6 December 2009
Realtors® guide to making a living in a Web 2.0 World Part Twelve ~ YouTube
Posted by Jerry Kidd under: How to...; Social Media; Uncategorized .
The next step along the way to utilizing Web 2.0 tools to enhance your business is to utilize video. In a previous post I talked about the Flip video camera, which in my opinion, is tailor made for real estate agents. Go here to check it out http://realtytechbytes.com/video-made-simple/. Once you’ve got your hands on this little gem you are ready to go.
You may be wondering why I think that online video is a necessary component for your Web 2.0 marketing. I’ve heard it bandied about that YouTube is now the number 2 search engine behind Google. Never one to just blindly believe that sort of thing, I went looking around to find the source of the statement. Along the way I ran into this site http://www.alexa.com/topsites which ranks the top 500 sites on the web. At the time of this writing, YouTube was number 4. (I did find the original reference to the claim that YouTube is the number 2 search engine, but there is some controversy there about whether YouTube IS a search engine or whether it simply HAS a search engine – who cares? A lot of people look at YouTube, daily.)
That makes me think that it cannot hurt you to have videos on YouTube. Since YouTube allows you to have keywords listed with each video submission, and since you can link the videos back to your blog, and since once a video is on YouTube it can be emailed to anyone or embedded in your blog or uploaded to Facebook…why wouldn’t you just do it?
Getting started is easy. Go to http://www.YouTube.com and just log in. If you don’t have an account, just follow the prompts to create an account. Once the account is created, log in. Then double click on your name to enter the Channel editing location. This is where you can spruce up your Channel (What other people see when they search for you or your videos on YouTube). You can upload your picture or logo, set background colors and choose what you will display about yourself.
YouTube has an excellent help section which you can find here:
http://www.youtube.com/t/yt_handbook_produce. As you might expect, most of the help is in video format.
Now you just need to create some videos. If you are using the Flip, just get to it. The Flip makes getting the video out of the camera and up to YouTube a very easy process. Once it’s there, why not embed it into a blog post? Or email it to clients, prospects and other agents (if it’s of your new listing)? Some of the things that you might want to video are your listings (of course) and neighborhood tours or highlights. You could do interviews with lenders, inspectors, title companies, escrow companies or even do “man on the street” interviews with people at neighborhood events.
Get creative. Get started. Go for it. But, if you are feeling overwhelmed, get in touch with me. I can help get you set up. It’s part of what my new company does for real estate agents.
And if you are already using video in your business, won’t you please share what you have done by posting some links in the comments?
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