MD10: 7 Step to Your First YouTube Marketing Video With Amy Schmittauer

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A YouTube marketing video is one of the best ways to get people to relate with you, and improve your personal branding because you are showing your face, your voice and your personality in a way that is also easy to consume.

Amy Schmittauer, founder of SavvySexySocial.com a social media brand that teaches you how to utilize video and social media through… well… video.

Maybe you have been thinking about publishing your first video but you are simply scare of doing it and afraid of the strategical difficulties that it could carry, because make no mistake, it does require strategic thinking. But worry no more, Amy goes straight to point to show you a effective process to getting your YouTube Marketing video out there.

Steps Learned In This Episode:

Step 1 – Knowing Your Audience

Step 2 – Equipment

Step 3 – Research and Deciding a Topic

Step 4 – Recording Tips

Step 5 – Editing Tips

Step 6 – YouTube Video SEO and Marketing

Step 7 – The Importance of a Thumbnail

“Thumbnails are Human SEO” – Amy

I want to see your first video published, so once you do please send me a link and I will love to revise it.

The Transcript

Borja: What’s up divers? Welcome back to the Moneydiver Podcast. I am coming to you from Las Vegas, Nevada where I’m at the New Media Expo Conference. And this year is huge because it’s also combined with the NAB show which is the biggest media conference in all the world. I mean, you should see all of the presentations and all of the booths on some products that are showcased on the conference. Trucks that are bigger than my car I mean it’s huge. Today’s episode is going to take the mystery out of publishing your first video on YouTube with marketing sense and with marketing in mind – that’s we always do in Moneydiver of course. We have Amy Schmittauer with us from SavvySexySocial.com and Amy has come a long way. She has grown a huge business by publishing videos in YouTube and creating a video blog or a vlog like she calls it and some other people calls it. She’s going to walk you through with the step-by-step process of figuring out what do you have to do, who’s your audience, what the type of equipment and you’re going to be surprised by the type of equipment that she recommends so don’t be scared with doing this stuff. Even if you don’t think you have the right personality or anything because Amy does have an awesome personality for video and that helps her a lot of course but if you don’t think you have it don’t worry she’s going to give you some excellent tips on how to do it and get started and get over with it and just master it. Also I want to tell you about the contest for this week where you can get a premium membership to smartduu.com and Smartduu allows you to display different versions of your website. Let’s say you have you’re featuring different videos, right? You have different videos with different keywords and different topics you want to feature those topics those specific topics to the people that are actually interested in those specific topics and feature sign up forums or call to actions that are related to these specific topics that each visitor that comes through your website is looking for. This increases your conversion rates, your sales etc. In order to learn more about the contest and participate head on over to savvysexysocial.com/moneydiver, that’s savvysexysocial.com/moneydiver. Okay let’s jump right into the interview with Amy.

Borja: Hey everyone welcome back to the show I’m super thrilled to talk to beautiful and smart, queen of YouTube Amy Schmittauer from Savvy Sexy Social. Hi Amy welcome to show.

Amy Schmittauer: Hi how are you?

Borja: I’m excellent I’m super great. Amy, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your business and how video blogging has helped you grow it?

Amy Schmittauer: Sure. I have a video consulting and personal branding business. My blog is at SavvySexySocial.com where we empower brands to embrace their amazing personality and share it with the world. A video has been a huge piece of that I’ve been on YouTube for a long time. I think creating all the way back to 2008 just sort of a viewer before that and I was inspired to create videos so when I got into the marketing industry later in 2010 I decided to leverage a video to get in front of my audience and it’s worked out pretty well. I mean even today in 2015 people are saying, “Video is so hot right now,” and I’m like, “Where have you been for the last six years?” Because it’s been hot for a while.

Borja: It makes perfect sense I mean video has a perfect way to connect with your audience get yourself out there in personal branding and everything. For someone who wants to start creating new business around video marketing or video blogging and really master the YouTube what would the steps you recommend? Like let’s talk about getting your equipment for example, what camera would you recommend a beginner would get?

Amy Schmittauer: It’s funny like that should be the viewer first step. I would take whatever you have around the house whether it’s your smartphone, a video camera or something else and just use what you have to create something. But before that what you really need to do is know who you’re trying to talk to. When you define your audience fully and understand what they’re dealing like what their struggles are that’s when you’ll be able to create really effective video that’s actually going to help your audience and that should be the purpose of it. No matter if it’s comedy or information it all needs to come from a place of why and you need to know your audience in order to be able to define that. It’s less about focusing on your needs in terms of equipment and more about knowing what your message is to position you as an authority.

Borja: Precisely and I always talk about how important understanding your audience and talking to your audience very personally is for really engaging and having an active community and someone who you are really solving problems with. Alright so you grab your phone and you say, “I’m going to start with my phone I’m going to scale as I grow. Forget about the equipment and just going to do it and you want your first topic your video, how do you decide, “Alright I’m going to choose this topic because this is not very competitive or because I see that there’s sort of pain about it.” How do you do that?

Amy Schmittauer: I would highly suggest the easy way to do this is the most fun. Use Google for what it is so good at and that is search and YouTube is obviously owned by Google so that’s good as well. What is really fun is if you actually ever go into the search bar either be things you’ll get some suggestions underneath as you begin typing. When you start creating questions as you’re drafting your search query it will start showing you the top search relative to what you’re typing that people are looking for so this can really be helpful for finding those really big items that people are asking that you might be able to position yourself in answering. If you got to use Google and type and search, “How to create?” You’ll get an interesting list of responses underneath. There are things that are people are searching for most often and if there’s something there that really hits almost what you specialize in you know it’s already a pain point for a lot of people because it’s showing up as a top search result and you can answer that question and provide piece of content and know that it is going toward that cause of helping a lot of people which is great for brand recognition. The next step there is obviously to know what those keywords are that are going to help you rank well for that. It’s not going to rank well in search unless you’ve done that job as well. You can know what the pain point is but you have to also convey it and copy so making sure that you have a very clear headline and description and tags in your YouTube video and/or your blog content and it’s really, really important so that it’s helping you rank well in search. I highly recommend to give yourself sort of that first start. Just go and look for what is trending already and give yourself some ideas there.

Borja: Beautiful. That right there my friends is because is why Amy has savvy on her business name.

Amy Schmittauer: Thank you.

Borja: Better said than puzzle. Some recording tips for people there are several formats that people use to record their videos like the talking head, white background et cetera, et cetera. For a beginner, what would you recommend as a very simple format to get started right away?

Amy Schmittauer: I would take into consideration any natural lighting you can come in contact with. This is something that I use a lot for my content and no matter what sort of equipment you’re using. If you can just get some natural lighting in your life any camera can look pretty darn good. Be careful when you’re going outside however because if you are going to use a basic microphone that comes with a camera they’re just a little bit more susceptible to having the audio be a little bit more manipulated and audio can kill a video very quickly so always keep that in mind. Even if your video isn’t perfect if the audio is spot on you’re doing okay. Sometimes we don’t know if we have like the extra lights and things and I would just say try to have at least unless it’s part of your brand which mine is definitely going to be the opposite of this advice. Try to pick something that’s low distraction in the background. I sort of have a funny bookshelf with lots of things on it but that’s just sort of my stick but if you’re just trying to get started you want something semi-professional but you don’t necessarily have the backdropper. Helping forward, just look for something with decent lighting and low distraction in the background. But if there are some stuff back there, it’s totally fine it’s human and that makes you relatable. Don’t worry so much about that stuff but just be conscious of what’s back there because people will be paying attention to the whole thing.

Borja: Perfect. When you move onto editing because I mean anyone who’s in for videos can tell you how awesome editing skills. That’s for sure.

Amy Schmittauer: Thanks.

Borja: Some tips for editing maybe three segments like an intro video, an outro or something people could use.

Amy Schmittauer: You know what’s funny I’ve been kind of pairing back on a lot of the edited and branding actually just started today. The video that I posted I kind of pull it back on my title sequence and my end slates. It’s funny because there’s actually really amazing functionality on YouTube now that makes that lesser than need to have all these graphics and things calling action for us because when you can have built-in functionality that does it, it can look really nice and it can also fix for the type of action that actually moves the needle for you. Rather than worrying about extra intros or outros or anything like that in terms of graphic I would take a look at YouTube cards which is a new feature on the platform. It’s a really great way to get people to take the action you want them to back to your website by using that. But in terms of just general statements, when you’re starting a video get to the content quickly, audience retention and everything on YouTube if you want to rank well and you don’t want to lose the viewer in the average of eight seconds that they take to decide to stay for the duration of a video. So get straight into the content and save your call to action for last.

Borja: Perfect. Some video SEO tips and YouTube SEO tips because you want to, we all know YouTube is a search engine we don’t want to get find for those terms that our videos are related to. What are some quick SEO tips for video.

Amy Schmittauer: I think just like I said before the headline, the description and the tags are the most important pieces of your YouTube video in terms of copy so whatever keyword you’re trying to rank for have it show up very early in the headline have it show up very early in the description in the first couple of lines preferably and have it be the first tag that you type in. Because the more you prioritize that one keyword that you’re hoping to rank for the more likely it will actually show up. You will actually see on YouTube search result not necessarily Google but YouTube if you are ranking well for a video it will instantly show up on the front page or on whatever page it ends up on depending on how big the competition is. I just helped the company the other day they wanted to rank on YouTube for a term that really is only specific to them so the fact that they weren’t showing up on the front page was really silly and it was just because they hadn’t put that term in the tags. As soon as they did they were on the front page of that search result immediately.

Borja: Look at that. Do you link to your website? Where do you link from your description?

Amy Schmittauer: I link that to any to call to action that I would like my audience to take that in the description and whatever I’ve said on the video I need to make sure I put that link in the description so that there’s an easy way to find it and take that action but that’s another thing and just to make sure that you’re saying whatever you want people to do because you can put tons of link from the description. They’re not going to get use       d unless you tell people why they should take that.

Borja: Any thoughts when including a custom thumbnail so that your video stands out?

Amy Schmittauer: Absolutely critical. There is something called SEO which is what your headline descriptions and tags do but thumbnails are human SEO. If you rank on the front page of search because you did well with your copy but you don’t have a custom thumbnail and another video beats you out because they went the extra mile to show that they put their best foot forward on design you’re going to lose people because that’s the imagery that visual learners need to see to know that this is going to be a well done video.

Borja: Alright. Amy this is enough for people so want to get out there and take action and prepare their first video and just put it out there. I want to ask you something that I asked to all of my guests so that people understand how important knowing your audience is. Who is Savvy Sexy Social’s avatar and ideal audience? What does that person looks like?

Amy Schmittauer: My ideal avatar is the young lady I’ve named Sarah who works for an amazing corporation for women’s rights and wants to do something in that field but would like to do it on her own terms and start her own organization but she’s trying to find a way to prevent herself into being an authority in the space and moreover thought later that people will look to you in order to be able to start a successful company on her own. That is my avatar and she’s an aspiring business owner who knows exactly the field that she is best at and just need to share it with the world.

Borja: Boom! That’s super powerful actionable. People can get out of there and implement it. I mean there’s no excuse guys I want your videos out there. Amy, once again thank you for coming to show. I really appreciate that. We provided a lot of value. I hope to have you again in the future but real quick before we go because this is going to be live pretty soon and would you mind telling people about the tour that you’re doing?

Amy Schmittauer: Sure. I’m doing a series of live events called Savvy Sexy Social Live where we talk about best practices for creating your video presents and pivoting your online brand to being an authority and personality in your space. Our next stage will be in New York City on April 25^th, Orlando May 2^nd and we’re actually going to hop overseas to London in September so really exciting and it’s all at savvysexysociallive.com.

Borja: Beautiful. Okay Amy thanks for coming on the show I really appreciate that.

Amy Schmittauer: Thanks for having me Borja great to talk to you.

Borja: Alright I hope you enjoyed that interview with Amy. Let me know how you plan on publishing your first ever episode. Use the hashtag Moneydiver10 on Twitter and head on over to the show notes don’t forget to check out the show notes at rebelgrowth.com/Episode10. Also don’t forget to check out the contest. Guys, once again thank you so much for tuning in. Go out create your first video implement it.