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18 P a r t I Marketing Your Business Online with YouTube

For example, if you’re a travel agent, you can produce an informative video that
provides a guided tour of one of your featured destinations. You could also take a
more talking-head approach, and have one of your agents talk about travel trends
in the coming season. Or maybe you put together some PowerPoint slides compar-
ing travel costs to different destinations.

The key is to provide information that your current or potential customers find
truly useful. This helps establish your company as the authority on this topic; when
the customer wants to pull the trigger, he’ll think of you because of the useful infor-
mation you provided.

Of course, you do have to remind the customer of who you are and how he can
contact you. That means placing a title card at the beginning and end of the video
with your website address or toll-free phone number. You can also overlay this
information onscreen during the course of the video. And don’t forget to include
this contact information in the descriptive text that accompanies your video.

The key is to provide enough useful information to be of practical value to viewers,
and then make it easy for those viewers to click through to your site for more infor-
mation or to purchase what you have for sale. It can’t be a straight advertisement; it
has to be real information, presented in as straight a fashion as possible.

Note

Learn more about informative videos in Chapter 3, “Creating Informative
Videos.”

Educational Videos

Another approach is to educate the viewer, show him how to do something useful
with the products or services you sell. This means producing a “how to” video, a
step-by-step guide to doing something the viewer wants or needs to do.

For example, if you sell appliance parts, you could create a video showing how to
change the water filter in a refrigerator or the light bulb in a dryer. If you offer cus-
tom woodworking services, create a video showing how to build a bookcase or
install wood trim. If you’re a tire store, create a video showing how to check tire
pressure or change a flat. You get the picture.

The key here is to offer truly useful content. Nothing theoretical or ethereal; down-
to-earth practicality is what attracts YouTube viewers. Make the task common
enough to draw a large audience, produce an easy-to-follow step-by-step tutorial,
and then use the video to sell other goods and services.