I have to apologize to my clients, I’ve been really pushing YouTube on them for years. I really wanted each of them to put the time and investment into building video content about their products and distributing it on YouTube as if it were a late night infomercial. I made the promise of views, shares, clicks, comments and sales because their content would be consumed by relevant consumers, which would in turn lead to revenue back into their business. I have to apologize to them, because even with my suggestions during my consulting hour, none of them listened to me, and I was right.

I’m still right today, YouTube is bigger and more relevant to consumers looking for product reviews, how-to videos, and entertainment than any other service out there. I don’t have a link to a white paper about this either, you can tell, if you are distributing media. I have multiple channels on YouTube. I use it for my personal family videos, my This is Marketing Podcast, other fun videos, product reviews and with Youngstown State. Each one has a different audience and analytics that show that no matter what kind of content you put out on YouTube, there is an audience to view it. For example, my This is Marketing podcast videos don’t have thousands of hits, but in the month that I have put them out there, they have a small flow of views. Over time, this will get better, especially as I continue to build content.

That is where your business has opportunity to build content that will find it’s own audience. No matter what industry, people will take to Google or YouTube looking for content. If you build it, they will come. If you don’t, they won’t. The title of this post speaks about data for content building, and YouTube provides analytics that will help you understand a little about your audience. At the end of the day, total views and the speed at which they happen is telling about what kind of content you should be building. With my fun videos, I posted a how-to about changing out my Jeep Wrangler speakers. Within 2 weeks, I had over 300 views on it with comments. If I were selling a product, that’s 300 potential customers. What that tells me is that there is an audience for how-to Jeep videos. I’ll be making more in the future because of this, and with the monetize option through YouTube, I will get paid for views on my videos. By the way, I used my cell phone to make them and edit them, so don’t tell me you don’t have the budget for it. The device is sitting in your pocket.

What now? Get into your day-to-day business and figure out what is happening naturally that you can video with your cell phone and post it to YouTube. It is worth your time to sign up for a new YouTube account then post your videos there, this way you don’t combine them with your personal account. If you want a quick start-up guide, I recommend the book below from Amazon.