by: AskPat 733 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everyone, Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 733 of Ask Pat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.
All right, now here's today's question from Ernie.
Ernie: Hello Pat, this is Ernie Bryan from MilitaryDiscountsCentral.com and VegasVetSaver.com. I run a couple of blogs out there catered toward the military, military veterans, military retirees. My question for you today is I've been running these blogs for a few years now, I've been getting some good traffic and some subscribers to our mailing list. My question is is it time for me to start a YouTube channel? I've been thinking about that for a few months now, I'm seeing everyone seems to have that as a compliment to their site. I'm kind of struggling, I guess it leads to my question for you.
If I were to start a YouTube channel for one or both of these sites here, would you have any ideas you could recommend that I could actually use to put on the site? I'm thinking perhaps taking some quick videos of attractions, theme parks that I visit that offer a military discounts. Perhaps some of the restaurants around the US that offer discounts. Perhaps some places in Vegas that I could offer or provide some videos. I'm kind of up for any kind of recommendation to help me think of whether this YouTube channel would be a good direction for me to compliment our brand here and any suggestions you may offer for what should actually be on the channel.
I love your work, I love all your products, and your brands, and your services, and thanks for what you're doing. I'm looking forward to hear back from you. Thank you.
Pat: Hey Ernie what's up, thanks so much for the question. Awesome stuff you got going on there it sounds like. It's really cool that you're thinking about branching out into a different medium. YouTube was actually the second thing that I did after I started my blog back in 2008. I started my YouTube channel in 2009 and then in 2010 I started the podcast, in July of 2010. Now I'm on all these different platforms and I see a lot of people trying to do the same thing. Which I think is smart, but if you try and do all of them at the same time you're going to spread yourself thin and instead of being everywhere, you're actually going to be nowhere. I think it's cool that you've had these blogs for a long time now, and you're thinking of expanding now. I think in that sense it could potentially be the right time for you to expand on a different platform, not only to offer your current subscribers and your current readers and visitors to your website something new to look at, and something interesting, something that will allow you to build an even deeper relationship with them to potentially trust you more and for you to become more of an authority in the space.
Also, you'll be able to use YouTube to collect more people, to get more traffic, to get more subscribers, and I think that could work out very well for you. Now, the one thing I will say is you don't just want to start a YouTube channel because everybody else is doing it. I think the fact that everybody else is doing it is a sign that you should look into it, but that's why you're here and that's why you're asking this question. I think you know that already, but again, another one of those warnings. Especially for everybody out there who just has bright light syndrome, or what they call squirrel syndrome where you see this thing over here and you want to go over there and do it because everyone else is doing it. Then all of a sudden you might go over here because this new thing came out and you want to try that next. Again, I just wanted to mention that. Now, what could you put on your YouTube channel? Well there's some universal things that typically work really well on YouTube channels no matter was nature you're in. First of all, answering your audience's most important questions. So what are some questions that you might always get on each of these websites that you seem to just answer over and over and over again.
You can begin to start to answer those questions, because typically people are also searching for answers on places like Google, or on YouTube, so if you could provide that answer then you're going to be ahead of the game for sure. Plus, if people ask a question, instead of you having to answer it individually every single time, you can answer with a video. It will seem much more personal, it'll be coming from you directly, and it'll just help you with that authority in a more automated fashion, which is really cool. Secondly, any sort of behind the scenes stuff typically works really well for brands too. Showing how you work, showing … You had mentioned something like going on location to actually get those discounts and showing people how it works. I think that's actually a really fantastic idea. I think location specific ones would work very well but you can shape those around in different ways. You could probably start to build a library of you sharing, and video-ing different discounts that you can get in different locations. Then you can create different packages. For example, you can cut all the ones together that are related to the Las Vegas area, for example.
Here's a top ten discounts that military personnel can get while in Vegas. That would be a fantastic video, like framing it in that way, “here's the top ten.” Then you can frame one that's “here are five restaurant discounts for militaries in a certain area.” Again, you can do it in many different ways but I think you can be creative with it, you can have fun with it. Again, that's sort of a mix between giving a lot of great content, showing people exactly how to do things, which again just levels up your authority like mad. Also the behind the scenes stuff. Giving people access on how it's done and I think that's really cool. Another thing you can do on YouTube is just share some upcoming projects and what going on. You can get your audience involved too, that's the cool thing about YouTube is people are typically very open to commenting and sharing their thoughts about things. You can ask questions, instead of just answering questions, you can ask questions to your audience. Have them participate, and have them potentially even offer their own answers to questions. Maybe they have certain discounts that they want to share with the rest of the community.
You can pull one every week from commenters and feature that in it's own YouTube channel, and then give credit to that person. I mean, there's a lot of things you can do here to move the community with YouTube and I think that can be a really smart thing to do as well. Just start small, pick one video that you want to try and get that YouTube channel up there. Then over time you can begin to brand it out a little bit more. What I mean by that is start to focus, after the first few videos are up, on the artwork, and what the page looks like, and what the channel looks like. Creating different playlists and starting to create collaborations. Going out there and meeting other YouTubers who might potentially be a good fit for you. Those are all great things that you can do, but before you do any of that, even before you do the artwork, set up your YouTube channel and get a couple of videos up there. Just to get that going and start to get those in the world of YouTube so that they can be found eventually in search, and found on Google, and plus just to get practice.
I don't know about you Ernie, but for some people it's very difficult and for me it was. I think the earlier you start the better, because you can just get over those fears and then just keep producing. Hopefully that helps you Ernie, I really appreciate the question and I wish you all the best of luck. Another thing you can do, by the way, just thinking off the top of my head is product reviews. If you sell any products, or you are an affiliate for any products, show people what those things are like. You could even do screen casts, if it's web based. You can do unboxing videos. There's so many things you can do there that I think can be really helpful, so yeah. Keep up the good work Ernie, and thank you so much. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to Askpat.com and you can ask right there on that page.
Finally, as always, we're going to end with a quote.
Today's quote comes from Glenn Gilmore. This quote is, “When you lose followers because of where you stand, you strengthen your tribe.” I love that one. Thanks Glenn, thank you, thank you Ernie, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.