I’ll be honest, as someone who has never taken a marketing class before, or who has never even heard about 90% of the things discussed in this class before taking it, I had a little bit of a hard time keeping up at points. That being said, I’ve had the opportunity to review everything before now to work on our project, and I think I can take away a few decent pieces of information from what we’ve learned.
While I found the information in the book to be helpful, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to apply any of it to my personal life or even professionally in the future, which makes this final blog post fairly difficult. What I’ll be talking about here will mainly be information learned from the podcasts and videos from our discussion posts. I found these to be a bit more informative especially because we were able to pick and choose through the videos, allowing me to view the podcasts that I found to be interesting/helpful. Most of the videos that I listened to revolved around creating your own content, building your personal brand, and information discussing different types of recording equipment that exists out there for content creators at a fairly low price. These things interested me more as I’m taking the Digital Media Technology course here at NWTC, and have an interest in content creation, already creating content for YouTube at a semi-successful level, so my take-aways will be based on my hobby, and what I’ve learned or have re-learned from the videos.
“Your Network is Your Net Worth”
Taken from the first discussion’s “Personal Branding Examples” Video
From our first discussion, I learned about the importance of building and maintaining connections with those in your niche/field, how to grab your audiences attention via sweepstakes or contests, and how to properly use YouTube ads, primarily, creating your own ads to promote whatever you’re trying to sell/offer to potential consumers. I have already begun to put these tips into practice, with the exception of creating my own YouTube ads, which I’ll get into later. As a growing content creator, I have noticed how incredibly important it is to connect with other content creators. In my personal experience, connecting with these individuals allowed for us to work collaboratively on projects, bounce ideas back and forth with each other, proof-read scripts for one another, and also would help to grow both parties audience, as each content creator became familiar with each other, so did their audiences and personal communities. I have also done contests for personal videos/shout-outs/roles for my community server in Discord in the past, this definitely boosted my interaction with the viewers and made more people want to participate as the contest went along, (Fan-art contest for example). Even if I was smaller at the time, getting people excited to do something and having them actively participate in a contest or some sort of activity encouraged them to stick around. As far as the YouTube ad thing goes, I don’t think I’ll ever be creating my own ad for YouTube, but there was some good advice in the video I watched. Basically, create the ad for the intended site. If its an ad for YouTube, make the ad an interesting video that will catch people’s attention, and if its an ad for something like Facebook, make the ad a picture that catches people’s attention. If you use a video ad on something like Facebook, people will more than likely scroll through it, making your ad pretty much worthless.
In our second discussion post, the videos that I watched dealt with creating a successful livestream show, or any sort of “show” where you upload content on a fairly regular basis, and using the correct social media sites to get your point across, (Similar to a point we’ve already made with the YouTube/Facebook ad examples. The first video, discussing the creation of successful shows, was pretty informative. I’ve put the tips to practice in the past and can speak from experience that maintaining consistency is incredibly important. It takes awhile to build up an audience, so to effectively help yourself, it’s important to continue uploading/going live at the same time every day that you’re scheduled to upload. Not only will it become a “ritual” for yourself, making the process easier on you as a whole, but it will also allow viewers to set aside time for your content, allowing them to be able to know and predict when something you’re creating will be uploaded, or performed live. Taking long breaks can ruin whatever viewership you once had, so again, consistency is key. The other video just really drives home the idea that you should personalize your ad, or posts in this case, for the specific social media site being used, for the exact same purposes as before.
Lastly, the third discussion post and main takeaways from this course for me. Something that is worth mentioning from this section is the ability to grow your brand by using influencers. It’s pretty self explanatory, but I won’t ever be using this to promote my own content, as it’s sort of a slippery slope, and using someone else to promote your videos/content has about a 50/50 shot of working anyways. The real takeaway from this discussion for me was a video discussing how someone can grow a YouTube channel on a budget. I’m glad someone else discussed this and made a video surrounding this topic, as a lot of people get trapped into the mindset that perfect/expensive equipment = perfect content. People tend to think that their audience will grow at a more rapid pace if they buy the “best of the best” equipment before they even start or have an audience. Doing this is pretty dangerous, and starts you off with a net loss before you’ve begun to even make a profit. In my experience, I’ve done this before once with buying a camera for my computer with the intention of using it to livestream to my audience. Turns out, I never used the camera for that purpose, its still being used for other things, but it still put me out $60 before I had even earned any money on a channel that was still incredibly tiny. After that however, I used any donations and profit earned from the channel to slowly upgrade my equipment. There are plenty of affordable equipment options out there, look into those before wasting your money on expensive things that may not help you out in the long run.
So these were my main takeaways from the course. I really liked the opportunity that we had with the podcasts to pick and choose from a wide variety of content, allowing us to listen to something that we’d personally like, making the information that much more valuable. Now the real question, since I’m curious, “What were your takeaways from this course”.
References:
- https://www.convinceandconvert.com/podcasts/episodes/how-to-create-a-successful-daily-livestream-show/
- https://blackboard.nwtc.edu/ultra/courses/_157422_1/cl/outline
(For the blackboard, visit our discussion posts 1-3)
Eagle Social 
this was a great read!
LikeLike