How To Start A Real Estate YouTube Channel
In recent times, video has been the most effective medium for generating a lot of interest from the public. Currently, it’s the most commonly used means for marketing and generating leads for businesses. Real estate agents are not left out of this effective medium.
For real estate agents, video makes your listings visual and gives your brand more depth and personality because almost everyone is addicted to videos in one way or another.
Research has shown that video-enhanced real estate listings generate 403 percent more inquiries than those without. To make the most of the effectiveness of video in your business, you need to utilize the power of YouTube.
Three reasons why you need YouTube for your business:
- It’s the second largest search engine after Google.
- It has 2 billion monthly active users. That’s nearly a quarter of the world’s population.
- When ranked by Google, videos are more weighty than written content.
With all these, it’s safe to say YouTube is one of the best platforms to pitch your tent as a real estate agent. To do this, you need to create a YouTube channel.
Creating a YouTube channel may be difficult if you don’t know where to begin. In this post, I’ll explain the techniques and methods you’ll need to create a successful YouTube channel as a real estate agent in 2022.
Points I will cover in this article:
How To Get Started
- Tips for Setting Up Your Channel
- Tips for Creating Your Videos
- Tips for Making Your Videos
- Tips For Uploading Your Video
- Tips For Promoting Your Video
- Tips For Increasing Your Analytics:
- Conclusion
How To Get Started
Getting started on your channel takes courage and guts. The first step is to take the detective role and never reinvent the wheel. By this, I mean molding your channel by taking inspiration from other successful agents’ Youtube channels. Take a look at the videos they produce and the frequency and quality of the videos.
After that, decide the number of videos you will be posting per week. This means having a strategy -more like a timetable- on how and when to upload your videos.
Be consistent and have a long-term aspiration on how to continually grow your channel. The easiest way to implement this strategy is to find out what topics and angles will be best to teach your audience, then zero in on the specifics of each type of video you want to make. Below are some ideas that popped up in my head:
How-to Videos: These are videos that explain tasks that buyers and sellers should be aware of, such as how to determine an offer price or how to obtain a mortgage loan.
Videos on Market Updates: These are videos that give insights into the recent happenings in the real estate market for your local area.
Interview Videos: Interviewing those with unique and interesting stories goes a long way towards strengthening your channel.
Videos on Listing: spread your listings to the world by uploading high-quality videos to your Youtube channel. This is by far the most effective way to generate many leads.
Tips for Setting Up Your Channel
Name
The best thing to do for naming your channel is to use your original name. This helps your business have an everlasting name on the board.
Page “About Us”
Before they subscribe, visitors can learn more about you on this page. Additionally, the information you provide here appears in search engine results for your channel, allowing more people to find you.
Header and Profile Image
Your header should simply state what your channel is all about and what the visitors stand to gain when they take a look at your header. For your image, only a professional headshot of you would be great. Do not use your logo as your profile image.
Trailer and description for the channel
For the description, a brief explanation of what your channel is all about in a few paragraphs wouldn’t drive your point home. However, a thorough explanation of who you are, the type of video content you post, and why they should subscribe to your channel would sum it up a great deal.
As for the trailer video, try capturing all the juicy parts of your channel — introduction of yourself, your background, and why they should trust you with their business — in about 60–120 words. In the end, ask them to subscribe and turn on their notification bell for more videos.
Tips for Creating Your Videos
Video creation for your YouTube channel comes in steps and processes. You don’t just decide to post any video on your channel. There are some guidelines you need to follow, and I’ve highlighted some of them below for you:
Keyword Research
Before you start uploading your videos to your channel, the first thing you need to take care of is conducting keyword research, which will aid in the visibility of your video in search engines.
Do away with irrelevant keywords and focus on the keywords that are relevant to your local market, especially those that have a close association with your city’s name. A site like KWFinder.com is a great tool for this purpose.
Choosing Topics
The amount of energy you expend on coming up with your SEO-inclined blog post titles should be equally invested in creating groundbreaking topics for your videos.
Use tools like Google Adwords Keyword Planner or TubeBuddy (or whichever you are comfortable with) to find out which words are most relevant to your videos and entire marketing strategy. Note down and arrange the keywords so you may use them throughout your video material, increase your reach, and see which words and phrases generate the most clicks on your recordings over time.
Once you’ve compiled a keyword list, it’s time to get creative and come up with topics for each video. Consider a few alternatives for each video and choose one that sounds natural when read and stands out from other videos on the subject.
Also, don’t rely solely on making real estate videos. Spread your wings: Create videos that ask questions about people’s opinions on restaurants, activities, and other topics that have affiliations with your target audience and market.
Tips for Making Your Videos
Making your own videos isn’t as expensive as you thought. If you don’t have the means to acquire all the high-end cameras and props you’d need to make high-quality videos, you can still make do with your iPhone or Android devices.
Below are some of the tips you need to put in place when making your videos:
Hook
The first 15 seconds of your video should be tailored to hook your viewers. You can either hook them with thought-provoking questions or counter a widely known fact. But make sure you integrate the exact words into the title for congruence. Also, tell them what they may anticipate getting out of watching the full video.
Introduction
The next 15 seconds should be about yourself and why they must pay attention to you. Make viewers who are seeing you for the first time have a taste of who you are and what you can offer them.
Content
The bulk of your video, roughly 6 to 12 minutes, will be devoted to your main subject. You can make an outline ahead of time to help you stay on track and avoid drifting. You can also script down your words to assist you to refine your ideas and appear more organized.
Offer
Finally, include a call to action at the end of your video. Remind your audience to like, comment, and subscribe to your channel. You can also include external meet-points where they can get to you for consultation, either on Zoom or via your social media networks.
Editing
I’d recommend seeking the services of an experienced video editor to help make the magic of your videos. But as a newbie in this space, you can actually do just fine by editing your videos all by yourself. There are numerous premium and free programs available to assist you in editing your real estate videos.
You can try free software tools like DaVinci Resolve and iMovie to do the magic for you. But if you’d like to spice it up further, you can try premium tools like Final Cut Pro X; that’s what I use currently. Nothing technical, just the basics of editing, such as editing and splicing footage together, adding text, transitions, and other effects.
Tips For Uploading Your Video
Nothing comes as easy as uploading your videos to your channel. Just hit the upload button, and you will be on in seconds. But first, upload the video in unlisted visibility. This will give you access to add descriptions, tags, and titles, make a thumbnail, and schedule it for publication.
Add tags
Tags inform YouTube about the content of your video and assist the platform in distributing it to the appropriate audience. The majority of your tags should be related to your video’s content. You should, however, include some that are more general and tied to your identity or brand. The algorithm will get distorted if any of your tags seem out of place.
Create Titles
A lot of your keyword research should go into making your titles and descriptions top-notch. Your title should include attention-grabbing keywords. For example, “Why Dallas’s Most Secure Environment Is Actually The Worst”. Also, try not to exceed 70 characters for the headlines.
Include a description and Call-to-Action
Write a description for each video that properly describes the topic, and then optimize the content — with relevant keywords — for search engines, just as you did with the titles and tags. The copy should include a key summary of your video, relevant keywords, relevant hashtags, and your Call-to-Action, everything not exceeding 300 words.
Your Call-to-Action, be it annotations, cards, or text, should be well spelled and straight to the point. This could be a link to direct your viewers to sign up for consultations, view your website, join your email list, listen to a podcast, or watch another video.
Make Eye-catching Thumbnails
When making a thumbnail for your videos, make sure whatever copy embedded on it agrees with your tags and title. The image used should be catchy and relay the important point in each video. Take a look at the most popular agents’ channels and see what they are doing right.
Tips For Promoting Your Video
Now that you’re done with the trouble of making, creating, and uploading your videos, then it’s time to weather the storm of making them go viral. You don’t need to wait on YouTube to do the work for you, you have to take the bull by the horn in this regard.
The first thing to do is to make your videos accessible to as many followers on your social media platforms by sharing the links, not forgetting your email list too if you have one. Make a point of asking people to like, comment, and watch your video all the way through. These three factors influence your video’s position on the search results page as well as the number of organic views it receives.
There’s also your real estate website to consider. Create blog posts that revolve around your videos. Include films from your neighborhood on websites about the communities you serve. On your about page, you can include videos that explain who you are, what you’ve accomplished, and how you might assist buyers and sellers.
In your role, keep the engagement and conversation moving by responding to their messages and comments. This shows that you have your viewers and subscribers at heart, thereby increasing your engagement and viewership.
Tips For Increasing Your Analytics:
The three most important metrics you need to be watchful of as a beginner in this space are your click-through rate, initial retention, and overall retention.
First, before going all out on analytics, I suggest keeping your fingers crossed until you’ve uploaded 10–15 videos before you get serious with the key metrics.
For your click-through rate metric, this means the number of viewers who saw and clicked your thumbnails to watch your videos. The percentage for this ranges from 9%-10% for excellent and 6%-8% for very good. Anything above 4% is quite good.
For the second metric, initial retention is the percentage of viewers who have watched your video past the 1st minute. Anything less than 75% should be worked on by enticing your hooks and title with an attention-grabbing copy.
Thirdly, your overall retention rate is the percentage of those who watched your videos till the end. Anything short of 35% of your audience’s view should be dealt with by either creating more engaging content or making your videos shorter.
Conclusion:
Starting a YouTube Channel for your real estate business can be quite tasking, but enormously beneficial to your company if done the right way.
I’ve detailed all tips that have helped me — and still helping me — get my YouTube channel holding up and progressing. If followed judiciously, I believe your channel will be up and running in no time.
