How To Build a Successful YouTube Channel & Generate Business From It

There are many ways to run a real estate business effectively and successfully, and one area we very often overlook and miss opportunities in is YouTube. One of the hardest things to understand is how to turn YouTube videos and social media content into relationships, leads and closings. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to do. 

YouTube gives us the chance to build a truly evergreen, constant lead generating, funnel-supplying source of business that we can control. And it can work when we’re not working and do the heavy lifting of building our credibility. One YouTube video can give you leads for years to come. That’s the beauty of tech and the times we’re living in, and something we should be taking advantage of.  

YouTube is the second most powerful search engine in the world, owned by the most powerful search engine. With so many people turning to the internet to learn about a real estate market, it’s smart to position ourselves and our online activities to align with these people through local market-driven YouTube content. It’s no different to other real estate business generation tools, we need to build a system and do the work.  

Jackson Wilkey and Jesse Dau are the creators of the wildly successful YouTube channel, Living in Portland, Oregon. They generate 100% of their business from YouTube, over $20 million! I recently interviewed them for our podcast and in that conversation, they shared with me how they built real estate business on YouTube. Below are a few of my key takeaways.

You can’t find any other platform in the world that you gain that much trust just because you put your face on your video

When people reach out to us from YouTube, they feel like they already know, like and trust us.The way they talk to us is different because we have already built the authority and shown them the credibility we have. 

You can make a video that can become everything else

It’s important to have a multi-platform and multi-prong approach to our content creation, and that’s why repurposing our content is so important. It allows us to get all the use out of one video. 

Start with what gets searched and what you can actually get traffic for 

The biggest mistake many agents make on YouTube is making too much content about real estate. What we can learn from Jackson and Jesse’s success is that we need to be making content based on what people are already searching for. Start with the pain point first. 

All of the elements combined creates a very masterful piece of art.

Enable custom thumbnails. Thumbnails and titles are up to 90% of why your video gets clicked. Your description needs to have your title in it, and you need a 1-2 paragraph description. Type for humans not for robots.