 Tom here from Orange Systems and this is different than my normal content. This is a zoom video I hosted at LA2M marketing education Well, they hosted and I did the zoom call and it's a breakdown of getting started in YouTube And how it can apply to your business and I share all the details of behind the scenes and how I do the YouTube How I got started on a platform and some ideas for using the YouTube platform as a both a creator and a business owner So this is stuff. I've talked about broadly on my channel. It's gonna be specific to this I told them when I was done I would upload it to my YouTube channel to allow anyone else who would like to watch it all this content Of course is free and this is for people who couldn't attend the live stream I also will have a link below to the slide deck I created for this which was a part of the presentation for anyone Who wants it I have links to all the assets. I also at the end of this video is Q&A So the first part is the slideshow second parts the Q&A So if you're interested watch it if you're just looking for my other more deeply technical content Well, there's links where you can find all my other videos So this is kind of a business talk I did. All right, let's get started with it YouTube. I started this around 2015 with the idea that hey, I should probably put some content on YouTube Because I have a cousin that's doing it and we said she started talking about how well she was doing in YouTube And actually had a successful business and said I'm selling my business because I'm gonna go full-time YouTube and I said what like what do you mean full-time YouTube? I didn't realize exactly what all that meant So that started me down there down that little rabbit hole of what is YouTube? How does it work as a creator platform? Now a little bit about me. I've owned my company for 17 years. I've worked in tech for almost 25 now. I'm a super geek I dive deep into technology. So that's a lot of what my channel is about. That's one of the reasons I don't I won't bother any of you or some people ask like well, you know getting more subscribers You know you post more on Facebook or whatever. I'm like that. I have very niche content I'm gonna talk about creating niches of content as well from my perspective and then also talk about how to create broader content I have a larger appeal, but I'm doing what I do. So it is deeply technical very detailed type videos and Being just being in technology this long. Also, it's kind of a pivot because I do public speaking I was doing that as a way to once I started my business It was like well, how do you get more customers? That was a real challenge for me because being technically Good at fixing computers did not at all equate to customers. It turns out not it not even a little bit So I started doing public speaking and talks and that's kind of how I led into that So it was an easy turn to start once I figured out how the YouTube system worked Oh post those same public talks on YouTube But let's start with the stats on YouTube and why it's interesting YouTube right now has two billion logged in monthly users And it's probably going to be even higher Due to the pandemic the fact that you know more and more people are turning to YouTube for information So I bet those views counts are substantially up YouTube's kind of close to the vest on some of their Secret sauce behind the scenes of exactly how much is going on other interesting thing about YouTube is despite Google actually being owned by the parent company alphabet YouTube is it was never broken apart when they did that YouTube and Google are still a singular piece of the alphabet pie. So they have all the other divisions, but YouTube you is just not broke out Google keeps it all in house So it's really hard to distinguish Google from YouTube, but it's obviously it's not just a YouTube visit Just a Google property. It's an integral part of how Google works 81 percent of the 15 to 25 year olds in the US use YouTube This is just one of those crazy numbers because pretty much anyone under 30 gets most of their information How-to's videos from YouTube and the reason for that is, you know, look at even my kids They started by watching gamers on YouTube and that was an easy, you know It's an attraction when you're kid, but then you graduate high school and after my daughter graduated She just went to the same place She always went to to look up, you know things about her career things about her college courses Knowledge she needed for things like that. It was the same platform. She's using so you're watching people grew up YouTube's been around since 2006 it got really I would say the turning point around 2009 is when it really started to take off With the younger audiences and they're now growing up 10 years later with it. So It's a really important platform for this younger demographic Now the one of the challenges is there's always these Debates about how YouTube should filter things or how they control things and it's become a it is a Daunting challenge and last year they hired a lot more people to help Do filtering and things like that on YouTube because with 500 hours of Video every minute are being uploaded. So in the hour that we have this You know or the minute i'm talking about this 500 more hours Is going to be added in content to YouTube and each visitor on average spends 11 minutes and 24 11 minutes 24 seconds per day on YouTube when you talk about 2 billion monthly And maybe I think their daily average active user is still over a billion That's a lot of people and to put it in scale as well when you think about it from an international standpoint You got figures only 300 million 329 million people roughly At the last census in the u.s. Um, that's a lot of global audience a lot of global reach It's also scary to think that mostly the core team of youtube is One in two thousand people there's not a massive audience in there 70% of what people watch on youtube is determined by its recommendation algorithm If you watch a video on woodworking, you're going to see more videos on woodworking You watch your video on finance and real estate more videos on finance real estate um the The discoverability of videos on youtube is what It absolutely makes it an incredible platform and really tops facebook one of the problems of facebook is It's ephemeral i created a video i uploaded to facebook try to find my video from last year You'll spend 20 minutes trying to find anything i posted from last year on facebook other than what comes up in memories and that gets Reshared facebook has never really cracked the system for good recommendations In a good platform for it. So when you want a right now thing Uh, you want a right now video where i want to share something out on facebook to say I want to attract audience to watch something longer facebook's great for getting a three minute clip out there and having a discussion about something that's of the now But it falls away fades away into the background versus youtube I've got videos my videos from 2016 I still have a very popular video and this is what they refer to as evergreen content content that's still relevant If you were doing a video on we'll go back to the example of finance Certain principles of finance and how you get a loan or how you increase your credit score They may change those rules may change a little but that's kind of evergreen content. It lasts several years videos I've done that are still relevant today about technology. I talked about still get views and the discoverability algorithm If someone watched even a newer video on that same topic my video from three four years ago still comes up So their algorithm is really um, what makes youtube one of the really amazing platforms for doing this In the u.s. Alone youtube will make 5.5 billion dollars in advertising revenue in 2020 It's incredible how much and it's maybe with and these were some of the earlier numbers. This is from a hoot sweet blog It's probably going to increase more because a lot of the advertisers right now So much in my industry was dependent on those physical events a booth at a tech event can cost you 10 20 000 dollars to attend a tech event as a vendor Well, all that money is still floating around those tech events got canceled those companies still have to sell product They're going to be pushing more and more for platforms like youtube For their advertising revenue now this advertising revenue doesn't just go to support the platform in terms of you know keeping the lights on It also is divided up and this is one of the things i'm going to show you with the creators So you are incentivized to create content because they do Split those ads that ad you may watch before youtube video get split with a creator and of course youtube Will keep the lights on and keep the servers running and pay the teams that develop things Now there's two strategies for youtube you can Buy ads which is all part of the google ad sense network the same way you buy Targeted ads or any type of very specific advertising that goes on to youtube that goes on to the google pages that google ad system It's the same ad system. This is one of the reasons google doesn't separate themselves from youtube and it's kind of one big thing google uses the indicators from what videos people watch their geography also what they search for so all that Two data points are separate from what we most people see it You know web and seo what was searched for targeted ads and then youtube google sees them as one piece And by having those two different data points They know what you were searching for and that's often why youtube videos Are favored as top search results and you can buy those ads And the other way to do it without buying ads is create available content So I see we're going to talk about the create available content because well This whole talk would end at buy ads just buy ads if you just want to get it out there The challenge of buying ads though is try to get someone's attention with the commercial people are just waiting to click that skip button all the time Everyone that works in advertising knows creating compelling engaging ads is really really challenging I'm getting people to watch them So if you want to get started on creating content first start with be useful create content around a subject or theme That an audience can follow channels that follow a consistent theme build audience much faster So I seen someone asking about subscribers This is you know If you look up anyone on youtube who talks about the mistakes they made getting started almost always It's like they they became the variety channel They decided that everything they could possibly make a video on they made a video on and if your audience doesn't know What to expect from you They why would they subscribe to you if you are jumping between Random topic to random topic that doesn't necessarily create a subscriber and an audience that's engaged with your content Because they're like I don't know the person talked about cooking one day and cars the next day So I like their car videos, but I don't feel like watching their cooking videos So you kind of niche into what is really good for your audience and by the way It's an ever-changing moving target that you may not get right the first time. That's just the nature of it Now you can also be an entertainer and this is a Harder part too. So I create tutorials. I don't really look at myself as an entertainer But this is definitely a very popular category people like to be entertained. This is why we like movies This is why we like, you know, watching someone along for the journey along for the story Whatever they're compelling things a lot of the travel people do this like the travel bloggers and things like that that are popular on youtube Um, they create a compelling story and bring you along for entertainment for what they're doing That sounds easy on the surface, but there's actually a lot of work doing this It's not something I do but it is a valid point on youtube This is where a lot of people, you know, get their entertainment from especially the younger audience And this is what the gamers really to me are entertainers And it's always weird when people ask the question of why would people watch other people play video games? It doesn't make any sense. I'm like look at a sports stadium. You're watching other people play a real world thing The kids lend themselves to watching themselves play their favorite and they have their favorite stars They have championships and that whole industry. So that is an interesting way for you too But we're going to focus on what I do here in the tutorials I think this lends itself easier to the business people Because anytime you're employed whether you own a business or you're employed by someone you have some skill that that business is leveraging You can take that knowledge or still people who want to buy that knowledge As you work in that company or you can put it out there's tutorials and become the perceived experts So if you create content that educates people Create use cases and show how you're using that knowledge or product. That's a lot of what my focus is So there's just a tutorial and I do a lot of those but then I also create content that's very Showing how I use the product showing how we integrate it into our workflows and that's my tutorials go a little bit more in-depth I talk about products we use now I'll break down how that actually equates into business and also some of the youtube business for it Because the next question is you know, I've talked a little bit about it But now what and I purposely left this blank because this is how people go I'm going to get started on youtube and they sit down in front of the computer and they stare at a screen going What am I going to do it does take a lot of thought and planning Because starting from zero is really hard This is probably the first video is probably one of the hardest ones you're going to make and you'll anytime you dive into If you type in mistakes first time youtubers make which is a fun search You'll have a lot of people talk about and some of the big youtube people and personalities I've talked about wow. I spent a lot of money. I did all this Work and I scrapped the entire project after putting tons of time into it And I still started with a blank slate again because it was so hard to analysis paralysis It's it's really a challenge. I do think a lot about it on the strategy, but get something out there Now the first thing people seem to do Especially I made a lot of business owners who want to jump into youtube and we have a few dollars set aside So we're going to buy a bunch of gear and I encourage anyone who asked me about getting started on youtube I point them to kasey nice that's guide to filmmaking Kasey nice that's a very interesting YouTube personality creator with he's one of the top youtubers But what does he actually do for a living? Well, he works with brands You might have heard of like nike and samsung to create commercials and content He talks a lot about Filmmaking and he's just a pretty epic and prolific creator But one of his guides to filmmaking starts with gear doesn't matter and he talks about how some of the most inexpensive equipment That he used we're talking like really cheap camcorders He won an hbo special that was actually nominated And the other thing he highlights. I think is so important. It's a good hit home thing He talks about movies that bombed with 200 million dollar plus budgets And he says if if all that took was money to create great content A 250 million dollar budget for a movie means that movie would be absolutely successful no matter what But all of us can think of a movie that failed no matter how big your budget was It comes down to focusing on that idea and everything else Right now i'm recording on these two things and I have videos that have over 200 thousand views Deeply technical tutorials that I have this Brand new 129 dollars you can pay for this blue yeti microphone. You can find him used for like 50 bucks Um, and this you just can't find right now because of the pandemic But this is still sold new for 79 dollars used for like 25 dollars on ebay Of the logitech c9 20. This is what i'm using to record this This is what I still to this day use for a lot of my recordings. It doesn't take a lot matter of fact Working within the constraints of a lesser system So to speak makes you focus on your content and really think about it And that's kind of what casey nice step mentions in his guide to filmmaking And I think there's a lot of value in that because first figure out what you want to do And start honing your content to make it really good before you go out and build the studio The other thing I use is this free tool called obs studio This is free for windows mac or linux for recording tutorials and content I told Lee I wouldn't spend too much time on this But I wanted to mention at least these are just some of the basic tools that get you started By the way, you can see that this is a less than 200 investment to get started on youtube All the all the time is on that idea Now over the years I've grown this is a kind of snapshot of my studio and I detail out So I won't spend any more time on this all the things in my studio that I bought over time Because once I figured out what I wanted to do it was actually easier to pick the hardware that worked for me For how I wanted to do things. So that's how we ended up building out the studio Was completely based on My needs of understanding what I need. So this didn't even get built towards. I think that mid 2018 we built it in 2017 2018 when we started building it out like in more detail All right, so how does this actually look on the back and where am I mad? So we were talking about these subscribers nice snapshot of this yesterday So I got a hundred and twenty two thousand six hundred eleven subscribers as of yesterday. There's probably more today 70 000 views 3.4 million views. This is all over the last 90 days Overall views on the channel watch time and hours they break down 18 000 more subscribers in the last 90 days And this is that ad split i'm talking about so my estimated revenue, which is actually uh was a little bit higher than this They always say estimated, but they do break it down a little bit differently when they do the deposits But um, that's how much I made just exclusively from youtube 11 319 dollars over the last 90 days So what does that look like in term of analytics when it comes to reach impressions are anytime someone came across my content or channel So this is 53.9 million impressions. That led to a 3.2 percent click rate 3.4 million views like I'd mentioned on the other page, but this is the really interesting part So even though I only have 120 000 subscribers The 1.3 million unique viewers most of my content because it solves a problem. It's a tutorial it only Uh, my subscribers are just only a small percentage of it people search for something They search for how do I do and then I often have a video on that particular technical thing and they watch it They may not lend them the subscribe But they then see me as the expert in that because they watched an entire video where I technically go through And walk through that process and create that tutorial how to do it So I end up with a really high unique viewer account This changes a bit if you're uh storytelling if you're a entertainer type of youtube because they want to subscribe to you Because you're going to do the next in your series of which what your story is and what how you're going to bring them along for the story So it's going to vary um on that but for me I have lower subscribers, but really high unique viewers Now how does that translate into people even going to your website? Well, I thought I'd break that down as well So laurance systems.com my company. Um, we've got 26 000 new users This is to say I think the zoom thing might be in a way, but this is a 90 day snapshot in as well Uh, 27 000 unique viewers are new 26 000 new users over the last 90 days and Most all of that comes from people that see my youtube channel and they kind of whittle it down And of course we've all seen the sales funnel diagram where we take the impressions views from impressions watch time and On our website, there's a little button at the top that says hire us. That's what they're coming to our website for The hire us page has a bunch of details about our rates One of the things I learned very quickly was when you're doing things at scale And the most common question was how much do you charge? I realized if I didn't have that on there I would get way too much in my funnel of people asking that question. So actually we put all of our rates We keep all of our Consulting rates and project rates listed on our website and it whittles it down to when they click the form that literally says This contact a human you can go to a website and see it. You'll see that We're only getting probably about Five to ten people a day that contact us But the good news is that's about an 80 close rate because they've seen our rates. They know what we do They watched a video. They watched a tutorial by the time they decided to contact us all those questions have been answered So when they say contact that means I want to hire you for a project And I also for those of them people and there's kind of another segue here When they don't want to hire me for a project but still want to engage with me I set up forums and Right now the forums just these as another 90 day snapshot for last quarter 2.5 thousand posts in my forums. It gets about A day four thousand views now. This is across the breakdown. That's why I have this status here So over a thousand one one thousand one hundred seventeen people actually created accounts on my forums to interact with Anonymous people because it just gets search index because they're public and free So another 1800 anonymous and and crawlers are Google and other bot systems that actually index it which also helps people find me and have those discussion topics This is an important part to me because sometimes people they aren't always ready to hire But they want to ask them questions But I I mean when you talk about 1.3 million unique viewers and whittling it down to someone has a question I don't have time to answer 2.5 thousand questions So having these forums is another important aspect to kind of whittling it down before companies want to engage with us Now what are the videos that i'm doing? This is an example of a video I did on April 4th And this is also why I said don't push people towards my content or posts on facebook I'm like, don't worry people who are looking for something Um, and they know what I do They will hire me because I'm going through and like I said unless you're in my industry This probably isn't interesting. This is a really technical deep dive where I dive into the Back end of exactly how zoom contacts other servers how it does it to establish TCP IP connections and all kinds of nerd stuff so But what this has done is because people know that me and my team know how to dive into these type of topics They frequently will hire us for engagements for security engagements for Diving into network engineering and things like that This is a lot of why I do these deeply technical nurses concept that Well, tom if you showed people exactly how to do it They won't hire you to do it and I will tell you that just doesn't hold water in any measure I absolutely on so many of my tutorials. I walk through In depth and I create content that sometimes this one's only uh about a nine minute video Some of my videos are over an hour long of me walking through step by step piece by piece without leaving any details out of How to set something up those videos convert extremely well to people hiring us to just do the same thing They look at it It's the same thing you could say well, I could watch a video on how to Fix my car But then you look at the complexity of it and you go that person knows how to fix my car better So I will take it to them and the same thing is what happens is by creating content that is absolutely in depth No, you know no Partway through I say by my book where I'll tell you exactly how to click the finish button on this It's it's non-stop friggin end tutorial and for those people that are just looking to do it without hiring me cool They got the information without hiring me for those people that go that person seems to be an expert because 40,000 people Watched this video. It helps establish your Relevance in there now let's break down a couple of our ideas I don't want to talk about just me doing tech But I will talk about a couple other people that I do Occasionally follow on youtube that I also found interesting and I know a lot of you are in a lot of different industries And I want to throw ideas out there Graham is an interesting individual because he His youtube channel he shares out everything he does and how a 29 year old youtube millionaire making up to $220,000 a month spends his money He's really funny because he uh the joke with him holding the coffee is if you're a follower of his channel You realize very quickly he jokes about how you shouldn't spend five dollars on coffee because he's really really frugal And he talks about starting from nothing and building everything up These are kind of a snapshot of some of his videos Now one of the things he does that I think is interesting is who hasn't seen the click Beatty type things of the sale the traditional which i'm just not a big fan of sales funnels And there are these financial freedom scams sign up for this sign up for that And they give you kind of low value content But made you sign up for all their marketing and send things He's someone who just breaks down real estate concepts by the way anyone who's worked in real estate Probably knows more than gram especially when he started so you actually follow him He's only had his channel for a few years But he grew very fast because he's just talking about how to buy houses How he spent money with contractors when he hired different contractors. What went wrong. He's very honest about it And I find that very interesting But here's a guy that resonates not just because he's young. He's just someone who chose to start doing it And before you think that he may has some complicated way of doing it He does it very much like this guy does who also is a little bit interesting because here's a young guy that I like the the Name of whiteboard finance. He's talking about Finance literally on a whiteboard. He sets a camera sets a whiteboard up So how many of you having camera maybe on your phone? Have access to a whiteboard that you could go buy for pretty cheap Some dry erase markers and then this video in particular. I think it's funny how he breaks this down So how car dealerships rip you off the truth? It's it's um, it's okay. It's not a bad video. It's got 6.7 million views But what the concept is is really interesting He talks about and how many how many of us know other people that made a bad financial decision They bought a lease they racked up a bunch of miles got nothing under trade in Rolled it in and now they're making a car payment that doesn't make any logical sense at a high interest rate When he could have done something else He takes 11 minutes and just breaks down What is common sense to a lot of people who are you know, let's just say over 30 Who've spent any time reading a little bit about finance and have had some real world experience But who's that audience you have a lot of young people going? I was searching for games now. I'm buying my first car They're on the same spot How much do you make off a video like that when the video hit 5 million views? He did this other video for how much youtube paid me for 5 million views I didn't want to share the whole video in here, but you can watch it's another one of his videos That are all about 11 minutes long and he breaks down How much he made at the time it's actually more because if you notice it's at 6 million 6.7 million views now He made 41 Dollars off of that particular video just talking about how to refinance your car So just throwing it out there a pretty easy idea But let's go to a whole another topic. Maybe some of you work in finance. Some of you work in accounting Clearview tax. Um, I discovered this channel and I thought it was kind of neat And uh, he did a great job He just sits down and sits in front of a camera and explains accounting business accounting and some of the back end for you pretty tax preparation work and uh, recently, of course, he's been pretty popular No fancy editing matter of fact, no editing. He just seems to hit record and then stop and talks about Stimulus check questions, which by the way, as you know, if anyone's dealt with the ppp or stimulus check There's unlimited content you can create around it because the rules keep changing and there's more information So him breaking down these videos, uh, the last couple of them He did 2.6 million 2.5 million 1.8 1.8 and I will tell you It is undoubtedly led to I don't know this person at all personally Um, it is undoubtedly led to more and more people finding him more and more people hiring him contacting him for advice and Any of those are going to be really, you know, that's what happens when you start making these videos Everyone starts learning who you are it helps your everything around you SEO and by the way When you start looking at what this probably pays for video You can say, okay, if you made 41 000 on 5 million views roughly you may say he made 10 000 for each one of these videos just talking about what he already knows with accounting It's hard to say what the ad rate was on there. It does vary But you kind of get in the concept here that someone who just leveraged your expertise in accounting And if you're in accounting you have an expertise in accounting. It's it's really that simple I'll last kind of bring to You know something this is actually what my cousin does for a living and it's really fascinating and she actually said Maybe she'll do a interview at some time if anyone's interested I can always ask her about it Sometimes she talks a little bit about behind the scenes. She speaks at some big events She's got about a close to a million subscribers. She has several channels She's done and she literally has stories about her dogs that pays a very good living for her um 8.4 8.5 million views Over just the last 30 days and by the way, she doesn't post that often. She's only posted four videos in the last 30 days 283 million views overall on her channel And it's really interesting because her brand deals that she works out. She's been featured by pet supply plus and lots of places just because she has dogs So she's got ad placements mentions everything else But this is a business where all she does is kind of talk about exactly what it says here treats travel and fun She just kind of lives a very relaxed life So I kind of pivoted across a couple different ones here, but you'll see that you can do About anything you want on here for youtube and share that expertise And really create a lot of content around it now earlier. I I know I think it was sarah had mentioned working at hr and Working with some of the businesses that want to reopen in the manufacturing space Let's talk about some of that. So if you were to look at something like that You could say well, why not do a you could religious with a cell phone? You could do it with some social distancing go to one of those factories that have figured it out reach out to them Hey, can I showcase when I'll mention your name? Can I showcase how you guys put up? Maybe like I see stores doing it like whatever they have those dividers between her to keep people separate Anything that you can do to create content around there and what happens is you suddenly become hey That sarah person is an expert on consulting on how to do this and how this other company opened it So if you reach out to these companies at opener factories do some video content showing what they did speaking with people And by the way, it's easy to get interviews. You know what people love talking about Whatever they do it turns out. They're really interested and it's way easier than you think to get a guest And start just doing videos around those topics and you can pick this I've seen plumbers have excellent youtube channels just by talking about what they do on pipes It turns out if you think back to um the famous mike row with dirty jobs It turns out people are really interested in what other people do So it's it's not that hard of a concept to think that what you do Even though it may be slightly mundane if you do it every day But might be really interesting to other people and create engaging content So um, that's my story of how I got here and some ideas for youtube and I know I went a little bit over 20 minutes These are questions I think everyone's on mute. Yeah, thanks tom. Um, so um, we have a couple that we can get started And if anybody else wants to punch their questions in we can um Go go that route. How about that? Okay. So Cheryl says What types of forums? What type of forum and where's it at? You spoke of forums Ah, so I I'm specifically using a program Software called discourse and discourses allows me to have the forum top to bottom Now for a lot of people i'm going to tell you facebook forums are really good The downside of facebook forums is you don't own the content You're always tied to the facebook platform, but the facebook forums are free the discourse forums cost money So you have to decide leverage the free facebook, which is good in a lot of people on facebook And it's not a bad thing at all to leverage that or do you want to own the platform? And that's what I chose to do with discourse, but they're both they're both good options It's just kind of a decision for me being more techie. I didn't mind the expense it costs to have the discourse software to do it. So I've got videos on anything Specific one of the things I have a lot of is behind the scenes videos of how I do things So anyone who wants to reach out and email me I can send them links to very specific things that I do And I have usually a library of that Okay, so roger has a great one. He says what do you use for screen capture? obs studio that's one of my favorite tools. It's free It's actually used by like almost every major big game person on youtube obs studio is the go-to Uh tool to use it's really really good It's actually supported like to develop the reason it's free is the development of it is supported by a couple hardware companies That sell really neat hardware like the stream deck and I think I might have a video on it But if you type in like obs stream deck, you'll find a lot of interesting videos on exactly how to use it It's a really slick way to switch different views have multiple camera angles It's more than just screen capture at the base level it does screen capture But it allows you to extend it into a lot more including makes it really nice for doing live content Right over pot Um, so Maybe you can mute everyone and then Okay, um The best and easiest way to post video podcasts to all distributors such as itunes So one of the tools out there is blurberry. Um, I think blueberry or I can find let me actually i'll drop the link in there blu rbr Podcast because I always I always say it wrong and it's what it's actually blurberry. There we go To me, it's just a hard word to remember. I dropped the link in the everyone. It's uh blubrry.com They are one of the easier systems out there. So you As a podcast or what the this is where youtube has a big advantage over podcasts So where do you get your podcast from well itunes or all these other platforms Blurberry is one of the concentrators that will put it and push it to all the other platforms This is where youtube has such a big advantage of being a singular platform for discoverability So when you put something out on youtube the discoverability is quite big across all of the You know because of the discoverability engine someone likes your content or a similar tutorial content Your content comes up recommended harder to do that with a podcast Okay from Hassan he says lots of success stories in the examples. How many people are making more than I don't know was it less than a cent a month. This all seems great, but this can't be easy, right? No, no, it's not easy. I have nothing to sell you I don't think this is something that everyone should just run out and do this is not I'm not uh raw wrying the entire thing. I mean explaining how I did it I explained how a few other people did it if you say I have no use for this at all Then you might be right. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna oversell it. I have no Offer to get you on this and coaching and training. I have nothing to sell I'm just sharing how I did things and it works for a lot of people, but you're probably right There's a lot of people it doesn't work for You even can look at big companies and we'll use another tech example because that's my space But bill gates bill gates was never the best public speaker stand out in front of everyone That's why he even hired other people to work in marketing So if youtube was available in the early days of tech and when bill gates got started He still probably wouldn't have made youtube videos. He would have eventually had the money to hire someone else to make them But it's not necessarily if you have no strategy around it Don't go out and buy a bunch of equipment if you don't have Some use case for this don't run out and just think it's the next big thing It's a big thing if you can use one of those ideas if you have an idea you think has legs You have something that you think is valuable. You content you can create around it. It works very well Now something interesting is On the number of companies we've landed several companies that are in the fortune 1000 that have given a small contract work It's amazing. How many people with c level under title watch youtube Dan Gilbert said in an interview. They said, what do you do with your spare time? Like what are you watching? He says, oh, I love science videos on youtube. He said that in an interview And I thought that was so funny like dan Gilbert like he's what does he do at night? He's not watching tv He's got youtube on and he's watching science videos. I just thought that was great I'm like so trust me everyone even not just kids not just You know certain niches of people or tech youtubers It's a lot of people like dan Gilbert still on youtube. He may find and discover something That may be interesting that content you're created Okay, so earlier you mentioned, you know people ask about getting more subscribers or or followers So i'm going to like rephrase that maybe so if someone is creating content and they're putting it all out there Um, and they don't seem to be getting any traction What advice would you give them to tweak things or um or to kind of think about it in a different way to Find their audience So the first thing is the youtube algorithm works very very hard against you when you first start out We ran into this because I split my content into two different channels for some hacking videos I do with some friends because hacking videos are one of those ones that the youtube likes to Ban your entire channel for doing so we split that in our channel What you realize very quickly is even with pushing my audience going hey, we have another channel where we created our content Until we got the first thousand subscribers You couldn't get more than 10 views on videos that same video with the same title posted on my main channel Had like 20,000 views. So it is really really hard getting started Guesting on other once you have some content created Reaching out Guesting on other places you can promote it. You can't even pay and buy views On on some of the videos. So there are little methods. It's really really hard to get started I'm not going to lie. You talked to dead air for a long time It's it youtube is more of a long game not a short term game now occasionally and there's been Peter McKinnon is really interesting. He does advertising and photography He's someone who broke all the rules of youtube and actually Came out successful, but but I like to before I sell him as a success story Peter McKinnon worked in advertising and photography So when he created content it blew you away with its high end production value And he already did advertising. So he already knew kind of the how to do things So he started youtube channel and it took him only I don't know less than two years to reach his million subscribers I think it was like a year and a half. He hit a million. So it's really It takes time So hopefully that's it's not easy to start that's a that's one thing you have to you have to be in it For the long game. That's probably my shorter answer To getting that started. There's no there's no real easy tricks on it great really Valuable search for content by the way if you would have been an accountant and started with those ppp loan videos because there's only like two people doing it This guy with the few million views you would have killed it right place right time people searching for that So sometimes that can be a real help If you know people are really searching for something and you have the expertise in it And I'll you know reach back up to like Sarah said if you are help could have a solution to hr for how to Reopen your business safely. I'm willing to bet people are typing in how to reopen my business safely all day right now in front of the computer If you have a solution for that That seems like a niche that I don't know the answer to but boy Someone could probably create a video on it that knows more than me and I would watch it Right, I think that was a great information to say it took the first thousand to get more than a 10 views on a video like that. Yeah, all right. So we have a few more great questions here. It says You mentioned one person posting on youtube for 11 minutes Typically, is there a sweet spot for the amount of time they should run? I know this is a loaded question Yeah, and this is something that um me I was I was on the Detroit startup week I was on a panel and uh, I've I was funny because I was arguing with the other people on the panel But one other person did agree with me and we kind of joked that both of us have the most audience So dave from pot who runs pot gets Detroit and me where both like content needs to be as long as it needs to be And no longer and the reason we both said that almost at the same time While other people said don't know the sweet spot is this many minutes and someone else was arguing this what I found is It's if you're if you're just in the video umming away to try to make it longer You've now run out of content stop talking It needs my tutorials are over when the tutorial is done So if i'm doing a very complex thing It's going to be a long tutorial if it's a very Much more simple like when I broke down that thing for zoom That's only nine minute video to break down some of the security behind zoom because that's all I had the talk about so a lot of it is How long the content needs to be is as long as you're not just filling dead air and you're keep Periding value. That's how long the content should be once you're just Filling dead air to try to come up with eight more minutes because you think it needs to be 30 minutes every time Then it gets to be tough. Uh, so as long as it needs to be is really the answer and What we've actually um, we're doing some ab testing with my friend who's doing programming videos It turns out that doing a deep tutorial called part one part two part three, etc He has an eight part video on doing tutorials. That seems like a good idea Doesn't it turns out's a terrible idea if you take all these Videos, even if they're all like an hour long and make one Six or eight hour video. It turns out that gets millions of views. Uh, people seem to like that better That was just kind of a surprise because you can index things in youtube and you can always come back to it So if they get like an hour into it today, they watch another hour tomorrow Um, sometimes having a singular long video that's that in depth works out much better than you'd expect At least it does for programming tutorials. This may vary with other content That's great says um Any advice on how to use cell phone for av input to zoom for those who lack A webcam and can't get one since they're out of stock There are a couple tools for it. Um There if you if you look someone has an article There's a plugin you can load an app you can load that will turn your cell phone into a webcam And if you type in how to make a cell phone a webcam, you'll find it Um, I don't remember the name of the app right now Of course, you could always just run zoom on your phone. That's a complete another option as well Um, but yeah, yeah webcams. Um, they're at really really short supply right now Man, if if I would have known I would have bought boxes of them as I could be selling webcams I didn't have the foresight for that How long did it take you to make the revenue that you're making now So revenue, um, it's taken it's cumulative over time. I think we hit We started breaking and it's funny because right now it's it it's coming back up. Um, I think it was about Two years in before we started making maybe a thousand it's two thousand dollars a month And then it started getting really big last year because it's the revenue is almost seasonal You make way more money because the your money is directly a relation to the ad buy and ad spend of advertisers on facebook Or sorry on youtube so the more advertisers on youtube The more the ad spend that they're willing to buy and it's a competitive marketplace So the more advertisers the cost is higher for them to advertise We win we benefit from that so if two advertisers go, no, I both want my content on one of these particular videos of this topic They will ratchet it up So around october and november and into december your ad revenue rates spikes and you'll make way I make more money. I made I think six or seven six thousand or so on December because the ad revenue rate was so much higher because christmas ads Um, so they kind of come and go in cycles the lower months are right now So it did take a couple years before I started making revenue, but most of our uh, I mean I'm enjoying the money I make off of uh, youtube It's it's definitely not a fun But we also have a lot of other ways we make revenue and so do a lot of other creators We have our amazon affiliate links. Um, so we get a percentage of all the sales on amazon for just referring people We're not doing anything other than saying. Hey, here's a product and here's my affiliate link That probably brings in it varies, but about another three or four thousand dollars a month I have a video where I break some of those revenue numbers down. Um, the weirdest thing is if you told me a couple years ago I can make money telling t-shirts. I'm like, but I make tech videos turns out we Make shirts that my staff wear and people want to buy them So we started selling shirts that brings in another five or six hundred dollars a month and shirt sales Kind of varies sometimes. There's like a big sale. There's all these little Things you can do for revenue add placements and things like that takes time to build all that though Okay, um So can you decide how often ads are shown on your video and can you decide how many ads are shown? You can suggest to youtube youtube has some restrictions on it. So, um, I can add extra inserted videos You also have to try and figure out Your balance of audience now you can force and in some of the back end settings of their unskippable ads and some of the really popular youtube Will do because the highest paying ads are unskippable because they can't just click next They can't skip it. They can't they have to watch the whole video. I never turned it on some people do It seems like that would be annoying To do but if you have if you have exclusive content that's so good and so compelling that no one else No, they're not going to go somewhere else to watch it and you have it in your head that way. You can do that. I just I I figured there's a balance because I want people to watch the content. I don't want to kill them with ads um, but yeah, and sometimes you can also take and Uh, once you get qualified for some of the advertising revenue You can split the video up and add what they call mid-roll ads On top of there and all these will increase your revenue on there But at the same time some people go so over the top with it that people I can't watch that person's channel because they took an hour video and inserted 15 ads And it went the max that youtube would let them and you can drive your audience crazy. So it's finding a happy balance on there All right, how much of the video Like what portion of the video needs to be watched to get revenue from the video from youtube? Um, that's a mystery question. I don't know. I think they they kick off an impression payout After I think it's 15 or 20 seconds that number varies a little bit and youtube is vague at best of how some of those back end things work They have this whole creator Channel that you can watch where they try to explain how the outs how they want you to use youtube I should say not how the algorithm works. Um, that's still a secret but um They'll tell you some of those breakdowns, but then we'll find out that that number changed on us So that's always kind of a moving target At least you're not going to get any ad revenue unless they watch at least I think it's 15 or 20 seconds is still a number for that. If not, they're just not going to do it Um It is asked could you show the interface you use on youtube with a share screen? Oh, yeah, absolutely So let me uh switch to that See we'll go to We'll show my real time everything that's in here. Let me go share screen So make sure I get the right desktop again. Hey, there we go. So this is how I see everything in real time So uh latest performance video. Here's my news roundup. This is the news creator roundup This is where allegedly they're going to tell us the new things we're going to be doing on google. Um It's kind of interesting that you actually this was actually good. This this is not just for me This is anyone who wants to learn about the back end of youtube the ceo and hank hank green is a really amazing creator and susan Who is the ceo of youtube? They did a great video together breaking down what it's like being the ceo of youtube and Some of the challenges they face and it they have some very real challenge This is how the analytics dashboard looks like it defaults to 28 days So you can see in the last 28 days. I've done 3,500 with the revenue on here Gained this many subscribers watch time then we have all the comments. Oh the comments Good nothing profane is in here Um, occasionally you do have to deal with the spam system catches a lot of them But yeah, uh the spammers and everything else are Are weird occasionally you get a bunch of them posting profane things in here It's not too often, but I do take the time to moderate it Uh, this is where I'll open a new window where you build playlists and things like that This is where you can actually go edit all the videos I can dive into any particular video and look at the analytics on it If I want you to understand better like demographics the audience actually let's do analytics on this particular video Here's how it rose. It's still rising right now in terms of views this particular video. I made 34 dollars on Reach engagement audience This one's interesting because uh half the people that watch it seem to be subscribers Which is different. So if we go into my overall analytics We'll go back over here analytics audience I mean you can dive into any section you want This is the like a heat map of when people watch my videos 36 of my audience is the united states. This is the currently not subscribed to 64 So it's actually higher. It was a little bit lower not that long ago, but you can dive in there My age demographics so 25 to 34 and 35 to 44 So 60 of my audience fits in the 25 to 44 category um 45 to 54 and This is where uh, we just landed a deal with a very large imaging company that does medical imaging We sold them all the hardware for the back end of their server And just because I you know look know the person on linkedin They fall into this category with a c in their title and spent quite a bit of money with us Found my youtube videos watching me talk about storage servers this big huge company I won't name their name, but they're big uh that does medical imaging equipment Hired us to design the storage servers off of a video They watched for me doing a storage servers And it's just kind of an interesting all's i'm really doing is talking about my job and People are watching it and they're like I said c level people in Decision-making positions that you may not expect and it's like I said this extends beyond the tech industry. There's people Um that watch these videos that are not in that so was there anything specifically they wanted to see in here Or just wanted to see what it looked like um, I think just um Wanted to see what it looked like So, okay, I have an I have another question for you after I mentioned that benji said wow women do not like your videos Yes that is uh The tech industry as a whole it's no secret That uh, you can walk into any computer science or engineering class and you're maybe maybe will have a single Female in there. Uh, that is a stat that is unfortunate in the tech industry So um, it just is reflected on youtube the fact that people um on here But I will say something I learned interesting especially working in the hacking uh and cyber security a huge number of Women identify online with male names and the reason why I was at a keynote at a big at a conference and uh She's an amazing developer and she for years went with a male name because when someone found out She was actually a female developer and most things are done somewhat anonymously online They're looking at your handle so to speak not actually your name when they found out that she's female They found that they didn't want to submit her Code update requests and things like that So she always shows for a long time just to be a male online that way everyone just no one would assume or try to hit I knew and keep it that way So sometimes a statistic may be a little bit skewed on that but overall I do know as anyone knows the tech industry is Um overly male dominated right now, which also female youtubers who talk about tech sky rock It just because I'm not saying they're not good, but it is easier because um well people listen to a female voice That's that's not a secret either. There's a reason all of our uh things that talk to us are more often a female voice Turns out people will listen to them males males and females alike Interesting I I will admit you're the only tech person. I would probably watch on youtube ever so Just because I know you okay for the foreseeable future YouTube looks like a good avenue for creators What would youtube have to do to screw that up? For example in 2018 they changed the requirements to become a partner Do you see them making it harder for people to earn revenue directly from youtube in the future? Yes, um, they keep raising the bar a little bit, but there's there's a dark dark reason for that So well, there's there's one that's not so dark one people When monetization was easy Literally I had to keep sending takedown notices because people would take any video that was popular by me or any other youtuber Grab that video re-upload it. They wouldn't do any editing. We're talking no effort here Download here upload here create content start monetizing videos made by other people So youtube said all right. We got to raise the challenge It is to start up a youtube channel And people were really upset by this it was a challenge But the other side was kind of obvious youtube was like we're we're in the middle of it because with 500 hours a minute We don't have time to audit to say did someone re-upload tom's video or is this really tom's video? And then someone actually has to go look at the two videos confirm They're the same and take them down obviously that from a business standpoint That doesn't scale very well when you have a thousand people but 500 hours a minute getting uploaded the second problem youtube has is um, it was used for Literally terror scripts. There's no other way to describe it. Um, really bad awful people would upload terrible things to youtube And try to monetize it. They were horrible videos and things like that So youtube's had to do a lot of crunching down to vet people better In in as literal as it sounds isis was uploading beheading videos and sharing them on youtube So it has been youtube's had some real dark challenges to deal with creepy people and awful human beings They are such a tiny piece of our society, but of course you can't have that on youtube So they've raised the bar to make it harder for good reasons But if of course people to get caught up in the algorithm that get angry of how much harder it is to start a channel You are a side effect of it and i'm sorry, but it is So to speak youtube sees it for the greater good And that's actually why that interview with susan's interesting because you know, you think about this from a company standpoint one of my favorite books i read um It's called without their permission, which is by alexa sohanian And it's a really good book about starting an online forum Which is reddit became one of the most popular forums on the internet and he talks about the amazing You know feeling of being a startup entrepreneur who has a success story But then also all the awful things he had to deal with and go wow I didn't expect to be a startup dealing with people who decided that my platform could be used for child porn I guess I didn't see this in my pitch deck Like where's the part where I deal with this and he really breaks down the emotional challenges of it And this is where youtube is you have the largest platform with two billion human beings on it And they're uploading content that you're trying to create an automated system around So there's going to be times where it gets more challenging just so they can filter the content and it's it's going to get harder over time There's going to be these times where the algorithm goes there and most recently we've seen all the craziness where people say I'm an expert. I'm going to share this really terrible information Related to the pandemic and put it on youtube and then when they take it down. Oh, no youtube is Centering free speech and youtube is like no, this is like really bad things that people are telling you So you're going to see more of these challenges coming from youtube and it's it's it's the reactive result of trying to police two billion people with the ability to upload Wow, okay How does youtube use ai to find copyright violations for music and video uploaded? Oh, this is fun. So, uh, there's a few people and me and one of my cyber security friends We got to see some behind the scenes on this. So one they're indexing every word we use and the youtube YouTube and google as a whole you ever talk to your phone and realize how well it understands things Let's take it a step further the way the youtube voice recognition system works Is it's contextual if I asked, um, How old is clint eastwood? I can ask that question to google right then I can ask the next follow-up question of how tall is he Now that's actually a big leap in ai because now I've started with one question pivoted to another Which any one of us would answer in harpy with oh, yeah, he's this tall But youtube has to contextually understand the questionnaire and asking related to the secondary one They've done an amazing job to open ai they take that ai and point it at the youtube videos It indexes every word you use then derives context for the words Now why is all that important? Well, what happens is if you were to create a video that says one thing, but you say another You will find that video get ranked down because the content doesn't match the title The same thing goes for copyright violations Music is actually really really easy to index as as well as any of us can recognize from a partial graphic What something looks like I show you something partially you're like, oh, that's this or that's that The youtube algorithm works very same way from music and anytime it senses a few notes Occasionally gets it wrong a few notes or a piece of content that it knows has been uploaded to the copyright machine It's using that same indexing to go that is a video you pulled off of abc news and then reuploaded to youtube That's a video you pulled off of the tonight show and reuploaded And but this is where fair use gets to be a real problem because we have the right to fair use But the algorithm has a hard time understanding that and frequently sends a copyright claim and then everyone gets angry again Okay, what matters most how long someone watches views comments subscribers or a combination It's a combination of them Subscribers matter very little So subscribers are cool for a bragging thing and I got a little plaque that says I got over 100,000 subscribers But the reality is what really matters is well, what first start with your goal What if my goal is do I make money on youtube? Absolutely. There's one goal second goal Do we want bookings of clients? Absolutely. Does it work for that? Yeah So it doesn't matter to me if they commented if my goal is bookings and watching my video got it there So the exact minutes number of minutes they view as long as they viewed it enough to engage with it It seems to be effective The comments do help show that there is some Reason people like the video. They'll watch the comments. So they're that can help rank it up higher The same with the like button on youtube actually means quite a bit at this moment right now in 2020 This could be completely changed. They could have removed the like button tomorrow. It might happen YouTube's changed the algorithm a couple times They used to have the subscribe button with the bell And I would have told you that subscribe button in 2018 was important And then youtube changed the algorithm and admitted in one of their talks that yeah, we quit using that as an indicator They literally just after telling everyone to use it from a creator standpoint They just dropped it one day and decided it. Yeah, we don't that's just that bell button doesn't do anything It just makes it Maybe so maybe we'll suggest your video to someone So anything I say now is only relevant is To that and it is some combination there of of the algorithm Which we're not privy to exactly youtube does not offer a blueprint on how it works That's how they keep people from gaming the system as well Okay So we'll we'll go to two last questions. Sure. He says I have under 1000 subscribers But there are ads in my videos when I hit the 1000 subscriber number will that backlog Pay out or is youtube just keeping that ad revenue YouTube's just keeping that ad revenue Um, you can so any videos you had before you were monetized You can go back and monetize them but videos you posted You don't get any backlog of ad revenue. Matter of fact, this was one of the um, some of the large tech youtubers who derive Their living so to speak off of ad revenue. I'll give an example There's there's a couple tech youtubers who get like the new iphone when they're released So they're first they get to review it, but they're under embargo and they release date They're going to release it on the day that youtube Stops the embargo. This is common in a lot of reviews. So you get to test the product to get to review it You make all your money because you really only care about the new features and the review of the new iphone When it comes out two years from now, you don't care. You're like, that's the two year old iphone. Why would I even watch that video? um What's happened to some people is unfortunately and this is also where they don't give you a backlog if they decide your content Is not worthy of For whatever reason and they demonetize that particular video and then they monetize it later And one of the tech youtubers pretty upset. He got like 10 million views on his new iphone video The first eight million he got no revenue for because they decided or something in there that made it demonetized They don't know what and later he got it monetized, but he got none of the back revenue for it either So even after you're monetized, you can still lose because it's based on views you can still lose and they don't give it back to you So it's unfortunate and can be um Highly aggravating especially because that's not an evergreen piece of content that that content is only relevant when the new iphone came out And he got the views he didn't get any of the ad revenue for it. So those are those are definite risks you have Okay was your last one Do you do much live youtube and do you need many admins? Um live youtube is fun. I do it every thursday. Um, i'm consistent on that with uh, i think the last few years I've not missed a single thursday for doing all of my live shows. Um, right now i'm up to about 300 people. Uh, I think we're at 325 was the peak at last thursday's live show The comments do roll by really fast, but i'm not going to say that I need too many people to admin it. Um, it's it's actually For 300 people. They don't all comment. So it's actually not too bad in terms of uh, that In overall, I you know, I said I do admin the comments even on youtube But I delete a comment a day and when you talk about 1.3 million people 1.3 million unique viewers over 90 days and only Deleting one comment a day. It's actually not too bad. I'm going to say in the same thing with the live streams Um, I rarely ban more than one or two persons and it's usually a spammer Like a spam bot will Find your live stream because they look for live streams and they just start posting the same link over and over again Until you ban them. So they're not too bad It's usually not a person doing it. It's usually some automation tool that you just want to get rid of Wonderful, okay Thank you, tom and i'll turn it over to matt now. Okay Matt you're on mute. Yep. You're on mute matt I don't think he Okay, I guess uh, I guess you got to wrap things up here. Thank you guys so much for all the questions. Um Really do appreciate you guys taking your time out of your day to be here and tom Thank you so much for for your expertise and for sharing your knowledge Um Again, if you haven't given us an intro and an ask in the chat feel free to do that We're going to be making sure that we get all of this info Out to everybody through our facebook page and through our email subscription like our newsletter. So If you uh, haven't joined either of those feel free to find us and um in the meantime I hope everybody is staying safe big. Thank you from la2m to you guys big. Thank you to you tom again um Yeah, I hope you have a great rest of the day or rest of the week And we hope to get something like this going for you guys again next month All right. Well, thank you everyone. Thank you