Tech Tuesdays – YouTube – KISS RE #6

Keeping in line with our series on KISS-RE (Keep It Simple, Stupid), we’re in the social network phase and today we’re going to talk about YouTube. We can argue back and forth about whether it’s a social network or not, but a social network is where people connect, and let me tell you something. People connect on YouTube. The comments are some of the greatest leads you’re ever going to get as a small business slash real estate agent.

First and foremost, let’s just say, get over what you look like on camera. Get over the makeup thing. Having a bad hair day. I don’t know if you’ve seen YouTube lately, but nobody cares. In fact, the best videos, the most viral videos, are the ones where it’s just a person talking, or just a kid doing something silly. It’s just people. And remember our thoughts here. Remember our goal. Our goal was to create a personal relationship in an impersonal world. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is better than creating that relationship than YouTube. YouTube is the big dog.

Some people call it a search engine. I prefer to call it a social network. But it is a search engine, in its general description. People go there to find answers to questions. And that’s what a search engine is. Google owns YouTube, which means the two largest search engines in the world are meshed. They’re owned by the same people. They work together in harmony. If you want to be found on Google, there’s no better way than to be found on YouTube. And I think you’ll find that to be true once we get into this series.

All right. So we’re going to get over that whole “I don’t look good on camera” thing, please. I’m begging you. As a real estate agent, what you want to do is answer commonly asked questions in your industry. Every day, you either get an email, a phone call, you talk to somebody in person, and you know what they do? They ask you a question. That question is also being asked by millions of other people across the world, in the United States, and especially the ones that are looking for homes in your geographical farm. Use those questions as your material for YouTube. Make a three-minute video on “Why do I need a termite report?” “What’s an escrow?” “What happens after my loan is approved?” These are questions related to real estate and mortgage. These are what you put on YouTube, this is how people find you. And I’m telling you right now, we’ve done this for a year and a half on our YouTube station, KeepingItRealEstate1. It’s for a radio program, Keeping it Real Estate Radio, where we talk about questions that are asked by buyers, sellers, whether it’s mortgage or real estate. And I’m telling you, if you go to that channel and you look up any of the questions that we’ve covered, type it into the search engine, Google. See what comes up. It is the fastest and best way to get on Page 1. People are looking for that Page 1 result? They are working like dogs on their sites to get it. You can get it like *snap* in 30-60 days on YouTube.

Please don’t be afraid of it. It is probably the most important part of your online outline.

All right. A couple of things. When you’re in there setting up your profile. First of all, log into your Gmail, go to YouTube, it’ll recognize you, cuz they’re both owned by Google, and it will start the process of signing you up for a YouTube channel. One of the things it’s going to ask you is “Do you want your name or do you want a business name?” Please use the business name and brand it. Remember my brand for this series is Belmont Shore Homes for Sale. So I’m going to try to get some version of that into my YouTube channel description. Don’t use your name. People need to find you for what you do, not who you are. Remember. It’s the Internet.

Use the link in the Cover Art portion. Because you’re a real estate agent and people want to search for homes, use that link to link to your IDX on some other site. Hopefully it’s on your blog. If you have IDX on your blog, you link to it, what happens? People come to your blog, they learn more about you, they connect with you.

Please don’t forget. It’s not how you look, it’s what you say that matters on YouTube. So that’s the fourth one in our network phase. We’re going to move on to some cool tools in our next video, and these cool tools begin to put it all together. So you’ve got all these social networks, you’ve got this blog, you’ve got this brand. How do I keep it together? How do I network it? We’re going to start with a couple of easy tools that are free on the internet to use that are going to help you do that.

If you have any questions about what we talked about today, or in the past, or if you just have a question in general for The Coach, 562-646-6710 or TheRECoach@gmail.com. And if you’re a broker or an office manager and you’d like The Coach to speak at your sales meeting or do a training in-house, please give me a call. I would love to help you explore the internet.

This has been Tech Tuesday. I’m The Coach. I’ll see you on the next video.