 Hi everyone, I forgot about that intro. All right, so let's jump into it. I know I stand between you and lunch. Let's talk about doing, converting our blogs to videos. So I'm gonna take sort of a start off kind of framing what I'm gonna be talking about and looking at kind of bigger context of the three groups that I like to think about of who makes videos. I'm just talking about videos in general, because ultimately we're all kind of competing, if you're making videos, you're kind of competing for that same watch time, that same attention. So we got our obvious ones, we got our big studios, Netflix, HBO, Hulu. And then when I talk about YouTube and mention it to people, kind of the first thing that comes to mind is content creators, YouTubers, the creator economy, the Mr. Beast, the Casey Neistat, and so that's not what I'm talking about today. I see a third group of creators, brands, companies, people that are making content or videos, sort of part of their marketing efforts, marketing strategy, but they don't make their money off of the content, they make their money because they're selling a product, a service, an agency, something like that. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today, we're gonna be talking about you have a company, you got a product, you got something, you've got some existing content, some blogs, how can you capitalize on that and tap into video? So with YouTube, I'd say it's YouTube for businesses, not YouTube as a business. So what I'll talk about in this talk, why I make videos, why I get into it in the first place, how to identify your blogs and how to start turning your blogs into scripts, what are the similarities and differences? Gear and editing, kind of a high-level overview because that gives the whole talk in itself. Publishing to YouTube, so once we got the video done, getting it up to YouTube and making sure that it is maximized to get the most attention. And then after we publish digging into YouTube analytics, what to look for and how to interpret that data. And then lastly, a little bit on short video content. But yeah, so you kind of got the quick overview but a little bit background, as was mentioned. I have a background in documentary producing with some projects in New York Times, Netflix, Hulu. I got a little bit burnt out and Pivoted started an online company which interesting experiment in building out a membership site with streaming video on WordPress. But the biggest thing I kind of picked up from that was the biggest growth that we were getting came from videos on YouTube. And that was sort of how I got exposed. Like I had a background in making like films and movies but that was how I got exposed to YouTube SEO and YouTube as a platform for getting content to ranking, like getting attention. So that was where Pivoted and I created an agency. Yeah, I was way better making videos and it's a lot more fun. So I Pivoted, started an agency in new territory media. And so what we're gonna talk about here is stuff that I've learned and that you can apply to your own content. So why make videos in the first place? To kind of frame this too, I know this talk is sort of framed as like blog to video but it's really about content repurposing. So I don't want you to think of it as just like a linear path. It's really, you have some piece of content, probably a blog. You put resources into it, you researched it. You have this piece of content here. How can we maximize on it? Not have to reinvent the wheel, turn it into, but not just video, how can you turn it into short form content? If you have podcasts for turning podcasts into videos, podcast into tweets, threads, TikTok videos, you can see the whole cluster there. So what I'm talking about can apply to a lot of these things and you can sort of think of it as more of an ecosystem versus just like a linear path of blog to video. All right, so benefits of video, big ones, the SEO advantage. So we've got two platforms and kind of a third one that I'll talk about later, but the two main platforms for capitalizing on search engine optimization is we have Google and YouTube. So Google increasingly more keywords when you type into Google, they're showing videos in the search results page and the video surf box. And they're also starting to see, they're starting to index the videos themselves. So getting video, getting it to rank on Google, huge win especially if it's kind of a competitive keyword and maybe there's some long standing competitors that are ranking there, bypass them, make a video, get it ranking on the homepage. And then also in some cases and talking about that content back and forth, you can get the original article and your video ranking on the homepage. So in this example where I have YouTube upload limits, the original article about YouTube upload limits and a video about it on YouTube are both ranking on the homepage. You kind of get a double whammy there. And then also looking at YouTube as a search engine as a platform and getting your video to rank on YouTube. Often stated, YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, depending on what numbers you look at, it could be the third, but either way, it's a huge search engine. So having a presence there, obviously the price of entry to be on YouTube is you gotta make a video. There's no other form of content that's gonna work on it. So, but it's being such a huge search engine, you can own that space, own that domain or whatever your topic is. So just kind of overall advantage is reaching new audience, become an authority in your industry or your niche, build stronger connections. With stronger connections, this is a quote from Daya who I interviewed on my podcast. And so she sells an online course to become a digital business manager and she started a YouTube channel. And as she explained, like she had someone who stumbled on her content, watched a bunch of her videos, sort of had that connection because video is such a powerful medium of her talking to camera and explaining things where that person like the next day bought her course and she said she hasn't had anything that like converted so quickly just because this person really got to know her and felt comfortable with her because she was watching videos to help that connection. And so that's just one of the powerful connections that we have with video and being able to someone can stumble on it and it's sort of a more personal connection than just reading a blog post. And there are some technical benefits too with video. So increase time on page. With your blog posts you have, you have your blog posts set up, embed those on the page. This is a screen grab from my site and with the top 10 ranked time on page, longest time on page, the top 10. So you can see half of them, they have videos on them. And so if you think of the idea, someone comes onto a page and if the page has video, they stick around, watch the video, increases time on page, gives you an SEO benefit for having a longer dwell time. All right, so hopefully you're sold on that but also here at the talk. So I assume that you're into video and want to learn more about it. So let's talk about blogs and turning them into scripts. So how do you pick which ones to start with? Sometimes maybe you have a handful of blogs, it's easy, but maybe you have dozens or hundreds of blog posts. How do you figure out which ones are worth the time and investment to turn into videos? So some easy formats that always tend to do well on YouTube, listicles and resource lists, top 10 lists, top 12 lists, top 15 lists. So if you have blog posts that already kind of fit that format, those are a good place to start and make videos that sort of have that natural structure where someone comes and sort of know what they're getting. Other format that works really well is targeting queries, questions, people looking in to solve a problem. So instructional videos, how-to videos, especially when you do keyword research and you kind of see like, oh, are people looking for answers to a specific problem and can I make, do I have existing content on that or can I like make something about that? Now let's say you either exhausted that or you just want to like look into the data a little bit more. Dig into your Google analytics, look at what your top pages are. I mean, chances are you probably already know what your top pages are. Look at Google Search Console, what keywords are driving the most traffic to your website and then you can run an analysis on those keywords to see if it's sort of a good fit, which I'll get into in a second. So there are YouTube keyword specific tools to do YouTube keyword research, but I will say they are definitely not as robust or accurate as you might be used to if you use Google keyword research tools. The numbers, I'll run the same search term across all of them and the numbers will be like drastically different and so you don't really know who to believe. So I kind of use them more as indicators of like yay or nay, but Ahrefs is a super just solid overall research tool and I'll run the websites through Ahrefs and see like what pages are ranking up high and like which keywords and how much search traffic those keywords are getting, but Ahrefs also has its own YouTube keyword data where it'll give you some YouTube, you can run keywords and search or get the search volume for YouTube, but again, I kind of take those numbers with a grain of salt. TubeBuddy and vidIQ are also YouTube specific keyword research tools, but they're also just sweet. They're a plugin that is a suite of tools that applies to a lot of stuff on YouTube. So I'd highly recommend if you're gonna get into YouTube using one of those tools. They do a lot of similar things. I personally use vidIQ, but they're both super solid and they both provide, in addition to keyword research data, checklists when you're uploading your video to kind of make sure you hit all of the recommended benchmarks. When you're looking at other videos on the platform, it'll give you additional metrics and data, so it's helpful when you're doing research on other videos. So I said the keyword data, I don't really trust the hard numbers, but what these tools are really useful are useful with and in addition to using Google Trends, they're good for comparing two different keywords and helping you frame how should you present your video or how should you kind of package your video based on like what are people searching for and which terms are people searching for more. So like in this example, for searching for WordPress, it's a low resolution, WordPress blog tutorial versus WordPress website tutorial. So running those comparisons both in Google Trends and then running those keywords inside YouTube and that sidebar is from vidIQ, it recommends that WordPress blog tutorial, I'm gonna make sure I got that right, WordPress blog tutorial. People search for WordPress blog versus WordPress website more. So if I'm doing sort of a tutorial, framing it around a blog or calling it blog, will help the video because that's sort of what people are searching for. And then also I mentioned I have this glimpse logo because this was a new plugin I was trying on Google Trends that helps give additional data. I've been finding it useful, so shout out to them. And the also other useful thing with Google Trends is you can change the search engine inside Google Trends to be YouTube instead of Google. So you can get YouTube specific data and I would obviously trust Google Trends more because they have direct access to the data. Now it does a lot of, it can get a little heady with the analytics and stuff so don't overthink this too much. Best thing, pick a handful of blog posts you wanna start with and just get started. So now we've got our blog posts identified. How do we turn that into a script? What are the similarities? What are the differences? Lots of times this question comes up like should, can you get away with just doing like a bullet point, detailed outline and then just kind of running through it and riffing on each topic a little bit free form or should you write a detailed script word for word and load it into a teleprompter and read it off that. And the answer is it really depends. It depends on you, it depends how you are as a speaker, how you are as presenting. Also when you're starting it's probably gonna be a little rough so you're gonna need like a couple of practice runs. I sort of like to think of it as, it is a bit of a, ultimately they end up being trade-offs because if you do the outline, yes it's gonna be a lot quicker in the scripting stage because you're just writing out bullet points but then as you're recording and depending how you are as a speaker, there might be rambling, there might be a lot more like false takes, there might be, you know, you're recording later on and then you're like, oh yeah, I forgot I gotta like mention that thing and go back and rerecord it. So then your editing time has now like increased because you have a bunch of footage, you have to edit to make it into something coherent. Whereas with the script you're gonna have like bigger scripting time because you're gonna write out everything but then hopefully in theory you're gonna have a much quicker editing time. Internally we do script everything also because as more people get involved and as the team gets bigger and you have like different separate editors, graphic designers, it's helpful to have that script so there's like one document that everyone can refer to as far as not just what's being said but like what text do we need on screen, any like notes or visuals to add just so everyone's on the same page. Now as far as SEO similarities and getting your keyword, whatever your target keyword is, there's a handful of similarities. Obviously you're gonna have your title, you're gonna wanna have your keyword in the title, that applies both to your blog posts and your YouTube videos. We're gonna take that blog post content and that's gonna obviously turn into the content of the video which will turn into captions and then also we're gonna have some form of that content inside the YouTube description which I'll talk about a little bit later. And then with your blog post you might have tags and there's also a similar tags feature inside YouTube. I would say tags from what I've seen and just some other like studies. With YouTube videos they don't really play a huge role as far as helping rank your video for target keywords but it's a field that's there so you might as well fill out the tags inside YouTube. Another big similarity is thinking of you have your blog post that's sort of structured with your headings, your H2s, your H3s so you sort of have that outline structure as far as how your blog post is built and that same structure applies to YouTube videos. And so we'll build out the YouTube video with kind of similar section titles or modify the section titles but with the same idea that it's built in sections and then after publishing we'll turn those sections into labels and add the timestamps inside the description. YouTube will turn them into clickable links and they'll also add a navigation bar on the bottom of the video window so if someone goes to the video they can click around and kind of see which parts are in the video so it helps them navigate. So if they land on your video but they're only interested in a specific question or topic it helps them navigate to that part versus if they land on it there's no navigation they might try to find their answer to their question not be able to find it and then bounce. More similarities, there are tools on YouTube that I would put into the same kind of grouping as like categories and internal linking. So with categories on YouTube you have playlists you can add one video to multiple playlists. The obvious use of playlists is if you wanna build a collection of videos that play in a certain order. So that's good if you're doing like a mini course or something that you wanna put on YouTube but the other use for playlists and we tend to just use it more for categories because playlists end up becoming the backbone of how you build out your channel homepage. So once you've got videos and there's a good amount organized into different playlist categories we'll build out the structure of the channel homepage. So if someone comes to our channel maybe they find the video then they wanna go to our channel and check out what kind of content we have. They'll see the channel they'll see all the videos we have organized by category and it gives them a good idea of like the variety of content we have and also like what topics we cover based on the names that we put into the playlist. You also have end screens in video. So at the end of your video you can link to additional videos, playlists, subscribe buttons. And now I am talking about this. So this stuff, the technical stuff of this is something that you do in after uploading your video to YouTube and we're still talking about the scripting stage but I'm talking about this now because you wanna think about this stuff while you're writing the script before you film because these work a lot better when you're recording and you say on camera, you know, hey if you wanna like learn more about this topic we have another video here, we have another video here and specifically guiding people to like your additional content. And that works well on end screens where you can guide them to another one of your videos that might be similar to keep them viewing content on your channel. And then that also works with cards which are kinda like the internal links. So you can link up to five cards and the card can link to another video, another playlist or an off-site link but best use is just linking to another video and so while you're recording your video and you're talking about a topic like you know, if you wanna learn more about DSLR cameras we've got an in-depth video of DSLR cameras so go check it out. So these are things you wanna think of while you're scripting. The technical stuff happens after you upload but you wanna make sure you think about what other videos can you mention and put it in your script. All right, and so those are similarities now. What's different about writing for video, writing for YouTube? The intro of your video is a lot more important than the intro for your blog post. Like I know blog post intros are important but it's very easy for someone to land on a page and quickly scroll by and kinda skim and see if the information they're looking for is there. With a video, it's not as easy to skim. And now the first thought might be okay, yes, you've heard, like yeah, you need to have an engaging hook, you need to capture attention in the first like 15 to 30 seconds. I think, yes, that's true to a point but it depends on the context of the video. So if it's a video that is in general, you're addressing a problem or you're teaching someone some skill, chances are you don't really need to do much of an intro because they either found your video or they searched for that term, they saw your headline, they saw your thumbnail so they're already bought in like to like why they wanna watch your video. So you don't need to spend a minute at the beginning of your video explaining why they should watch it because they're already bought in when they clicked on it. So in those cases, like just get to the content, get to the point right away so they get that instant solution or start teaching them the solution to their problem. If the video is a bit more like on the entertainment and or informative end, then that could be a place where yeah, like an engaging hook will come into play two kind of simple frameworks I like to think about is how and wow. So either like open up with a question or some sort of problem that by the end of the video you'll answer or wow opening the video with like a crazy finished product or like a crazy statistic that throughout the course of the video you'll break down or explain how it's done. And then I would also say that non-verbal impressions matter. So someone clicks on a video having like if I'm like on a search results page and there's like five different video options for like whatever I searched for and I click on one and it's got like poor audio, bad video quality. Like even if it answers the question I'm probably not gonna stick around that long especially if there are other options cause I'm gonna be like, all right, I'm gonna bounce like I don't wanna deal with like trying to decipher this bad audio. Like I'm gonna check out these other videos. So having, and I'll talk about gear in a second but having that better audio or just having a decent level of audio video quality how you present yourself definitely makes that first impression of like is someone gonna stick around or are they gonna bounce? All right, next we speak a lot differently than we write. If you took the transcript of what I'm saying right now and turned into a blog post and didn't edit it it would probably seem really crazy. So we just, we write more formally, we write longer sentences usually. So there's things to be aware of as far as the differences in how we speak and write but also just the length of content and how we adapt it. So like when we've adapted scripts and we've looked at the word count of the scripts of like how they ended up, how long the video ended up being versus like how many words were in the script it averages out to about 125 words per minute. So being spoken and talking on camera. So we're gonna just take like an average 2000 word blog post and turn that word for word into a video that would be 16 minutes which is probably gonna be too long for whatever that blog post's content is. So a couple of things you might need to simplify your blog post especially if you have really long like pillar content blog post. You know you might think oh I'm gonna make like a super long in-depth video that's gonna like go into everything about this topic. Chances are it's probably gonna be a better strategy to like take that long blog post and turn it into four, five, six different videos each one just kind of going into a more specific topic of whatever that long form guide is. And then also as I mentioned just we speak differently than we write. Best way to check for this especially if you're writing a script read your script out loud verbally the practice run if stuff you kind of stumble on words if stuff sounds weird then that's probably a good indicator that you should go in simplifier sentence break it up into smaller sentences or maybe use simpler words. And then last big difference kind of an obvious one blogs or written format videos or visual format so you really wanna think about visuals and how you can illustrate your points inside your video because you really don't wanna just have a talking head camera where you're just talking to the camera for like 10 minutes and like nothing visual is happening it's not very exciting. So some things you can keep in mind screen recordings, obvious one if you're doing a tutorial or showing something on your screen I would say though like don't the opposite of like not having a talking head video don't also just have a screen video for the entire time that's where it comes into play you kind of wanna mix it up have different going back and forth between faces and screen recordings just to have that visual variety. Photos, still images, b-roll that you film yourself or stock footage just tons of great stock footage libraries different camera angles and so I don't mean like getting multiple cameras you can add variety to just like a single camera if you scale it up or zoom in reframe the shot just something to sort of add kind of think of like music where you don't want just like a flat line you wouldn't like to have like peaks and valleys and rhythms so same thing with like editing pacing something where you can like break up the variety to just give visual variety, a little pattern interruption and just a little bit to keep people engaged and then also on screen text and this does have a similarity with blog posts where if you have your blog posts you probably have pull quotes to like call attention to like certain quotes you might bold sentences inside your blog posts to call attention to it same thing applies in video you can just put the same text that you just set out loud on a full screen and just put the text up on screen to just emphasize it add a little bit again visual variety and just to like mix things up and highlight important points now also a good tip when it comes out to creating the content we find that like batching makes things a lot easier so if you're planning like a video week map out the month you got four videos we'll just get all the scripts done for four videos ahead of time also because we'll film them all on one day because filming is usually gonna be the most resource intensive activity out of all this in terms of like you got to get the gear you got to set it up you got to get the audio you might need more people involved so as much as we can like everything prepared maximize on the filming day both save a lot of time headaches and money and then also we have a good amount of footage to edit so then we can kind of space out the editing and also have enough stuff filmed where we can then not run up against deadlines and like have stuff done ahead of time and then the whole process repeats itself alright so got it scripted let's run through gear which is gonna be another high level overview because that could be really detailed so if you're gonna buy one thing for video not a camera get a microphone people can forgive bad video quality mediocre video quality way less forgiving if it's bad audio quality so if you're gonna buy it's gonna be an order of like things you should buy if you're going down the list so get a microphone chances are you might already have one of these microphones when everything went to zoo maybe you upgraded your mic got a USB microphone to plug into your computer these work great the USB microphones especially if you're just gonna start recording off of your webcam plug the microphone in instant improvement of your audio quality works great you can also get XLR versions of these microphones which gives you options to plug into other devices but if you want to plug it into your camera or your computer you're gonna need another adapter device now if you want to film and have more of a freedom of movement or you're filming with multiple people lavalier the clip on where now best option just clips on picks up clear audio great if you're like walking and moving or doing multiple people or just don't want to be stuck sitting behind a desk because you have to be in front of a microphone and then if you don't want the on-camera mic look at all shotgun microphones are the best option these are extremely directional whatever it points at it picks up that audio and ignores most of the audio around it so that one you put on your camera or like directly above your head but out of frame of camera and so picks up your audio nice and clear but visually you don't see any microphones alright next one in a list of improvements still not cameras lights just by adding some light you can drastically improve the quality of like mediocre webcams just by adding some more light to it so like there's tons of LED light options on Amazon and other websites they've all come drastically down in price they're all really good quality so like you could easily pick up a couple LED lights and just generally the more light the better depends there's a style question there but generally the more light will improve mediocre cameras a lot and then in some cases you don't even need to buy additional lights you can get creative depending on where you're filming if you have a lot of windows a lot of natural light just by looking around the space and kind of like framing where you film you can use windows to your advantage and it's hard to beat the sun it's extremely bright and powerful and so you can get a lot of great free natural light from the sun if you position yourself properly and then lastly cameras but in this case you still might have a really good camera in your pocket smart phones specifically iPhones the cameras are phenomenal they keep getting better iPhone 14 so those cameras are excellent in themselves there's a great app called Filmic Pro that if you want to like unlock full control full quality of your camera it's the app that they use Steven Soderberg used to like film feature films on it you can unlock a lot of power out of just basic iPhone and smartphone camera but now if you do want to improve your quality bigger sensor higher shallower depth of field option to change out lenses then you want to upgrade and get a mirrorless or DSLR camera and then in between option and I kind of throw this up there because you might also already have one of these action cameras specifically GoPro's in the more recent models they added features where they don't have the like drastic wide field of view they have a little bit more features that make them into actual like video cameras and they have really good quality and they're a couple hundred bucks so it's kind of like a good mid-range option something you might already have or something you can use as a second camera and then I'm just going to briefly run through these just extra tools and things to think about screen recording software teleprompter great teleprompters for iPads iPhones and there's a lot of free apps out there to run your script and even if you're not scripting they're also really good for putting your outline in there just so you can have your notes directly in front of camera so you don't have to keep like glancing down 8-10 mixer is super handy if you're using multiple cameras or want a live stream that's kind of a Swiss army knife of uses and then Stream Deck is a programmable shortcut button thing great for launching shortcuts great for doing live streams great for editing shortcuts just another all-around handy tool alright and then editing tools I'm going to skim through this too because there are a lot of options out there Adobe's got a bunch of options Adobe Rush is more of an easier one Adobe Premiere would be more of a pro level one CapCut LumaFusion if you are more of like an iPad Pro like iPad Pro is your main device LumaFusion is the most professional editing app out there for specifically dedicated to the iPad I'm going to come back to Descript but Final Cut Pro a solid Mac option and then DaVinci Resolve is pro level software but it is completely free they monetize their software through hardware so just using their software there's no limits on it you can use it for free Descript is relatively new and it's been a game changer in how easy it is to edit they've basically made it where if you can edit a Google Doc that you can edit video so you feed your video into it it'll transcribe the video and then you just edit the text and if you like delete a sentence it will delete that from the video so I have people on my team now that have like zero video editing experience and they're making like our social media clips they're pulling clips out of podcasts they're adding the captions on screen and that's all from Descript and it's just been a really interesting tool that's sort of like rethought how to edit video and made it super easy okay so that's high level of review because that could be a whole talk so let's say you've got your video done now we're going to publish it to YouTube talk about some YouTube SEO stuff and sort of just a broad checklist of things to keep in mind and the nice thing with the vidIQ and TubeBuddy that I mentioned is they mentioned is they'll remind you of these things so we got your title that we talked about before we got your description so inside the description you'll have your timestamps you have 5,000 characters in your description so you can get kind of meaty in the description so I've seen some channels sort of treated as like a mini blog post Ahrefs YouTube channel does this where if they have a video about like a kind of an in-depth topic they'll have like a pretty in-depth overview and text inside the description and the idea of this is sort of to help with ranking inside YouTube and on Google and then you could also good spot to add links to other videos on your channel links to resources off YouTube and you can add up to three hashtags if you add them in the description they'll then show up beneath your video we got tags which we mentioned before captions definitely get your video captioned obviously for accessibility but it also helps just with being able to analyze that what's the spoken words in your video for ranking there's a lot of great there was one main captioning option Rev which has integration with YouTube you say they'll pull the video automatically and then add the captions and then there's they'll add them back you can also just let YouTube auto caption it and then they have a pretty easy editor where you can jump in and then just correct the mistakes you got this is where you would add your cards or playlist your end screen and then once you publish another good trick is to then go back into your video add the first comment and this is a good spot where you can put any caught actions or link to your blog and then pin that first comment because people the only the first two lines of your description are going to show up unless someone clicks on like show more but the pin comment is going to show up when people land on the video too so it's kind of good real estate that you can use to highlight whatever you want to feature and then the big one with YouTube is thumbnails there are a lot of facial expressions you've probably seen with YouTube thumbnails there this is something you definitely don't want to like leave for the last second and like think about after this is something that definitely you want to think about in the scripting phase and while you're filming to capture the stills that you might need for your thumbnails so you really think of the thumbnail as the movie poster of your video this is what is going to get people to click and watch the video and you're sort of competing against all the other videos on YouTube to capture their intention attention and curiosity one good tip and this is something that was guilty of for a while is to pair the title of your video with a thumbnail instead of repeating it so like when I would make a video like top five cameras for vlogging I'd have that in the title of the video and then I'd be like alright well I'm just going to put that text inside the thumbnail as well but it's sort of a waste of space because there's really no time when your thumbnail is ever going to be displayed on YouTube without also showing the title so what we do now is we just think of like like sometimes people just highlight like one word or like a specific keyword but we'll also just think of concepts of like how can we pair or like illustrate the concept of the video without like stating it in text on the thumbnail so like sometimes just broad things to think about faces obviously they always do well on YouTube or human we connect with faces how much expression you want to show inside on the face that's up to you but I will say people don't keep doing it because not because it doesn't work colors you can sort of kind of brand your channel and sort of consistently use the same color scheme so when people are scanning thumbnails and as I keep seeing your videos you can kind of get to a level where like oh they kind of see a certain color pattern or color scheme and then they kind of mentally associate it with your content and then more abstract curiosity and problems and so like for the problems one this Alex Chamozzi one is a good example of how he has the title which like specifically addresses a problem he has your followers, what to do and then the thumbnail is a nice pairing where it's just like very clearly comically illustrates that problem in an exaggerated form but it's not repeating the title, it's playing off it and all right so now once you publish a video you gotta promote it be on the scope of this talk but just don't think it's like set it and forget it utilize whatever other social media or other newsletter any other channels you have just start the YouTube flywheel going but one obvious one is you made this most likely off of your existing blog post embed it back on your blog post especially if this blog post already gets a good amount of traffic this is a great way we have some newer videos where like they're based off blog posts that were already pretty highly ranked and that turns into like the number one source of views for that video because that blog post already gets a lot of traffic so it's a good way to kind of just get the flywheel spinning of people finding your YouTube content back on your blog and then also just to mention this came out pretty recently in Google search console they added a video tab where they'll give you the data of all the videos embedded on your site and so it's good to check and see if there's any red flags once you start embedding videos and to make sure that everything's good but with sticking with YouTube it obviously should be pretty good all right then we got YouTube analytics so you publish the video if you head over to analytics there's a lot of stuff to look at but there's really only two important stats that you need to focus on and that's gonna be your click-through rate so how many people saw it your thumbnail and title versus how many actually clicked on it and then percentage viewed so how much of the video once they got to your video how much of it did they stick around for we like to aim for getting above 6% target on the click-through rate obviously the higher the better we have some that are 11 and 12 but if we see stuff that's like below 6 we'll start experimenting to see what we can do to change that and I'll get to that in a second and then percentage watched 70 is really really good but also pretty hard if we get stuff that's over 50 that's usually we'll see it even if it's over 50 like still continually get pushed by YouTube and get views so 50 is a good kind of target number top YouTube creators they're like aiming for like 90% but that's crazy but with thumbnails or I'm sorry with click-through rate you can keep experimenting because you can keep changing the thumbnail on your video so this is from one of the channels we managed that does Spanish language teaching we'll constantly run AB tests swapping out thumbnails and trying different designs so these are an example of some of the biggest gains where like they first were up and they got like pretty dismal click-through rate and then just by swapping out the thumbnail and changing a little bit how it's framed you can see that it had a lot of these had huge improvements and so like as I mentioned click-through rate you can improve because pretty much everything about your video you can keep changing you can change your title you can change your thumbnail the only thing you can't change about your video is you can't change the video file so if your percentage watched isn't that great there isn't a whole lot you can do about it so best cases look at the retention graphs see where people were like falling off in interest and then just use that to inform your future videos and how you make them in the future alright so maybe you're like YouTube sounds cool this also sounds like a lot of work alright well there is an easier option that is going crazy right now obviously TikTok and YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels because why not I mentioned there's a third SEO platform so TikTok SEO is becoming a thing here is a recent example of just searching for kind of specific things around Excel XLOOKUP and you can see there are videos they have hundreds of thousands of views TikTok has recommended searches on top of that even Google has acknowledged like obviously TikTok is a threat to YouTube but Google has also acknowledged it's a threat to their other search products like people are going on to TikTok doing searches and then like they finish their search on TikTok so it's still a little bit of the Wild West especially with like more technical stuff so it's a good time where you can make content on TikTok and sort of own a domain or own a space also going back to Google they are indexing TikTok videos so right now I was only able to pull up TikTok videos when I add TikTok into the search phrase but I can only imagine it's a matter of time before we start seeing these integrated with the video cert box and also with YouTube Shorts where ready gets indexed in the video cert box so reasons to experiment with Shorts they're going to be, they're obviously short so a lot easier to make we found like lower production value videos tend to do better anyways so like you can just record them on your phone you already got the gear for it they're really good to validate ideas so if you want to test like hey should this blog post like go out further you can kind of make a video, a short video and then if it does well you can expand that to a bigger video or you can just do a whole strategy around Shorts and then also because there's a three platforms you make the video once and you got one thing you could upload to three different platforms and we put the same video on three different platforms and like it'll just wildly perform like well on one and then like do nothing on another and there's no rhyme or reason and then lastly some interesting case studies we found that posting consistently for like three months like sometimes you'll get some a quick win but more commonly we found like we gotta post consistently before we see stuff take off so in that first one those are like posting, posting, posting and then we started seeing spikes and the spikes started coming more frequently and then this is the craziest one this channel so they're posting, posting, posting that's a stand up comedy channel so they post comedy clips and then it took off like a rocket ship those are their daily subscriber counts and they got 600,000 subscribers in five months and it was all from YouTube Shorts, Wild West yeah so I covered a lot in this talk but the main thing is to hit record and start uploading and I know it's not between you and lunch but I could take I don't know question maybe yep you have to do the mic. Hi, when you say post consistently for three months at what rate would you say is consistently daily a few times a week? Those were daily but we had enough content to pull from of like they're repurposed from other things but I would say yeah I mean A schedule is better than no schedule so even once a week is better than nothing but it's basically the more videos you can put out then the better the algorithm gets at understanding what types of videos you're making and who's interested in that and pairing them up properly so it's really just like it's kind of a numbers game and just the quicker you do it then the quicker you can understand it but not to say you can upload less and still have a take off Yes, yes so for the shorts, TikTok, YouTube, Shorts but it's still the same YouTube platform and Instagram Reels Instagram has a lot of bad stories and other things but it's Instagram Reels and just to repeat the question it was the top three social platforms to post on and in the back there Hi, what's your main traffic source for your Shorts videos? Is it like Shorts feed or do you get views from I don't know for example YouTube search too? Shorts feed usually it's the Shorts feed I mean Shorts it's usually the Shorts feed Do you recommend creating a new channel for Shorts or just posting it on your main channel? Yeah, good question I would say start with posting it on your main channel and if it takes off and maybe you hear feedback from people like they're not into the Shorts if they're into your main content then make a second channel but I wouldn't I would just start and consolidate into keep it all on one channel like that the one before the comedy channel they have videos that have like full 10-minute sets of comedians in addition to the Shorts and so it also helps with that like because so much traffic came in through the Shorts a lot of that trickled over into the full length videos as well All right, thank you All right, and last question So is the main goal to get new people to learn about you from YouTube? Is that the main goal? Yeah And then the secondary goal is well now I've made this and I got this blog post so I'll embed it in the blog post so the video will be in the blog post and the whole blog post will be there so then the secondary goal is maybe existing people who know about me stay on my blog longer so that's a question is the primary goal getting new people to know about me from YouTube? Yeah, and that's why I talk about YouTube specifically looking at YouTube as an ecosystem and like as its own search engine thinking of like very top of funnel stuff of getting discovery, getting people to find out about you via YouTube and then the smaller percentage of that digging into your site learning more about you, what you offer and the video itself should be like standalone and useful but there's nothing wrong with like mentioning like hey if you're interested in this more like we have a course so we do this you know mentioning that inside your video Cool, well thank you so much everyone I'll be here if anyone else has questions