A lot of small business owners, solo-professionals, and cubicle-dwellers who have yet to make the bold leap out of corporate safety and into the abyss of “Yipes! What now?!!!” often say that money - or rather, lack thereof - is a barrier to their success.

Nonsense.

The only barrier to success these days for ANY endeavor, big or small, is a lack of creativity. Why? Because the Internet is this giant cornucopia of galactic reach and potential, just waiting to pluck out the finest, ripest fruit and deliver these juicy yum-yums to the niche audiences that crave them.

And one place people are looking for targeted yum-yums is www.YouTube.com.

Armed with the simple motto and directive “Broadcast Yourself” (something about that two-word call to action pleases me…hmmm. What could it be?), YouTube.com was founded on Valentine’s Day of 2005, received funding in November of 2005, and now serves up information and entertainment 70 million times a day to rabid viewers around the world.

In the last month alone I’ve had friends and family - including business owners, full-time mommies, Internet-addicted uncles, former colleagues, high-school alumni, grad students, and fellow laugh-aholics - send me videos of barfing babies, dancing comedians, a time-elapse artpiece of the Nile river, galloping camels, and grumbling geriatrics.

And today I’ve just watched a nine-plus minute commercial for Subway that’s also a brilliant demo reel for an international creative marketing agency called, well, Agency.com.

Would I have ever voluntarily watched a nine-plus minute commercial about submarine sandwiches? Absolutely not.

Was it AWESOME to see 18 hours of footage about the creative process and the talent behind it distilled down to just over 540 seconds?

You bet it was.

And guess what? The YouTube.com service is FREE. That’s right. You shoot the video, they provide the forum. That’s the game.

Of course, if you want to make YouTube.com effective for your own business, you have to do your best to create compelling content. Viral content that splashes your ideas or brand to hundreds, even millions of viewers doesn’t take off just because you want it to.

But the good thing is, there are no rules that say you can’t experiement with the medium. The Agency.com video may have top-line talent behind it, but sometimes too much polish can turn people off.

Remember: Quality content trumps glitz 99.9% of the time.

Entertain, offer an experience, inform, delight your audience, educate, experiment, and offer up new ways to see that world - and if you can do this while getting your name out there, you’ve just earned yourself a million dollar advertising budget for the price of your own willingness to think outside of the box.

The YouTube box, that is.

Tools like this that are specifically designed to handle and honor creative, hot viral content abound on the Internet. They exist and profit from your best efforts. They’re sitting there waiting for you to show ‘em what you got.

Why not take ‘em up on the offer?

Posted in All About Content, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"? |

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 12th, 2006 at 4:07 pm and is filed under All About Content, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.