set up a channel to build up a business, you can host the videos on your own website instead.
If you are interested in building one, the lessons are:
- To produce good quality content
- Have a consistent schedule
- Engaging with your audience – answer comments and interact with viewers
- Position yourself as a community leader
In terms of appearing in front of camera, what is your best advice for people to get over any fear they have of this?
It’s less relevant in terms of how you look now. Due to all this live video going on, it is a lot easier to create video and everyone is doing it now from phones or otherwise. This has made the need to look good much less because we expect people to look worse on video. The main thing is that you need high quality content. People want access to you, warts and all.
How important is it for people to understand and use YouTube features like YouTube cards, annotations and close-captioning?
Steve feels that if you are using a tool you should know how to use it intimately. He says that there aren’t too many tools that YouTube provides. For example YouTube cards provides a way for you to take people from your video to your own website.
Outside YouTube where do you consider the best opportunities to use video are?
If you look at where the investments by the Social Media networks are, then Facebook Live is the place to go. But Steve does restate that most views of videos on social media are accidental – that is they are in the feed. You should go for much shorter bite-sized content not the long-form material you would get on YouTube. You should be driving people to your own website and mailing list.
Where can people find out about you and the things you do?
You can find Steve on his website http://www.dottotech.com/ and he’s dottotech on Twitter.
If you liked this show you might also like Using Instagram to Market Books with Jenn Herman, How to Use Promoted Pins with Alisa Meredith and How to Handle Reviews with Jay Baer
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