Dear friend,

This week we’re going to talk about how to video and specifically how to use your You Tube channel to generate more leads.

So last week if you were following along you had a lot of homework, I gave you about seven different things that you could do to expand your digital footprint and one of the things that we talked about was getting a You Tube channel.  Now I probably don’t need to tell you that You Tube is the number one video source on the internet by far.  There is so much activity, so much traffic on You Tube, so many videos are served up there every single day, way more than television and it’s becoming part of our mainstream culture.  So the one thing that I advised and talked about last week was the opportunity that you have to get a good name for your You Tube channel.  Now that’s just the name that you set for your account when you sign up at You Tube.  So your channel name would be YouTube.com/, whatever you choose as your channel name.  So you could have Winter Haven Real Estate for instance as your channel or you could have your name as a channel.  I would recommend getting at least both of those as a starting point.  The thing about it, is that once they’re gone, they’re gone.  If somebody already has Winter Haven Real Estate then you’re left out, you have to change and get another channel.  If somebody already has your name then you have to choose another one.  So that’s why I recommend even if you’re not sure on how you’re going to use this or even if you’re not sure what to do with it, go ahead and at least set up your account so that it’s there when you’re ready.

Now I’m going to talk about some different easy ways for you to get started and to use your You Tube channel to start generating more leads.  Now I’m going to put some links at Marketing Monday.com for you and this particular podcast you’ll see in the transcript I’ll include some links for you to some very cool uses of video that I’m going to talk about here.  So one of the easiest things you can do and one of the things that I recommend is to set up a guided tour of your town.  Now in this tour what you can do is give people a sense of the types of homes that are available, the kinds of neighborhoods that you have available.  It’s a nice welcome for people landing on your YouTube channel to find out what Winter Haven real estate is all about.  I’m going to post a link here to an example of one of these tours for you so that you can see what that might look like for you but basically you’re going to just take some time and drive around to the different neighborhoods to give people a sense of starting at the lowest priced condos, all the way up to the sort of smaller detached homes, the town homes, the luxury homes and the biggest newest homes that might be available in your marketplace.  So they get a sense of what their dollars are going to purchase in their new community.

The reason that YouTube and the reason that video would be very helpful for people is if they’re moving from out of town, if they’re moving from across the country.  We’ve even had clients who have talked about moving from other parts of the world from Europe, coming across and seeing what their dollars, what kinds of homes are available for them when they get to their new community.  So it’s a little project that you can do and you can show people all the things you would want to show them if you were taking them on a tour physically.  It gives people a sense of what they can get when they come to that town.

Now you may choose to do separate videos for the different neighborhoods.  You might choose to do a separate video just for the condos that are available or ones just for the golf course community, so that you’ll have these as an asset, a digital asset you can embed in your blogs, you can send a link to it in emails – you will have it so that when it’s appropriate you’ll be able to share it with people who are coming to your town.  You might take some time to do schools, to go by and do a tour of some of the schools and maybe do a little interview or a welcome from the Principal of the school or one of the teachers of the school to give families a sense of where their kids will be going to school.  It’s a great way for you to start building that digital asset base.

Another way that you might use video is to highlight your listings.  You might want to take people on a walk through of your new listings.  This is a fantastic way for people to get a sense of what the house is really like.  Video is becoming the new virtual tour.  Before video, before it was really easy to stream video, before it was easy for people to take advantage of video tours, that’s when virtual tours became popular because you could get that sense of almost having a video.  But now that video is available, it’s very easy for you to walk through a home, take videos of all of the different aspects of the house and give people a real sense of what that house is really like.  I’m going to post an example of some of these video tours and what that might look like for you.

Another way that you might use video is to do videos for your clients.  You might want to create a walk-through tour with the buyers of a new home where they get to be the host of the tour so that you’ll have a video for them to send to all of their friends to show off their new house and of course you can set that up on your blog so that they will send a link to it or it will be on your You Tube channel so that they can have all their friends, all the people that they’re sending that video to, will have exposure to your You Tube channel.  I’m going to post an example of this for you and let you see what my friend Jessie in San Diego with his client Diego.  He created a blog for Diego, called Diego’s First Home and this video was an example of him walking through the home with Diego on the inspection, so that Diego could give a tour of the home and let his friends see the house that he bought.

Now another great way to use video is to host a weekly video show.  Now if you’re comfortable and confident with creating video, you have a fantastic opportunity to do a weekly or a regularly scheduled highlight of a lot of different things that are coming on the market.  You may be able to do a show that highlights new listings.  I had an idea where if you do your agent inspections or your agent caravans on a particular day of the week, it might be a nice idea if every Tuesday say, after caravan, you did a little video tour for all of your prospects who are looking for a home to let them know about the new homes that have come on the market.  Let them know about the new listings that you saw that day.  That would be a fabulous use of video.  Another might be to just focus on a specific segment of the market.  If did just condos or just town homes or just historic homes or homes in specific neighborhoods.  If you have the personality and the character to carry off a weekly show like this, it’s very easy for you to become famous among prospects who are buying a home in a particular area and have them look to you as their leader.  Now I’m going to post a couple of examples of some video shows that have some personality to them.  One of my favorites is Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV.  You can find that at winelibrarytv.com.  Every single day Gary has a wine show for about 20 minutes where he tastes and tests three or four different wines and he gives his opinion on those wines.  Now another example of that is a young man who does a show called Freezer Burns and what he does is he tastes and tests different frozen foods.  So there’s so many uses for video, it’s kind of funny all the ways that you can use it, but nothing is as profitable to use video as a real estate transaction.  So you’ve got a really big advantage in that real estate is a big high-ticket item.  So you’ve got a lot of opportunity there if you’re comfortable and confident enough to do a weekly show.

Now in order to do this there’s a few little skills that you have to develop.  You’ve got to know how to shoot video and be comfortable with it.  So all you want to do is just make sure, just get your video camera just to jump in there.  If you don’t have a digital video camera, one of the easiest ones that you can use is the flip video and it’s a very easy to manage digital video recorder.  There’s even a high definition version of it, it’s a couple of hundred dollars, it’s less than $150 for the standard version of it and it comes with it’s own software that once you plug it into your computer, it automatically recognizes that software and it’s very easy to use.  So here’s what I want you to do is just play around with it and go through these six steps.  There’s just six simple steps to learning to master video.  Number one, take me on a tour of your house or your office just so you can get used to shooting video and narrating the video.  Just demonstrate your house or demonstrate your office just like you would if you were doing a listing.  Just like you would if you were doing somebody else’s home.  Second, take the video off the camera and get it on to your computer, now if you’re using the flip video, it’s as easy as just flipping the little USB attachment that’s built right into the camera, plugging it into your computer.  The computer will automatically recognize that your camera is attached and will suck in all the video that you’ve created on your flip video and have software there for you to edit that video.  So go ahead and steps 3, 4 and 5 are to add a title to the beginning and the end of your little video.  Try and do something where you’re arranging multiple clips together, that’s number 4.  Just learn how to take one clip, add it to another one, add it to another one and remember what we’re doing here is we’re not focused on the finished product here, what we’re focused on is the process.  If you can learn to do these three things, you can do them again and again and again.  Then number 6 is to upload it to your You Tube channel.  Right up there, just it’s very easy, there’s just a single button that you can click when you’re in your flip video software and it will upload automatically to your You Tube account, to your You Tube channel.

Once you’ve done those five or six steps and once you can do it, learn those moves, you can do it again and again.  Once you’re not scared of the technology you can let your creativity shine.  So the process is to get comfortable with the technology and the tools, to get confident in using those tools and then to get creative with those tools so that you can use them to generate as much new business as you possibly can.  So that’s it for this week, tune in next week and we’ll talk about even more ways to get more leads, get more appointments and get more referrals.

VIDEO LINKS:

The 3 1/2 Minute Guide To Milton House Prices:

Diego’s First Home (Client house tour):

A Single Property Video Tour: