How to Use YouTube to Take Your Business to the Next Level
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Hannah Ashton on How to Grow Your Business Using YouTube
You love YouTube for funny cat videos and watching tutorials on new beauty trends, but have you ever thought about using it for your business? Long-time YouTuber and influencer Hannah Ashton knows what it takes to put out great, subscriber-worthy content on YouTube, grow an audience, and make it convert into money in your pocket, and she’s giving us the down-low on how you can make YouTube work for your business too!
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Her Entrepreneur Journey
Hannah became a YouTuber at a very young age when she would make videos of her American Girl dolls. By high school, she had transitioned into doing videos about entrepreneurship and empowerment for high school and college girls, and was already getting some brand sponsorships. During college she found a mentor when she started working with a startup magazine, helping with their YouTube content, and her mentor pushed her to pursue making a business out of helping others with YouTube.
Hannah loved that idea, and soon put together her own website and a consulting program to help women start their own YouTube channels. She ran that for about a year while also launching a course, and now is still pursuing her entrepreneurship degree at Belmont University in Nashville, TN, while continuing to run her YouTube channel, a podcast, and even stepping into the product world to help women even further with YouTube.
How can we actually use YouTube for our business?
Most people on YouTube are there for leisure and just want to connect with creators. That means that even though you’re hoping that YouTube will help grow your business, you shouldn’t use it solely as an advertising platform. Use it to really connect with your audience and add ideal clients/customers to your audience who may not have found you otherwise. If you sell a hair product, for example, don’t just make videos talking about why your product is the best and why people should buy from you. Create content that shows up different hairstyles, tutorials, or fun behind-the-scenes style videos. This will keep your audience from feeling like you’re constantly selling to them, and keep them engaged with what you’re doing. Eventually that will drive them to follow you on more platforms, subscribe to your email list, and buy your products.
What factors make for a good YouTube video?
What gets people to click on your channel and watch past the first 5 seconds are the outside elements: good quality audio and video, clear and proportioned thumbnails for the video, decent lighting, etc. Once you’ve got them there, it’s all about the content. After about 30 second to 1 minute you really need to start diving into the main topic of education or entertainment that brought them there in the first place. When you’re just starting out, focus on the technical aspects first, like where you’re going to film and making sure your viewers can clearly see what you’re showing them, and then focus on the content once you know you have a good starting place.
How do you get started and actually get the content in front of an audience?
It definitely takes a few good months of uploading to really start seeing attention from viewers. Your first video may do really great since it’s a new channel and YouTube likes to push new channels, but after that it’s going to take consistency. If you can start by doing a video that you know will be popular (search videos in your niche that have done well and do something along the same lines), you’ll probably gain a little more traction, but people aren’t usually going to subscribe until they’ve seen you put out a few different good pieces of content.
Once you’ve gotten a few videos out and have some consistency, start diving into your YouTube community. Search channels and videos in your niche and leave comments and engagement on those.
Like any other social platform, you get what you give!
Is there a ‘sweet spot' on how often you should post new content?
Every day is fine if you’re more of an influencer and getting 6-digit views on your content. If you’re not getting quite that much, you should probably stick to around once or twice a week. Posting too much definitely comes across as spammy and people won’t want to subscribe to your channel.
Is there an SEO aspect to it?
Definitely. There is an algorithm that changes sometimes, so it’s not always so easy to say what works or doesn’t but for the most part YouTube is going to look at 3 parts of your video: the title, the description, and the tags (keywords you use when uploading). You definitely want to make sure that there are searchable keywords in your title. For your description, write it like a caption and keep using those keywords. Make it personable and as if you were speaking (so complete sentences). Then for your tags, use keywords as if they’re a title so instead of using “morning” and “routine” as 2 keywords, write it out as “my morning routine 2019.”
It also depends on where YouTube chooses to show your video. While the previous advice will help you out with searches, YouTube will also use the quality of your thumbnail and the quality of your video to decide whether or not you show up in other user’s “suggested videos” section.
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