Last updated on June 5th, 2024
What if you needed to promote and market your business on YouTube but you had zero budget? Could you do it? Yes, you could. Today we’ll tell you how.
HOSTS: The VidAction Podcast is hosted by:
– Dane Golden – VidAction.tv
– Gwen Miller – LinkedIn
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
It’s time for the VidAction Podcast. Today we’re talking about how to do YouTube with zero budget for your business. My name is Dane Golden from VidAction I’m here with my friend Gwen Miller from Hearst. Welcome, Gwen.
Gwen Miller:
Hi Dane.
Dane Golden:
Hey, Gwen. People put a lot of money into making. Their YouTube videos, their YouTube channel, great, but how much does it really cost when you get right down to it, what?
How much does it cost to do the basics?
Gwen Miller:
Uh, You can pretty much do it for $0, given that you have some basic things that most of us in a Western economy. Typically half. So I want to caveat here, like there was probably money that went into some of the stuff you already have, but it was stuff you were going to have with or without having YouTube aspirations, right?
Dane Golden:
Alright. So, yeah, like, you know, in my normal life I have a MacBook Pro, I have a webcam, I have a, I have some earbuds. I have an iPhone 13 currently. So is that enough? Is that all I need?
Gwen Miller:
Yeah, I mean, to get started for sure. I mean, you have the sun, like biggest free source of light out there. Like you have the, there’s editing software for your. Phone that that’s free for your computer. Like you probably have owned three things with some sort of camera capability. So it really is that easy at this point.
Dane Golden:
All right, so let’s talk. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Let’s talk about the basic elements of, you know, what you just technically and software. You know what, what you need to do, and, and maybe this is just too basic for people, but let’s just, let’s just run through ’em real quick. You need video, you need audio, you need some sort of light, you need some sort of way of recording it.
And these are all essentially built into our average office system, right? You have a web, your, your webcam on your, on your computer is probably seven 20 p, which is the very basic, but, you know, might be good enough. You can get an external webcam that’s a little bit nicer. I have a Logitech Brio, which is a 4k, but you don’t really need that.
Gwen Miller:
And if you have a phone, it probably has a higher camera than that, just automatically.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, so let’s say you have just a basic, you know, iPhone and, you know, my last iPhone before I got a 13 was an eight, just a straight eight. So it’d been several years. But even that phone phone, I know Anthony Ambry, his dad has a sort of a, a decorating channel or fix it up channel. I think he has an iPhone eight that’s run the whole, that ran the whole channel for a year.
Got a hundred thousand subscribers. That’s all he did. He didn’t have a mic, he just had a well lit room. And often in a room you want to have lights, so you probably already have some sort of lighting in your room.
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. Absolutely you have. You have really everything. And then even beyond that, like you start to think, well, do I need, you know, X, Y, or Z? But like the beauty about YouTube has always been like they provide you with like, you don’t need to buy necessarily like fancy data tracking software because they provide it all for you in studio.
Like the power of the amount of stuff that they give you just right off the bat for free. Let’s not even just. Like me, Dane, you and I are old. Like we remember the days
Dane Golden:
talk about yourself.
Gwen Miller:
Well, you’re very young. You don’t remember the days before YouTube, but before YouTube, like the idea of actually like, you know, putting like, video on the web if you take a, a away, the factor that it was, you know, it, it, it, the technology wasn’t, wasn’t always there, but even in that brief time where the technology was there before YouTube started, like there was significant cost.
To, video storage. Like you had to pay for all that, that uploading and hosting yourself, and it’s really expensive. And you’d be like, well, it’s now what, 15 years later? It’s still expensive now. Like they burn a lot of money hosting your little videos. Not that they’re little videos, but you, you get what I mean?
From a context, they’re doing a lot of stuff that if YouTube had never existed, we had, remained in a pay-to-play model essentially. Like you would have significant costs to think about launching a channel that for yourself, where you had to store a lot of video. And especially if you wanted, you’re using your iPhone and you’re like, oh, I want to record it, like, 4k, like they’re hosting that for free.
And you could easily be, and this is usually BA, was based on like traffic costs. So the more people that watched the video, the more it cost you rather than now you make money, the more people watch you. Before it was a cost the more people
Dane Golden:
it’s an inverted, yeah, it’s
Gwen Miller:
you could have a viral video and come back with like a hundred thousand dollars internet bill that month, like the.
The fact that YouTube did what they di did is still mind boggling to me, and it probably would not happen today.
Dane Golden:
Right. So, you get your storage for free. You’ve got your, your built-in methodology. Let’s talk a little bit about editing. Now, you could just livestream right into the YouTube channel, so no editing there. You could even use YouTube’s after the fact editor, whether you’ve. Live streamed or uploaded something.
It’s not fancy. It just, you can only just cut things out, but you could use it, you could shorten things down. But there’s a, a variety of free video editors you could use. A lot of the paid editors have free versions. My, my current editor is Descript. It has a free version. You could use iMovie. You could
Gwen Miller:
Mm-hmm.
Dane Golden:
a number of free
Gwen Miller:
Adobe has a Premier Rush, is their free version. You could use InShot. There’s Filmora, there’s a ton out there that you can use either on your phone or on your computer. Like I’m say, a Adobe, I think may be phone based for their free version. But iMovie is definitely on the computer and InShot is actually a fairly good one that’s on your phone.
Dane Golden:
Now, what about free music? That is totally easy to use on YouTube that you don’t have to pay forever? What, what could you use?
Yeah,
Gwen Miller:
YouTube has solve for that too. They have their, music library that you can use, copyright free. Now, I will caution you, make sure you’re going to the official copyright free music library like, like actually physically on YouTube. Like if you just type into the search bar, bar, bar, like a YouTube copyright free library, it pulls up a lot of scams that will have music.
And I just know someone who got caught in that where they’re now claiming his video and he was like, oh, it was part of the copyright free library. And then YouTube looked into it for him and it wasn’t, they’re like looking at the link. It’s like, oh no, this is some random guy on the internet. Posing as us, so make sure you’re actually physically in the section of the app for the copyright free library.
Dane Golden:
There, there is a link. You go to studio.youtube.com, and in the left hand navigation there somewhere is the YouTube music library. And that is all legit, but it’s not necessarily legit for using it off YouTube, but we’re just talking about YouTube today. Okay. What about B-roll? What if you wanted to use B-roll?
Just some cool images or video clips. What would you do if you, if you didn’t have any money?
Gwen Miller:
Well, there are, there are feet free B-roll sites. I’m trying to pull up if I have…
Dane Golden:
pexels, P E X E L S. Some editors have them built in that you can use, and I’ll tell you what, it’s not quite the same, but you could make some little, shorts on your own YouTube channel from other people’s videos if they permit you to do so.
Gwen Miller:
Mm-hmm.
Dane Golden:
I mean, if Gwen Miller has a video and she permits me to make a clip of it, I can just make a clip of that and turn that.
And I think, I don’t, I don’t use that feature, but I can turn it into a short, can’t I?
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. Yeah. And here’s the interesting thing. So everybody, absolutely, everybody has just resigned their YouTube, their YouTube partner program,
Dane Golden:
Oh, okay.
Gwen Miller:
contract. When. Shorts rolled into existence in February. They went back in and made sure it made everyone essentially, rere to the entire Y ppp. So even though you’re think you may have thought you were just going in and agreeing to shorts, they used that opportunity to essentially clean up.
because like over the last, what? 15, it’s probably less of the partner program. Let’s say 12, 13 years that they’ve had the partner program, like. They, they’ve essentially had different versions of it going through, so everybody was kind of on some sort of weird version. So this way they cleaned it up and one of the things they did at that point was they went in and if you had those options turned off, they turned them back on.
You can go back in. And you can, bulk update. You’d have to bulk update your entire libraries. It turned, it, it turned the, the ability to make shorts and, and small clips off your content on, for all your content. You can go into settings and say, moving forward, I don’t want this to happen, but you still have to then go in and bulk upload your library if you don’t want that to happen.
So as of. February, a lot more stuff is available to make shorts out of, maybe without the actual, under the channel being too aware, but, you know, hey, they’ll figure it out eventually. Right?
Dane Golden:
Now what if I wanted to use something like TubeBuddy or Vid iq? Could I get a free version?
Gwen Miller:
Well, vi iq, like, it depends on what you want to do. Like I use just the free version of Vi iq most of the time. I, I have access to, like the actual, like, That I Q Q. But seriously, most of what I use is like the keyword stuff, which is, you can just access that. So I, I think before you jump to buying the full versions of a lot of the software, start with a free version and see how far that gets you.
You may find, especially when you’re starting out, it’s plenty and you would’ve just kind of been paying for no reason.
Dane Golden:
Now, let’s say I wanted to, write a script. Now, not everyone wants to use a script, but let’s say I did. What about freeways of getting a script? Could I, could I have chat? G p t? Write it for me. Could
Gwen Miller:
A lot of people are doing that now.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, so they could write it for me. I could just read that as a script or, one of the ways that I actually write scripts, for clients is I interview them.
And I record the audio of that onto my phone, and then I export that into a, you know, just an AI transcriber, descript as one. There’s other tools and you get sort of the general description of that. And then I use, you know, Google Docs and I morph that into a script because so many people in business, They just have writer’s block.
They, you say, well just write a script and then we’ll do it. They’re like, I don’t know what to write. And like, listen, you’ve been doing this for 20 years. You know what you’re talking about. Just tell me and I’ll write it. Or someone will write it. Just explain to me in a conversation what I need to know.
Suddenly you’ve got five tips, you know? So that’s actually sort of a trick that I use. And then, another trick that we use apart from, you know, instead of reading off a teleprompter, which I always think is very forced, what we do instead is we encourage people to, once they have some sort of outline or script, To actually read that into an audio recorder, particularly if this is an important thing, like an ad that you have to say things just right.
We say, read it into your recorder now walk around the house, or you know, your everyday stuff around, whatever you’re doing. If you’re driving, if you are doing the dishes, walking the dog, sometimes diapering a baby, you can just listen to this recording you made over and over and over again. It maybe 20 times.
And I tell you, you know, by after an hour or two of listening to yourself say this, you’ve got it memorized. You don’t need a teleprompter, and you can improvise on the fly because you know this stuff backwards and forwards already. So that’s just another freeway of not using a teleprompter, having a script.
And other things. Now, what about if you needed to come up with a strategy for what topics to talk about? What would you do, Gwen if you didn’t have a budget at all?
Gwen Miller:
Well, you know, ChatGPT can do that for you too now. But you know, there is a lot of the times with what, we’re talking with real serious business expertise. You’re your own best resource. Again, if you’ve been doing this 15, 20 years, like. There is just what are the most common questions my customers ask me?
Your customers are great resources, right? Resource, right? Spend a week, ask people when they come in, what are the, what are the things you wonder about the most? You know, your social media is a great place to start sourcing ideas and questions. Tweet out to your, or on Facebook, you know, if you’re small business, like oftentimes you have a good f.
Facebook presence locally, like find out from, from, your social audience. Like what are they thinking about? I find in this new world of like, it’s so much easier. I can’t imagine television producers from 30 years ago vacuwe have to figure this stuff out, but now it’s like you could probably program most channels for years as off of the YouTube comments.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, you, you, you’d think it’s easier to, to make movies in TV today, but you know what? There’s a whole bunch of movies they spend a hundred million on it that don’t make a dollar. So you
Gwen Miller:
Oh, I’m not saying it’s easier to make TV and movies these days, but it’s certainly easier to make what we make.
Dane Golden:
Okay, sure. Well, and, and one of the other ways of finding out what topics to make, and, and here’s something that I always talk about with my clients and customers, is that, you know, what the, the, the customer who’s ideally positioned to work with you may be asking stupid questions.
We any, no matter what specialty is, and that’s not insulting to the customer, but. Every business that anyone is in. If you meet someone randomly and they say, what do you do? And you tell them that they’re going to ask you a dumb question. And it’s not because they’re dumb, it’s just they’re misinformed.
Right? And we, the first thing we say is like, oh, that’s not actually how it works. You know, like you have to sort of inform them, oh, okay, so here’s actually how it works with our business. You know, we meet somebody they might say, Oh wow. How do I become a famous YouTuber? Or you know, how do I get more views or how do I get more subscribers?
And you’re like, well, is that really what you want though? Who do you want as viewers and subscribers? And it’s really actually more important to get audience retention. And they’re like, what? What’s audience retention? You know, things like that, right?
Gwen Miller:
Mm-hmm.
Dane Golden:
In, in every business there is questions like that. And I, I ask the same.
Dumb questions that everyone else has. So we want to meet the customer where they are and find out what they’re asking. But how do you know what they’re asking? And one of the ways you can do that is just very simply with Google’s auto complete and some, and sometimes it’s better to do, you know, incognito.
So just, you know, type in a few words that are related to what you’re. Where your ex area of expertise is, see what people are actually typing in because that auto complete will tell you in general, what’s the first word people type in after you know how to get YouTube blank, you know? Oh, it’s views. Well, I didn’t really want to talk about views, but the reason so many educators talk about how to get more YouTube views is because that’s actually what people are looking for.
Even though. That’s actually not the thing you need to focus on most, but it’s what people want to know and that’s why people make videos about that. What about, you know, one of the things that we, we talk about is what are the first questions that people ask your sales people? So your sales people, anyone who’s selling whatever you have.
They know what those first questions are and you know where else you can get those questions. Gwen
Gwen Miller:
Where.
Dane Golden:
in Google where it says people also ask
Gwen Miller:
Oh yes.
Dane Golden:
that people also ask questions, and if you click those little arrows by the people also ask and click a few of them. It’ll expand out into a much larger list. And that’s a great way to make a, like, top 10 questions answered about X, Y, Z, about buying a home or getting a mortgage or, you know, shooting a basketball, whatever it is.
Those questions are really, really helpful. Do you ever, do you ever, drill down into those Gwen?
Gwen Miller:
I have not off to play with that now.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s really great. And there’s a few other little areas around the Google page now. People don’t always go to YouTube for the same things. They go to Google and, and this is another tool I use that’s absolutely free, is I go to google Trends, trends.google.com. It’s not going to be as granular as, you know, it’s very specific question.
But you can look for trends. So for instance, It might be that, you know, I was looking into doing a Black Friday YouTube channel last last year, and I was just like, well, how would I do it and when would I do these videos? And I realized it wasn’t just the week before Black Friday, but the couple of months, because I could look on YouTube trends and see when it sort of started.
It starts at the beginning of October and then peaks December 1st and it’s done. But people, if you can toggle between what people do for web search and YouTube search, you actually see people look a lot more on YouTube for how to do something and a lot more on Google for what is something or, or that type of thing.
So those are really good. What other things am I missing? Gwen?
Gwen Miller:
I mean those, those were a lot of ways to find topics
Dane Golden:
What other things do you have to do on YouTube that people would normally have to pay for? How about transcriptions? That’s one.
Gwen Miller:
Hmm.
Dane Golden:
Or translations even.
Gwen Miller:
Yeah, they’re doing a lot. Like, you know, they, they make your captions for you these days. Like, and here’s the, the real kind of fun thing is you can also take those caption files and use them other places. They let you down to download the caption files. So like, that’s really powerful because a lot of the other, platforms don’t have quite as good a.
Tools as a YouTube does. So, you know, even if it’s, so there’s a couple ways you can either, they can automatically make your captions for you, highly encourage you to double check them. You could, if you ask, say you do have a script, you can, what I really like to do, you can upload that script to YouTube and they will sync and make a caption file
Dane Golden:
Oh, right, sure.
Gwen Miller:
So you don’t have to, can you imagine having to sit there and like type up an SR if you dunno what an s r t file is, it’s
Dane Golden:
done it.
Gwen Miller:
Time code, and then exactly like, oh, it’s so painstaking to have to do it by hand. So the fact that you can just be like, here’s all the text YouTube’s AI goes in and figures out exactly where it matches, and it’s really, really good at that matching, and you have a wonderful s r T file you can then download and upload to like Facebook.
It’s amazing.
Dane Golden:
How much does it cost Gwen to link from YouTube to your website?
Gwen Miller:
Nothing
Dane Golden:
Nothing. It’s
Gwen Miller:
can, yep.
Dane Golden:
It, you can put it in your caption, in your description. You can put it in the header, you can put it in your about section. What about, YouTube ads? You know, one of the things that, you know, if you start a YouTube ad account, they will actually give you an incentive of, I don’t know, it depends on when they offer it.
50, a hundred dollars and you can run some ads that way. And there are some services, Gwen, like the one I have at VidAction where we actually run ads at no charge for the customer. So that’s a service we offer and they only pay us for the leads or the sales. It’s not a match for every customer, but that is free based on performance.
Gwen Miller:
absolutely.
Dane Golden:
Now what if I am a brand and I find that a ton of people are making videos about my products? Is there anything free that I can do about that?
Gwen Miller:
Yeah, you can definitely drop all those videos into a playlist. Have it on your homepage or your channel. Embed those on your freaking website, man. Like, share, like share links to them everywhere. Like, like that’s the, that’s the, that’s. Gold when, when that happens and you have all this content, you know, running around now, be careful.
That doesn’t mean you can rip it and then use it with anything for anything you want without doing some sort of reimbursement for the, for the crater. So there’s some things like people like, oh, do I have to, like, do I have to like, get permission to put them in a playlist? No. Those natural type of social media things like, no, there, creator’s not going to complain if you’re, they’re on a playlist on your page getting free views.
It’s just if you say you want to like . Take that piece of content and run it as an ad, then you do need to make a deal with the creator.
Dane Golden:
Can I just, if they uploaded it to YouTube, can I just take it and run it in a Super Bowl ad?
Gwen Miller:
And no, you definitely will not get away with that. But Dane, let’s talk about the reverse side of this, which again, if we go back to that analogy of, think of a world where YouTube never started. You have to like have your own website that you’re supporting. You’re paying for your upload costs. Guess what else is, it can be, would’ve been really, really expensive to do on your own, selling your own ads. Can you imagine that? You gotta have some sort of, you know, slick sales guy sitting, sitting in an office in your basement calling up all these advertising, be like, Hey, you want to advertise on my client’s channel? And YouTube does sells that for free for you.
Dane Golden:
Mm-hmm.
Gwen Miller:
and that is kind of incredible that they’re being your sales team for you.
Dane Golden:
That’s true. That’s true. And, and, also in, in essence by them just promoting your videos to the people that want to watch them. They are being a salesperson of your, whatever you talk about.
Gwen Miller:
that’s a really good point. You’re getting free promotion. Can you imagine, like, so let’s, like, here’s a good analogy of a, a product that developed largely outside of the Google ecosystem, which is podcasts. And podcasts still have, pardon my French crap, discoverability,
Dane Golden:
What.
Gwen Miller:
Like if your dis, if your podcast is going to get found, like you’ve gotta figure out a way to get in front of people, whether that’s some sort of social media promotion, buying a spot on someone else’s podcast to push your podcast.
It’s a whole thing. Whereas YouTube for free, Will go out and tr and with their magic, with their algorithm, try to find the perfect match between you. It’s like a matchmaker trying to find your perfect match and turns the audience. And they’re all about wanting to make that audience as happy as possible.
So they want to find the exact right person just for you. And it’s so powerful and crazy to me that it’s your, yes, imagine replacing that with paid advertisement like it, it would be insanely expensive.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s absolutely true. So I guess that’s, those, those are a lot of the free things that you can do as a business on YouTube without spending dollar one. You can invest little bits here and there. But that’s just a ton of stuff you can do as a business. Now, what’s not free? Gwen? You know what’s not free is your
Gwen Miller:
blood, sweat and tears. Yeah.
Dane Golden:
Your time, blood, sweat, and tears. Yeah. The work, the learning, the executing, the trial, the error, and often the waiting after all this work for it actually to take effect, which can be months, sometimes years. That’s not always easy. And there are some ways of speeding it up through expense or proficiency, but that’s just sort of the way it goes.
We, we talk about a lot of those different ways on this podcast and, people can check out those other episodes until next week. Gwen. Miller. How can people find you?
Gwen Miller:
Oh, well come hang out with me on Twitter, I am “gwenim”. And then just find me on LinkedIn, Gwen Miller.
Dane Golden:
And my name is Dane Golden from VidAction.tv. We help you with your YouTube ads. We help you with your YouTube growth on your channel. And if you’d like to book a call, go to http://TalkToDane.Today. Until next week, here’s helping you help your customers through video.