In today’s episode of the Mail-Right show, we have special guest Malcolm Lawson, a real estate agent in Maryland, with a YouTube subscriber base of over 82,000. In 2019, he generated a commission of over $100,000 after only being in the industry for three years. If you’re interested in generating business using his process, be sure to watch the episode for yourself.
Using YouTube to Generate Leads
So Malcolm started his YouTube career with survival videos that share outdoor and wilderness tutorials and guides. The preparedness content he’s created has been doing consistently well and has jumped up in traffic after news of the Corona Virus broke out. That channel still generates passive income for Malcolm, and he uploads content on it whenever he has the time.
After getting his license back in 2016, he started experimenting on using his YouTube expertise to generate leads for his new real estate business. At first, he wasn’t doing too well, and his videos weren’t getting the leads and traffic that he expected. And the in early 2018, he found a video that worked well, and he figured that to generate leads using YouTube, you need to be making the right video format that people want to consume and share. That video was “10 things to know before moving to Maryland”, that video got over 800,000 views on Facebook and over 9,000 shares.
The Right Equipment
If you know me, I’m a big advocate of realtors using video to ramp up their organic marketing efforts. We asked one of the most frequently asked questions that a lot of my audience asked, which is what type of camera do they need to make these videos? Malcolm used to use a $3,000 DSLR camera that he bought five years ago. However, nowadays, the newest iPhone can take videos that have a similar quality to his old DSLR camera. New Android phones today can even go up to 100 megapixels and shoot HD-quality videos. If you have a relatively decent phone, you can use that for all your video taking needs, including home tours, neighborhood tours, and vlogs. Instead of buying an expensive DSLR, just buy a versatile camera holder for your phone. If you’re planning on doing vlogs at home or the office, he also recommends you buy Softbox for your lighting. Softbox provides a soft light that looks attractive on your face when you’re taking your videos.
Editing Your Videos
Malcolm does his own edits, which he does for about an hour or two for a basic video with minimal edits required. However, if he’s making an unusually long video with lots of graphics and effects, it will probably take him close to six hours to make. If you’re not confident with your video editing skills, the good news is you can hire a Freelancer to do it for you.
The Power of Video
So right now, all the videos that Malcolm built on his YouTube channel are getting him about 1,200 views a day. So just imagine, that’s 1,200 new people he’s getting in front of and introducing himself as a realtor in Maryland. The best part about it, these are people who are searching for information about real estate in his target area. In 2019, he did over 30 transactions, and out of that 30, 11 were leads that he met exclusively on his YouTube channel. As Malcolm mentioned, it’s a slow build, especially on YouTube, but once you’ve created a consistent stream of content that ranks in YouTube search, you can see the results stack up. If you’re at all interested in creating a sales funnel that’s consistently generating you leads after an initial investment of a few days. You need to incorporate YouTube and video into your marketing strategies.
Embedding Your Videos on a Website
Here’s another suggestion that Malcolm had that I also recommend to a lot of my clients, and that’s Embedding your YouTube videos onto your website. Google Search rewards articles for having YouTube videos on them. Creating a blog post or, in our case, neighborhood posts and then pairing them up with a YouTube video adds tremendous value for both content material. It helps get your post ahead of your competitors and get you into the number one search result for your niche.
