 Tom here from Orange Systems the question comes up a lot How is it that you pivoted to YouTube and what does that mean and how do you advertise on YouTube? What do you mean you're buying ads on YouTube? Can you explain that this is a question? I get from a lot of other IT people and people in general asking what exactly are you doing with YouTube? They know it's something I have gotten involved in but I figured I'd explain this and talk a little bit about the Circumstances and happenstances and no I didn't have any great vision that led me towards this It all started out with I like teaching people seem like a fun thing to do I like sharing knowledge and well, I love technology. I like talking about technology so I've done a lot of stand-up and speaking about technology including some deeper topics that like the Linux conference when it comes to Things about firewalls and open source, you know, and it's what I do for a living and someone said hey Is that available on YouTube? This is probably all the way back in 2015. I'm like I could probably upload that to YouTube or something That sounds pretty easy Come over to 2017 about mid 2017. We built this studio. Well, not exactly this one this space But it was really ugly then coming up in 2018 We kind of figured out how to make it less ugly and a little better and bought some nicer equipment And I would say by 2019 I made a decision with all the people that were following my channel going Hey, I wonder if we could advertise ourselves on this and kind of pivot to this being marketing now It all started with my passion for sharing knowledge and that sharing knowledge led to a big audience of me giving away All the knowledge and I had a lot of people tell me Tom quick giving it all away Tell people a key teaser and just tease them of something and then offer to sell the rest of solution That'd be the better business model and I'm like, you know, we need more people in it I have a passion for sharing all this knowledge I have a passion for you know teaching people this I like engaging with them I spend time and created forums a couple years ago now Just so I could have more in-depth and in one-on-one essentially discussions with people on the topics I cover on my channel, but we did add in 2019 a little pre-roll that says hey Why don't you hire us and I just don't know I didn't think about doing it sooner because people had a lot of questions They're willing to hire us for our expertise and it you know allows people to engage further now My videos are complete, but that also means they can look at a video and go that looks like something I just don't want to do there's some people who are thankful that the tutorial is like an hour and a half long And other people go I don't have time for an hour and a half tutorial But I can just hire those people who made the tutorial that kind of thinking I didn't have in the beginning that that many people would hire us but come all the way here to 2020 and hire us they did We actually booked 349 unique clients off of our booking forms that we have That's not the entirety of people that came to our booking. That's just all the people that came in So in 2019 when we started doing that we also kind of took a gamble and quit Advertising completely and just did that hire us button and it turned out pretty lucky because the well pandemic of 2020 turned into The only way of advertising compared to the way we used to like, you know No more in-person events. No more going to the chamber of commerce and local business meetings and things like that like we used to So we really accelerated in 2020 and brought us all the way here to march of 2021 Now I want to share a little bit of the statistics and how that's going for us Just behind the scenes of what's been going on now Like I said last time we spent any money on advertising at all was early 2019 You know buying google ads and facebook ads and things like that. We haven't spent a dollar Since we stopped doing that a couple years ago now And these are the stats for the last 90 days on the channel to give you an idea Now these are actually really small in terms of youtube stats and but 43.9 million impressions as people searching for some of the topics that our videos will show up 3.1 click-through rate leading a 3.3 million views by 1.2 million unique viewers Just in the last 90 days and it's impressive that this is working out for us as well as it has It is not something that I Had the vision for as I said, it wasn't like a carefully calm and calculated plan I do spend a lot of time creating content sharing knowledge and not all my videos have Well, even an option to hire us because it is something I may be talking about like this video here Sorry, I have nothing to sell you. Sorry. I'm not a youtube consultant That does come up once while but it's not really my thing If you want to hire me for firewalls or network engineering or me talking about storage servers for a few hours and setting those up and building those out for people Those are all things that my company, you know, absolutely does consulting on and technology jobs Now many of these because I do work in the managed service space, which we still have our managed service clients And that leads right into this as well We have people that we've picked up quite a few of them from the bookings Where they start with a consulting project with us that then later leads into a More in-depth engagement where they buy our hours or put on Contract for example to monitor and manage your systems. That is all the type of leads It's mostly project work But occasionally as you know, if you work in it, someone says well We just want to pay to manage it on a recurring basis and that's services we offer as well So I just wanted to share a little bit of how we pivoted And the fact that it's working really well and just put the thought out there in case something you were thinking about I know you're probably going to say tom this works great for tech But not for other industries, but I'm going to tell you to take a look around take a look at people like Graham Steffen and he does real estate and investing and he's doing really well on youtube follow this channel I actually do myself because he's got a lot of interesting advice when it comes to that topic There's other industries that this works for It just takes a little bit of out-of-box thinking And a lot of time and effort it does take a level of Somewhat technical acumen, which it's getting easier and easier to publish and produce videos But if you've never done it before that's going to be the first hurdle you have to cross is kind of learning how to produce the content I spent time learning the production learning the content learning What tools to put around me to make this easier including things like this little video switcher So I don't have to spend as much time editing because I still don't like editing So I just like to switch on the fly and set this up So there's still nuances and I'm always learning and improving But this is to throw it out there and answer the question for people who ask how do you advertise? What are you doing and I have a series of videos on my channel about ways we've advertised in the past I still think those are relevant and as you know things go back to normal. Hopefully here in 2021 I think they're going to be relevant again going to your local business meetings and Meeting with people and business events, etc But we're going to keep pursuing youtube now one last question I wanted to answer because people say well you're going to go full-time youtube and not have your business And because my business and youtube are one and the same Not really. Here's the thing most of the stuff I talk about is real world experience from deploying and working with projects As people bring projects to us or hires to consult these projects Sometimes they turn into ideas that become other videos and some of the videos are absolutely directly driven Based on ideas and concepts that someone wanted to hires for now. Don't worry. It's not any trade secrets We're you know putting out here It's just basically someone have a concept of can you set servers up in this particular way To accomplish this task. We look at that We may engineer it out and in in the end we may even do a video about yep We can engineer this out and kind of do an explainer of how to do it like that It's kind of a fun process to talk about and that experience we have selling these servers Especially the experience we've had in the last year selling several movie studios Large-scale storage servers has taught us a lot more about storage and I've been doing more and more videos on that topic So it kind of feeds itself. So it's never that I would not do what I do with my business the business and the youtube Like I said are just one and the same now Like I said, it is the way we get our inbound leads and things like that So hey, there's a link at the top of website if you want to do want to hire us other than that Hopefully you found it insightful. Maybe this is something you're thinking about doing Feel free to put questions in the comments or some other topic around this if you're interested But I just like throwing knowledge out there and like I do with all the other videos and things like that All right, thanks And thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content Please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from this channel Hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to hire assure project head over to laurance systems.com And click on the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways There's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated For deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the descriptions of all of our videos Including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out well randomly So check back frequently And finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel Thank you again, and we look forward to hearing from you in the meantime. 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