If you have earned your aquarium maintenance certification and want to go into business for yourself, what’s stopping you? With your certification completed, you have the know-how to hang out your own shingle, so that’s not an issue. Sure, it’s a huge dive into the deep end, but the rewards can be huge, too:
· You have complete autonomy
· You can create your own schedule
· You get the pride and self-satisfaction of ownership
· You get to be the boss and hone your leadership skills
· It can be a chance to earn more money than if you were employed by someone else
Thanks to the internet and social media, it’s never been easier to get the word out about a new business. Better yet, accounts on these outlets cost nothing to use. Free marketing!
The number of people who use YouTube is staggering: nearly 2 billion people log in regularly at a rate of a billion hours of content consumed daily. Despite the statistics, however, less than 10% of small business owners have their own YouTube channel.
Like Facebook and Twitter, having a YouTube account costs nothing but can make a big impact. Managed well, a YouTube channel is a great way to attract interest and engage with potential customers. It might sound daunting, but creating a channel is pretty straightforward, and there are helpful videos that can walk you through the process. You can also find free tools to design your channel art—the banner above the video—such as Canva and Adobe Spark.
The real challenge is creating content that people will watch. Knowing who your clients are likely to be, aim to create videos that will appeal to that demographic. For example, lots of stress-inducing places like dentist offices and law firms keep aquariums for their calming presence, so making professional looking videos to appeal to that target audience makes sense. What do they want that your YouTube channel could provide?
Check out competitors’ YouTube channels to see what they’re putting out there and figure out how you can do it better. What kind of videos are they putting up? What’s the tone? How long are they? Consider your own favorite channels—what do you like about them? What are they doing right that makes you keep watching their videos?
Above all, strive to make the cleanest looking and sounding videos possible. People will stop watching in a heartbeat if the sound quality is poor or the video looks amateurish. The goal is to present your business in a professional light, and sloppy videos work against you.
The words you use in your channel description, video titles, and video descriptions should be carefully weighed for maximum impact. SEO, or search engine optimization, attempts to make content relevant in a way that makes it pop up in user search queries. Optimizing these important elements using keyword research dictates whether or not your videos will appear when people type in something like “aquarium care” in the YouTube search bar.
It might be tempting to come up with a clever, catchy title, but if you want to attract people searching for videos about aquarium care you would be wise to figure out what they’re most likely to type and employ those words. Unsurprisingly, there are lots of online tools to help you determine what keywords you should be implementing.
Like and subscribe! Leave a comment! Share my video! There’s a good reason YouTubers beg and plead for viewers to engage with their content: the more “likes” and “subscribers” a video has, the more popular it looks, making it more attractive to potential viewers. The same goes for the number of comments under a video. Here’s another helpful hint: when viewers comment, it’s a good idea to respond! Get a conversation started.
Savvy small business owners make the most of every online opportunity because that’s where most people hang out these days. When aquarium owners have questions or need help maintaining their tanks, they head straight for the internet. Make sure they find you waiting there with helpful and interesting YouTube channel.