A Caribbean YouTube strategy

MARK LYNDERSAY

DEVON RAMDASS’ new ebook, Pursuing YouTube in the Caribbean, is an excellent way to start with the popular video streaming service, particularly if you’re doing it with a mission.

Ramdass, writing as Devon X Scott, delivers a tightly considered 24-page document filled with advice for anyone thinking about using the service as a way to build an audience or even a career.

I’d first encountered Ramdass as the creator of T3CHSMASH, when he produced technology reviews and observations as “The Smasher.”

“Devon X Scott is my new alias,” he said in an interview.

“Devon is my first name; Scott is my middle name. The X in the middle is for my brand, Xtraordinarywear. The purpose of the brand is to promote being extraordinary in whatever you do.”

His enthusiasm and good humour are infectious, even if you happen to be a worldly cynic prone to squint and cross-examine the claims of tech companies with shiny boxes to sell.

That personality crackles on the virtual pages of his new PDF, an elegantly produced listing of the steps that any YouTube beginner would be well advised to consider before posting to the service for the first time.

I’ll say this. I’ve been posting to YouTube since 2009 and there were at least three things I had to make urgent note of.

Ramdass starts by cross-examining the intentions of his reader, demanding a clear vision of the expected outcome after putting hours of work into producing a video worth watching.

“You have to really consider your content and ask yourself why your viewers should give their time to you,” he writes in the ebook.

From there, he suggests ways to get paid for a regularly updated channel, touching on the Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliate programs, though he should consider an accompanying chapter on navigating the latter’s requirements for payment.

He’s honest about the challenges of getting review units and the cost associated with receiving even free goods and the hurdles that international brands, spoiled by huge engagement numbers, raise for local content creators still building their audiences.

He also skips smartly through the creation of effective video in five pages, a subject that he could easily have lingered on for a bit, though he’d probably have doubled the size of the book, before wrapping up with tips for posting.

The finished work is a refreshingly honest, convincingly nuts and bolts look at the challenges of using YouTube as an influencer/promoter/journalist/host in our local environment, which offers a decent broadband connection for uploading but little else.

When I pointed out that the copy I read needed some proofreading, he responded an hour or so later with a list of the corrections he’d made on the project.

Has Ramdass been successful using YouTube himself?

This is a young man who spends his time setting fires on the web pretty regularly to see where the sparks will catch.

TriniTalQ.com stalled when contributors who promised to write didn’t deliver, but trinispaces.com and trinicarsales.com are both ongoing projects in development.

Video posts to his YouTube space have slowed down recently because, he admits, “Local companies have seen my videos and love the production quality and have since then hired me to produce content for them. Due to the current workload, it’s tough to do both.”

The ebook in PDF format is available from his website (devonxscott.com/book/) for US$4.99.

My full interview with Devon Ramdass is here (technewstt.com/devontalks)

Mark
Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there