BiggerPockets

Are any of you guys marketing your properties via Youtube?

I know this kind of thing has been done before, I've got a flip camera and was going to make a short video of my next property and upload it to youtube, just wanted to get some pointers from people that have done it before and what their success was

Nick,

I do my house tours that way. I have been learning on how to use keywords and tags and this thing called Backlinking which is another language to me. But I like it for using house tours. I rented a home to a lady sight unseen. Just the video. I also really cut down my tire kickers.

What I did was place the video on my website and started using it in ads on craigslist....my website link I mean.

I have been successful. There are a lot of people that are doing this thing called internet marketing....which I barley know how to spell internet. But its fun to learn and implement.

It does work.

Reginald, thats what I was wanting to do, is create a channel as a way to store and market them. Are those guys having success at it though?

Nick, yes I get leads off of it.

I did some beta testing with Youtube last year and felt that it was worth the time and effort.

We are looking forward to expanding heavily into video this year.

I am working with Final Cut Pro for video editing (big learning curve there) and am educating myself on how to shoot better quality video with by using the proper lighting, incorporating green screens, ect.....

We have a long way to go, but the plan is to get this up and running in the 2nd quarter.

Nick, it will absolutely give you an edge, and it's fun too!

I don't know, it's kind of a toss up for me when it comes to pictures online. In my experience, unless you have a house that takes very good pictures/video (high ceilings, stainless steel appliances) you might actually be limiting the amount of people interested in seeing it by posting a video.

Seems to me that most pictures I see of houses on CL or video tours on Youtube really aren't that flattering. Not sure I like the idea of making that the first impression people have of my property.

What I've done a lot recently is created a simple Yahoo website for a house that I'm selling using a very easy to remember website.

For instance my current one is:
www.733house.com

I put this on the sign and ad it to whatever I'm doing on CL, leaflets, bandits, whatever.

This allows someone to go to the site, get as much info as I put up.

I do not, however, put pictures on the site. My reasoning is the same above. I actually want people to read about the house and have them wonder what it looks like. This will hopefully peak their interest enough to have them give me a call and ask to see it. Surprisingly most people do not ask me for pictures off the site. They will email or call to see the house. Those that do ask to see pictures I simply say, I don't have any, and then they say, "well, when can we come look".

The only reason I bring this up is because I use to include pictures on my websites before and my 'conversion' rate of visitors to showings was A LOT worse. If I had the same amount of visitors to the site in a matter of days, I would have far far less people calling or emailing to see the house. Granted, that could have been based on price/location/size etc., but from what I gathered, with a lot of visual information (that may not be the nicest pics/video) people maybe make to rushed of a first impression.

So, unless I were to hire a professional photographer to shoot the house, I would probably hold off on presenting too much of it online.

Obviously if you have 20 houses or a house 40 miles from where you live, that might change things a little. In that case, pictures pictures pictures, if you like them THEN I will head over.

Just wanted to chime in... One of the big benefits to using YouTube for your video is for the SEO and backlinking that Johnathan Rex had mentioned. YouTube is in the top 5 most visited websites on the entire net, so it has HUGE value for getting inbound links to your sites. Also, Google has the ability to convert the audio part of your video's to indexable text. So if your video has lots of relevent content to your site, along with keyword dense descriptions, and then a link to your site... all VERY good for search engine optimization.

So, if you are going to put video on your site, why not create a YouTube channel and then drop the code on your site to feed in the YouTube video? Kills two birds with one stone... your site has video, and you get YouTube visability along with the very powerful inbound links.