TJ Walker answers questions from a student named Rick about video file sharing, promoting media content, and getting sponsorships on YouTube and Facebook.
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Are there any video file sharing sites you should be on in addition to YouTube? Rick, one of my students on the Udemy learning platform, writes in with several questions. I want to address all of them. He specifically wants to know are there any platforms that he feels or that I feel he should be on? If he's trying to promote a news network of information related to his niche in a video format, I of course Recommend Getting on YouTube. The question is, where do you go beyond that? Certainly Facebook these days is getting large audiences. So if you have time and resources, you would want to be on Facebook. But time is limited, resources are limited. There are a hundred video file sharing sites you could be on. Udemy has far and away the largest audience. By some estimates, 75 to even 90% of all video viewing on the Internet is coming from YouTube. So when your resources are limited and whose resources aren't limited, I recommend just focus on Udemy and use that extra time promoting your, your YouTube video on lots of other social media websites. I want to share with you other questions. He says. TJ is there anything you would recommend for me to try to get the word out to other universities, college media students. Rick's niche is in media journalism at college level. It's not my world, but in general, you want to be active on social media sites where people you care about are already there. Become a known presence. Also stress personal connections. If you go to a yearly college journalism convention and you make connections with dozens of other professors, write to them personally, show them what you have, try to interest them, try to convince them this is going to be useful content for their students. Stress personal connections, number one. Number two, try to be active members of the social media websites where the people you care about are already there. Next question. Do you recommend any of the video upload sites beyond YouTube? I touched on that. Certainly Facebook would be a number two. There are a lot of video sites that technically are great. Vimeo, viddler, there's all kinds of sites. The question is, how much of an audience do they have? If they're just hosting it and you have to send all the audience, why not send that audience to YouTube? Because if you're sending audience to YouTube, YouTube can reward you by putting you higher up in the search engine, bringing in larger audiences. The smaller video file sharing sites can't do that, with the exception these days of Facebook. Next question. When you send your informational video clips to CNN or other large media outlets, do you attach them to an email with a short letter describing them in the body of the Email? No, I don't attach videos because if someone is at CNN or the BBC or NBC, the last thing they want to do is click download to some huge file from somebody they've never heard of. That's where I definitely send them a YouTube link. Because people in the media trust YouTube. They trust if they click on something with the YouTube URL, they're not going to get a virus. It's simple, it's fast, it's easy. And then if they want the original video clip, you can always send it. But the first step should be short email explaining to them why this is going to be helpful for their news broadcast, what's newsworthy in it, and then the link. Don't send attachments. I wouldn't even send a press release as an attachment. Media people do not like that. Finally, do you recommend any of the other udemy courses or websites on sponsorship of YouTube videos, podcasts, etc. Well, when it comes to sponsorship, I hate to tell you, you got to be your own sponsor until you get huge, huge audiences. There's not a lot of money to be made from YouTube sponsorship. But of course you can sign up, as anyone on YouTube can, to be a part of the ad program on YouTube. And YouTube essentially matches you with sponsors, but you're talking about just pennies in a month dollars. I mean, it's really hard to make more than $100 a month on your YouTube ads, but again, that's one way where you can automatically get sponsorship. Facebook, as of today, is still talking about that, but they're not splitting revenues, to my knowledge, with any of their video creators. You want to know more about podcast? I'll tell you what I do, and it may or may not work for you. When I want to really know something, dive deep. Whether it is marketing online courses, whether it's everything about podcasts. What I do these days is I go over to Amazon. I'm already a member of the Amazon Kindle unlimited program, and I'll just quickly get every book on the subject that's available on unlimited. So I probably read 70 books on podcasting last month when I was doing research on podcasting, and it doesn't cost me any more than the nine bucks I'm paying every month. Anyway, the other thing is for about a hundred bucks, you can get 10 or even 20 courses on various online course providers on those sites because there's so many discounts around. And just go really deep into that subject area and get a wide swath of information from all the experts. That's what I do. That's what I would recommend. I wouldn't really recommend any one course over any others, but try to get as many as you can if you're interested in that subject. Rick, thanks for writing as always. We answer all of your questions as it relates to media training, public speaking training and communicating by speaking through YouTube, Internet, video and any other means. Thanks again.
