Essential Video Marketing Course to Grow ANY Business

1. Introduction to course: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, firstly, I want to thank you so much for giving me the time of day to check out my video marketing course. I have been in the space for quite a few years, and this is a complete culmination of all of my knowledge of video marketing strategies that I have seen work personally and by other people to grow your business and your personal brand online. So let's jump in. So what we're going to cover here today in this course is why video marketing is so important, especially in today's age. Overcome any fears associated with just getting started. I know. Sometimes it could be a little frightening to get in front of the camera for the first time and start recording yourself. I'm gonna hopefully help you overcome those fears. I'm going to show you what equipment that you need to get started. It really is a lot less than you think. You don't need $10,000 cameras. You don't need the best audio recording equipment. You can get started with video marketing. Very easy. Very quick. I'm going to show you strategies and fundamentals for video marketing success that I have both personally tested and have seen work time and time again. These are tried and true strategies. I'm gonna show you some publishing strategies. So where you can publish your videos and really repurpose all of your content to reach not just a wide variety of people but a specific audience set that you're trying to reach and of course, how to analyze theory results and the analytics so you can see what's working, what you need to do more of what you should do a little bit less up. 2. Who I am: so before I get into the nitty gritty video and digital marketing strategy is I want to introduce you to me. My name's Austin Armstrong and I've been doing digital marketing for about 13 years now. I started back on my space of any of your Remember that platform back in the day, and I was what was considered an influencer before that term was really coined, um, had several 100,000 people on there that I was able to use and leverage for digital marketing means I have since been working for the last 4.5 years for a company called Therapy Cable. We are a video and digital marketing company that specializes in the health care industry, So we work with addiction treatment centers, nonprofits, medical facilities, individual, a therapist, doctors, psychologists You name it to really help grow their business and their personal brands online, both from video marketing as well as just digital marketing strategy as well. It is truly a passion of mine. I just love digital marketing strategy. I read about it on. I try to put the best quality content out there for you and for everyone that sees all of my content as I want to provide you with as much value as possible. So I truly hope that this course is valuable to you, that you take something away from it, that you learn many new things and that by the end of this course, you're able to directly implement them into your own strategy so that you can fit your own personal or business goals online. 3. Video marketing statistics: So here's a couple pretty incredible statistics about video marketing that I'd like you to know about, just to show you the sheer power that you can tap into by doing some of these things. Over 500 million people are watching videos on Facebook every day. Now I want you to stop and think about this for a little bit. If you are a Facebook user, odds are you probably are. Think about the last time you scrolled through your newsfeed. Or maybe if you're if you're have this course up in one tab, you have Facebook open in another tab, take a quick break process video and scroll through your newsfeed on Facebook. Tell me how many of those posts are video? My guess is it's quite a few, I know on my personal account. It's like every third post is a video. It's It's become crazy over the last couple of years with how much video content there actually is. Almost 6,000,000,000 with a B. Videos are watched on YouTube every single day. That is a mind boggling number. Interestingly enough, YouTube is the second most popular search engine next to Google. Google owns YouTube Therefore, it's often used as a search engine. People search for things how to do things. Tutorials, reviews on boxing. You name it on YouTube to find out how to do or how to learn a new thing. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Think about how many cat videos that is and how much crappy content that IHS, as well as high quality content as well. YouTube gets over 30 million visitors per day and Facebook live videos are watched three times longer than videos that are not live anymore. I'm going to go into a little bit of live video strategy later on in this course, but I want to really emphasize of this because live is such a new technological advancement across every social media platform. They are prioritizing this content. So if you are not doing live video, you absolutely need to start incorporating that into your strategy. I'm gonna show you again a couple ideas of how on what you can do live streaming videos about. But I really want you to get this and understand this, that you should be doing a live streaming videos 4. Example of how video marketing can work for you: okay. I wanted to show you a really cool end of the line example of how you can leverage YouTube and Google Teoh, get your business out there or get your personal brand out there. Whatever your objectives are, um, this is moving a little bit forward, and then we're gonna kind of reverse engineer how to get to this point. But I wanted to show you some really cool results that I was able to achieve. So this is a This is one of our clients on addiction treatment facility. We create video content with them, some of the professionals in their for YouTube, for Facebook on other social media platforms. Now, as I said briefly before because Google owns YouTube, Ghoul likes to index YouTube videos directly into their search engines. Now a So you can see here these air both on the first pages of Google. Now, what we were able to do here is analyze search terms and create videos around those terms that ranked very well into the first page of Google. And then we were able to add the phone number into the description of that video. So think about this. If you're familiar with search engine optimization whatsoever. It typically takes several weeks to several months to even start ranking for a specific page. Now, a little work around or a hack for that is if you create a really high quality, I want to emphasise high quality, their piece of content that answers the searcher's intent. You will be able to rank a video in the search results of Google much quicker. I have actually I I b s you not. I have seen results show up on the first or second page of Google within 15 minutes of publishing and optimizing that video. Think about how powerful that is to be able to get your phone number on the first page of Google within minutes. Having toe complete bypass s CEO. This is incredible moment in our lives to be ableto leverage this. Now I'm gonna show you exactly how this works later. But this is a great way you can blanket your industry based on what your potential clients or whoever your objective is to reach online on get all kinds of phone calls. We used this to generate tons of leads for the treatment center and I get e mails like this as well. So people watch our videos, they come to our website, they fill out a form and this email that you can see her actually turned into a client, which is pretty powerful. 5. What you need to get started: So I want to start this section with a motivational quote from the late great Zig Ziglar. You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. This goes with everything in life, all aspects of life. Don't expect to be perfect on that. It's OK not to be. You will find your voice. You will find your message. You will find out what works for your audience and you'll get better as you do it. The more you do it, the more repetition the better you will get. Just start. Just begin. Just get started. I cannot drill that enough. Don't postpone anything. Just jump in. So here's exactly what you need to get started to create a video marketing campaign. Before we get into that I want I want to sidetrack here and show you really explain this image here. This, if you're not aware, is uh uh she's dubbed Chewbacca Lady, this is a little bit older video. Now this came out right around the time that live streaming on Facebook became a new feature that was readily available and accessible to the masses. This lady, all she did was buy these this Chewbacca mask at Kohl's for the, um, a recent Star Wars film that came out. What the mask does is when you open your mouth. It makes that are sound. It's really cheesy. It's really silly. But it brought her so much joy that she started to record herself. She started toe livestream, so she all she had to do. This was her cell phone. She went on Facebook. She started live streaming kind of reviewing and talking about the mask that she's. She's so happy she can't believe it. She's telling her friends and family, That's not me. Making the sound. It's the mask. She's just so genuinely happy. It's hilarious and connected with so many people in in just such an amazing way. Well, if you can see the results on the slide here, this one single video generated over 170 million views. It got over three million reactions and three, almost 3.5 1,000,000 people shared this video from this one simple live stream that was only taken on her cell phone in her car. She was able to get this crazy amount of reach, which resulted in uh, she was on the Ellen DeGeneres Show It Cole's ended up paying her like $100,000. She is now an influencer on Facebook as well. So she has close to a 1,000,000 followers on Facebook, and she's She, she's now said she can leverage that that following to do anything that she wants in life and generate new profit. So from this one silly little video she is now set for life is think about how powerful that IHS. So what do you need to get started? The willingness to just try just a zig Ziegler taught us and slide before this. Just give it a go. If it's a thud, you can always delete the video people will forget. Don't worry about it. You'll get better. The more that you dio your message and your type of video. This is extremely important to be able to, to know who to connect with online and to be able to connect with them in the first place. So I'm going to show you a couple strategies and types of videos that you can try Teoh use and incorporate later on in this workshop. But it's really important to have your message and the type of video down. So a camera, uh, you don't need a crazy cinema quality shoulder mounted camera to do video marketing. As you can see in this example here, you can literally get started with your cell phone. You can live stream you can record on your selfie cam. Most sell. Most smartphones now have really high quality cameras built in. A lot of them are four K, if not 10. 80 p is good as well. This is a great starting point for anyone to just give it a shot. Just start trying now. Of course, if you want something a little higher quality, you can get entry level pointing click or DSLR cameras for several 100 bucks, which are very high quality and gives you a lot more of customization, all options. I'm a lot more freedom, but you can literally just start with your cell phone tripod. Now this is essential for stabilization. You can get tripod specifically for your cell phone as well. A standalone cameras as well. Of course, this is a very cheap option. You can get tripods on Amazon or at WalMart Target. You name it for as low as $10 on. Then there's, of course, more expensive brands that were made with better quality equipment. But just get started. You can buy one for a very affordable price. Good lighting. This is essential as well. You want to make sure that people watching your videos and your content can actually see you and see what you're talking about. What's going on? If I were to turn all the lights off in here, you would just see a pretty dark video on. Just hear some audio and wonder where, where the where is that coming from? Uh, the attention span of of humans is very low because of how much content there is out there . There's, as I said earlier, there's so many videos on on Facebook, and on every social media platform you want to be able to keep their attention. You have to maximize everything that you do, lady included, even if your content and what you're talking about is incredible and very valuable. If they can't see or they're struggling toe, look at it, they're gonna leave your video and they're going to go to someone else's. That maybe is worse quality. Make sure you pay attention to the lighting and a good setting. Now this what I mean by a good setting is, is a good background, something that's interesting as well. Now as you can see over here with Jubak a lady, she was able to make it work in her car. I don't always recommend the car, but sometimes it can work for you, especially in this case. You don't want to do a video in front of a blank white wall. That's incredibly boring. Mix it up. Throw a plant in there through a picture up on the wall, standing or standard. Sit in front of a green screen so that you can create a custom background behind you. Just mix it up a little bit, so it's not. It's not boring. It's not stale. Give the audience something toe look at, so it adds a little bit of depth to the video in a quiet room or really good audio equipment. Nothing can take your concentration out of a really high quality video like the background sound of someone flushing a toilet, so make sure you're in a very quiet office or building or space or whatever. Avoid as much wind noise as you possibly can avoid any background distractions, noise or what not so the viewer can pay attention to you and what you're talking about or what you're showing them, or you can if you if you don't have the best environment to record, you can supplement this with a very high quality recorder as well. Shotgun microphones can be purchased for around $100 or so. This picks up directional audio content, which will be able to kind of, uh, dull out the other background sounds and it's, ah, a lot less apparent. 6. Types of videos that do well: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, So now we're going to get into some of the fun stuff, the types of videos that consistently do really well online. You can take all of these models and approach it with whatever you're proud of your service . Whatever you're trying to pitch is and it's statistically operates and connects with people really well. So give all of these a shot, See what works for you. See what works with your audience. Rinse and repeat toe unboxing and demo videos. Record yourself opening and testing products as could be your own product or anything really that you want. I recently just purchased the Oculus go. I didn't unboxing demo of it. You can do the same thing if, uh, if you're purchasing a new book or a new, um, item for your industry or if it's something that that you have created yourself. If you're selling a product, if you're selling a book, you can do a complete demonstration about that product from the packaging. Unboxing it with the packaging is like what all the features air like how it feels, um, etcetera. People love to watch these things. They're basically reviews of the product before they make the purchase online. This is incredibly powerful, and a lot of people search for these because it's helpful and they want to know what it's actually like before they pay money for it. Educational informational videos are highly recommend these for a long term approach. The examples I showed in a previous slide of the videos indexed in Google Search engine our educational informational videos. These are just discussing your insight onto ah, particular topic about your industry or whatever your knowledge is. Look into what frequent questions. You get any objective up any objections that you receive from people or or thoughts, anything that people want to know more about your industry, whether you think it's common knowledge or not. Great overview videos about these that that sustain and live as a pretty much a second employee for you. Their works around the clock so that when people are searching for content or for videos online, you're there answering that specifically and then you can filtered into phone calls, emails, your website, whatever you like. Behind the scenes, everybody likes that all access pass. Don't you think about going to ah, concert and getting getting that backstage pass watching video behind the band playing. That's pretty incredible. Um, you can do this, uh, in any industry, take viewers into your facility and show them things that typically wouldn't get to see. Um, you can show them how your business operates, so you're not just a brand, and you're not just that surface value, but they get a better sense of what you're all about and how you operate. This is great live streaming material as well. Give this a shot. Testimonials, testimonials, testimonials, testimonials. No matter what you're selling, um, if it's if it's your expertise, if it's your service. If it's a product, get testimonials. This is the best thing that you can do on line. The best brand evangelists or people that, um, that are happy with your products writing are creating a video review that you can repurpose and put it on social media. You can put it on your website, and this will help convince new paying clients facility and services overview so similar to behind the scenes, but more focused on exactly what you do or what you offer as a business or personal brand. So just create a narrated video highlighting your beautiful office, your location, the surrounding area and what exactly you do. Quantify all the services that you offer if you're ah, mental health facility or an addiction treatment center, because that's often when I work with I just talk about talk about all the services or other levels of care that you offer and live videos. I'm gonna keep drilling this into your head until you start doing it. Do live videos livestream yourself, Cover an event. Goto on event. If you're going to, ah, networking events say, Hey, my name's Austin and I'm here at this event right now and here's what I'm gonna learn. This will encourage Aton of engagement with your viewers, which is what you want. What you can do for live videos is live Q and A's. You can directly communicate with your audience. That way, you can talk about a certain topic, maybe a trending topic on ask for user feedback and engagement 7. Video keyword research: Okay, Video topic research. This is how, in the previous slide towards the beginning, showing those videos that were indexed into Google. And I'm gonna show you several different ways that you can find these search terms to create video content around that you know, your audience is looking for This is extremely powerful strategy that you should implement because this is really an instant growth hack online because you can leverage the amount of viewers that are searching for a particular search term or piece of content in your industry, or niche your field of expertise and find the gaps. Find what can be improved upon and then do that. So you have a much like a much more likeliness of actually showing up for that content. So, first and foremost Google related searches, you can go to Google type in a loose industry term. In this example here I just typed in an addiction. I went to google dot com I typed in addiction, or you can type in mental health or you can talk type end pizza. Um, whatever it is you're selling, start, start broad, start very broad and then scroll down to the bottom of Google. Google will actually show you searches related to that broad term that you searched for. So you can go through these and you can kind of see that these are things that you might be able to talk about. So addiction, meaning, causes of addiction, types of addiction, drug addiction articles? Maybe not that one list of addictions drug addiction, definition, causes of drug addiction. These are all videos or topics, pieces of content that you can create because you know that people are searching for them because Google is telling you that their search, their searches for these you can kind of go through all of these keyword terms. See what people are searching for. Find a lack of content or lack of quality content that you think that you can expand on and provide MAWR expertise where mawr inside on and then in Put that into your content strategy . Now I'm gonna show you how to take this to the next level. A swell. So there's a free chrome extension tool. I know it's on chrome because that's what I use it for. It might be on other browsers, but I cannot deny or confirm that I'm just gonna go off of Google Chrome. It's called keywords everywhere. What it does is it actually shows you the search volume. How many people on a monthly basis are searching for these terms? So, as you can see here, it shows you the amount of searches per month, the advertising cost. And then this third number over here is the competition. So the higher the number, the higher the competition is on that particular term. Uh, so you can see, um, addiction meaning, for instance, has 22,200 searches per month. This is a very high advertising cost, so it's gonna be a little more competitive with that being said. There's probably quite a bit of content already around that title of addiction, meaning so I would find that happy middle ground of other things in here. So we see causes of addiction gets 2400 searches per month. If we look at causes of addiction here, we can see that it still gets 2400 searches every single month. But it's a lower class of advertising in a lower competition rate, so it's much more likely that your truly valuable piece of content will be able to be found and indexed on that search term. And then that I queued down here is another rate. I cannot say how valuable this tool is. Its ah free chrome extension. Tulloch's well that integrates directly into YouTube, so it will show you a ton of a great Insight analytics directly onto your YouTube video rather than diving into the analytic section. And I'm gonna jump a little bit more into Vidic you later. But I wanted to show that it is a great way and a great tool. Teoh. Get keyword research that you can create video content around. Another great tool it's not listed on here is a little pit of a bonus piece Is Google keyword planner. So if you go to adwords dot google dot com on log in, it'll ask you the law again. It's entirely free to use in the tool section. There is a tool called keyword planner so you can basically do this exact same method within Google, and I'll show you the search results that Google is showing you eso. You can type in addiction meaning, for instance, and then what it will do is it will show you relevant searches around that same topic and how many searches per month they get in the same additional advertising costs and competition so you can see what's what's more competitive and what there's kind of Ah, a little bit of a lack for on you can do this and create a huge index of video ideas that you can talk about So, you know, if you put in addiction meaning it might also show causes of addiction. Or it might show specific searches like, um, 10 causes of of addiction, I don't know. It's an example mess around in their Google keyword planner. It will show you a ton of great keywords that you can start to immediately create video content around that you know people are searching for and that you have high likeliness of showing up on that particular search term. 8. How to optimize your videos to be found: Okay, here are a couple things that I want you to focus on to optimize your videos to maximize the potential that they show up in front of the right people when they're searching for it . So, first and foremost, make sure you know what the keyword is that you want to rank for before you even record the video. You want to do this research as I showed in the previous slide, Feel free to go back if you want, but, um, that target keyword research using Google using keywords everywhere using Google keyword planner using video I Q. Make sure you know the specific search term that you want to rank for for YouTube. Facebook three title And the tags are the most important, followed by the description. So you want to make sure you were title of your video is optimized around that keyword that you're searching for. Then you want to put that tag into the, um, the tag section of that video, both on YouTube and on Instagram. I'm sorry on Facebook and on YouTube and then write a description around the variations of that particular keyword that you want to show up for and then use those variation terminologies as different tags for the video as well. You want to include your target keyword in the title and video tags for Instagram. You want to use hashtags, so if you don't use instagram or you're not that familiar rather than a tagging system, all of the content is indexed as hashtags. That's the pound symbol and then so it's pound symbol key word on, then a lot of different variations. Like I said again, you want to research and incorporate variations of your target keyword into your video tags and the video description as well be descriptive right out. A long description. Come up with a bunch of variation keyword tags that people might be searching for to find your video and incorporate all of that and finally create a custom thumbnail and change the file name to your keyword. Now again, like the video file name. I've seen this. I've seen people swear by it. I've seen people say it doesn't work. Why not optimize around it just toe to see if it offers any sort of boost for you? It doesn't take a lot of extra time. It's just naming the the individual file off the thumb knee. Thumbnail the target keyword changed the name of it. Upload that manually, and it will really help you. Not only that, Google images actually indexes YouTube thumbnails, so if you're going off of a specific keyword, this will help Google images rank the thumbnail, attached your video and then drive just a little bit of extra traffic to that video as well . 9. Recording day checklist: Okay, so you have your type of video ready. You have your message. You've done your keyword research on what you want to record of all your equipment. Here is the recording date checklist. Make sure you use this checklist so that you know, you have everything that you're ready to dio you're ready to have so that you can knock that video out of the park message and idea down. You have all of your equipment yet? Camera. Gonna make sure your battery life eyes charged your batteries full charge. Get a backup battery if you need on storage space are plentiful. So you have multiple SD cards or your phone's not bogged up with the cat pictures and selfies. You have your tripod and you have your audio equipment. Make sure you have a good background and a good setting to record in and a big smile. Remember, You want to do this, You want to grow your business or grow your personal brand online. You got to just get started. Smile, smile 10. What time to post: Okay, So where and what time to post your videos on different social media networks? So here is a pretty helpful chart that you can stick to toe upload all of your content so that you can make sure that you reach the most amount of people these air prime hours when there's the most interaction and engagement on each of these platforms. So, as you can see here on Facebook from 1 to 4 p.m. Is the best time when most people are active on that platform. On YouTube. Mid afternoon again. 12 to 4 p.m. Um, Instagram again. It needs to be under 60 seconds in length. Instagram tends to have a late night early morning user base. So after nine PM up until about 8 a.m. So before they go to sleep before they go to work is , uh, eyes when the most interactions on instagram are, and then on Twitter during lunch hours as well. 12 toe, 1 p.m. And then after work at 6 to 7 p.m. you can try different times. Pay attention to the analytics on your social media accounts. This will show you where, um and what time you're getting the most interactions on your videos and on your content as well. This is a general rule of thumb, but depending on who your audience is, these times might very a little bit. 11. What you need to pay attention to about editing: the power of video editing gives you total control over your videos and everything that you dio both video and audio. So let's jump into some of the things that you should pay attention to while you're editing your videos. So what software you choose to use four year editing is very important. I use Adobe Premiere. It is. It's a very powerful platform that gives you total control over everything. It's, uh, it's it is paid, but it's fairly cheap. You can get student discounts or if you work for a nonprofit or if you, if you just look for discounts online, I'm sure that you can find them. I highly recommend it. It's used for everything from independent projects, too, UM, feature length films, so there's a lot that you can do within it. If you don't want to use a any budget towards editing off the bat, there are plenty of free Softwares, one that I have used a little bit and I recommend is called Open Shot. You can download this from their website on. It will give you a lot of basic controls for audio editing, the video transitions you can put in graphics. You can put in images and what not. It gives you a lot of creative freedom, and it's a great starting peace, so you can make sure that you like to do the editing anyway. If you're just recording on your cell phone, you can. If you're using in on iPhone, you can use, um, I movie. It's a great editing software on the phone. There's a couple great ones on Android phones as well. You can literally go to the Google Play Store and search video editor and you'll get a list of a 1,000,000 of them. So the length of video is very important as well, especially when you're deciding where you want Teoh upload that content. So, for example, say that you are recording an event. It's It's a several hour long events on your covering, the entire thing from start to finish. Now there's a couple things that you can do here say you add it, all of that content down, and you have an hour long video of the event. Now you don't necessarily want to put that on every single platform, but there's things that you can do to maximize the reach and maximized the use of that particular recording. So what I would do is put that entire recording onto YouTube. YouTube loves long form content. People go there expecting long form content, so it's OK to put in a long video like that one there. Now. What else you can do is you can really come up with a summary video of the entire event, maybe the highlights or speakers or anything in this example. Andi, trim it down to maybe three minutes. If you can get it down that that low are five minutes. Maybe if you really can't dream a lot on bats a great piece that you can put on toe Facebook. You can upload that on toe length in, uh, whatever other platform that you want to use. You can put that video on there and then in the video on the description of the video, you can say if you'd like to watch the entire gala, click the link and then you can drive that traffic to the YouTube video as well so they can view the entire thing. Another thing you can do to condense even more as you can create a one minute clip takes take a couple different clips from the event itself create a less than 62nd video, and that will allow you to upload it onto instagram. And then you can funnel viewers that way. The speech pattern is another thing that you'll pay attention to, the more you edit yourself. Memorial noticed the US, the thumbs staring off into space to get the answer. You're looking for the weird hand placements that you don't know what to dio with your hands. You'll notice a lot of things and odd habits that you or other people have that you may not even be aware of until you start editing them. Eso it's It's a great way to kind of figure out what you can do to improve in the future on . If you're a pretty savvy editor, you can cut a lot of those things out as well. You can cut the US out if your head's in the same places and people won't really notice. Pay attention to the speech patterns. Adding visuals and text is another incredible way to encourage engagement and increased time spent on your video as well, so you can do things like lower thirds, which is or title cards for the video itself. What the videos is abound, or a lower third introducing the person or the person speaking, maybe credentials, and you can mix in different images here and there. It really changes up the content that the individuals watching. So it's not boring talking head the entire time like this with no camera at it, sort no change of anything. You're gonna lose your audience that way. Another thing is to incorporate text. So on Facebook, specifically when you're scrolling through your newsfeed. Sometimes there's videos on there that you want to see on watch and are interested in. But maybe you're not in an environment that you can listen toe audio at that time. Like if you're taking a little break and you're at your desk with a couple co workers around you. When you're scrolling through your phone on Facebook, you might not want them to know what you're looking at. Or if you're in school, for instance, you might not be in an environment that that audio's is acceptable, so what you can do is you can put in cards with text on it. You can add your own subtitles so people can follow along, and it's a great way to to reach those extra people. That may not be an environment. That audio is appropriate. And lastly, this is a little bit of an insider trick. But I heard pros and cons on both regards to just just like we did on thumbnails named the video file the actual name of the key word that you're trying to rank it for. So after you export your video, changed the file name to the key word you're trying to rank for and then upload that onto the platform. I've heard this does work for some people. I've heard it doesn't work at all from others. It takes no additional time, so why not give it a shot? 12. Why thumbnails are important and how to create them: so some nails are a very important thing to include in your video marketing strategy as well. For quite a few reasons. Here's a couple examples of really high quality engaging and eye catching thumbnails. So thumbnails air really the first barrier to entry for your video. No matter what you're searching for online your your eye balls air naturally driven to catchy things. Yeah, they grab your attention if it's just a still frame from your video, and it's just a odd shot of you looking at a weird way with the with and, you know, with a non engaging background setting, people aren't going to click on that. A supposed toe look at these examples here. They all include large text that's descriptive about what the videos about. They all include the individual. They all include the person. Unless you're Pew Die pie down here, who just does. Look at me. Um, when you get toe 60 million subscribers, you can pretty much do anything that you like. But all of these examples here are very descriptive. They complement the video title a compliment with the videos abound, and they showed the individual in a little bit of personality of who they can expect to connect with for clicking on that video. So how can you create really good thumbnails like this? Okay, so how can you create really good thumbnails like this? Well, can va dot com c a n v a dot com is a great free platform that I cannot recommend enough. It's basically online photo shop, but way easier to use. Everything's a dragon drop editor. They actually have a specific default template size for YouTube thumbnails that you could use. You can create something like most of these very easily on their dragging squares or circles or rectangles in putting text putting in a picture of yourself. It's very simple to create pretty much any of these in that platform. If you have VIN I Q or to Buddy installed. These are chrome extension tools that link up to your YouTube. You can actually create thumbnails right from the video editing platform, the video editing area. So after you upload your on video, you can take a still frame shot from your video. Uh, you know, find a find an interesting point within the video, and then you can overlay shapes and text so you can do something very easily, like this one in the upper left hand corner thumbnails will that will engage viewers. You can take a still frame from the video that maybe has a photo of you, and then you can put a couple of different rectangles or a big square that's an engaging color and then puts him text over it as well. And it's It's very simple to do. It takes no additional time and will dramatically increase the click through rate on your video drive more viewers. 13. Where to distribute: Okay, So where do you distribute your video? So everything's finished. You have your awesome thumbnail. Uh, you have your video shot. It's edited. It's up on YouTube. Uh, you've published it. It's live. Now what? Can you expect? A 1,000,000 of a 1,000,000 people to come to your video instantly? Well, probably not. Unless you have a large following on there already. And then in that case, if you have a very dedicated audience, that might be all you need to dio. But if you're just getting started, you're gonna need to leverage other distribution channels to give it a kick start. I've recently learned as well and, uh, incorporated this into my my strategy when you publish a video onto YouTube specifically that 1st 24 to 48 hours is is so key for the longevity and up the life of that video. If you're able to drive decent amount of people that are interacting with your video, stick around for a period of time like it leave comments, it will significantly hope it's organic ranking so that it continues to show over time rather than if you upload it, you don't do anything, and then you share it on your Facebook. Ah, week later, it's going to significantly hurt. It's organic ranking factor now. It doesn't kill it. You can bring videos back to life, but might as well maximize the strategy off the bad to ensure that it's gonna have a better chance of ranking and showing sustained growth overall. So these air a couple platforms that you can leverage to get a decent amount of use pretty quickly. So an email list. If you don't have an email list yet, start building that. That's another day, another topic. But if you do have ah, collection of emails, maybe you have 50. Maybe have a couple 100. Maybe have a couple 1000 or 10,000 if you're lucky. If you've been doing this for a while, chances are if they're subscribed to your email, your newsletter that they're interested in the type of content that you're creating. This is a highly curated group of individuals, So if you're creating videos for them, put that video in an email. Put that link to the video in an email and send it to them because they're more likely toe watch your videos for a longer period of time and engage with those videos. Other social media accounts. So if you posting that video on YouTube, share that link onto Twitter until linked in onto Facebook, etcetera. Now, of course, the platforms like native content, so I would mess around with that a little bit. But why not spread it out? You can even test on. One day you can post a link to the YouTube video. When the next you can natively upload it. Try these. Why not? You can leverage the fans that you have on the other social media platforms to drive them to another platform. Of course, you want to embed them on your website. Maybe you have a videos page. Or maybe you create standalone landing pages or blogged articles that you have, ah, piece of video that compliments that are highlights it. Embed that video onto your website to help organically boost that page. There's a lot of positive ranking factors to having videos on landing pages on your website . Facebook groups leverage the hell out of these. No matter what industry you're in, there is most likely a Facebook group for them. What Facebook groups are if you are not a member of them or you don't leverage them or a collection of like minded people around a particular topic. There's even local groups. If you're in a town or a city or a state, um, share your link into these subgroups toe. Make sure that you reach a like minded, interested group of people. You'd be surprised how many people in these interested groups will interact and watch your video content for a longer period of time. Niche forums and subreddit. It's similar to Facebook groups, really Facebook groups and Subreddit R evolutions of niche forums. These are collections of people that have banded together around a like minded topic or interest. So you confined niche forums online by searching Industry Forum Industry Forum on It will show you a list of active forums that people are actively posting one. You can sign up on their share your videos on there, similar toe that is subreddit. It's or on reddit dot com. There are subreddit. It's for virtually any topic industry product, anything that you can think of on there that has a dedicated collection or group of people that are following it. So here's an example of subreddit for instance, one of our clients is an addiction treatment facility, and we just created a video about benzo benzodiazepine detox in Withdraw on. I posted it on the drugs Subreddit. So it's Ah, it's a It's a subreddit r collection of group of people that are interested in learning information about drugs. As you can see here, this post of my video link got 934 views. It got 31 up votes. That means 31 people clicked. Basically like more of those up votes you get the more, uh, higher ranks you on that individual forum when there's quite a lot of comments on here. S 0 934 people viewed my video, uh, hefty percentage of them actually clicked and watch the video. And this really helped the ongoing life of that video. Ah, stumble on. This is another. It's kind of like a boredom based website where people go on stumble on dot com. They put in their interests on particular topics. On they click stumble to see content around that particular topic that they're interested in. Well, you can sign up for a stumble on account, and you can add your own content and index it under a specific field. This is a great way to drive a ton of viewers to your content. This works not only on video but on blogged articles as well and, of course, paid advertising. So all of the previous strategies on here are organic strategies. You can also, of course, implement a small or high paying budget to target a specific individual, a group of individuals, a target area, um, etcetera on Dr Tons of use really quick if you don't mind spending the money. 14. Fun video concepts to incorporate: Okay, so here's a couple fun concepts that you canning, incorporate and really used to test your audience to see what connects with them on what they like, what they engage with. This is a great way to drive more views, get more time spent watching the actual video and get returned watchers, for that matter so they keep coming back to your future content. So, firstly, you want to engage your audience on ask them to participate in the content by asking them questions, asking them to leave Commons with their thoughts. You should really be engaging with your audience no matter what you're doing, whether it's a blogger article or if it's an image asked their opinion. User engagement is is key for ranking and promoting your content, its social media social network that you're posting this content on, keyword their social. You should be engaging with them. There's also a great livestream strategy as well. You're able to directly communicate with your audience and ask them for their feedback and ask them what questions they have tying onto that live Q and A's. Make sure you're live streaming again. If you are not live streaming, just do it. Just whip out your phone. Start live streaming. Do it on Facebook one day. Do it on YouTube another day. Do it on Instagram. Do it on periscope for Twitter. Just just start live streaming This again allows you to directly communicate with your consumers, your buyers, your clients, your potential future clients and hear exactly what they want to know. Maybe they have questions. Maybe they have concerns or thoughts or criticism. Or maybe they're a huge brand evangelists for you, and they just finally want to communicate with you and say Thank you. Open up that portal For them, technology is an amazing thing, and we should be taking advantage of this. This can really help increase your customer service. So trying different styles like we went over earlier. Try the Unboxing videos, trying taking them behind the scenes. Do more live streams. Try just every different type of style video that you can think of until you kind of hit that vein and and see what connects with your audience. Pay attention to the views on each of your video. If you notice one style of video gets several times more views, try it again. Try that same concept again. And that's how you're gonna figure out exactly what your audience like so that you can do more of it and less of what they don't like shoutouts and success stories. This is another amazing way to grow your network of people. Grow your tribe, shout out people that no matter what you do or what industry you're in or what product you're selling, um, I assume that you're in this industry to somewhat help or cause ease or cause someone to think differently or anything. Shout out some people people love to be heard. Ask them to send you an email or a video, uh, getting their opinions on your service or your product and then shout them out, tweet them posted on your page. Do a video on YouTube. Um, saying Hey, I acknowledge you look a what success this individuals have. This will help fuel further people in try adding comedy bill silly here and there. You'd be amazed how much that incorporating comedy can actually increase the watch time and return viewership as well and chronicle your journey. So if you are learning a new skill or you're painting your office or you're moving across country, do what's called a vlog or chronicle all of the different steps. You're essentially creating an ongoing story and putting that on lines that people have a reason to come back, come back, so they want to see what happens. 15. Helpful tools to grow your youtube channel: all right. I briefly want to talk about a couple great tools on chrome extensions that you can use to boost your ranking on have a lot more success specifically on YouTube. One I mentioned earlier have ID I. Q. I want to talk a little bit more about this tool. It's it's amazing. It's free to use. And then there's, of course, a paid version as well. But it gives you a ton of very valuable insight into your own videos as well as competitors videos. That's one of the main reasons I love this so much. Is that so? When you have it installed here, you can actually it it opens up all of these tabs over here of of information. All of this information that I have circled in blue is not accessible if you just have a YouTube account. But if you install this video, I Q for free, it shows you and you can see all of this information for competitors, videos or really any channels. Well, think about that so you can see the estimated earnings from AdSense that the individual channel is making. Um, how many daily views how many Total channel views three ranking for specific tags, which is very powerful and the tags that they're using so you can see what the top ranking videos are for particular searches and what tags that they're using. Think about this for a second. If you have you searched for something in YouTube and you have, like you active, you can see exactly how and why. That video is ranking first and you can copy it and you can do it better yourself, and you can outrank them because of that. That's incredible. So, yeah, you can. You can access all this information. There's there's a a bunch of great things on here to like where the videos are embedded outside of the website so you can see what websites are driving views to their individual videos, as well as your own videos and a whole bunch of other great things. There's also some, uh, keyword research options that you can use through this asses Well, you can type in broad keywords, and it will show you some suggested ones, and you can create thumbnails through this platform as well. So as soon as you upload video, they have an option to create your own thumbnail, and you can do that. I highly recommend this. It's a free tool to install another one I really love, and I use both of these on a daily basis. But to Buddy, so too, Buddy offers a lot of the same features as well. So insider information, um, tanks that are being used but thumbnail creation as well. But what I really like about two buddy and what makes it stand apart is all of the bulk options that they include. There's also a lot of tutorial videos in there for best practices to grow your YouTube channel. They have very popular and successful YouTube creators checklists. So you can kind of find some checklists from very successful people what they do to make sure that their videos rank, uh, and continue to rank over time. And then there's some incredible features that are bulk related, like editing the the info cards. So if you can see this in this video, there's this little I appear, which, if you're familiar, it's basically a call to action on your videos. So when people are watching your videos, you can trigger this little action within YouTube, and it drives them to another one of your videos. Now, on YouTube itself, this is a manual thing that you have to dio on each video. What you can do if you have the paid version of too Buddy is you can update all of those cards simultaneously. So, for instance, on this channel I have about 500 different videos. It would take me forever to manually go through each one and update that card through to Buddy. I can immediately drive all of those cards to a new video that I upload, and it's called like a little velocity push, basically, so you can take all of your already ranking videos. They're driving views and point them to a video, and that helps it organically rank. Because there's all of these other, um, sources that air pointing to your new video. And then every time you uploaded a new video, you can you can point to that new video as well, and it's a very powerful strategy. You can also bulk ah blowed content that you have on YouTube over to your Facebook account , which is super powerful as well. I believe the Max currently is ah 100 videos, so If you have up to 100 videos on YouTube, you can tell to Buddy to take those 100 videos and upload them onto your Facebook account. That's incredible to there's a ton of other great tools. There's promotional links that you can use similar toe Betley trackable links and you can distribute those out and it shows you how many people clicked on those links. And there's just a whole bunch of up amazing features that they offer. Both have free versions. I definitely recommend checking both of the free versions out. See which one you like, if any. If you were to go with one paid, I recommend to Buddy, uh, as the top one to go to. 16. Tracking and analyzing results: so tracking and analyzing the results of your videos is so important, data doesn't lie. The numbers never lie. Tracking and looking at your analytics across all of your platforms will show you exactly what your audience likes when they are checking out your content, the age range and so much more information. Every social media account gives you access to these analytics on. You can figure out where the traffics coming from so you can figure out what you want to put more time into. Figure out what your audience likes more, um, and just create. Start creating better content by using that insight. Uh, you will need to be an admin on Facebook on the page that you want to check out the analytics Where if if you created your own page, don't worry. Already an ad meant, but if it's, ah, business account, make sure that you're, uh, an admin so that you can view the analytics how you're gonna access them on Facebook and YouTube for this. So on Facebook, you're gonna go to your actual business page, the home screen of the page and then at the top, the very top. There's a tab that's called insights. You're going to click on that. The insights opens up all of the analytics for this Siris in general. We're just gonna click on videos on. Then it will show you all of the video insights all of the individual videos. You can go into each one and see how much time was spent watching those videos where the people were coming from, where they were watching from the average duration. How many people watched it for a certain amount of time and a whole lot of other great stuff on YouTube. You're going to go up to the very top right hand corner and click on the little arrow that's next to the next to your icon. Uh, you're going to click on Creator Studio, and then you're gonna click on analytics. On the left hand side, there's a Thanh of analytics in the YouTube platform. I highly recommend diving in here. You can see everything from suggested videos where other videos are driving views to your own video. The average duration. If you're able to monetize your channel, how much money each videos generating sky's the limit. There's so much information in there that you're able toe really hone in and figure out exactly what your audience likes