Golf is the greatest game on earth, and that's an undulating hill I’ll die on.
Knowing you're playing golf the next day is like a surfer anticipating good swell.
You’ve cleaned your grooves, loaded up your bag, and your shoes are waiting by the end of your bed, but it’s only 9 PM.
I’ve been in this situation many times before, and I find myself on the website of the course I’ll be visiting, trying to get a peek at the gift I’ll be receiving come morning.
But all I see is a couple of blurry photos from a decade ago that barely show the course.
So, I head on over to YouTube thinking, “surely some opportunistic young gun with a drone has flown over every golf course in this state and listed it online”, but nope.
A couple of courses here and there and a plethora of vlogs, but that's not what I’m looking for.
I want to feel like I’m already there. I want to slowly glide over each hole of the course, envisioning what it’ll be like tomorrow while I’m definitely not slicing every second drive into the bushes.
But I can't because the videos don’t exist.
That’s where the Golf Course Drone Flyovers YouTube channel should swoop in and grab that prime digital real estate.
Here's the play:
I'd purchase, rent, or borrow a drone (or hire/rent/borrow a drone operator). I'd go to the nearest golf course, flip the drone into cinematic mode, and fly it over the whole course in the direction of play - hole by hole. I wouldn't do it as a full-on bird's eye view, and I wouldn't do it at eye level either. I'd do it at about 2 or 3 times the height of the average person. This way, the video gives the viewer an advantageous look while still showing the beauty of the contours of the course. It shows them what it would be like to play there and makes them want to play there. It makes them want to see the next hole.
This process wouldn't take too long at all. Covering 18 holes in one or two hours with a drone would be an easy feat. And that's budgeting extra time for some artsy shots around each green.
If each hole becomes a YouTube video and potentially a webpage (added SEO strength) and this is done consistently, such as one course per week for a year or two, I cannot imagine a world in which it doesn't produce an insane amount of compounding benefits.
Let's look at how this might play out:
After a year of doing even 1 golf course a fortnight you’ll have 494 individual videos uploaded to YouTube. (18 holes a course - 26 fortnights in a year). These videos will get viewed repeatedly for the next 10+ years.
Some of the courses may pay you for linking to their booking page from your video descriptions.
If you snap 3-4 photos per hole as well you’d have a valuable folder of assets that the course might pay you for.
With a little bit of web design experience, you could use those videos and photos to create your own website highlighting every course that you’ve flown over. Then sell ad space on each page of the website to Golf Courses, Golf Stores, Golf Brands, or even through an automated service like Google AdSense.
-YouTube views.
-Selling the media or use of media to the Golf Courses.
-Promoting shops and brands within the media or video descriptions.
-Housing the media in a website and selling ads on the website.
Now let’s look at how this could scale..
You could document exactly how you film your videos and hire other drone operators around the country to film courses beyond your state. You could now have multiple courses being filmed per weekend, massively increasing your online reach.
Courses could start paying you to add them to your channel. Considering you would do it for free anyway, for your own benefit, I think positioning it as a service you sell to courses is a no-brainer. Before you do it for free, give the course a chance to pay you for it.
You could start your own Golf brand (bags, hats, shirts, etc.) or Golf Store and all of the media could direct people to your own products as opposed to the courses or golf stores' websites.
I can think of more examples but I’ll stop there for now. Hitting even 1 or 2 of those possibilities could be life-changing for an aspiring entrepreneur.
Now swap Golf for something you love so much that doing all of the above would feel like play to you. Is there a way you can leverage technology and the internet to build a system where you have fun creating something of value to other people in that community or industry?
If the answer is yes, then that is how you Formulate Freedom.
By the way, I practice what I preach. Through my freestyle scooter business, Syndicate Store, we've been reviewing skateparks and posting videos on YouTube. If someone googles the name of any of the skateparks we've reviewed, our video and website both show up on the first page of Google, with our videos often being the highest suggested result. This puts my brand right in front of the direct target audience at the exact time they are at home researching what skatepark they might want to visit the next day. Just one example of putting digital leverage to work.
Want to learn a little more about me and why i feel qualified to speak on such topics? Checkout Finding Freedom where i break down my 10 year entrepreneurial journey into bite sized pieces.