 Hey there, this is Vlad from the Insurance Sales Lab and welcome to the Insurance Sales Lab podcast. I am your host and with me today, I have a very special guest, David DeFord, who is a friend in the insurance industry. David, welcome to the show. Greetings and salutations. Thanks for having me. It's a normal greeting. If you haven't watched any of David's videos, that's the first thing he says. And actually watch your conversation with your wife that you did last year. Oh, and she gave you, she's making fun of you and the way that you start every video. Yeah, I deserve it. Yeah, very good video for anybody to watch. David, thank you for jumping on this call. For anybody who follows my work, you know that I focus on the PNC insurance side of business. I do not focus on life and health, whereas you do the exact opposite. You focus on life and health agents, not so much in the PNC. So the purpose of today's conversation, what I'd like to learn from you and have everybody who's watching this learn as well, is how you built your business using YouTube and also writing the blog articles that you do. I feel like a lot of insurance agents are looking for a way to build a predictable marketing pipeline and they're buying leads. They're doing some Facebook ads, some YouTube ads. They're doing some SEO. They're hearing all this advice, but a lot of that requires time, effort, learning a new skill, paid advertising. What you have done, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but you've built a business almost organically because you don't pay to post videos on YouTube. You don't pay to write a blog post. So that is organic growth. And based on our previous conversations, you told me that 95% of your growth is attributed to the YouTube channel and also the blog articles that you write. So that said, why don't you give us a quick background of your business model now, who you are, what you do, and then also how you got started with this whole YouTube thing and why you use it. And then we'll go in deeper and how agents can take that and implement it in their business. Sure. So I started selling final expense at a desperation in 2011. I had a personal training gym that was going down the toilet, a great recession hit Main Street. People weren't spending as much money. And the only thing I could get was an insurance job. So I started selling final expense. I ended up liking it. Did well my first year, failed out after a year in, got back into it after I realized how terrible it was working for somebody else and kind of vowed not to make the same mistakes I made the first time around. I did well after that point and eventually went full time about a year after I had the job I did a part time. Fast forward about a year from that point, I decided to get full time into agency building. And the reason why was because I didn't want to have one source of income streams. There's a lot of talk and a lot of people are familiar about the idea of multiple streams of income. And when you just sell one product or one line of insurance, what if something political happens? Think of health insurance agents 10 years ago. So I wanted to diversify and I decided to go into the agency building route because I knew how to sell final expense much because of the mistakes I made as much as what I learned from it. And I felt like I'd love training. I used to be a personal trainer. So training was kind of up my alley. So I didn't know if I wanted to be like a full time agency builder. I just wanted to kind of test the waters out. At the beginning, I didn't even want to necessarily keep agents after I trained them. I do now, of course. But yeah, I mean, things went well. And we can kind of go into this as much detail as you want. And I had one of those important inflection points in your life where Warren Buffett's business partner Charlie Munger talks about this. You've got like everybody in their life has like three, two or three instances where there is a blaring opportunity. Like a big opportunity that if you take it, it can dramatically change the course of your life. And that one of those, I think, looking back was realizing that YouTube was an untapped huge opportunity to make connections and relationships with other agents and in return over time, build an agency out of the content that I provided. And so I started that in 2015, I think. Or maybe it was 14. And anyways, I'm six or seven years into full time YouTube content creation. It's been the single best thing I've ever done in my agency building. And without it, my agency wouldn't be anything like it is today. And you can take it where you want to from your blog. I'm happy to discuss anything about how this became and what I've done to make it so. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that background. For those that haven't watched any of David's videos or not familiar with her channel, you at the time of this recording, at least you have a little over 20,000 subscribers, which compared to other channels that might have a million or more, 20,000 in a niche market. And I would assume that most of the people, if not all of the 20,000 subscribers are insurance agents, right people in the industry. That is like having over a million subscribers if you're just mainstream targeting everybody. So you have built a substantial channel over the last six years. You have over 10 million views combined, 1400 videos in total, over 1400 videos. But it all started, what you said about five years ago, walk me through the progression from then to now, some of the big things that you learned as far as how to properly construct these videos so it produces the outcome that you want to produce. So tell us about the outcome that you want to produce and then how you construct these videos to produce that outcome. Well, so I'll be kind of tell you why even did YouTube begin with. So I had watched another gentleman in the business. He had put a video up on a forum, training agents for free with no requirement to them work with them to get the training. And I remember seeing the video and I thought, man, this is stupid. Why is this guy giving his content away for free with nothing in expectation and return? Aren't these agents going to take it and run with it and not do business with them? Now it's kind of like the proverbial devil on my shoulder trying to talk down this idea. And I thought about it in that same instant, but what if this is actually the best thing ever? What if giving information away and helping people without expectation actually elevates your brand, your persona? And while not everybody that's viewing it is going to become a customer, what if a portion of those people do? While also simultaneously building like your rep or cloud or whatever as being a trustworthy person and otherwise largely untrustworthy business. Let's face it, a lot of people don't like the MLM aspect of at least the life insurance side of the business. So having any kind of truth or transparency or doing good without, you know, having like a tip for tad is a good thing. And that's what motivated me to do this is because I realized we live in an age where trust, transparency, these things, they're in such short supply and people desperately want it, especially in the insurance business. So I figured, well, if I start making content, maybe not instantly, but over time, if I dedicate myself to this idea that this will turn into something that's you know, lucrative. And then, you know, I didn't know how big it could get, but it's turned out to be huge. So what did I do for content? I had an old iPhone 4. I didn't have the big fancy camera I've got now. I just, you know, no mic. I just talked into the camera about different parts of in this case, final expense sales, you know, how to present, how to close, how to deal with objections, that kind of stuff, right? And I just started from there. People liked it. People picked up on it. I kept producing content. And about a year or two in something at YouTube flipped the switch and I started getting way more views, way more engagement. And I realized this is good. And when you've got a good thing going for you, you don't just like ignore it. You triple down on it. Okay. If you are doing really well at one marketing, you don't find another marketing piece. You like go all in on that marketing. Can I interject real quick? What outcome are you looking for when you produce these videos? Yes, you're educating, you're providing free outcome, free videos, and a great concept. But what exactly are you looking to get when agents watch these videos? What am I looking to get? Yeah. I mean, recruits to my agency on some level. I mean, I wasn't doing this strictly for the pro bono or the good vibes, you know? I mean, I had a purpose and that's to recruit agents, but to do it in a soft way, not a hard pitch way, like come and join my agency, see my big, you know, airplane and my fast car, like that's what people are tired of. They want to see that. Yeah. They want to see people help them and give them content and people are shocked or like, they realize for themselves, I want to work with somebody that's this giving to complete strangers without any expectation. So it was a long way around with the ultimate goal of doing what every agency wants to, which is recruit. So if I'm a PNC agent, life for health agent, I'm listening to this and thinking, okay, my goal is to get more clients who buy my products for me. I'm not looking to build an agency at this point, let's say. So how do I take that idea and convert that to building my agency? So let's say you're a PNC agent or you're a life for health agent and you want to take that same idea and provide value first so that you can grow your agency. How would you go about doing that? Yeah. I mean, my recommendation would be to create content that an audience and you got to define this stuff would learn from, appreciate and build your brand, if you will. And that can be, I don't know, how to figure out. I know you got to think of some content that would be noteworthy, like maybe relevant events and talk about how, if there's some relevant event that relates to insurance, like say the floods in Houston, like what's the economic cost, talking about that, maybe as a reminder about how home insurance works and how you should consider what, you know, you can tie your kind of content and relevant content that's going on with the news. You can give useful information on, you know, say, for example, you sell Medicare, you know, what are the things you need to be concerned about when you start Medicare? You know, what are the parts of the, you know, property and casualty contract that you should be aware of and make sure that you've got, you know, slanted in your favor. So you have to bottom line, be helpful, provide world-class content and what you film on and is not that important as long as you can be seen decently and most importantly, as long as you can be heard well, if you're delivering really good content to an audience that wants to see it, you're going to find leads that way. Yeah. And that's one thing that I really appreciate and like about you that you are, you shared with me that you're an introvert, right? You call yourself an introvert. You're not someone who is looking for more exposure at any given opportunity, like you're not the person who is looking for all the attention, just in general aspects of your life. But when it comes to creating this YouTube channel as an introvert who's not really using any props, you're not hiring actors, you're just using very similar, very simple equipments, you've been still able to build out this massive channel. And I think if that doesn't provide hope to agents, then I don't know what will. Like you don't need to have all the fancy equipment to build out a good YouTube channel. So most of my videos now that I do are from here. I used to always find it difficult thinking, okay, what's my background going to be this time? What's going to be my environment or setting for this video? And then I just simplified and said, look, I'm just going to do it from my office chair where I'm working from and just do the videos from here. And it sounds like that's a lot of what you're doing is just always in the almost always in the same exact place. So how do you come up with the content? Because I think that is probably the hardest part in doing what you do is coming up with the content that people would care about. So if I'm a PNC agents, life for health agent, how do I go about coming up with my schedule of content? How do you do that? In relation to YouTube lot or just anything as far as content on any platform? Particularly YouTube. Okay. So let me kind of make it as simple as possible. If you're going to create content for YouTube, first of all, you know how the old saying is you buy low and you sell high. You have to have some kind of opportunity. And the opportunity you're looking for in your research are for keywords that are high value but have low relevant content for. Like for example, when I started Final Expense, there wasn't a ton of Final Expense videos. So I could create a bunch of Final Expense videos and they were very good and content oriented and people would watch them and they would rank high in the search engines. So like what you don't want to do is rank for a video or think you might have a chance as a brand new YouTube agent. Let's say and you're ranking against a Dave Ramsey type subject matter. I don't know what but you know like Dave Ramsey is on YouTube, he's got a bunch of subscribers, he's an authority, he's going to rank higher so you don't have a competitive edge. So with YouTube, if you've ever looked in the organic search, you want to get what's called long tail keywords. You want to get a keyword in YouTube that doesn't have a lot of content going after it. You want to create the best content for that keyword. So maybe it's not like best, I don't know, homeowners insurance. Maybe it's best homeowners insurance in Tennessee. That's a longer tail keyword. It's going to have less search volume because it's very specific to Tennessee versus everywhere. But the people who do that usually are higher intent. So even though there's less traffic and there's less competition, the leads are actually a lot better. So you've got to create a piece around that, find those opportunities and then create the best content you have for them. And then as that stuff ranks in YouTube, as people are looking around at your content and they see your content and they like it, that's where you start getting subscribers. Certainly, that's where you get people to start calling you and getting help with those particular insurance products you're selling. Yeah. So how do you find those long tail keywords that don't have a lot of high authorities already using those keywords? Yeah. Real quick and easy method. Go into YouTube and start typing out whatever keyword you have in mind. So if I go to YouTube and I put in final expense, YouTube will autocomplete. If your browser set up for this autocomplete, the different keywords below final expense. So it might say final expense sales, final expense leads, final expense presentation. So the more words in there, the bigger, that's a longer tail keyword. What you got to do is just simply manually go through the variations. And remember, YouTube showing those keywords, those autocomplete keywords, because those are what people are searching. It's not just random. It's search terms. So you can rely on that to some extent. Then you look at the content and you see if the content actually matches the intent of the keyword. So for example, if I go to final expense presentation and the first three videos are about insurance sales presentations, but not specifically final expense presentation, that what YouTube's doing is getting something closely related to the idea of a final expense presentation as far as the topic and putting in its place a something as close as possible to that term. In other words, that is an opportunity for someone in this example to film a really good video about final expense presentation. And it's likely going to rank higher than those other pieces of content simply because the other content's not oriented towards what the user is intending to try to find, right? They're not looking for an insurance presentation. They're looking for a final expense presentation. What YouTube and Google want you to do is spend as much time humanly using their content, specifically YouTube. They want to satisfy your search intent because if YouTube or Google doesn't show what you want frequently enough, it is a pointless system to use. People stop using it, use an alternative instead. So my point is this is a high odds opportunity in this example because there's not good content to match that kind of example. So that's probably the easiest thing for a new video person to YouTube to go after is just those high odds, low traffic, low competition opportunities for search term results. Okay, so let's say I put in some key words that are relevant to the niche and then I start drafting titles for the videos and what I'm going to discuss. For you and your business, how far out do you plan your videos? And I've got a good rule of thumb for agents to follow. Here's what I would start with. Start with 50 keyword ideas. The best thing I could suggest is an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of pain or something like that. Get the idea. The more you plan ahead of time and you think the stuff through and you really, truly go after the high opportunity, low competition keywords, if you can get 25 to 50 of those, that's really good place to start. You don't have to do a piece of content a day, but you need to do the thinking involved to find the best opportunities because like what I used to do, I used to just, you know, spam, I don't say spam videos, but I would, I would just take any video concept and it was just like, let me just do it all. And that's okay, I guess, but in a competitive niche, if you just do a bunch of content that's mere image of everybody else and there's no differentiation or there's no angle or edge that you have, it's never going to rain. So you have to be thoughtful in what you rank and what keywords you're going after. And I think starting off 50, well thought out, low competition, high opportunity keywords is a good start. Do you mind doing a demonstration live right now? If I'm an insurance agent, can you show us what that would look like? Sure. So let's go to YouTube, right? So this is just a random YouTube you go to, you see the search up here? Yes. What you want to put in here is, let's say a final expense. So you see all these that pop up, these are relevant search terms related to final expense, right? So really the process that I would recommend is just start from the top. So final expense, tell sales, let's look at what's showing up here. Okay. So there's my video. So I did an interview with this gentleman, Jason, and it's ranking number one. But you can tell in the title, it says final expense, tell sales. Then below here is final expense trainer. This is Doug Massey. Same thing here. He's doing final expense, tell sales presentation. So kind of going down here, we've got people who are, we are very specific in our or in our, in our examples of what's showing up here, right? Wouldn't we agree? Like the search query that what we put into the search engine is giving us back relevant content to what final expense, tell sales is about. We kind of just eyeball this. I would say as a brand new, you know, content creator, I wouldn't go after final expense, tell sales. However, if we go back to the search engine here and go a next step over, now we're getting longer tail keywords, right? So let's do final expense, tell a sales script, right? There's probably people searching for tell a sales scripts, right? And final expense. So let's click that and see what happens. So same thing here. We look at the couple of results here, final expense, tell a sales phone script revealed, final expense presentation by phone, script included for free, tell a sales final, so there's still content here that is pretty competitive to go after as a first choice. Okay. So still I'm not, I'm not 100% convinced as a new content producer would necessarily go after that. So maybe I'd go back and then let's go down to final expense, tell a sales leads, right? So if we go here and we show up leads, we're going to see the same thing here. Yeah, this is a perfect demonstration of what that would look like on a B2B side. So selling business to business because insurance agents are business owners, they're independent contractors. Whereas if you're marketing to the consumers, people who would buy insurance, how would that play out? Can you give me? Yeah. And the key thing here is obviously this is not relevant to your audience as far as they're not interested in final expense, but it's not so much the relevancy of the search terms. It's the process we follow. So if we, to kind of give you an example here, like, just finish this out and I'll get to what you're asking. Final expense, tell a sales leads, check this out. Doug Massey here, final expense trainer. But notice this one here. Why you follow a script, final expense, tell a sales. All right. This one is not about leads. We see the title doesn't mention final expense, tell sales leads. It says a script. And then there's a little talk about leads here. So maybe perhaps there's an opportunity to rank a video that's really good that it's explainer about final expense, tell sales leads in this, in this example. So again, if we do get, give me something your audience would be interested in ranking a consumer facing video for to get leads. If we're talking about PNC business, like a lot of times people are looking for the cheapest car insurance in their city. Okay. So car insurance, Chad and, well, let's just go, Atlanta. All right. If I can spell right here, Atlanta. So again, same process we just learned. Let's pull this up and see what happens. So here's what we got here. We've got cheapest car insurance in Georgia. Well, that's not Atlanta. Okay. Atlanta is a more specific term to Georgia, right? It's in Georgia, but people who are in Atlanta aren't necessarily people in Georgia aren't in Atlanta, right? So again, possibly the first choice here kind of gives us an idea that maybe if you ranked a specific video to car insurance in Atlanta, you might have a better chance of ranking it, right? And then you see some of this stuff here, like top 10 car insurance in Atlanta, Georgia. This one is how much I pay for insurance on my charger. The intent of this video here with this dude, it's not about getting car insurance. It's about how I'm a young guy and I got a fast car and how much my car insurance is about. So the intent of this video doesn't match the intent of the search terms. That makes sense? Yes. So what does that mean? That means that's video number three. If you have a relevant search term to this example, you pretty much stand a good chance of probably getting in the top three videos. So that's how we find keywords. My advice, again, for the new guy or gal doing this is find the one keyword, the keywords that look like this. You need to find keywords that have low competition, that aren't being ranked. And it'll give you a best chance of ranking. And when somebody does search that, they're probably going to click on yours because it's going to be very relevant to what it is you're looking for. Awesome. Thank you for doing that demonstration. I think that was super helpful, especially seeing the B2C side. Okay. So I have my 50 keywords. I started writing up the titles. So I have a plan of what my next 10 videos will be. When it comes to recording, how do you go about recording the video? What part do you script? What part do you not script? Yeah, I mean, CTA then. What's the call to action? If I'm an insurance agent who's wanting to sell car insurance, how would you go about plugging this? So I would, here's how I do it. I mean, I've done this so much that I don't script. I do every, I wing everything. So I'll kind of give you some thoughts on an intro. You want to introduce, you want to buy a hook. You want to hook them on something that they will receive if they watch the entirety of the video so that they're going to pay attention to it. If you don't hook them, some of these people will click off. They're not going to be interested. So you have to have some hook. I don't know what it would be in this example. Maybe, hey, if you live in Atlanta and you're sick and tired of your escalating car insurance premiums and you're looking for the best deal, you found the right video, that's a hook. You should be able to hook them in like five seconds or so. Then you introduce yourself and you should have some kind of tagline that's almost like a CTA and it tells you what you do. My name is David Dewford. I run DeFord Insurance Agency. I help people in greater Atlanta find quality car insurance for their everyday needs, whatever it is, something like that. It explains clearly to the audience what your intent is, who you are, kind of a formal introduction. Then you get into the meat. The meat of this is, so like I was saying, the reason you're probably here is because you're concerned about escalating premiums on your car insurance and you're tired of paying so much for car insurance. It's crazy. Then relating to them, describing the problem a little bit more, and then showing them the solutions on what steps they can take to lower their premiums. Here are some tips to lower your premiums. Not necessarily like buy for me, but maybe, I don't know, you guys, car insurance guys know how to do this. Maybe package your home and auto together, I don't know, or something like that. You give a list of things that your person watching this can benefit from. You close with saying, if you want to shop, the best thing we can suggest is shopping your insurance because you'd be shocked at how much insurance premiums differ. If you're in the greater Atlanta area, we can help you out. Then your call to action is, here's what steps you need to do to get a quote from us to hopefully potentially lower your auto insurance bills. The CTA is either whatever you want it to be. Call a number, go to your website, shoot an email to a certain email, whatever it is that you guys do. That's the structure or process that I follow in all my videos. If you don't feel comfortable ad-libbing this, you're normal. I've done 1400 of these. I scripted this out a little bit more in the beginning. If you feel like you got to script it, script it. Put it in front of the camera, read through it, make yourself notes. Eventually, as you do more content, you won't need to do that. You'll be able to just roll through this automatically like what I do, but it's completely fine to script this stuff. People don't really care all that much. If that's what it takes to get you to create content, so be it. Yeah, beautiful. Thank you for that demonstration. Now, once you do the video, you used to edit your videos by yourself. Now you have someone else doing that. How would you go about if because we don't want insurance agents to learn a bunch of new skills, how to find their keywords. Automating the video editing pieces is one of the easiest things. You can go five or upward. There are so many companies out there or places that you can find a video editor who can edit a three-minute video for less than 10 bucks. What are some key things to consider when it comes to editing a video to keep your brand presence there at all times and also help the viewer know exactly where to go after watching a video? What instructions should they be giving to their video editor? I don't know if I'm the best at this to answer that. Let me explain why. You pose a good question about editing, but people overvalue a well-produced piece of content. When I say well-produced, like the zoom in, zoom out, what we call B-rolls, short videos that explain it, of what the concept of the person is talking about it, and just being this dynamic, living, breathing thing. When we're educating our clients, our prospects don't care about that. What they care about is the delivery of the information and is it useful to helping them improve from where they start to the end? If you can do that, your audience will forgive a lot of your editorial issues. For example, I'm a big believer that you should not focus on editing too much. I think a transparent, straight-up talk with your audience without a bunch of edits is actually way better because it feels more natural. Plus, if you're in a position where you're like, well, I don't want to outsource this, I'm going to do it myself, you're going to suck a lot of your valuable time spinning it on editing. I like what's called a one-shot film. What I do now is I get on and I film the whole thing. For years, actually up until about the beginning of the year, I had no editing. I just would film, and I'd stumble, I'd screw up a little bit. My audience doesn't care because my content's gold. You got to remember that your audience is very forgiving. As far as editing goes, don't go overboard with it. Some basic editing, if you screw up, yeah, you can find somebody on the cheap on Fiverr Upwork, pay them a little bit of money, edit it out. Make sure, though, in your delivery that you always open and close with the same, you want to have some congruity between your opening. I'm David Duford. I help people become top producers selling final expense in Medicare. I say that every time. Your clothes need, your CTA needs to have congruence to as well. You can say the same thing at the close. You can have what's called an outro that does the close for you, but there needs to be some congruency between all your videos doing that because you want to always remind the audience, here's what you need to do. Here's what you need to do if you want to work with me and tell them exactly what to do. But beyond that, editing-wise, just don't go overboard about it. Let's keep it simple and focus on the value of your content more than anything else. The editing stuff is overrated in my opinion. I pulled up a video that I did like six years ago that was like eight minutes long where I was hosting a workshop and I was inviting insurance agents to attend this workshop. I pulled it up just recently. It was so embarrassing just watching that video because it was the very first time I was doing a video like that and it was just so dry and just me speaking to a camera. I remember when I posted that video and sent it out to a lot of agents, I had a ton of people sign up for the workshop because they're like, man, I connected with you. The video wasn't sales, it was very simple. To this day, I have found that the best videos for me, with the exception of one that I hired an actor to do a crazy funny video, I've always just kept it super simple and that's worked really well for me. I think a lot of times when people look at YouTube channels, they're thinking of these million subscribers that involve multiple characters and they're giving away a bunch of free stuff. They have their cars, homes, jets. You don't need to have all of that to be successful on YouTube. So I think the longevity is key in this as well. A lot of people would post five videos, 10 videos, even 20 videos, and then get very few views and then give up because it's not working. For someone who has posted say, if you haven't posted at least 20 videos, then you haven't started. That's my firm belief. You've got to do at least 20 videos before you can even say, I tried YouTube. If you have done 20 videos but you're still not getting any momentum, what are some things that you should, what are some things that you would tell a person like that who's considering possibly stopping because it's just not working for that? Yeah, great question. I mean, I would ask first of all, is your content even relevant? One of the problems that you may run into when you use, and I can go into some detail on this, one of the problems you may run into ranking any content YouTube or otherwise, is you got to consider who the audience is and is there an audience? For example, is there an audience of people that are going on YouTube and asking about car insurance in Atlanta? I don't know. You got to do your research. You might have really good content, but there's barely any people who are interested in it. What do you do about that? That's kind of an issue, right? That's kind of the big thing. The way I would address this, and I can, like I said a lot, I can go a little more detail. Yeah, go in detail, please. One of the tricks in this business is that, and it's always been, it always has worked in life insurance sales. I don't know about PNC, is to think one level above or two levels above of selling a policy. Most of us are thinking, well, how can I find leads to sell insurance to? Right? But what some of these really successful agents and agencies have done is they think of themselves a step or two above, providing some kind of service, or in this case with say YouTube, as I'll talk about commentary, and the old by the way, is I help people with insurance. So I had a great idea from a gentleman that I work with who unfortunately is lazy and he never did it, but if he did it and he did it for a couple of years, it would be incredible. His idea, he sells annuities. His idea was I'm going to create, I love RVs. I'm going to create a channel about my kind of like a vlog content review channel about recreational vehicles. And I'm going to do, you know, content that helps explain how these RVs works, what the benefits are, maybe problems with them, my life living in an RV, etc. And who drives RVs? Well, a lot of people who are at or close to retirement, a lot of people who would be great annuity prospects. And yeah, he's not selling annuities, but he's contacting an audience that's susceptible to buying annuities. And the one thing we know about insurance sales is it's not so much the company that sells a product, it's the person, it's your relationship with that person. And the truth is, is if you connect in one way, and you trust a person like over RVs, there is spillover effect, a lot in fact, to trusting them with other matters. If you find out they do annuity sales, oh, I'm retiring, you want to take a look at my thing, you've already trust and like the guy seems like a good dude. Why not? And so my point is, is that this idea was fantastic. It's not an immediate hit. And you do have to do something other than sell insurance. But it exposes you in a broad way to a huge audience, from whence you can translate some of that, that trust that you've developed and parlay it into whatever insurance product you're selling. So if you got, if you're selling PNC, maybe, and you're not on a national basis, maybe you become, I don't know, maybe you do a about the town or round town type of podcast, you know, you talk to movers and shakers in Atlanta, become business owners, business owners, you know, success of Atlanta business owners podcast, right? And you interview different local businesses. How did you get into business? What was it like? You'll start creating connections. People will start listening. Oh, by the way, I do PNC. Great. I need to check out the rates. I got a huge rate increase. I'm going to call this guy and listen to his podcast forever. That's kind of what you have to think if you're going to have any kind of traction with some of these products. I have consumer facing final expense videos on my YouTube channel. And they get a little traffic, but it's not enough to warrant like resolving or resounding success. And so if I were to go further in that direction, I'm not, I'm so busy with everything else. I would create more of a senior advocacy channel talking about things like how the stimulus is going to affect seniors, are they going to get paid? What do they need to be worried about? Information about disability and retirement, you know, just going a step above. And then because of sharing some of that information, I know I'd probably get some final expense deals here and there. So that's kind of what I would ask your audience to think about, is think about something larger than just selling the product itself. Think about how you can create something more of a value in the form of, you know, commentary, something like what we talked about a related product and generate leads that way. Yeah. I think for people who have watched this interview to this point, I know I would be sitting there thinking, okay, if I'm a PNC agent, how am I going to piece this together and actually put this into action? So I get the keyword search, but I think the concern would be for some people that with the PNC business, you will usually write business in the state that you're in, maybe the state nearby. So national, the people who find, you know, there are states to watch your videos may not be the ideal prospects for you. So yeah, one of the things that I would recommend to anyone who is watching this, I'll give you one idea and you can work off of that. And David, give me your input here. The place that I'm in, we have in Portland, Oregon, Portland Metro, I'm in Vancouver, but there's a lot of small mama pop restaurants here, a lot of small business owners. You can be the guy or gal who goes and interviews small business owners in Portland Metro area. And that is your show where you're, you brand yourself as the guy or gal who works with small businesses here in the Portland Metro area. You use their names or the company names in your videos and you can have a list of five general questions that you ask every business owner and then a few more that pertain to their particular business. And it doesn't even have to be like a Zoom call, but you actually go to their business and they give you a tour, they show you around and you document that process. And then at the end or at the beginning, or both, I should say, mention who you are. Hey, I'm Blanchard Genico. I'm an insurance agent here in the Portland Metro area. And with me today, I have so-and-so owner of this restaurant and he's going to give us the behind the scenes look of the restaurant or whatever. So people come in knowing, okay, this is an insurance agent who's interviewing business owners. And if they like the content that you're producing, then at some point it'll click with them where they're like, oh man, my insurance bill went up. Who's an insurance agent that I know that's local that I can reach out to? No, remember you because they're always watching your content. So that's just one way to get started where you can involve other people in your area that could be part of the show. So you're not the one sitting behind a camera coming up with content to use every time. That's a good point. That's for a lot of people. It's a struggle of Jesus. Will people even care about this content? Well, if you go out and curate content through reaching out to business owners, it creates itself, right? And you've got it kind of templated out, you know what to ask. I think that's a good idea. And that is a classical strategy in PNC and in any business that where everybody's prospect essentially is you got to be a man about town. You got to have some kind of exposure, you know, do the B&I bit, you know, get referrals, you know, serve on different committees, etc. This is kind of similar in that regard. Obviously, for the modern age, you've got some sort of content that's being streamed out there. So yeah, I think it's perfect. And it's a long game thing, you know, it's not going to happen overnight where you just get a flood of business. It's something you've got to put in years, frankly. But it turns out it pays off a lot of the time. But you just got to be committed. Yeah, I was watching a guy who has over two and a half million subscribers recently. He was showing his graph of what it took to grow his channel. And the first year, he would have a few hundred, he would have a few videos that had a thousand videos and he was in the fitness space. He's a personal trainer. And he showed that the graph and it was only after like 100 some videos and doing it for over a year that he had one video that took off. And then the next video took off and then it just went way up. And now, like he has over two and a half million subscribers. But yeah, it took him a year before he got any momentum from what I heard you say earlier. It was kind of like that for you as well. You hit this point where you had to figure it out that, okay, this guy's really good. His content is clicking with people and you started getting more exposure. Was that the case? The thing you got to realize and I'm not going to get too political here, but it has some relevancy. The thing that's the social media, the world of social media is concerned about is fake news. That's the big thing in politics now. In other words, who has the right to say what's real or news? And it's a big deal to social media and politics aside. It used to be a random guy who has a perspective could rank in Google or get their videos viral on Facebook or YouTube. And it's concerning from a standpoint because who says they have the authority to rank that kind of the content? So I say all this because what's happened now in the world of like Google and YouTube and Facebook is that there is especially YouTube and Google is they wait the authority of a content provider over the quality of their content now. So like for example, Dave Ramsey has a bunch of content on financial planning. He gets preferentially ranked because he's Dave Ramsey. He's been around for a long time. He's got millions of subscribers. So anytime you do a financial planning search term, Dave usually ranks some of his content. Arguably, is he the best? Well, maybe he is, but maybe he isn't. But YouTube and Google are preferentially treating those as more likely to rank. And here's why I say all this is because what you referenced there with the fitness guy, YouTube is concerned about finding people that will create good content on a regular basis and they want to make sure that the content producer in most cases, not always, but most cases has a track record of consistent content production that and there's something that happens. This is a kind of kind of like something flips the switch at YouTube and then a video takes off. It's ranked. It goes viral. Now you start to progress out. So for a lot of content creators, you have to stick to it a year or two before you have any chance of getting any serious traction up until that point. You're going to be like, is this really worth my time? Is this really a good investment? And it is. You just got to be patient. You got to keep doing really good content. David, this is very helpful. How can people find you and learn more about what you do for insurance agents? Yeah, thank you. DavidDuford.com is my website. And then you can also find me on YouTube. Just put in DavidDuford into the search box and you'll see all my 1400 plus videos. Awesome. We'll glue the links below this video as well as have it come up here on the screen. Thank you enough for sharing these insights, David. I'm hoping that agents who watch this video don't just sit and enjoy and learn from this, but actually apply it in their business. Once again, thanks so much for hopping in the show. Thank you.