This book provides an easy-reading introduction to making, uploading and promoting YouTube movies. It starts out with some simple guidance on how to decide what type of videos might be most effective then it gets down to the nitty-gritty details of the software and hardware you might need to make them, how to upload them and how to let the online world know they are there.
While the author does a good job of explaining the fundamentals of YouTube marketing, don’t get too excited. There is no ‘magic bullet’ here so don’t expect to find some special secret that’s going to make your videos the next big YouTube sensation. Much of the advice is, in fact, pretty much ‘common sense’: determine who your ‘target customer’ is, entertaining videos can be more effective than boring ones and so on.
Then there are chapters of more solid technical information: for example, choosing a camera, using a video editing program, enhancing your videos with captions and managing your YouTube Channel.
There are a few areas it covers rather too sketchily in my view, however. For example, the sections on marketing videos and optimising them for searches are, to my mind, a bit thin. True, it may be worth posting links to web sites, blogs and Facebook but, frankly, most people would probably have thought of that already. I think a bit more examination of how professional PR companies optimise their marketing strategies would have been useful. Another weakness is that the author assumes that videos will be shot with a camera. So there is next to nothing on other types of video such as animations or screen-recordings (Techsmith’s popular Camtasia screen recorder only merits a one-line ‘tip’ which says that it can be used for converting PowerPoint presentations).
In summary, this is a pretty good book for a YouTube novice. I am not so convinced that it will be especially useful for the hard-headed business users which its title seems to target.
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