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YouTube is an incredibly powerful platform that has even started to surpass Google as America’s preferred search engine. In fact, YouTube’s top suggestions are prominently displayed on Google’s search results page.
This is precisely why building a strong presence on YouTube is crucial for your business. By establishing a robust channel and engaged community on the platform, you can tap into its immense potential for converting viewers into customers.
YouTube is the go-to destination for experts, educators, and thought leaders to share their knowledge with the world. When individuals are looking to engage in business within your niche, they are likely to seek advice from their favorite YouTube channels, and you can be the one they turn to, rely on and purchase from.
However, the advantages of YouTube for your business extend beyond community engagement. It offers creators unique opportunities for generating income and leads. Unlike other social networks, YouTube videos have long-term visibility and are frequently discovered through search queries. This means that your valuable and relevant content has a lasting impact on viewers.
Once you have compelling content, there are multiple ways to monetize it. YouTube itself provides ad revenue opportunities. Additionally, you can pursue sponsorship deals with brands your audience loves, earn commissions through affiliate links, and even explore monetization options with YouTube Shorts.
To begin leveraging YouTube’s potential for your business, community-building is essential if you’re going to cultivate an active and engaged community of subscribers who are eager to learn from you and invest in your offerings.
While subscriber counts, likes, and shares may initially seem important, it’s crucial to prioritize subscribers who convert into customers. Focusing on vanity metrics alone can only take you so far.
Instead, strive to become the top authority in your niche by dominating the top search results for your product type or services.
Here’s how you can build a YouTube community that loves your business in 4 steps:
Step 1: Craft a Captivating Story
Your story is the key to standing out in the saturated world of YouTube. It’s what sets you apart from your competitors and attracts your unique audience. Embrace your uniqueness and share your story authentically.
Remember, not everyone needs to resonate with your content; your goal is to connect with the right people who align with your brand. Uncover what makes you special by exploring your personality traits, seeking input from friends and colleagues, and reflecting on your expertise.
Once you have your story, infuse it strategically into your content by highlighting relevant aspects throughout your videos.
Step 2: Build Trust through Branding and Expertise
To establish trust with your audience, take charge of your branding and communicate your values clearly. Develop a branding guide that encompasses your color palette, fonts, channel banner, “about” section, and a concise statement highlighting your uniqueness.
Define your content pillars—topics that showcase your expertise and provide value to your viewers. Divide them into categories for new viewers and those further along in their customer journey.
By consistently presenting your branding and offering structured playlists, you’ll cultivate trust and demonstrate your commitment to delivering valuable content.
Step 3: Conduct In-Depth Research
Research is essential for generating video ideas that align with your content pillars. Leverage the search engine capabilities of YouTube by using keyword research tools like TubeBuddy and vidIQ to uncover new keywords and assess your ranking potential. Focus on longtail keywords and tailor your video titles accordingly to ensure visibility.
Additionally, analyze your competitors’ channels to gain inspiration, specifically from their most popular videos. Extract keyword ideas from their titles while adding your unique twist to the content.
Observe trends, such as common phrases or eye-catching thumbnail styles, to enhance your video production.
Step 4: Embrace Consistency for Lasting Community Growth
Consistency is the foundation of building an engaged YouTube community. Make content creation an integral part of your routine and prioritize it accordingly.
Plan your videos at least two months ahead, starting with keyword research and title creation. Aim to publish two long-form videos (5-15 minutes) and four shorts per month, minimum.
Remember, quality over quantity is key, so prioritize longer videos. Consider batch-recording to save time and, if necessary, outsource video editing.
Stick to a publishing schedule and strive to have edited videos ready at least two weeks in advance. With consistent effort, your audience will grow steadily over time.
Bottom line, YouTube presents a unique opportunity for business growth. By establishing a strong presence, creating valuable content, and building an engaged community, you can harness the platform’s power to drive conversions, generate income, and position yourself as an authority in your industry.
Lessons in Entrepreneurship from Ocean Gate’s Titan Submersible
In the history of submersibles, there’s been exactly one implosion: Ocean Gate’s Titan on June 18th.
In case you didn’t see the news – seriously, were you in a coma? – a submersible containing 5 people, 4 of which paid $250,000 to be there, were on their way down to see the Titanic on the ocean floor when things went wrong. Terribly wrong.
Here are a few things we can take away from this bizarre tragedy…
Follow expert advice – If the opinion of the first expert isn’t what you want to hear, it’s true that you can find more experts and see what they say, weighing the advice of all of them to arrive at your best decision.
But no less than 38 members of the Marine Technology Society told Ocean Gate CEO and Titan Captain Stockton Rush that the Titan was headed for disaster, and yet Rush unbelievably ignored them all.
Just because you don’t like what experts are telling you doesn’t make them wrong. Maybe you think you’ve figured out something new that no one else is doing. Before you go ahead and try it, do research and ask experts if this thing has been done before. If it has, what were the results? If it hasn’t, why not? There’s a good chance the experts know something you don’t and asking costs you nothing.
Optimism and positive thinking only go so far – Stockton Rush may have believed he was smarter than everyone else and that Titan was up to the task of going to Titanic depths, but the laws of physics don’t give a darn what anyone thinks.
The market is no different. While you may think you’ve just created the greatest product ever, it’s the customers who will decide if that is true, not you.
Do your research – Chris Brown, a digital marketing millionaire, paid a 10% deposit to Ocean Gate for a dive on Titan to see the Titanic. But then Brown did his research and found terrible reviews for Ocean Gate as well as experts warning of potential dangers to passengers. He quickly realized how dangerous the dive would be and opted out rather than risking his life.
Conducting research before choosing niches, joint venture partners, sponsors and so forth will pay you dividends and possibly save your reputation and the life of your business.
Don’t cut corners – Would you use a PlayStation controller to pilot a submersible to unimaginable depths while carrying 5 passengers? How about using lights from Camping World? Would you use carbon fiber – a composite material used in aircrafts and untested in submersibles – for the vessel when experts are convinced the pressure of the deep sea will crack it over time?
I’ll bet you also wouldn’t haphazardly glue it together with epoxy, use a porthole rated for a depth of just 1300 meters and jerry-rig this vessel that’s intended to dive 4,000 meters, either. It sounds like something a couple of ten-year-olds would put together in their backyard over summer vacation.
As soon as you can afford it, purchase the best equipment, software and outsourcers you can for your business. It will save you time and money in the long run, and maybe even save the life of your business.
Test everything – Stockton Rush was told repeatedly that he needed to do many more diving tests with Titan, but he refused. He could have also done non-invasive tests on the hull to locate expected (EXPECTED!) micro-cracks in the composite material and repair it before catastrophic failure, but he refused.
He even fired expert employees because they told him he was being unsafe.
If you want to avoid mistakes in your business, then develop the habit of testing everything before it’s available to the public. This means testing your product with a control group, testing your sites, links and forms, testing downloads, autoresponder sequences and essentially everything that will be seen by your customers.
And if someone tells you that you’re about to make a whopper of a mistake, don’t fire them – listen to them instead. They might know something you don’t.
Honor refunds – A Florida couple who paid $210,258 to Ocean Gate Expeditions filed suit against Stockton Rush earlier this year, seeking a refund for the trip they booked in 2016 that never happened.
Assume you will get refund requests, set aside money for those refunds and honor those requests promptly when appropriate.
Too much ego creates ruin – If Rush had set his ego aside and listened to the people who knew a great deal more than he did, he and his 4 passengers would still be alive.
Self-confidence is a great asset if it is in proportion to your skills and ability to get things done. But overconfidence is no substitute for doing the work, learning your business and building upon established methods already proven to work.
Get away with murder – The one sure way to get away with murdering 4 people with your arrogance (and getting them to pay you a quarter million dollars each for the privilege) is to die at the same time they do.
And while your business will likely never be one of life and death, you still want to ensure not just your customer’s safety, but your business’ safety and yours as well.
A big part of that is keeping your website and all of your data safe. The more you can do to keep hackers out of your business, the better you will sleep at night and the less likely your business will suffer a catastrophic implosion of its own.
Keep records of everything – Titanic didn’t carry a black box to record those final moments, so the experts aren’t going to be able to track the last movements of the vessel. They’ll have to piece together the wreckage fragments they find to try to determine exactly what happened in those final seconds. A black box would have revealed much more conclusive evidence of what went wrong, without having to rely on speculations.
When you keep careful records in your business of what you do each step of the way, you’ll be able to analyze later why things worked or didn’t work. But if you don’t keep records, you can only guess, making it harder to duplicate success and easier to repeat failures.
Perhaps the bottom line in all of this is to use your common sense, take precautions, follow rules and eschew shortcuts, because some lessons you simply don’t want to learn the hard way.
And if you’d like to see just how poorly the Titan was constructed, click here: https://jalopnik.com/the-titan-submersible-was-designed-and-built-even-worse-1850570095