Getting Along with YouTube

With a foot in the doorway of 2020, marketing on the web is a matter of utter survival for your products, your business or even yourself. Yet marketing can be a daunting process. If you're if not careful and you can't afford patience, then the process will quickly exhaust your resources, your time and your money.

I bet you already knew that. But it's also possible that you have already tried every possible variation of blogging, advertising, speaking, podcasting and streaming under the sun. All this with no tangible result. Indeed, many SMBs already ran out of marketing ideas and schemes.

So if you think you've exhausted every other way to get noticed, then I've got news for you:

Let there be Sound.

Lights.

Music.

Words.

Images.

Let there be Video!

Ah, but you're not a rock band (are you?). You don't know which stage to show up on; which cards you should play; what you should look or sound like; what message you should convey.

These are all legitimate, and difficult, questions. Starting with the stage problem. In that case, you need to go with the obvious: pick the stage that is both the most popular and the easiest. The arena that has the biggest audience already. The stage that has the least barriers to entry. Remember: your path to better recognition needs to go through those places where you are most likely to be seen and heard by as many people as possible. You can always change venues later. If you are just starting out with web video marketing, pick YouTube.

There are hundreds of good tutorials to learn how to get acquainted with, and how to carve a niche on the YouTube platform. Here's one: this recent article on the BuzzSumo website summarizes the main concepts and even suggests a few twists to the commonly accepted YouTube marketing strategy. Here's a summary:

1. Approach YouTube as you would a blog, and not so much like the social media it claims to be.
2. Use social media (i.e., the other platforms) to point back to your YouTube assets.
3. Research your competition and peers thoroughly. What you'll learn should influence how you re-purpose your content or message and make it more palatable as videos.
4. Put everything on a schedule: it will make the process more manageable.
5. Don't count on YouTube's monetization scheme: it's unlikely to be worth the effort.

Here's a couple of additional advice, this time from us:

1. Be aware that most social media platforms support, and most likely encourage, their users to use video as a medium. Every such platform will prefer their native format. YouTube is rather lenient on the formats it supports, but others, not so much. You may need to publish your video content in the platform's native format to ensure you get the best results.
2. Be extra-ordinary. Or die trying to. If you want to get noticed, you'll need to stand out. Whatever your take on life is, do take a stand for it: unless you are completely unreasonable on the matter, you will gain more than you'll lose by standing up for what you think is right.