Did you know that YouTube is the #2 search engine after Google?  People go to YouTube for all sorts of reasons, but the most compelling is for instructional videos.  I have a few nieces and nephews who are teaching themselves how to play musical instruments from videos.  My niece can play the harp, my nephew is rocking the bass guitar.  I use it all the time for help in my own job as a web designer.

However you  have to do a good job and not waste people’s time.  Case in point.  A couple of years ago my cat brought a chipmunk into the house.  Was the chipmunk happy?  No.  Was I  happy?  Not particularly.  I’m a master mouse catcher and have a lovely little catch and release box that I bought for this purpose.  However a chipmunk won’t fit and they are really hard to catch, mostly because they can climb up walls and jump on your shoulder to get somewhere else.  So I went out and bought a larger animal trap.  However, there were no instructions and I had absolutely  no idea how to set the door open to catch that chipmunk who had been in my house for three days.

Enter YouTube.  I watched a video that promised to show me how to set the trap, and this man proceeded to spend 4 minutes opening a can of tuna.  I didn’t need a video on that, so he wasted those precious minutes on that, and then when it came time to show me what I’d been waiting for, he blocked the shot and I was no better off.  In the end I did find a video that didn’t waste my time and helped me catch that critter (how long?  baited with apple and peanut butter – 15 minutes).

My point is you can’t catch clients with tunafish either, but videos, especially instructional videos, are brilliant for your business.  Put them on YouTube, embed them on your website and post them on your Facebook page.  But make sure you aren’t wasting people’s time.  Edit them, make sure they are focused and the sound is clear.