youtube video ideas for small business: film the jobs your product does

the best youtube video ideas for a small business are not on a list of a hundred. they are the jobs your product already does that people type into youtube before they have heard of you. someone types how to screen record only one tab, or how to add subtitles to a video automatically, or how to book a cleaner online. page one answers them with somebody else's tool. if your product does that job, the video that shows it done with yours is the one worth filming.

that is what underway's promote tab now looks for. videos to film already found what your audience searches about their own problems, how-tos about what you make, and your own story angled at a search. it now has a fourth kind, with your product: the general tasks people search for, which your product does, each one to be shown done with it.

why most youtube video ideas for small business lists don't help

page one for youtube video ideas for small business is a run of listicles: twelve ideas, twenty, fifty, a hundred and seven. behind the scenes, testimonials, a day in the life, a product tutorial. none of it is wrong, and none of it tells you which video anyone will find. a list written for every business is written for none of them, and none of those pages checks what people actually type or who already ranks for it.

a search is the opposite of a list. it is one person, one job, typed in their own words, and youtube keeps a record of the words: its own suggestions as you type. if youtube suggests a phrase, people type it. if it doesn't, they mostly don't.

how it finds the jobs your product does

• it reads what your product does from your own website: the homepage, the pages it links for features, how it works, pricing and integrations, and every page in its sitemap, articles included. the address is the website link on your series, or the page site watch photographs.
• with github connected, it also reads the titles of every pull request merged into the repositories your series documents. a product's changelog says what it does more completely than its homepage ever will.
• it writes short searches for each job, the plain verb and the object, the way someone types before they know your name. often with the tool they already know for it, loom alternative, or canva captions.
• it asks youtube's own suggestions for each one. a phrase nobody types is dropped, and a suggestion that has turned the job round (a video into a voice memo, when you make the opposite) is left out.
• with youtube connected, it reads page one for the best of them: views, how old, how big the channel.
• it keeps every one worth filming, never padded, and says what each is up against.

it only suggests a job your site or your series says the product does. it never assumes a feature.

what page one full of another tool means

for most product tasks, page one is other tools' tutorials. on underway's own series this week, how to add subtitles to a video automatically was veed three times over, clipchamp and premiere. that used to be a reason to leave a phrase out. for a product task it is the gap: every one of those videos shows somebody else's tool, and nobody on page one shows yours. the card says so, and still puts it under harder when the videos there are big, fresh and exactly on the question.

each card carries a line the others don't: show it with, the part of your product that does the job, in your site's own words. every card, of every kind, now also says how it's filmed: answered to camera or a walk-through of your screen, what is on screen, and which parts of your product to show in what order. the rest is the same as every idea: the title to use with the searched words first, who types it, why you could rank, the top three on page one, ways to open in your own words and what to cover in order.

examples from underway's own series

• how to turn a voice memo into a video, shown with the spoken interview that comes back as a finished episode.
• how to add auto captions to video, shown with the captions written on every finished episode.
• how to make a youtube video with your face in the corner, shown with the face bubble over the screen.

the idea came from the screen sharing change. rich, who builds underway, noticed that how to screen record only one tab is a search plenty of people make, the answers on youtube show loom and others, and underway does it. there are dozens of jobs like that in any product. most founders never film them because they never see them as search terms.

the walls stay where they were

a promote video is never an episode. no number, no streak, nothing it learns reaches your interviews or your cut. a suggested opening is a direction to say in your own words, never a line to read. film this works the same: a with your product idea is usually a walk-through of your screen, filmed on a computer, with your voice.

page one checks share youtube's daily allowance of searches across every account, so each read checks page one for nine phrases, three of them product tasks. up to five more product tasks youtube suggests can come through with page one not checked, and their cards say so. the read runs again on its own after a week, and read again runs it now.

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