Have you ever looked on YouTube for a video of how to do something? I have a few times, it’s so much easier watching a video than reading a whole article of instructions.
I just typed in ‘how to’ into YouTube and it came up with approximately 10,300,000 videos. So you need a keyword, otherwise you could be scrolling through a lot of video’s. I had a quick look myself and you can pretty much find a video for everything.
I’ve picked a few video’s for you today, they are useful and hopefully you’ll learn something from them. They’re not necessarily related to being a virtual assistant, social media or eBooks – the purpose of this post is to give you some ideas about how you can search for things, promote your business or your products/services by using video’s and YouTube.
This first video I came across was through Completely Novel (the self publishing company I discussed in How to Self Publish your Book on a Budget) – Shoo has over 200 video’s on his channel and if you ever fancied taking up drawing, you need to watch these!
This next video is something I used only yesterday. I am redesigning the look of my website over the next few weeks, I need to add some new menu’s, I have some new pages I’d like to include but I wasn’t sure how to deal with the menu’s of my WordPress theme. That’s where my fellow blog challenge friend Martin Jarvis of DMJ Computer Services came in, he created this video for me and uploaded it to YouTube. It took 4 minutes to watch and I now know how to move forward with my menu improvements. Thanks Martin!
How to add sub menu / drop down structure
This last video is useful if you want to be able to embed videos into your website or blog. I watched this myself a few weeks ago, and it’s the reason this week I have been embedding video’s into my posts, such as Get Organised with this Free Resource, for practise! Thanks to Michelle Schaeffer for this one…
How to Embed a Video in Your WordPress
I’d recommend using YouTube like Google, if you want to know how to do something, or learn a new skill, watching a video can be a much better solution than reading text and trying to follow it. It’s also great for promoting your business, product or service.
I hope this blog post has been useful, if you have any great YouTube video’s you’d like to share, please leave a comment so I can check them out.
youtube has saved me so much time with these sort of videos it’s unbelievable. DIY tasks that I would normally have got somone in to do for us I can now do myself thanks to youtube
That’s great Rob, Google is usually my first port of call and YouTube my second, but to be honest watching a quick video saves so much time!
Fantastic. Next time I need to know “how to” I shall go here.
Thanks for the great mention in your post Jo.
I create videos to help describe common WordPress issues, specifically for my clients. If a client asks me how to do something in WordPress I tend to record a short 2-4 minute video, then upload it to youtube.com and also to my own support site. This serves many purposes :
It means next time somebody asks the same question I just have to refer them to the video (rather than explaining it afresh);
It means my clients have a library of useful videos to help them improve their sites;
I think it actually saves me time (how much time would it take to write an email describing how to create sub-menus in WordPress?).
It enforces my ‘WordPress Expert’ status 🙂
My tool of choice for recording screen-based videos is jing-pro, which I also use to take fixed screen shots too.
Now I need to create a ‘HowTo’ channel in youtube, rather than uploading all of my videos (personal and business) to the same channel.
Sounds like a How To channel would go down well Martin, and thanks for your help, only fair I mention you in my blog! 🙂
Great post Jo – just added a second You Tube channel for the other “arm” of my business …. just need to create some videos now! 🙂
That’s great Ian, I’ll have to go and subscribe!