In this episode of the Content Amplification Podcast, host Shaun Whynacht shares a deep dive into using video—specifically YouTube—as a core content and marketing channel for businesses. He begins by reflecting on his 20‑year background in radio and television production and observes how audience attention spans have shifted from long‑form promotional videos to short, bite‑sized clips. Shaun explains why YouTube matters: it is the second‑largest search engine, a powerful discovery platform, and a universally engaging medium that can serve any type of business. He outlines the main advantages (wide reach, SEO benefits, high engagement) and the few drawbacks (pre‑roll ads you can’t control, limited player branding). The bulk of the episode offers concrete, tactical advice: creating custom thumbnails that act like email subject lines, optimizing channel branding and URLs, embedding clear calls‑to‑action, fostering engagement through comments and subscriber prompts, and avoiding hard‑selling in videos. He highlights the strategic use of playlists—including unlisted onboarding playlists—to organize content and support post‑sale education. Production tips are provided for creators on a budget, emphasizing that a modern smartphone, a cheap tripod, and a selfie‑stick can produce 4K video. Shaun also encourages multi‑channel approaches, repurposing videos in blog posts, and even running separate YouTube channels for distinct client segments. The episode closes with a call to subscribe to the podcast and to visit his own YouTube channel for further learning.
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Hi, welcome to this episode of the Content Amplification Podcast. How's everybody doing? Hope your content is doing great for you. Been following us along in the last several episodes. Today I'm going to talk to you about video and more specifically I want to talk about YouTube. This is a very exciting topic for me because my actual formal training over 20 years ago, I know I'm getting old, actually this week is my 39th birthday and that's coming up tomorrow, that's right, the 15th of January, so I'm getting pretty old. Well, I went to school for radio production is what I went to but I quickly quickly switched in my second year into television production. So for many years I've been involved in creating videos for clients and for myself. And video has evolved, it actually has evolved so much, so rapidly, even in the last 2 to 3 years that it's mind-blowing to me. I mean, even 10 years ago, being able to create a 10, 15, or 20-minute promotional video was something that people did. And now you couldn't get away with that because the attention spans are so short. People are not gonna be sitting down to watch a 10-minute video that you're doing, more so as a cold audience. That means, I mean, you could use video in longer form once the audience has been warmed up. I mean, we see that every day with training videos, courses, webinars, but you're not gonna get somebody who has just heard about you to sit down immediately and watch a 10, 15, or 20-minute video on you. What we're looking at now are smaller chunked-up pieces of video. So maybe 10 1-minute videos is something that you would put on your landscape to produce if you were looking at generating more interest and more leads. Well, this episode we're going to talk about, you know, the benefits of using YouTube. And if you are at least considering doing video, and you should because it is a very engaging platform. It's a very engaging form of content. You know, it can fit any type of business out there. I don't think there's any business that I've run into that could not benefit from using video. So today we're going to be talking about the pros, the cons of video, and how it is leveraged in YouTube. A lot of the stuff that I'm going to talk about here and the tips that I'm going to give you could be used in other video platforms, whether using Wistia or Vimeo or even hosting the video on your own website. You know what, you could use a lot of this here, but I'm going to talk specifically about YouTube because it is a main player. So let's get started right in that. YouTube, very, very popular, owned by Google if you didn't know that. So it is actually the second most searched search engine. That's right, YouTube is a search engine and people are actually using it to look for content because they want to consume it in video format. A couple years ago I had a washer and dryer in my basement where the dryer, no it was the washer it was, that actually stopped working. It wouldn't shut off the water coming in. So I figured out that it was a little module in there somewhere that controls whether the water turns off or turns on during a cycle. So I knew that I could probably replace that myself, so I went to YouTube and I searched, you know, how to replace the— I don't even know what it was called, but you know, water thingamajigger from it. So I put in the model and there was a video there by a plumber who said, hey, you know, this is a common thing. A lot of homeowners can actually replace this. This is how you actually get it out, how and this is how you put a new one in, and you can go get the part number, here's where it's located, da da da da da, right? So I did that, I found a parts supplier, I bought the part for, I think it was like $50, I took the piece out, put the new piece in, and works good as new moving forward. So saved me a lot of money. So I used it as a search engine. I didn't mean that I had to go on there to find a plumber, I was finding a way to do it, okay? So think about in your business being able to put out valuable content in which your potential audience may find you. Now, if you're a very localized market where you're dealing with local clients coming into your business, you can still leverage this to gain interest. Become a topic expert online in the field in which you do business. You can also leverage video in YouTube to be as a secondary piece of content. So if you are creating a product, if you are providing a service in which, you know, follow-up or education after the sale would be extremely important, you could create a YouTube channel just for that, or you could create a YouTube playlist of videos that you would send out after the sale. So the pros of using YouTube, the pros of marketing with video, is that it, like I said, it can fit any business. It is the second most popular search engine, right? You want to rank on Google, why wouldn't you want to rank on the next one down, which is YouTube, right? It's very engaging. Now, there's very little cons to this, and I do have to mention them. You know what, when you're putting out YouTube videos, YouTube has the ability to run ads over top of your videos. I mean, you experience that all the time when you, you go to watch a video and then that ad comes up., right, and you're waiting for that skip button. You don't have control over the type of ads that run over top of your videos, right? You have no control over that. The other thing is there's very limited customization that you can do with your actual YouTube in the way of colors and branding and things like that. Now there are ways to put your logo on things, there are ways to, you know, change the, the visuals on your actual YouTube channel, but as it comes down to actually controlling the way that the actual player looks, very little to no customization that is available with that. Now, if you're going to go down this road or you even have a YouTube channel, there are some things that you should be doing. There are things that you can consider, and there are also things that will help you improve your channel. Making sure that videos, every video you have, has a really great thumbnail image. If you're just uploading a video, you're leaving it to chance for YouTube to automatically select a thumbnail or a still of that video that is the representation in the catalog in which people search. You have the ability, once you've verified your account and you have a certain amount of views, that you can actually upload your own thumbnail image. Think about thumbnails the very same way that we consider using subject lines in emails. That thumbnail is the thing that attracts people to wanna click on it. So by designing custom thumbnails with graphics, it's going to catch people's attention towards what that video is. And there's a lot of, of services out there that will allow you to generate thumbnails, add graphics over it, and automatically push it up to YouTube as well. So that's really important. Customizing your channel, making sure that your YouTube channel speaks exactly to the outcomes that you want your client or prospect to have when they come there, because they may see just a video that comes up in a search, but then they're going to click on it and see your company name or your name if you're doing individual branding, and they're going to go check out what's called your channel. That's where all your different videos are housed. So customizing that, making sure that the right images are there in the header, the thumbnail, it's all important elements to have in there. Make sure that you have your URL in the description of your videos. You want people to consume this content, but if they want to take action and learn more about what you do, hire you, or contact you, you want them to be very easy for them to do that. So making sure that you put your URL in the description. One thing that I've started to do is I have a standardized footer in the description that I say, if you'd like help marketing or promoting your business, please give us a call, check out our website, and then I give the website link, right? I put that in the bottom of every video that I'm putting out. Making sure that you use different calls to actions, right? There's things that you can say in your video, like, hey, please rate this video, follow me on Twitter, find me on Facebook, subscribe, right? You want to build those subscribers on your YouTube channels, getting people engaged and saying, hey, why don't you comment on the video? If you've got a question, comment down below, because you want to create that engagement. Google and YouTube want to show videos that are being highly engaged to more people because that's a good piece of content. So if you're just going on there and you're doing your thing and you're not telling people, hey, you know what, if you got a question, why don't you comment below this video? Or, you know, why don't you rate this video or subscribe to our channel? Build that subscriber base up. It's going to be extremely important. One thing that you should avoid trying to do is hard selling, right? You shouldn't be asking people to buy stuff after watching your video. If you're providing great quality content, you're providing that education, you're providing that value that people find extremely important, they will go and seek you out. They will want to learn more. So saying, hey, if you want to learn more about what we do here, go to our website. Let the website do the selling, right? Don't try to sell in the video. Video responses, making sure that you are posting relevant content, but then you're also getting good responses to that by getting people to make comments. I post tutorial videos a lot of time on my YouTube channel, and I'm getting engagement even months, years after the fact on certain tutorial videos where people are asking questions. And I monitor that, and I go back, and I answer those questions. It's a great way to engage with your following. I mentioned in the beginning about playlists, creating a different type of playlist. What I mean by a playlist is you get to categorize the different videos in which you upload. So when I go and look at my channel, I've got different categorizations or playlists based on how-tos, reviews, I've got different ones on marketing tips, so there's different ones that are out there. You can create those playlists and then either embed them on different pages of your website, send them out in links. A great tip, like I mentioned, was if you've got after-the-sale service or education that you want to provide, create a playlist, or even a playlist for a new client. You can make it unlisted, which means it's not going to come up in any search. The only way people will get it is if you send them the link. So now you can utilize this, send it out as a new client onboarding, and then they can watch the playlist on your YouTube channel. You're going to get those views, they can engage with it, and you're going to create more value in your video. Okay, it's a social network. Think about YouTube as another social network. A lot of times people will just create a video and they'll just go upload, maybe put a title and a description, give some thought to it, but they don't do anything more than that. They don't leverage it as a social network to engage in two-way conversation, right? One of the things that I had come up was I had one video where people kept asking the same question over and over again in their instance, right? They wanted to know how to do something else. So I went and I took that, I created a new video on this other topic, Posted it back in the comment thread and then started to leverage that into the new piece of content. Right, so think about it. How can you come up with ideas to make video? If you're scared, and you know, scared in two different ways, either I don't want to be on video, then by all means do something where it's like a slideshow or a presentation or webinar format to get used to it. You know, then bring in the little video in the corner, the thumbnail, right? And then get more comfortable being on video, right? If you're not absolutely embarrassed by the first piece of content you put out, or the first couple, then you're waiting too long to actually put that content out. Yeah, you're being too harsh. Get it out there. Get in that method of putting out that content. The other thing that I hear a lot of times is, I don't have the the budget for all the big camera equipment to do my own videos. You know what? If you have a cell phone, you can create your own YouTube video. You've got a 4K, in most cases, high-definition video camera in your pocket all the time. Prop it up on something, even buy a selfie stick, and you can actually unscrew the little spring part of a selfie stick and screw that onto any type of tripod, even like a $10 one you might get at Walmart, and you can have something to be able to hold that camera so that you can shoot your videos and create great content. So think about that in your business. Think about it. What is it you're doing right now? What could you leverage in that, uh, to build your business? And you can actually have multiple different channels for your business. It doesn't always have to just be one.. If you've got different client bases or different topics of expertise that you talk about, you can have a different channel for that. Think about using those videos in blog posts so that you can then embed them, write some more content, and really have a multimedia method for expanding your reach and growing your business. So if you've got any questions about this, please by all means subscribe to us here in the Content Amplification Podcast. If you want to check out my YouTube channel, you can go to youtube.com/bluecowmarketing. You'll find me over there, and by all means subscribe to that. I'd love to hear from you. If you've got any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to reach out.
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