Kristina Smallhorn is an incredible YouTube Real Estate star! She has been featured in several books as an example of an agent who truly understands YouTube and her audience. She has built one of the largest YouTube channels by a real estate agent EVER! With over 125,000 subscribers, she knows how to generate YouTube leads on autopilot and, in fact, she’s been generating hundreds of leads and sending them out to her real estate partners all across the United States.
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Today, Kristina is sharing with us how to build a successful YouTube channel and generate YouTube leads easily as a busy real estate agent.
From Skits To Tips
Kristina started making videos in 2016, primarily on Facebook. At the end of 2017, when Facebook added a paywall, she started to shift her focus towards YouTube and began her journey of trying to understand YouTube. In no time, she succeeded!
Kristina started out making small skits. However, she found pretty quickly that people weren’t really into it and weren’t taking her too seriously. So, she decided to try something else.
In October 2019, Kristina found out that people were really interested in learning about affordable, alternative housing. She started making videos specifically about alternative homes like manufactured homes and modular homes. With that change, her channel started to grow exponentially.
Kristina continued to develop content along the same lines. At first, she thought she had to get rid of a topic as soon as she did a video on it, but she changed her mind when she realized many in her audience were new viewers who hadn’t seen her content before. She kept making similar videos with the same important lessons for anyone who needed them.
Pretty soon, she stopped worrying about subscribers and started seeking out views above all. She decided that people who needed her were the people watching, whether or not they subscribed to her channel. New views are the most important part of a good YouTube channel–you won’t generate YouTube leads of any value without them.
Should You Do Live Streams?
At first, Kristina didn’t love the idea of live streams, But before long, she realized that she was missing a huge opportunity for community engagement and she started live streaming.
She had a specific schedule for each live stream. First, she would spend 10 or 15 minutes chatting with a real estate expert guest, then she’d start taking questions for the rest of an hour. Her live streams quickly grew to see audiences of 200 to 400 concurrent viewers with thousands of real-time comments.
Not only does she get great attendance at live streams, but she finds many others watch the live streams later on…over 10,000+ viewers most of the time. In the end, if you’re able to, it’s absolutely worth it to create live streams!
Picking Your Thumbnail
When you create a video, what image do you want to attract viewers? It depends on your content.
Kristina develops a thumbnail to fit the content. Sometimes she’ll put an image of a house, usually when she’s discussing a certain type of home (manufactured, etc.). Sometimes, if she’s talking about the market, for example, she’ll simply use her face.
Kristina uses PicMonkey to create her thumbnails. PicMonkey allows her to save several versions of the same thumbnail, all her branding colors, and all her past designs. It’s easy for her to go on and make great thumbnails with just a few clicks.
Naming Your Channel
Don’t worry about stuffing your channel name with keywords. Make it memorable. Make it simple and sweet. One of the best options is to use your name–that way your content can grow and flex without you having to change the name of your channel to incorporate new topics. You can only generate YouTube leads if your channel looks legitimate and useful to viewers.
What Topics Should You Start With?
People want to hear about the market. They want to know that prices are going to drop, that things are going to crash. Make content that is unique–don’t just start with a pros and cons video. Start by making a statement, saying something controversial, and shocking or surprising people.
If you make creative and different content, you’ll get way more views. Try not following a script and just jumping into content that you think people really want to hear, regardless of whether it seems exceptionally important. If it’s useful and fun for your audience, you’ll get the views you need.
Other Tips
Kristina offered a few other tips for real estate agents to keep in mind while working on their YouTube channels.
- Don’t erase your old videos. YouTube doesn’t care if you have old videos hanging around. All that matters is that you keep making more new videos that reach your audience.
- Don’t worry about manually answering EVERY comment. For some, you can use canned responses. For others, you can offer a real response or ask them to send an email. Watch out for trolls, but don’t stress about deleting every trolling comment, either. Focus on the important comments and questions and address those.
- Make a consistent plan for how many videos you want to make a week. Then analyze and see how well it’s going after about 90 days. When you see what videos are getting you the most calls, emails, etc., you can decide what videos you should focus your energy on.
- Some videos take a long time to get going. Don’t give up if the first few days they get very few views! Keep going and eventually your videos will chug along to get more views and more comments.
- Video length is important, it’s just not everything. Make the length of the video as long as it needs to be in order for you to convey your point. Kristina likes to make her videos at least 8 minutes, if not more. You don’t always have to make your videos shorter–sometimes people are just looking for helpful content, no matter how long it is.
- Kristina uses Final Cut Pro and Storyblocks to edit and create her videos. She usually spends several hours (between three and six) editing to make her videos look good. Start out with a free editing option until you figure out what you want and how to do it. Then, you can start using more advanced options.
Generating YouTube Leads On Autopilot
Kristina offered us tons of great tips for creating and maintaining excellent YouTube content. If you have more questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!
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