5 Ways to Get a Job Through YouTube

Not only is it possible to use YouTube to get a job, but it’s becoming a more popular option, especially for the current crop of would-be-employees that grew up with web video.

Some argue that video is a more personal tool for job searching, acting as a digital interview, while others see it as cold and alienating, as it lacks the face-to-face element. But YouTube isn’t just about video resumes — there are a variety of creative ways to hop online and get hired.

Even better, YouTube isn’t just for Millennials. Web video can be useful for professionals of any age looking to expand their audience or pick up new clients. With a little creativity, honesty and hard work, you can utilize YouTube to create a more effective (and more interesting) professional and digital image, rather than just falling back on the ol’ resume (digital or not).

Read on for five ways to use YouTube to get a job. If you’ve landed a position through YouTube, add your story and tips in the comments below.

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1. Promote Yourself

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While this may seem a little obvious, amazing opportunities can come out of promoting yourself on YouTube. Tom Ferry is a real estate training coach with a best-selling book, Life! By Design. He hopped on YouTube two and a half years ago in order to grow his audience and to own the SEO in his field. Ferry has received speaking engagements and consulting jobs across the world by showcasing his talents in one or two videos each week.

“I believe in the theory of free, perfect, and now,” Ferry said. “Perfect, means short [and] easy. It’s a free twist to marketing. It’s never a concern of, ‘Gosh, if I put all my best content up for free, will people stop hiring me?’ … If I do put it up, people will see I’m a force.” For his book, he made a weekly video explaining each chapter and offering crib notes. Rather than give his book away, it became a New York Times Best Seller.

Ferry said that his audience has been steadily building, thanks to properly tagging his videos to maximize SEO and by constantly offering useful videos to his followers.

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2. Post and Hope

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This strategy may be the “Hail Mary” of getting jobs through YouTube, but it has proven successful in many cases. Perhaps the most famous YouTube discovery is Justin Bieber (yes, that Justin Bieber).

Bieber posted homemade videos of himself singing. He quickly jumped from hundreds of views to thousands. After he built up enough buzz, he was discovered by his now manager, Scooter Braun, and introduced to Usher.

While it helps to have boyish good looks and singing talent (like fellow discoveree Greyson Chance), this strategy isn’t just limited to teen idols. Create a channel and post videos that highlight your expertise. If you’re great at building fences, film that and offer some added value. Cultivating your fan base and reaching out to your fans can help build enough credibility or buzz to launch your career.

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3. Build It

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YouTube can help get you a job even if you don’t like putting your face on camera. That’s what happened for Stanford student Feross Aboukhadijeh when he created YouTube Instant on a bet to his roommate. Aboukhadijeh built YouTube Instant shortly after the launch of Google Instant to bring the same insta-search features to the video platform.

The CEO of YouTube, Chad Hurley, was so impressed that he offered him a job over Twitter. Aboukhadijeh, now an employee at YouTube, continues to add features to his design while finishing his degree at Stanford.

Not all of us can build a site that will get noticed by major execs, but Aboukhadijeh proves that creativity and hirability aren’t limited by your on-screen personality. Try programming, coding, sketching or designing something in your desired field. For example, create a new bird design for Twitter or better user interface for Facebook and post it online — you never know who’s watching.

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4. Be Creative

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When 23-year-old Brian Freedman saw an ad to write financial articles for iGrad, a financial advice site for college students, he focused on a small side note offering to submit video instead. Freedman created a sample video on how to budget by using envelopes and was offered the job on the spot.

Freedman felt more comfortable speaking in front of a camera than writing a cover letter or traditional resume. YouTube allowed him to show his financial sense and on-screen personality to help him land the job ahead of other potential contributors. “Doing a video with YouTube is much more effective than a resume,” Freedman said. “It basically shows what you can do, what you are capable of.”

After nine videos, Freedman parted with iGrad to start his own channel taking a bluer (read: NSFW) approach to relationship advice. He was able to build his brand and draw in far more followers than with iGrad.

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5. Enter Online Contests

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These days, it’s not uncommon for a company or employer to host a video contest on YouTube to draw in potential candidates. For example, Dr. Pepper teamed up with Step Up Director Jon M. Chu to hold a YouTube Dance Contest to find a dancer to feature in an Ultra Records music video — check out the winner’s video above.

Video contests are so popular on YouTube that it has an entire page dedicated to contests ranging from short film contests to social good efforts. Keep an eye out for contests in your area of expertise and enter when the right opportunity comes along.

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Final Tips

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YouTube is a simple, snappy way to get yourself seen. Aside from the social media pop and pizazz, it’s quickly becoming an effective way to own SEO terms, build a brand, and find jobs. While some video proficiency helps, fancy film work and high tech cameras aren’t key to success. Approach YouTube with creativity, authenticity and consistency, and the results might just come your way.

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20 of the Best Resources to Get Your Startup Off the Ground

Let’s face it: as an entrepreneur, the odds are stacked against you. Most businesses fail after the first few years, and even if you do manage to survive, that doesn’t mean your business will redefine an industry, become profitable, or change the world. Getting off on the right foot is essential to navigating a startup from its infancy to profitability.

Luckily, there have been countless entrepreneurs that have gone through the same toils building their own businesses, and most of them are happy to share their experiences to better prepare you for the journey ahead. In addition, there is now an array of social media and web apps that no entrepreneur has ever had access to before. Together, these resources can give you the edge in a fast-changing business world.

While we can’t highlight the thousands of resources at your disposal, we have put together twenty of our favorite guides, web apps, and tools that can help you build and launch a startup. This guide is divided into six sections, covering everything from coming up with the right idea to the steps you need to take and tools you’ll want to have to secure funding for your early-stage company. In total, you will find that this guide is a comprehensive resource for anybody who’s trying to realize his or her entrepreneurial dreams.

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Guides to Getting Started

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Before you dive into your startup (or maybe after you’re neck-deep), you should get yourself a crash course education in starting a business. There is no education like doing, but reading up on incorporating, collecting some checklists, and understanding just what it takes to get your specific business off the ground will save you plenty of headaches later on.

1. The Entrepreneur.com Startup Kits: Entrepreneur Magazine’s website has a gem for entrepreneurs: startup kits. There are kits for everything from starting a restaurant to a consulting firm, complete with articles, guides, marketing tips, and more.

2. eHow’s Introduction to Entrepreneurship: Collaborative knowledge resource website eHow has hundreds of thousands of great articles, including a strong set of guides and resources for how to open a business, how to incorporate, raising money, and bookkeeping.

3. About.com Starting a Business Hub: Another resource you should not miss is About.com’s Entrepreneurs Hub. They’ve curated some of their best content for starting a business, including checklists, a small business startup kit, and detailed articles on naming and calculating the cost of your startup.

4. Library of Congress’s Entrepreneur’s Reference Guide: Yes, the U.S. Library of Congress has an entrepreneur’s reference guide, while it’s dated (1999), it also lists a lot of great books that are updated yearly. It covers practically every topic related to starting a small business.

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Inspirations for the Idea

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There are few things more important to the success of your startup than having the right idea and continuing to be innovative with your product as it gets built and released to your customers. Ideas don’t just come in cans from the store, though. That’s why we’ve brought together some resources that should help inspire your creative juices and help you nail down the next big idea.

5. Vator.tv: A play on “elevator pitch,” Vator.tv is a place where entrepreneurs can upload short video pitches about their startup. Not only that, but you can follow industry news and specific companies. Watching these pitches will certainly jolt your brain’s creative juices. Also check out VentureBeat Profiles (formerly TradeVibes), which also has a great database of startups and a community discussing each one.

6. Alltop Startups: Reading the latest news and opinions in the startup world can only help jolt your brain and keep you current. Alltop has a great list of blogs and news websites dedicated to the subject (including my personal blog). Take a read, subscribe to the blogs that interest you, and you’ll be guaranteed to be reading about great ideas soon enough.

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Startup Web Apps

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While there is an array of great web tools for entrepreneurs (10 of the best we previously highlighted), there are some tools that just make your life easier when you’re trying to bring order to the chaos of launching your startup. Consider these tools when you’re in the early stages of building a company:

7. Evernote (): Information is king, and there are few web apps that do a better job of collecting information in front of the computer screen or on-the-go than Evernote. The service simply helps you remember everything. You can take pictures of your receipts for easy organization or save key info while you browse, for example, among many other ways to organize and catalog the things you need to remember for your startup.

8. Zoho (): Zoho is a suite of online collaboration tools. Not only does it include email and spreadsheets, but it includes, wiki, chat, customer relationship management (CRM), and web conferencing as well. While it is similar to Google Apps, it is built specifically for businesses.

9. PBWorks: Wikis are amazing for organizing ideas and sharing them with team members. There are few better suited for business than PBWorks, which is not only a wiki but a collaboration tool, document manager, and project management tool.

10. FreshBooks: If your business is client-based, you need to track invoices, teams, and payments constantly. While there are many choices, Freshbooks is one of the best due to its mobile apps, integration with Basecamp (), and reasonable pricing.

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Social Media for Startup Success

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Social media is about connecting with people. Interestingly enough, so is business and entrepreneurship, which is perhaps why there is so much overlap between the two. If you want to get your startup off the ground, you have to network, build up your social circle, and reach out to the right people. These social tools are adept at that task:

11. Plaxo (): There are few tasks more important in business than maintaining and organizing your contacts. You never know when someone you meet will lead you to a big business deal, venture capital, or a new team member. Plaxo acts as a digital address book that efficiently organizes everyone you meet. Plus, it integrates with Outlook, Thunderbird and the Mac OS X Address Book to make importing contacts a snap. You have to be diligent about adding contacts, though.

12. Google Wave (): Google’s () experimental real-time communication platform not only has a consumer version, but also comes in a corporate flavor for users of Google apps. Having your team collaborate on projects through waves is a unique experience, one that we have used with success over here at Mashable (). No other social tool has the same collaboration features.

13. LinkedIn (): This one may be obvious, but its importance in business cannot be overstated. It is the world’s most popular business social network for a reason. Its business features, especially those connecting you to friends of friends, are unmatched, and with over 50 million users, it’s a social media tool you need to be using constantly.

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Raising Money

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Bringing your startup to the next level takes more than willpower, determination, and grit. In most cases, you need startup capital to build the product, hire the right team members, and maintain the product after it launches. That’s why it’s vital to do your homework on how to effectively raise money.

These are a few resources that will give you a crash course education in venture capital and raising money to grow your startup:

14. Introduction to Venture Capital: If you’re clueless about how venture capital works (most people are), this short presentation by Will Price, former venture capitalist and the current CEO of Widgetbox, explains all of the basics. It was given at Stanford University in 2007:

15. TheFunded: This entrepreneurship community is very unique in that it is focused on helping you raise money. How? By giving you ratings and inside details of the practices of countless venture capital and angel investor funds. The information, once you’re in, is invaluable to choosing the firm that will help propel your business to the next level.

16. How to Fund a Startup: This guide by Y Combinator co-founder and early-stage investor Paul Graham is shockingly detailed on the different ways to raise money, the disadvantages of each approach, how venture capital firms operate, and the reality of bringing investors into your company. A must-read for any startup founder before raising capital.

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Startup Social Communities

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You cannot and should not build your business alone. The world’s greatest entrepreneurs not only had co-founders, but they had friends, family, and a community of entrepreneurs and advisors that helped them with difficult decisions, overcoming adversity, and fixing mistakes.

With the rise of social media and the web, a crop of incredible startup communities have popped up, each one with a unique character but with a wealth of community knowledge that you’d be crazy to pass up on your journey to build a great company.

17. StartupNation: The recently redesigned startup community network has extensive and active forums, useful knowledge hubs, community groups, and plenty more.

18. Hacker News (): The seed investment firm Y Combinator has built a thriving and active startup community known as Hacker News. Users add relevant and interesting stories on the topics of programming and startup entrepreneurship and consistently hold thought-provoking discussions. It’s an incredible place for insight and advice on startups.

19. Young Entrepreneur: Focused around discussion forums, Young Entrepreneur is a great place to ask any startup question on your mind or just to read the over 240,000 posts made over the years on the site.

20. PartnerUp: PartnerUp is a community that really focuses on one thing: helping you find business partners. In business, finding the right co-founders is often the difference between stellar success and a quick, painful startup death. PartnerUp is a community ideal for finding and networking with people that will shore up your weaknesses and help you answer those nagging questions about the partnership side of business.

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7 Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook

Millions peoples are using Facebook daily in routine, but most of peoples are not aware that how they can protect his account and profile on Facebook. Here we give some use full tips that how you can protect you account and profile. If you can avoid from these things then your account and Profile are safe and you can enjoy from Facebook for a Long Time.

Using a Weak Password

Avoid simple names or words you can find in a dictionary, even with numbers tacked on the end. Instead, mix upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. A password should have at least eight characters. One good technique is to insert numbers or symbols in the middle of a word, such as this variant on the word "houses": hO27usEs!

Leaving Your Full Birth Date in Your Profile

It's an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you've already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

Overlooking Useful Privacy Controls

For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself. Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don't want anyone to have access to that information anyway.

Posting Your Child's Name in a Caption

Don't use a child's name in photo tags or captions. If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag. If your child isn't on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the name.

Mentioning That You'll Be Away From Home

That's like putting a "no one's home" sign on your door. Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and be vague about the date of any trip.

Letting Search Engines Find You

To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to the Search section of Facebook's privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Be sure the box for public search results isn't checked.

Permitting Youngsters to Use Facebook Unsupervised

Facebook limits its members to ages 13 and over, but children younger than that do use it. If you have a young child or teenager on Facebook, the best way to provide oversight is to become one of their online friends. Use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications and monitor their activities. "What they think is nothing can actually be pretty serious," says Charles Pavelites, a supervisory special agent at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. For example, a child who posts the comment "Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes" every day at the same time is revealing too much about the parents' regular comings and goings.