Ever wondered how to level up your YouTube content and garner millions of views? This episode is your guide to mastering the YouTube game, courtesy of my report from attending the recent VidSummit 2023 - the mecca for video marketers and video content creators. Together, we'll unlock the following insights:
Finally, we unravel the secrets of marketing strategies and YouTube growth. Discover how a YouTube-based e-commerce startup hit the nail on the head with its launch strategy.
There's no missing out on our discussion of effective thumbnails and intros, and the role of AI in reshaping content creation. Learn how understanding your audience and optimizing for viewer engagement can skyrocket your channel's success.
From data and metrics to success stories, there's a treasure trove of insights waiting for you. So don't wait, tune in and elevate your YouTube journey with us.
Learn More:
Ever wondered how to level up your YouTube content and garner millions of views? This episode is your guide to mastering the YouTube game, courtesy of my report from attending the recent VidSummit 2023 - the mecca for video marketers and video content creators. Together, we'll unlock the following insights:
Finally, we unravel the secrets of marketing strategies and YouTube growth. Discover how a YouTube-based e-commerce startup hit the nail on the head with its launch strategy.
There's no missing out on our discussion of effective thumbnails and intros, and the role of AI in reshaping content creation. Learn how understanding your audience and optimizing for viewer engagement can skyrocket your channel's success.
From data and metrics to success stories, there's a treasure trove of insights waiting for you. So don't wait, tune in and elevate your YouTube journey with us.
Learn More:
What can you learn from popular YouTubers, youtubers that have millions of subscribers what can you learn from these experts about content creation in general, whether it's video or audio or text, and what can you do with artificial intelligence as part of your content creation? Well, this is going to be the topic of my review of Vid Summit, the largest conference for YouTubers and video marketing and, I would just say, for content creators in general. That happened in Dallas, texas, just a few weeks ago. Today, I'm going to give you a summary of 11 different presentations and what I learned, so that you can learn on this next episode of the Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.
Speaker 2:Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktok, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Shafer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neil Shafer.
Speaker 1:Greetings of the day. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Shafer, and this is going to be a very, very special episode. So, for those of you that don't know, two weeks ago, I attended Vid Summit 2023 in Dallas, texas. It was an epic annual event for YouTubers, for content creators, I'd say, for video marketers in general, and, as I did last year, I want to share with you my takeaways from the event, because there were so many golden nuggets and so many experts on stage that I think you're going to get a lot out of this specific episode.
Speaker 1:Now let's jump in right away. I'm going to be sharing with you 11 different presentations and or panels and what was shared amongst them. 11 is a good number. I could go on for hours talking about a two-day conference, but it really limited me to find really the best and the most impactful presentations, and those are the ones I want to share with you. So these are 11 different experts and or panels and what was discussed, all right. So our very first presenter that I saw that I want to talk about today is Preston Plays. Now, preston Plays, as you see, is a channel that has 14.8 million subscribers. The dude is a gamer, but a very, very successful gamer who now has his own what you would call a private channel network. He actually helps manage a number of other channels and is extremely successful at what he does.
Speaker 1:Now, I thought this presentation and what Preston was talking about was really impactful, because you need to understand that a lot of people that are really, really successful at video and at YouTube put in a lot of planning that you don't see. There's also a lot of failures that you don't see as well, and I can go into that in a whole other episode. In fact, zach King did a keynote where all he talked about was all of the failures that he did until he was successful, and it took him like literally more than a decade. But I'm not going to talk about that. What Preston talked about was really treating this as a business, and really he was talking about like treating your videos as lessons in project management. So he basically said to creators that you have to nail down your workflow and I'm going to go through what he talked about but that standardization of the things you do when you create a video and I would say, if you create any sort of content, that standardization actually gives you more time to be creative. He was saying that a majority of your time should be thinking and not implementing. I want that to sink in thinking and not implemented. It's funny.
Speaker 1:I was at Adobe Max last week and there was a similar talk about we need time to think, to come up with ideas. I'm forgetting the woman who presented, but she said let's have a screen list Saturday so that we can refresh our brains with new creative ideas. I thought that was brilliant. So what Preston says is spend 45 minutes a day to come up with two video ideas. Be creative, spend the time to be creative.
Speaker 1:Now let me jump into some of what he shared the workflow. Number one creative ideation, right. Number two video idea confirmed. You have lots of ideas.
Speaker 1:Well, when you create the video, what exact idea are you going to use? Once again, this is the same for any content. Number three pre-production preparing the script, the storyline, the thumbnails, whatever it might be. Number four film the video. Number five post-production the packaging of that video for YouTube, for social media, for wherever you're going to publish it. Number six the actual publishing. And then it doesn't stop there because you want to analyze. And number seven figure out how to improve what you did. And the whole thing is as it says here we cannot track if we cannot see, we cannot delegate if we cannot track, and there's only so much that you can do. Every successful content creator I know delegates part of their work to other people. I am the exact same.
Speaker 1:So, riffing on that, he talked about tracking your tasks and time. So if you haven't been doing this, start with the next piece of content you create. Once again, this is for YouTube, but it could be for any content Track how much time you're spending on each step of your workflow. I already defined that workflow for you how much time do you spend on each of those tasks? And then put it in this is a Japanese word, kombon, but a trello, mondaycom click up. That's sort of a platform, asana, where you can basically see, task by task, each step of that workflow, what are the tasks and how much time you're spending. And therefore, you're going to be able to start to delegate and finding ways to do that.
Speaker 1:And when it comes to delegation, preston talked about Pareto's principle. I'm sure you all know this 20% of the effort gets 80% of the results. So find out for you 20% of your time, what are the 80% of results. What tasks is that doing that for? Do not delegate these. If you only have to spend a little bit of time and it's providing that much impact, that is what you're going to keep as your secret sauce. But for the rest of that, 80% of time you spend on something where you're only getting a 20% return on it, those are the things you want to delegate to people. Frankly, that might just be better at doing it than you are right, and for them it might be their 20% time, 80% results. That's basically the idea about delegation and once again, it comes down to anything really content creation related, marketing related. I think these principles apply.
Speaker 1:I'm interested in hearing a gamer, a YouTube gamer talk about it in this way, and then he went in to say why standardization equals successful scaling. Standardization facilitates scaling by allowing for streamlined replication and automation of processes, along with clear monitoring through standardized metrics as production demands increase. I know that's a lot, but I want you to think about that and, once again, standardization gives you more time to be creative. Now he also gave two bits of advice. One is that your watch time hours per month is the key metric. There is a lot going on in YouTube analytics. Simplify it how many watch hours are you getting every month? Can you increase that month to month? The other bit of advice and I've heard a few people use the same word the Goldilocks zone, and the idea is content your viewers want to watch. Based on your analytics and content you are passionate about overlapping. That's what you want to really lean in. So short but sweet, but that is pressed in place.
Speaker 1:Moving on to speaker number two, kimberlea 409,000 subscribers. She is a podcaster, all about true crime. If you've ever seen Elvira on TV growing up I was a big Elvira fan, watched her stuff. She almost has this Elvira. Look in her thumbnails here. It is true crime, but also she is a law school graduate, so she also understands the legal implications, what she talks about as well, which gives for further, deeper and more interesting analysis, I believe. So Kimberlea has a really, really interesting story.
Speaker 1:She began her YouTube journey in 2015. And what you're looking at here is her views from 2015 to, more recently, 2022. And you'll notice, about 2017, 2018, there were some deep spikes in views, but it wasn't really sustainable. The channel was sort of dying and then she pivoted. In fact, in the YouTuber circle she's sort of known as the queen of pivot. So you'll see, in middle of 2021, she began to ramp to where she could get a constant I don't know if I assume this is like a weekly view, weekly views of 50 to 100,000 of views consistently. So she talked about this pivot. Now this is really interesting because you, as a creator, or your business, might have changed or you may see what I'm talking about. You might want to pivot yourself, for whatever reason. So she had been doing YouTube for 10 years and she made about $500 to $1,000 a month with AdSense, with the YouTube Partner Program.
Speaker 1:Now her channel was a one-trick pony. All she talked about was popsockets. She was like the popsocket queen. So people went to learn about popsockets and once they learned, they never came back, and a popsocket also is not really evergreen. It changes over time. I wonder how many of you have even heard of a popsocket as I talk about it. But she decided to pivot, to make a deep pivot to true crime. So she is a law school graduate, as I mentioned, and she had a professional perspective to share. So she talks about how she did this and I think it's really educational for anyone considering the same. She talked about these three steps for success.
Speaker 1:Number one recon and research. This was like the number one buzzword that a few presenters talked about at this bid summit 2023. So what is recon and research? She defines it as really and I've heard similar advice if you're new to a social media channel let's say you're new to TikTok you basically want to create a second account that you don't post to and you want to start consuming videos as if you are your target avatar and what happens is, over time, as you consume that content on a regular basis. With TikTok it's a 30-second, one-minute TikTok videos, so you don't have to spend a lot of time maybe 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day but if you consume that over time and you engage with those, or you watch more of the ones that interest you and you skip over the ones that you think your target avatar would not be interested in, you're basically seeing what the YouTube algorithm is feeding or the TikTok algorithm in this case, is feeding your target avatar, and from that you can do analysis what are the channels coming up, what are the types of videos coming up, what are the themes in those videos, what are the topics being covered and from that, really revamp your content strategy, that is, recon and Research.
Speaker 1:So what Kimberlaya did was she searched for channels in her niche that were thriving. Now this is a little bit different approach to it, but she started there and she said something really interesting. If it doesn't exist, you're not going to be a pioneer. And I remember my days this goes back to my B2B sales days selling embedded software If I talked about our product and when the potential clients said, well, who are your potential competitors? And I didn't say we had any competitors, that's sort of a red flag, right. If you have a competitor, it puts you in a frame of thought, a frame of reference. If you don't have a competitor, it almost sounds too wildly new that you're only going to attract very, very experimental early adopters. So, similarly, youtube finds audiences for videos. So if those videos don't exist so far, it's gonna be really hard to be a pioneer.
Speaker 1:The way it works is that a lot of views, if not most views, come from suggested videos, and those suggested videos appear like after, or on the sidebars or on the homepage when people watch other videos. So you actually wanna make sure that you have videos similar to other videos that exist, not copying them, but in your own style, providing a better experience for them, and that's how you tap in to this goldmine of recommended YouTube views. So, in recon and research, look for your role model channel. Look at what they have done on their popular videos over the last year, and this is one sort of accelerated way of doing it. But the other way is to make that dummy channel become the channel. Let your account consume videos that YouTube recommends. You'll find 10 to 20 channels that you'll wanna subscribe to because they keep popping up frequently and you think the content is relevant to your target avatar and that will understand the videos that your audience watches.
Speaker 1:Okay, so she said basically, for the first three months, focus on search. So this, like renovation and primary channel, focus on search to let YouTube know what your channel is about, to prime it. So you've done your recon and research. You've now done your renovation, which is you're sort of gonna change and I'm gonna get into something else you talked about there to really up your game. But also priming your channel comes down to that idea of you wanna make sure that YouTube algorithm understands, based on your titles, descriptions, the video content that your videos are about this subject. Okay, and in her case. She was pivoting from popsockets to true crime, so she had to make sure, give the algorithm three months, maybe publish a video a week for three months and that will give it a time and then YouTube will figure it out. The algorithm is that smart with YouTube, as you know. She said you needed three months to prime your channel. She also recommended, in that renovation, splurge on production value, and I wanna show you what that means.
Speaker 1:Now my background is a work in progress. I'll be completely honest with you. This is her background, which a lot of people would say is not that bad. This is the before, when she pivoted her channel. This is what her new background became. She actually hired a company to come in and get this set up in her. I don't know if it was her home office or a dedicated studio with the lighting in the background. This is not like an AI background. This is an actual background and you can see the difference. The difference is pretty stark between the two. So that is this notion of updating, renovating your production lighting, background, environment, atmosphere, all of that All right.
Speaker 1:So now I'm gonna move on to number three, which is MrBeast. Mrbeast, I think we can all agree, is the most famous YouTuber and MrBeast has 200 million subscribers. Mrbeast is one of the investors or co-founders or he speaks at Vid Summit every year, so it's always a pleasure to see him speak. This time when he spoke, he was on a panel with another gentleman that I'm gonna be introducing you to, mrjohnyoshie, but MrBeast basically talked about how he has 12 people on his creative team and these creative people, I believe correct me if I'm wrong are only about the creatives, which is primarily YouTube. Thumbnails Might be other sort of creative backdrops that he uses in scenes what have you? But he has 12 people on his team, so this is not like a solo career. This is someone delegating a lot of different things.
Speaker 1:So he talks about and he's talked about this before when he thinks of an idea for a video, he starts with a thumbnail. That is how important thumbnails are, and he will not move into creating that video until he nails what that thumbnail is. He also said that a first frame of a short form video, like a YouTube shorts or TikTok Instagram reel, is as important as a thumbnail for a long form. In that first second, what are you doing? Do you have like a crazy face? Are you doing something that you know that first, second is often the default thumbnail that appears when people are flipping through, which is why you need to treat it like a thumbnail. So I thought that was really really great advice.
Speaker 1:So here's his story. He does an incredible amount of A, b testing and experimenting to find the thumbnail that is going to get the best results. Imagine you get so many impressions in the YouTube feed and you have a thumbnail with a click through of 1% versus 2% versus 5% versus 10%. That alone can have a significant impact on your YouTube views performance. So he talks about hey, everybody talks about, you know thumbnails with open smiles being the winners. What actually the thumbnail on the left with the closed smile performed better in this case and unless you are experimenting, you will never know.
Speaker 1:Here's another one the $1 versus $100 million car. Once again, experimenting with different things. Do people want you know this crazy floating in the ocean Maserati? Do they want you know a sports car looking a Ferrari, looking car? And even these little differences. He's also wearing blue in the image on the thumbnail on the left, and in the middle and right he's wearing black Little things like this to test what is it that gets the audience to click and this is one example of a moving forward in this series of thumbnails a $1 versus $1 million hotel rooms. And he went from having him standing in front of a like a chateau to more of a close-up of Mr Beast, with different chateaus in the background, with a red carpet and at the end of the day, after experimenting experimenting with like a Disney, then castle looking chateau, a gold palace looking chateau, a more traditional French looking chateau it's actually the gold palace one that won in the results and he ended up placing the sports car there like a yellow Maserati instead of the red carpet. But all these little elements, through AB testing, he was able to test to come up with the perfect formula for that video.
Speaker 1:And what is incredible about Mr Beast that those at a Bindavid summit know, but if you haven't been you wouldn't know is that he is just geeks out on data. He is all about the data and the quote he left us was get addicted to approving your content. That is what he loves to do. He films almost every day now because he has this team of 12, if not more people around him. He also said that AI tools will reduce the time needed at every stage of the workflows. I'm going to give a lot more advice about AI tools and workflow, both in this podcast and video, as well as my new book that I'm writing. But suffice to say, if you can nail what your workflow is, you can find AI tools that will help you at every stage. And I think John Yoshe is also a cartoonist or cartoon creator, so this was the last slide was actually the cartoon that he created someone with 100,000 subs on YouTube saying I want a million subs, and then someone with a million subs saying I want 10 million subs, and then someone with 10 million subs saying I want a million, 100 million subs, and then Mr Beast the end, holding a bunch of cash, saying I want to improve and just a lot of respect. But so much we can learn from that work ethic and that perspective. And those are the people and I think Preston plays as well putting a lot of thought into project management and workflow and delegation, and Mr Beast with the data testing, with thumbnails and creatives. There is a lot of work that goes into the success of these people. So I hope by providing you this information I'm not done by any means, but I hope that this was inspiring to you.
Speaker 1:So, all right, we're now going to move on to our next speaker, and once again I missed the beginning. I think he's called Queble Cop. I hope I'm getting that right. This is the Ford speaker and he is really. He is a gamer, but he's really gone into AI and his quote is whoever can come up with the best prompt will decide the winners of the future of Gen AI in video. If you've ever experimented with Gen AI in creating images, you understand how the prompt is everything right. You're going to get vastly different things based on it, so you need to spend a little bit of time.
Speaker 1:Now. Queble Cop is actually developing his own AI video tool, so I'm actually going to show you some videos. My apologies for those listening on the podcast. It's going to be a little bit hard to follow along. That's another reason why you should check out the video as well.
Speaker 1:But he showed a channel called Chasing the Past. This video content here was 100% AI created RDS 47,000 followers, 1,300 likes on Instagram. All the content was made with his custom AI tool, all organic, started from zero and, in fact, the creator had no previous YouTube channel. So this is really incredible. I mentioned on Instagram, 47,000 followers on YouTube, 10,900 subscribers, 323 videos. Just to give it some context, he said and this is a quote that AI video production is 200% cheaper and 12,000% faster.
Speaker 1:I want that to dig in a little bit again. Ai video production 200% cheaper, 12,000% faster Takes a little bit of time to understand what tools are available, what you can do. Let's dig into what he's done. So his project is called Project V, and what we're going to see here is a preview of the version 2 of what he has created. The prompt for this video is smallest city in the world. Now there is also audio that you're going to hear, as well as different videos that appear.
Speaker 1:I believe that 100% of this was AI generated, so we know that text to audio, text to video, is possible to do. Let's see how compelling this technology is. So let's check out the video. Now here is another thing that he showed. He's already working on V3 of this Project V, and you're not going to hear any audio here, I believe, but the video showing how real this bird looks in a video is pretty incredible how far video AI is coming. So I'm going to once again, you're going to have to see to believe, so make sure you check out the YouTube, but here is just a short snippet of this bird on a tree with leaves moving in, the bird moving his head in an extremely realistic way. So you have to once again see it to believe it, but the bird moving his head looked just extremely realistic. So this is very promising for text to video. There's already other tools out there, but we are at the forefront, I think, of a new revolution, so definitely keep your eyes peeled for what is possible.
Speaker 1:All right, so now we are going to move on to speaker number five. Speaker number five is the YouTube creator, liaison, renee Richie. So you're in for a special treat here, because Renee actually introduced the roadmap of what YouTube is working on for creators. So well, renee Richie, on Twitter and social media, I think he has his own channel, but he basically heads, I believe, the YouTube creators channel, which has 6.53 million subscribers on YouTube.
Speaker 1:So he started with these AI tools that YouTube is going to be releasing, that within UI studio, you are going to have AI. You are going to have in the creator music, you are going to have a search assistant with AI prompts to help you better find creator music that you want to use. He also talked about AI generated dubs in different languages. This is called allowed, so you're looking at a screenshot, if you're on YouTube, of what this may look like, but basically of using AI to generate foreign languages of you speaking, you know, dubbed, which I think is incredibly powerful and you know we're really only at the tip of the iceberg as to what is coming down. Also, in addition to using AI prompts to find music to dub into foreign languages, he also talked about using AI this is basically Google barred within YouTube analytics to find new ideas, with a new tab in your research tab and analytics called get inspiration, which will generate an outline of a video to help get you started.
Speaker 1:So he actually showed this in action. You see, here we have get inspiration and I think he just put in Portugal. A journey through Portugal's rich history was the prompt generate outline suggestions, and there were three different outlines. One was visit Cintra, unesco World Heritage Site. One was Lisbon, as a vibrant city with a rich history, and one was visit Porto, a city of culture and history, and for every one of these there were three bullet points as to what you could create the video around. I'll just read to you from visit Cintra. The first bullet point was Pena Palace, a fairy tale castle on top of a mountain. The next one was Quinta de Regulera pardon my Portuguese a mystical garden with a maze. The third one was the Moorish Castle, offering stunning views of the town. So, being able to use this sort of tool within your YouTube analytics and hopefully, in the future, they tie this together with your analytical data based on the types of videos that your audience is watching, this is going to make it really, really easy for you to get a quick start on creating your next video. So, ai tools within YouTube.
Speaker 1:Now the second one, or the second point that he brought out was YouTube create. Youtube create, if you have an iPhone sorry, I have an iPhone as well it is not available. It is going to be coming to iOS next year. If you have an Android, you should absolutely be downloading this app and using it for your video creation. Basically, youtube create is YouTube taking on all of the video creation and editing features that a TikTok or a Cap cut or any one of these, whether it's a social media app or a video editing app has. So let's check it out. Got to see the screen, but basically advanced.
Speaker 1:This YouTube create app has advanced capabilities built for creation. Like I said, this is already out. There is voiceovers that you can record over videos. You can do automatic captions, speed controls, the speed up or slowed on any clip. Beat matching to make sure that the beat of the audio matches whatever beat you wanted to have with your edits. Audio cleanup remove distracting background noise in audio, which is a pretty cool feature. There's also foundational editing capabilities beautiful filters to help make your videos pop, effects of different types, transitions, adjustments that you can do to the video Text that you can add font and formatting controls for any creative need Royal T free content libraries, google Fonts, royal T free music, stickers, effects, motion graphics. I think you get the picture. They've really it's taken time for them to create this sort of app, but I think it is time well invested and more than worth the weight, and I think that this is going to become the video creation and editing tool for a lot of content creators out there, and that's something that you should definitely be experimenting with now.
Speaker 1:Now the third sort of new feature for YouTube for creators is something called the dream screen. Basically, you with a green screen background, you can use what is called generative AI fill to generate a static or moving image in that green screen background. So for those of you that can't see the video, basically the green screen effect and tick tock has this as well. If you take a picture yourself and you remove your background which I assume you can do in YouTube created, something that Adobe Express does very well as well you can now fill in that background with text image, text to video all within the. I believe this is in the YouTube create app as well, so that is a really exciting way of the. The example that he showed was a panda drinking coffee, and the different pandas drinking coffee that came around in the video is pretty interesting. But the fourth tool and this is something that a lot of YouTubers have already known about for a while, but if you've been using a tool like TubeBuddy and I'm going to talk about TubeBuddy in a bit as well the ability to test and compare different thumbnails this is a killer feature that is going to help you leverage the A B testing, leverage the data analysis to help you improve your video click through rate, just like I mentioned with what Mr Beast was talking about. So once again, this little video that will go through here. So interesting analysis there of the way that the tool is going to work is when you upload your video, you'll have you can upload up to three thumbnails, or maybe three is the default, I'm not quite sure but it's basically going to feed those out over a period of time and then the one with the best watch time is going to win, and I'm going to share with you some more analysis, but there's a lot of analysis that indicates that a high click-through rate often means a lower watch time. Now we can think about all the different ways of why that is the case, but this is what YouTube is saying as well, because they're using watch time as the key metric to determine which of these thumbnails win. So some pretty cool updates from YouTube on what they're doing leveraging AI and giving you more power to better manage your own YouTube videos.
Speaker 1:All right, we are now moving on to speaker number six. So we're a little bit. We're about halfway. In was BTOD. This is an office furniture e-commerce site, and the CEO and, I believe, founder, greg Knighton, was the speaker for this one. So BTOD TV is another channel that made a pivot of sorts. They sort of tried to revamp what they were doing and try to improve their videos and you're going to see how successful they were and what you can learn from them. As a channel of itself, it does have 60,000 subscribers, which I think is pretty amazing for a company that is, you know, their big claim to favors is an adjustable standing desk, but this gives you a feel. This is really, really relevant for businesses. I know up until now, I've given you know, content creator advice, which I think is relevant for businesses as well, but I was really interested in what this was, what this presentation would be, because it is focused on the business use of YouTube.
Speaker 1:All right, so Greg talked about and for those of you that have been reading many books, especially the marketing books that I've been recommending, he first talked about before he made any changes. He realized that video was the future. Right. 2017, his channel got 44,000 views aggregate. 2018, 124,000,. 2019, 640,000. This is even before he started making these changes. Now. Office furniture standing desk. You can imagine how COVID really helped his company sell. They were just this amazing demand for all this office furniture for the home. But even before that, he had already seen an increase and really wanted to double down and get you know further impact for his YouTube and video marketing.
Speaker 1:So the book that I mentioned is they ask you answer, and he basically rebranded until 2019, btod was called BeyondTheOfficeDoorcom, rebranded BTODcom and his entire content strategy, including YouTube, all based on Marcus Sheridan's classic book they ask you answer. If we were in a room, I'd say, raise your hand. If you've heard of that book, I assume you have. If you haven't, you should really go out and buy it. It's just a classic example, I think more relevant for B2B, but also B2C what are the questions your customers and target clients have? Right, and that should be the basis of your content.
Speaker 1:So also, until then, his approach was very much on search and what he realized was that and this is through some smart advisors Daryl Eves has a very, very famous Jumpstart your Channel course, or I should say, group coaching, and there were a number of people that had actually gone through this course that were speaking. Greg was one of them. It was basically saying, after he started working with Daryl and you see Daryl Eves' photo right here that YouTube is called the second largest search engine but actually the source of all views on YouTube 75% come from recommendations. Okay, once again, I mentioned before, it's about tapping into videos that when YouTube sees that someone likes this video and they see your video is similar to that, they will introduce your video as a possible option and hopefully you'll get that view.
Speaker 1:So you really want to lean in, not to YouTube search, which is great for launching and priming a channel to let YouTube know what the channel is about, but at some point it has to take its own life in recommended videos. This is what I've learned going to two video vid summits and from all the YouTubers I've had a chance to interview and read and listen to. So, with this in mind, it really comes down to understanding your audience. So once again, he talked about recon and research, and this term actually comes from Daryl Eves. Nothing is new to YouTube See what is working and make it yours. In order to do that, he had to understand his audience, went back in, did the recon and research and realized, especially after going through the comments of his channel, that I mean, look at the top comment here. I never thought I would be addicted to chair reviews, but here we are. That comment had 684 likes, which is pretty incredible, right. And the picture here is we love office chairs. That's his audience, right, whoever they are, whatever they geek out on. That's really what you want to tap into to give your YouTube channel a life of its own.
Speaker 1:So how did he revamp the strategy? Well, there's a thumbnail picture he shows here, or the way that he presented was just this stark background, stark flooring, with just him standing next to an office chair and, similar to Kimberlea, the before and after of the background of really adding more production value to your background than a lighting. Greg did the same, so this after photo of a screenshot is really him. He's now sitting down in a chair and he has two more chairs next to him and it's in this rich environment, with texture and things on the wall and greens and a TV, that it's almost like you're sitting in his living room watching him or talking with him Very, very inviting and warm atmosphere for something that you might not think of as being warm, which is an office chair. So really, really interesting way of changing that production value, that background that would attract viewers and keep them watching longer.
Speaker 1:That he did not just change the background, he also changed the thumbnail. So he used to have a very, very template that approached the thumbnails, which I'll admit that I do as well with this thumbnail is going to be very different than my other thumbnails, so I'm trying to shake things up as well. He has an example of office chair name review and he'd be standing next to the office chair In this case it was the steel case leap v2 review and then he would change it up. The new thumbnail has an office chair by itself and then it just has the text. I changed my mind dot dot, dot. Very intriguing, right Mysterious. Well, why did you change your mind? Why did you change your mind too? It really is intriguing and a lot more people would want to click through, and that's really what you want to aim for with a YouTube thumbnail. So I thought that was a great example.
Speaker 1:So he also talks about the success he found when he started doing it. This new way. He calls it the first narration video, and this is really interesting because when this is just an example, in June of 2022, when he started it, he got a few days where he would get 1000 views and then after a week or two, the video bombed right. So he got about 9000 views in the first two weeks and then it was getting, you know, less than 100 a day. He figured it bombed.
Speaker 1:A lot of people just give up on it, say this was a failure, move on. But here's the thing and another speaker talked about this as well that YouTube growth is not linear. It's sort of all over the place. So then he talks about if he had quit then he would have missed out on this. And you know the spike that he found in early August of 2022, in the first month or first two weeks, only at 9000 views. In the first three months Now he had 112,000 views. He went from 609 watch hours to 7000 watch hours. This is we never know when we're going to hit those peaks. So it's not this straight on growth. It is a bumpy road full of you know ebbs and flows, but you never want to quit. You always want to give it time. You never know when you're going to be able to find that success.
Speaker 1:And then, when the holiday season came, he got even more views than those two previous peaks. So, once again, we never know when we're going to get the success with our videos. We definitely need to give it time, and this is just a great example of why that is the case. So what he found out was afterwards because he had created these videos that were very evergreen and when the holiday season came, people were shopping for office chairs and standing desks that those videos that he had invested in making for the last one, two, three years were now starting to pay off. So the YouTube views in September were 700,000. In October, 1.04 million. In November, december, he basically hit about 1.5 million and remember back in 2019, he had less than a million and was still saying YouTube is the future and was able to improve, basically get one year's worth of views in about six to nine months now after revamping it with all this advice.
Speaker 1:Now the interesting thing that he talked about as well was he is further optimizing by including links. He was very honest in saying we had never thought about including a link in the first sentence of the description to create a direct path back to the website. There were always people coming back to the website anyway, but now he could do these links for special sales, for special campaigns, what have you and lead people back. So in this video, autumn sale on refurbished steel case chairs. Once you have videos that perform really well, you can revise those links at any time. You could add links to older videos. So this video came out September 27th to 2023. It was only out for two weeks. It had 12,000 views.
Speaker 1:If only a few percent of the people click on that link, you can imagine how YouTube can generate that website very, very targeted website traffic, because they already have intent, they've already seen the video, right, and if the link leads them to the exact product, you put one and one together and you could see how successful a YouTube strategy can be. And he said you know, most importantly, they use TrustPilot. Whenever someone purchases, they will ask them for a review and overwhelmingly, in all these reviews on TrustPilot, solve them on YouTube. Check out the video on YouTube. I'm a fan of the YouTube channel. Just the keyword YouTube came up in all these reviews. So they know, they know their YouTube analytics, they know that YouTube is getting traffic to their website. They know that some of that traffic is converting. Above and beyond that, they know that YouTube is having a bigger contribution to their business and they can literally see it in their reviews. So I thought that was a really, really great case study.
Speaker 1:There were some other advice that he talked about. You know, the move from search to recommended is really about the titles and the thumbnail changes. He doesn't even add tags to his videos and he's been really successful. And the funny thing was he used to start with a blog and then make the video. Now it's the other way around he will make the video first and then create the blog post from the video. Obviously, from a video you have a transcript. Very, very easy to create that blog post, but I thought that was a very, very interesting way of looking at it and really putting our priorities straight. Alrighty, that was speaker number six of 11 that I'm going to be going through. We're going to keep going here.
Speaker 1:So Mindy McKnight is a YouTuber that it's all about really hair, hair and fashion and beauty, and she decided to create her own product, which is called Heritage. I believe it is an electric brush, but Heritage if you go to her YouTube channel, which is called Cute Girls Hairstyles, she has 5.65 million subscribers. Now, what she talked about here, which is very interesting, was not about YouTube for YouTube's sake, but about launching a product from YouTube and then her success in e-commerce from it. So she talked about the different things you can do if you have a product that you want to use YouTube to sell, but a lot of things that she did outside of YouTube build an audience in YouTube, but now how do we activate that audience to become a customer and how do we get outside of that audience? Once again, this is a YouTube-centered conference, so these are people that have built their primary audiences on YouTube, not on a blog or a podcast or on TikTok or an Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter.
Speaker 1:So she talked about the 2020 launch party, which they did in Salt Lake City, where she's from, basically invited her influencer friends professional network, had a very, very fancy party because of sort of the theme and made it extremely Instagram-able in everything about the party and from that party, she had the equivalent media value of a Super Bowl commercial in terms of the value of just the reach of the content that came from that party. I've always said that events are potentially huge for brands. Bring influencers together, create an event for influencers, and that can create a lot of magic and this is just one great data point of the potential media value that that can have when you do that. So she was very successful. She also in the theme of being scrappy, being nimble, being fast. She realized that at Taylor Swift concerts.
Speaker 1:For any of you that have gone or know someone that have gone, there was a song where they give away these friendship bracelets. So she basically got in the parking lot of a concert in Dallas recently and basically had a friendship bracelet making booth. Not everybody was able to make bracelets before they got to the concert. Maybe they wanted extra ones to hand out. Basically made 1,500 friendship bracelets, or I should say, the people that came made 1,500 friendship bracelets. It allowed them to do physical and digital activation physically, give them samples. Digitally, make sure they follow, make sure to comment, make sure to share the photo, make sure to tag them. What have you? Once again, it's digital, but when you combine the in-person and the digital, it could be really, really powerful.
Speaker 1:Now I'm going to go in a little bit of detail here. This is someone that was once again coming from the YouTube world, an e-commerce startup founder, trying to figure out what are the different things you can do in e-commerce marketing. Now she put up the slide that says the CPG 360 flywheel. This is a really, really complicated slide, but I wanna go through it because the book that I am writing, I am hoping, in a similar way, to give you this list of things that you could do and she basically said look, we started with this list and I'm gonna go through it now. There's a lot here Brand partnerships, website direct to consumer retailer, social media, social commerce, in other words, directly selling through Pinterest shopping, tiktok shopping, instagram shopping, facebook shopping, user generated content, ratings and reviews, brand search showing up in more brand searches, brand visibility, in-store activations, price promotions, industry events, concerts, cultural events, consumer events, sampling and collaborating with subscription boxes, national retailer, paid media, a press or influencer, army, limited edition products, club affiliates, social handles, crm, press, pr, founder.
Speaker 1:Her being the founder, her being the big influencer, is there, does that carry any weight? And then the expert, key, opinion leader or KOL community. So all these different things that she could be doing and she shows in the first year of heritage she ended up starting, and I'm gonna count there are six, eight, 10, 12. There are 18 different channels that she listed Out of those 18 channels. You can't do them all, but she was able to actually activate, in a good and positive, impactful way, eight of them. This is what digital marketing looks like in real life. Rome was not built overnight, one channel at a time. How do we activate them. Heritage year four. She still hasn't activated all 18 of them, but she's activated the ones that matter and she's now activated 14 of those 18 different channels.
Speaker 1:So lots of takeaways here from an e-commerce marketing not so much YouTube, but really really fascinating to see how to really go from zero to become a legit company. She offered more advice than this she was talking about. We could sell through retailers and give them 38 to 45% of the sale, or we can work with affiliates and give them 25 to 30% of the sale and develop relationships with them, and that's why she has leaned in pretty heavily into affiliate marketing and really into developing those affiliate relationships. Once again, affiliate marketing is part of influencer marketing. It's interesting because there are not one, but two social media tools that I do a lot of promotion for that this year are actually canceling their affiliate programs for different reasons.
Speaker 1:I think that an affiliate program can be huge, and she also mentioned that there are third party companies where you can pay to get reviews. Amazon has the Amazon Vine program where you can pay to get legitimate reviews, and there are other companies and these are all legitimate. You provide them with product and they give you a legitimate review. So if you wanna get reviews, there are parties. She didn't say the names, but I'm assuming if you Google them you could find them. She also said that third party. She believes that this whole direct to consumer is gonna go away because it's all gonna be aggregated between Amazon, costco, target and Walmart, that these other players. Amazon's already huge, but the other players are gonna become bigger and over time, more and more people will shop there and fewer and fewer people will shop directly with you, unless they are your absolute passionate fans. So interesting perspective. As far as D2C ideas the one that she's leaning into I already talked about affiliates, product marketplaces, target and Walmart. Amazon you can't ignore and she works on an audience that is relatively young, cute girl hairstyles. Her audience is on Instagram. It's also on TikTok, so she's leaning heavily in the TikTok shop as well, something if you're in D2C, you might wanna look into.
Speaker 1:Alrighty, we are now at the eighth of 11 speakers John Yoshe John I had the pleasure of seeing at VidSummit 2022. He calls himself the creator's creator. He is a former YouTube employee, a former Instagram employee turned YouTuber, only has 400,000 subscribers, but he overnight he has grown his user base and I'm gonna talk to you about what he did and his advice for you. Okay, vidsummit 2021, he had 10,000 subscribers. Vidsummit 2022, when I saw him speak and I already thought he was a brilliant speaker he was at 66,000 subscribers Today he is at. When he published this online, he was at 398,000 subscribers, from 10 to 400,000 subscribers in two years. How did he do it? That was his advice. He became a true creator.
Speaker 1:Now he gave a lot of different advice. He also has a big enough channel where his wife is in charge of brand collaborations. He's been able to hire 10 people and these people help with production but also bringing in business deals. He works across short and long form YouTube, instagram, tiktok obviously former YouTube and Instagram employees so he knows the ins and outs there. He started with you know, you obviously need to be consistent, you need to be original and you need to be authentic. But he also talked about how important the packaging was. That this, the packaging, comes down to the idea, the thumbnail, and you know I've already told you most speakers talked about the importance of the thumbnail the introduction, the hook and then the clips. The clips is important for short form. We'll get into that later on. So this was the structure of his presentation. He first talked about the idea.
Speaker 1:When he looks for content, ideas and this is for long form YouTube as well as for short form YouTube, shorts and TikToks he had two different ways of looking at ideas Find outliers and find problems and he gave, like I said, really really great and detailed advice that I think you're gonna love. Now, when he did looking for outliers, he would say look at channels that have a similar audience to yours, that are targeting a similar audience persona, and what are the outliers? What are the videos that got way more views than any other video on their channel? So he gives an example when doing some research, he found a similarity Three different videos on three different channels that were the outliers. One was called One Day in the Coldest Village on Earth. Another was Visiting the Coldest City in the World. These are both come from Yakutsk in Russia. Another one is Dugout Shelter under 10 feet of snow, solo camping in survival snow. So three different channels, three different perspectives, but it's all about being an environment that's damn cold. I think that's the important thing here. So here was his advice to find outlier videos for your niche Search in one to three videos related to your idea sort by view counts. Sort by any time, click on the top videos, check the subscriber count to see if indeed it had way more views than subscribers is really what you're looking for and then make a list Really easy to understand. Advice and I think could be really impactful on the ideation stage.
Speaker 1:Now to find popular problems. He was doing Quora what I told you here for the search filters. This was all done in YouTube. Just through YouTube search For popular problems. He was leaning into Quora. Now Quora is really interesting, been around for a while. A lot of SEOers have talked about it. Some social media marketing pros have talked about it. There is a sense in Google's latest helpful content update that they are sort of upping the rankings for Quora and Reddit content because it tends to be more real and authentic.
Speaker 1:Some to think about increasing importance of Quora. But he would go into Quora looking for popular problems, typing your topic into the search bar, sort by questions, sort by all time. What are the questions that had the most answer. So he did a search for YouTube and Quora and the top five most popular answered questions, having between 1,600 and 2,000 answers, in descending order. How could we get more YouTube subscribers? What is your advice to grow YouTube channel? How do I increase views on YouTube? How can I get more views on YouTube videos? How do I earn through YouTube? So I think you see three distinct content ideas that come from popular problems Grow the channel, get more subscribers, get more views. I guess the grow is both views and subscribers. So increase subscribers, increase views. How do I make money right? Perfect, three, really, really ideas that are backed by data. So that was the idea phase.
Speaker 1:Next, he went to the thumbnail stage. In the thumbnails, he thinks that a thumbnail should primarily have one of four emotions or ways of describing them Transformation, mystery, comparison, wealth and miscellaneous. And once again, you're gonna have to go to the video to see examples of these, because he did show very, very visual examples. So this is transformation day zero to day 365, or a face that has freckles on one side and is clear on the other. You know, $0 on one side, one million, the other, a penny on one side, a few hundred dollar bills on the other. A 2012 to 2022, a transformation went from A to B right and the A and B should be vastly different. This is very intriguing, as you can imagine. You probably want to click through. Well, how did they do that? And that's the whole idea. You're trying to create these intriguing thumbnails to get people to click through.
Speaker 1:He talked about the downfall one Skillshare exposed, talking about a video or a thumbnail of someone last seen April 25th 2020, showing these characters with minus a hundred million, minus a hundred and fifty million, all the way up to minus 350 million, showing Sam Friedman in jail. You know what led to the downfall, what led to things going wrong, things going bad. Once again, intriguing. We want to learn more about what happened. Mystery, right? There is a picture of someone that is opening up a black box with Netflix labeled on it and looking inside it. We can't see it from the angle what he's looking at, so we sort of want to know what's inside. We see Mr Beast with a handful of just stacks of $100 bills. It looks like he's going to give it to a mystery person that's blurred. We don't know who that is. We also see someone with eyes wide open and it says 3 am. Why does this person have eyes wide open at 3 am? Right? Mystery Comparison Coke versus Pepsi, pippin versus Michael Jordan, me versus whoever, bard versus ChatGPT. I think you get the picture.
Speaker 1:Comparisons can also be really powerful for your YouTube thumbnail Wealth how I made a picture of Seth Curry of the Golden State Warriors and he's holding a house with a price tag of $23 million. Someone is showing Instagram verified $14.99. Another one is showing how I made my first $1 million. People love to see how people make money or what things are worth, or how do people have that much money that they what do expensive things look like? So leaning into that can be very impactful as well. So here's the thing Does it stop their scroll to take a closer look? Right For the thumbnail in general, does it accurately show what the video is about? You can't have a click bait thumbnail and not back it up. People will immediately close out. It sends a really negative signal to YouTube and your video is gonna suffer in the algorithm. And then, does it spark enough curiosity to click? Just general rules regarding thumbnails, all right.
Speaker 1:He also talked about intros and clips. Now disclaimer, two disclaimers here. He talked about Opus Clip or Opus Pro. You go to neilshaffercom slash Opus my affiliate link if you would like, but he is an advisor for this company. But this company really is one of the best companies where you upload a video and it will use this AI to try to find the most engaging sections of your video for you to repurpose and create shorts around.
Speaker 1:But I thought what was really interesting was he was saying before you upload the video, let the AI teach you what it thinks are the most engaging shots and then use that as your intro, use it as the hook, right. In other words, before someone clips your horizontal video and clips it into a short because they thought it was compelling, create the clip, create the most engaging part and leverage that as a short or as an intro, as the hook to your video, before someone else does so. Let's say a 10 minute video, maybe the most engaging part was halfway through. Take that out and put it at the beginning for the first 15 seconds the hook and then start over. You can repeat that hook. It's okay, people are seeing it. Five minutes later they're probably gonna forget about it, but that is really really, really interesting strategy to make sure that you have a hook at the beginning of your video that are gonna draw people in, all right. So that was, john Yoshe. Just a lot of really really tactical, impactful advice that I found.
Speaker 1:So now we are moving on to speaker number nine, we have nine, 10, 11,. Got two more to go here after this next one, alex McFadden, who is a VP over at TubeBuddy, my preferred tool for YouTube. You've heard me talk about TubeBuddy. I am their Japan evangelist, trying to promote TubeBuddy in Japanese to the Japanese and non-Japanese creators there. So that is my disclaimer. You can also go to neilshaffordcom slash TubeBuddy to check it out. But TubeBuddy already has a number of AI features, but they are releasing new ones and they're also showing the impact that the current AI features have. So I think this was really interesting.
Speaker 1:He started off with just a primer on AI and AI. Before generative AI, it was all about predictive analytics to model human behavior, like how do we make better decisions with video and content and leverage AI for that right? This is really where TubeBuddy is coming from. How do we contextualize content? How do we contextualize audience's engagement? How do we predict impacts and outcomes? So he says you know, with AI, if you embrace it from a YouTube perspective, you should see growth and impact. You can get you know idea generation that's personalized for your channel. You can do audience mapping to see which are your viewers. You know, map with other viewers as you segment your audience. I don't know how much of that is available today, but I think that's the future Better understand your audience, thumbnail options and then create better thumbnails.
Speaker 1:So he went into saying how everyone's using AI, like this is no longer an option. 92% of programmers are using AI tools, says a GitHub developer survey and a really, really interesting article he showed from WIRE that says teachers are going all in on generative AI. Survey suggests teachers use generative AI more than students Thought that was really interesting and 94.5% of creators are already using AI, with editing content and image generation being the top ways. This is back from February of 2023. So we can only imagine this is close to 100% and, as you can imagine now, if you went to the moon and back or you were on the International Space Station for a year and you came back, you wouldn't know this. But the adoption of AI, the adoption of chat GPT specifically, is historic. In order to get to 50 million users, it took the telephone 50 years, the TV 22 years, the mobile phone 12 years, the internet seven years, facebook three years, youtube two years. We thought TikTok was the fastest at nine months. It took chat GPT only one month to get to 50 million users Pretty incredible.
Speaker 1:Now he also wanted to give a word of caution, and his quick thought was to trust your own judgment. He talked about this mathematician who had the infinite monkey theorem. I had never heard of this before. Maybe you have, if you're into math, the idea and this is a quote from the mathematician approximately 1913, so before World War I with infinite monkeys, typewriters and time, one will write Shakespeare. So with enough people, enough typewriters, enough time, you can create anything was the idea, and really generative AI is sort of the realization of that. But he went on to point out that generative AI might give everyone infinite monkeys, but not infinite judgment or creative skills. You still need to have creative skills and proper judgment to be able to leverage gen I in a positive way instead of potentially negative way. So really really good words of advice. Now he believes that the creator economy is going to lead the AI revolution, because almost every creator is using AI, they're using generative AI and there are more than 300 million global creators and productions out there today across all the different social networks.
Speaker 1:He also said that AI is really about unstructured data. So the way AI is trying to piece together all this unstructured data and give it structure. So what gets likes, what gets clicks, what gets views? Yes, I can understand that, but what about all the other periphery things where we don't understand what's going on? What can AI teach us? And content really becomes a goldmine for unstructured data, which actually is going to help both improve AI but also give us more impactful results. You're going to have to ask him the meaning behind all that. I'm just the messenger here, but just something to think about as we delve deeper into AI.
Speaker 1:Now he talked about also AI models for video and content. So what is the data that we can get from videos? We can get views, we can get watch time, we can get retention. We can get clicks, conversions, sales, bots, percentage and engagement. I'm not quite sure what the bot percentage was about. I'm going to have to go over the replay again, but there are different types of data that we can take to feed into the AI.
Speaker 1:And then he had a slide that said hey, what about SkyNet? What about people's fears? And I'm sure you've heard this quote by now. He quotes it from Richard Baldwin, an economist, at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in 2022. That AI won't take your job. It's somebody using AI that will take your job, but it also says that AI is giving more power to all workers, but especially those average workers, right? So once again, we should be investing more time and leaning more into AI.
Speaker 1:So, part of the TubeBuddy Suite, once again, neilshapetcom. That's TubeBuddy. They already have an AI title generator. They have found that the creators using the AI title generator, versus those that don't, are already seeing 84% more views. This is internal data coming from TubeBuddy. They also have a suggested shorts functionality, similar to what you saw with Opus Clips, but they actually look at the retention data of your published videos on your YouTube channel and your analytics and then we'll show you what are those 15-second snippets that were most engaging that people rewind and see again and again, and they have found that creators that lean into those and create those shorts are seeing, on average, 33% more comments for those shorts that were generated from the suggested shorts. The thumbnail analyzer this is another AI tool that TubeBuddy has that will analyze the thumbnail and when you put in multiple thumbnails, it'll try to predict the one that's most successful, and those creators that have leaned into that have seen 71% views and 84% more likes when publishing videos with thumbnails using the AI analyzer.
Speaker 1:Now, the next set of features I'm gonna talk about are things that are in R&D right now that they're working on so prompt. I ate the world's largest slice of pizza and there's an actual thumbnail of MrBeast eating what looks like this huge piece of pizza in a kitchen, and you can see the model output has pictures of different people in front of these huge pepperoni pizzas. So it is getting closer right. It may not be as good as what MrBeast's creative team has done, but we're seeing this text to YouTube thumbnail generation definitely getting better. And then text to image editing and there's already the Adobe Expresses that will do this but replace the rocks with a paradisiac beach and make it unsunset and showing the different variations and the different visual tools that we can use right inside TubeBuddy, which then we could use the AI thumbnail analyzer for. So it helps us be more efficient with our workflow, predicting the click-through rate for titles and thumbnails. I'm really excited to see this. It is not out yet, but that is in the works that TubeBuddy is working on and yeah, that was all really, really exciting information from our friends over at TubeBuddy.
Speaker 1:All right, so the actually, this is not the 11th speaker. This is going to be the 10th out of 11. So this was an AI panel that featured Peter Hollins, tristan Goodwin, bilal Sadoe and Matt Wolf. Matt, I think, is a pretty popular blogger and YouTuber all about AI. You know the other gentleman. I didn't really know it, I didn't take a picture of the title slides some of my apologies and they didn't really share any slides because it was a panel but I want to share with you some of their advice vis-a-vis AI.
Speaker 1:So, with generative AI, we're seeing this revolution from machines that understand to machines that create. So, as YouTubers, as content creators, as business owners, entrepreneurs, marketers, we can now do more with less, and you don't necessarily need artistic talent to create. Now, obviously, you'll create better and faster with artistic talent, but it's no longer a necessity. It has made art more accessible, for lack of a better way of talking about it. So what are the specific ways they are using AI that they recommend you to as well?
Speaker 1:Regarding video, so the very first thing you can do is ask AI how to improve your video's thumbnails, titles and descriptions. This is sort of a no-brainer, but more and more AI is accepting, you know, image uploads and data uploads. But hey, I'm thinking of creating this video. Here's a transcript. What do you think can be improved? We want to start now using AI, not just for the creation, but for the analysis, and that was another thing that came through this panel. We can give AI an outline in order to create a video script. So here's an outline of what I want to talk about. Please create a video script based on this topic and flesh out the outline right Something we can do. We can obviously use AI to create YouTube thumbnails.
Speaker 1:So they were using Mid Journey, another tool called Dreambooth, another tool called Stable Diffusion. This is four different people talking, so they're all using different tools to create YouTube thumbnails. There was also a lot of talk about cloudai. That's CLA UDE, a similar tool to ChatGPT, where they would put the concept in the cloud and get some title ideas, and they thought that that was a better way of doing it, and then they would generate thumbnail ideas from those titles for the prompts, so you could also take the description of your thumbnail and generate an image in Mid Journey. The cool thing about Dreambooth and I think you need to have some programming skills to use this or hire someone is that you can train your face into the AI using Dreambooth. This is something I'd love to be able to do. Once it is trained, you have a model for which you can use through Stable Diffusion, where you can add your face to any image pretty cool. Then, when you create an image with your face in it, or whatever image you create, then you can take it into an Adobe Express where you can use the generative AI fill and change that background into anything you want. They have found AI generated thumbnails. A 10 to 15% click-through rate, which I think is envious, is a really, really good click-through rate to have for your YouTube videos. So that is one thing that I really wanna try to do more of is this AI to YouTube thumbnails, and if there's one thing that you do that might be the most impactful, that might be the one thing. All right, there are other ways of leveraging AI, obviously for YouTube.
Speaker 1:The next one that was brought up was image to video. So Pika and RunawayML I believe that these are both. You would require some programming language, but there are tools out there now that will do image to video. And again, that project V from Kwebel, I believe, was his name that I showed you is another example. If you don't remember that, rewind the audio or rewind the video to watch that part again.
Speaker 1:Text to voice. So one of the panelists has already created a synthetic voice of themselves in 11 labs. Need to check what the URL that is. Another one uses HeyGen, which you can take your voice and dub into a foreign language for up to five minutes. This is a feature that, once again, youtube is rolling out in the near future in their analytics to allow you to be able to dub your videos into foreign languages. Invideo does foreign languages. Invideo actually had an InVideo AI product, which was a text to video that would automatically add audio in addition to adding it in foreign languages. That was pretty cool, and there was also. Deepmind was another tool that was mentioned that was similar to HeyGen. I'm gonna put all these in the show notes in the description when this is published, but for now, you can look those sort of tools up Now.
Speaker 1:Those are all probably very, very intuitive ways of using AI, but the next one that was talked about was more about the analysis. So use AI to build an avatar for your audience, basically saying look for avatar templates online. A lot of them exist. And then in chat GBT, or harpa harpaai, I believe, is a browser plugin that can read what is on the screen, including YouTube transcripts and comments. It's a plugin for chat GBT, so train the API to become your avatar and then have the AI avatar find the most boring part of your transcript and then work that transcript into your outline better. So basically, train the AI to become your avatar and then ask that avatar how to improve or advice on what you're doing or what content they might be interested in. That that was really interesting. We can also use AI for competitive analysis.
Speaker 1:Scrape a Facebook group. I use phantombuster and neilshaffercom slash. Phantombuster is my affiliate link, but you can scrape the Facebook group to scrape the comments and look at what are the most common themes that come up. That come most common questions to better understand the target audience. You can also model a competitor's YouTube channel and find out what types of comments they're getting and use that as your audience. So lots of different ways of doing this. They went into a lot of technical detail as to how to do this that go above and beyond my knowledge of AI, but I think if you want to go in deep on this, you'll want to purchase the vid summit 2023 replay, but it's also something to look for Now.
Speaker 1:They also talked about keeping space to play around the latest and greatest in AI. You need to start devoting time, whether it's 15 minutes a week or 30 minutes or an hour a week. Find different ways of using AI as part of your workflow. There are suggestions where use AI as a business consultant. Tell it a little about your business and get feedback so you learn how to communicate with it. Treat it as a collaborative co-pilot. Treat it as a toy. Have fun with it. Spend time in AI like a playground. Lean in at AI as a creative sandbox. You don't have to do all those things, but hopefully you find a new way to give you a reason to use it more. And, like anything else, it's muscle memory. The more you use it, the better you're gonna get at it and the better results you're gonna get and the most more impactful it's going to be for your marketing in general.
Speaker 1:There were some other recommended tools Timebolt, a tool that cuts out silence from video I believe that Descript does this as well, as well as Opus Clip, as well as CapCut, I believe, so there's a lot of them out there. Another one was Makecom, which is a Zapier competitor, of basically taking a Google Sheet and integrating that with GPT4, chat GPT to summarize the product description of a new AI tool and then publishing that on Webflow once it is checked by a human. So this is an automated way of creating blog posts by using AI. That is just completely automated. All he does is basically put in the URL of the new AI tool. This is Matt Wolf that was speaking and he creates this new blog post. Pretty compelling, but that's how far we've come and how easy it is to do. There were some other comments, so chat GPT has a data analyzer functionality. So, once again, download your comments and try to find some themes that can help you better improve your videos. You can do this with your competitors as well. You can also use Zapier with chat GPT. In fact, zapier can also recommend different tools using AI for whatever you wanna do. So I thought that was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:And have a testing process for AI. Ask it lots of questions. If you don't like the answers, change that avatar, right? You know? Once again they went into the avatar and I think the ultimate advice was to create your own AI knowledge base. So personalai is an example of an AI where you can upload anything and it learns you and becomes you. So you know, Amazon and Google also have the ability to fine tune a large language model, but you're basically using AI to create a great knowledge bot. I think best AI might be another one that you can use. They talked about Robert Scoble, the famous technology, a geek who has a pendant that he records all of his conversations, which then he feeds into this sort of AI to record everything he's done. So he is literally creating a digital brain that is based on AI. You can also create your own knowledge base just from all of your Google Docs and Dropbox and automate it. So that's sort of the next generation of where we're going. I just wanted to plant the seeds in you to begin thinking a little bit more seriously about AI and how impactful it can be for your business, because I guarantee you, your competitors are already beginning to think about AI in that way.
Speaker 1:All right, so now we are going to get back to the final speaker, not the AI panel. That was speaker number 10, the final speaker and, I think, probably the most impactful. I know that some of you have stayed on. This is a longer podcast recording than I usually do, but I really wanted to use this as my own way of recording my own thoughts so that I have something to come back to for myself. So I go to learn, I share what I learned, and that's sort of my approach to all this. So thank you for tuning in and I hope this is impactful. If it is, I'd love a comment or two, a love review on Apple podcast, or a follow on my YouTube or subscription to my podcast, but I digress.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's go into number 11, patty Galloway. Patty is a younger dude, but don't let his age or his looks fool you, because he is one master at YouTube marketing. His channel header is YouTube and business simplified. He has 503,000 subscribers with only 33 videos. Perhaps some of the videos have been archived, but Patty was, you know, one of the presentations near the end. But he loves to re-engineer YouTube growth and he has worked both on his own channel and with other creators channels. He has basically generated more than 10 billion views and he dumbed those down into five core lessons from 10 billion views. So if you're still here, you are in for a treat and let us dive in, because this was some really impactful content that Patty shared with us. So five lessons, five core lessons, from 10 billion views.
Speaker 1:Lesson number one the algorithm is the audience. So you know a lot of people blame the algorithm for a lot of different things and you know, basically, the way the algorithm works is this there's millions of videos and when someone is on YouTube, youtube wants to pick the right video for the viewer. So they understand, based on the viewer subscriptions, what they've viewed before, what they've engaged with, what they've liked, what they've commented. They now can narrow down that list to maybe a few hundred. Then they need to rank them to a few dozen and then they pick. The algorithm will pick one and it'll randomly pick. Sometimes it is always testing, trying to find the right video for the right person. So the algorithm isn't the algorithm, the algorithm is the audience. So you're not trying to optimize for the algorithm, you're trying to optimize for the audience, and this is just a very, very different way of thinking about YouTube, which you need to stop thinking about. Youtube as SEO, maybe when you just start to prime the channel, to let Google, let YouTube know what the channel is about, and there are ways of making sure that when you create YouTube videos that it can appear in the top Google results as well for those keywords. So it's not that it's for nothing, but treat the algorithm as if it was the audience. So, as Patty said, the mysterious, crazy algorithms job is really simple Finding the right videos for a viewer and ranking them. That's all. There's nothing political, there's nothing emotional, and it's funny.
Speaker 1:He put up this, this chart. You know video performance. If your video performance is good, you say what an awesome content creator you are. If it was bad, you blame the algorithm. You say stop, the algorithm is not good or bad. The algorithm is what it is. You need to better find your audience and fine tune your content for your audience.
Speaker 1:Now he gave some ideas your video flops. Was the idea bad? Well, if the idea was bad, then you know why a flop comes down to your audience. You did not fine tune it to something your audience would be interested in. If the idea was good, was it a packaging issue? Thumbnail title description, right, packaging the first few seconds of you know? Well, I don't know if we include the hook as part of the package. So let's just say thumbnail title description tags for what they're worth.
Speaker 1:If that was the issue, once again, it's the. The algorithm is not the issue, it's the audience. You did not do enough to intrigue them to want to commit to clicking on your thumbnail. Was it a retention issue? Did your video, you know, burn out after the first 30 seconds? It's not an algorithm issue, that's an audience issue. You need to make sure that you retain people longer. Look at your videos where you perform, where you retain people longer. Look for the ones where they left immediately. What do you see? And I think you're going to find. Obviously the hook is really important, but you're going to find some similarities and ways to optimize your delivery and your storytelling.
Speaker 1:And then, if you're pretty confident that that wasn't the issue, wasn't an external issue, was it the fact that you know COVID hit and no one is interested in that subject anymore? Like the, the popsockets lady, right, no one is interested in that anymore. It's a trend that came and went. So there could be other external issues above and beyond what the audience explanation determines. You might, you might need to dig deeper, but based on his experience, it's an idea issue, a packaging issue or retention issue are the reason why most videos flop. Not an algorithm issue. An audience issue, I think, is the main thing here.
Speaker 1:So the takeaways from this first lesson always look for the audience explanation. Always be understanding your avatar, understanding what videos they watched in that search and recon that we talked about, and really focus on what's in your control. Right, deeply understand your audience. This goes the same for all marketing, but if you really want to be successful at YouTube, your audience is already watching other people's videos. So there's some data that you can get that can better inform your strategy. And I also want to remind people you know you can republish blog posts. You cannot republish YouTube videos, but you can change the thumbnails, titles, descriptions, tags at any time. Right, that is the secret to how to further optimize everything you do over time on YouTube. So lesson number two love this.
Speaker 1:Ideas set the ceiling. Execution determines the result. So the concept of Tam applied to YouTube. I don't know how many of you have ever heard of this, but Tam is basically the total available market or the total potential market. So you know, based on your niche, there's only so many people watching those videos, but a hundred percent of them would be your total market. How many of those people can you reach? Well, the idea is going to set the limit as to how many people you can reach, but the execution determines the result when it's some very, very specific idea. So your execution is a number of views, which is a subset of your idea ceiling, which is an upset of all the viewers that you could reach, right? Hopefully that makes sense. There is a great visual here.
Speaker 1:So idea strategy this is what Patty does. He brainstorms a hundred different ideas, takes the 10 strongest ideas with his own elimination criteria, and then he'll take one of those 10 for further development. So you're getting the best top one percent of your ideas. You're not making a video from your first idea, right? You're taking the top one out of a hundred. So, once again, sometimes you see these gamers and they look really casual and they look like they're just out there having fun and doing crazy things. There is a lot of thought and data analysis and time being spent that goes into creating a successful video and a successful channel.
Speaker 1:So two important frameworks that he introduced here the 80% strategy rule Try to aim to interest 80% of your audience with 80% of your uploads. Right, there is another 20% that he talks about, but really the 80, 20 is 80%. Make sure that you are on target. The other 20% do what you're passionate about that all of your audience might not be interested in, or experiment maybe with broader content. This is something that he talked about here. So the other framework he talked about is core, casual, new. Basically, you have thumbnails that attract your core audience. You have thumbnails that can attract a broader audience, which are more casual viewers that might fumble upon your. Maybe they've seen one of your videos before, but you want to catch them again. And then you have a new audience. These are people that have never seen any of your videos and once again, you're going to have to see the live stream or the video replay of this. But you know the core audience.
Speaker 1:He had an example of someone the official reveal of my new YouTube studio, like the full tour of my YouTube studio this is something that obviously his fans are going to be crazy about. You know got 374,000 views Now. He then created a core and slash casual video that could attract more, which was insane. Make the shot, I'll buy you anything. Challenge. And there's a thumbnail of him being blindfolded and making a basketball shot. You know not being able to see the basket from far away. And there's another guy who who's showing like $10,000 worth of product, right, so he's going outside of his core audience, trying to attract more of the casual audience with a broader topic. This one, compared to the 374,000 views, ended up getting 693,000 views. And then he goes for the new audience, right, and he does this by going to five NBA games in 50 hours. Right, he might attract NBA fans now, because we know that there's a ton of them, and in the thumbnail he's actually wearing three different uniforms. And then on the left, he shows the Lakers you know arena. And then the right, he shows the Boston Celtics arena. This video ended up getting 11 million views.
Speaker 1:So always be experimenting, but always make sure that your videos, first and foremost, are touching upon that core audience of you that you have, right, your diehard fans. What are they digging into? You need to always make sure they're coming back and consuming every video to show, you know, youtube, to show the algorithm that that your audience likes what you have right, and when you please your audience, youtube pleases you. I think that there's, no, no better way to say it than that. So he also went into some other hallmarks of a great idea, and the other hallmarks of a great idea was easy to convey in a title and thumbnail. If you have an idea that you cannot easily convey in a title and thumbnail, it is not a great idea. Really great way of thinking about thumbnails. Does it have a unique or novelty value? Need to be original.
Speaker 1:Combines viral formats together. Give a hundred thousand dollars, make something blindfolded, went to five games in 48 hours. Right, there are all these different viral formats out there. Try to find ways where you can find an intersection between the two. And then is it something. When you mentioned to your friends that they get excited about it, I thought that was really interesting. Hey, I'm thinking about making a video about this. What do you think? And if you're like dude, I can't wait to watch that. You know you have a great idea.
Speaker 1:So another sort of litmus test for your ideas the lesson takeaways the idea is the biggest factor in performance. It will make or break your video. Make ideas that interest more than 80% of your audience and always look for a fit between the core, the casual and the new user for best results. That's how you get videos that blow up, and those videos end up blowing up your channel as well. Alrighty, those are the first two lessons.
Speaker 1:Now we're going to go into number three. Don't under allocate time on the click. Now what does this mean? That there is a successful YouTube video is a result of interest plus delivery, and the interest is as important as the delivery. So he was saying most content creators spend so much time on the script and the filming and editing that the idea and the title of the thumbnail are an afterthought. And what he's saying is that should not be the case. You need to be spending as much time on the interest as you do in the delivery. Once again, you know, mr Beesh, you saw all the time he put into his thumbnails. He will not create a video until he has the thumbnail idea. I think he has a better balance of this. So, as a creator, you need to have a better balance with this idea, title, thumbnail. And in fact, you know he was saying and this is database and his interviewing YouTube creators that most spend an overwhelming majority of the time like 80% of their time, on storytelling, editing and scripting, and then the thumbnails and ideas get very, very little time of this pie chart Now the three stages of effective packaging, and he has this great thumbnail.
Speaker 1:I pick pocketed a pick pocket. It literally shows a pick pocket picketing someone and then someone pick pocketing the pick pocket. Just easy to understand, visual and title. So does it stop the scroll? Does it create curiosity? Most importantly, does it get the click? So we've had John Yoshe and some of the others had all these different frameworks for thumbnails. This one I thought was really really easy to understand. I think Patty does a really good job of simplifying all these different strategies.
Speaker 1:Title interest what are ways in which we can generate curiosity from our title? A superlative Bend, the world's strongest bar when $500. Building titles around a superlative world's strongest. It gives the video natural uniqueness. Great example. What about an impossible challenge? Can you get the splits in one day? It sets a seemingly impossible task. Natural intrigue. How is that possible? Maybe it's not possible, maybe it is, but once again, the curiosity and the intrigue is going to create people clicking through.
Speaker 1:What about challenging convention? Why Californians regret moving to Austin, texas? Five big reasons Challenging convention or wisdom and thought. This can help evoke an emotional response, get people really tuned in. What about juxtaposition? I tested pet-friendly hotels with farm animals. The thumbnail literally shows a guy being turned away from a hotel with this big pet-friendly sign with a pig on a leash. Why is that there? It's a natural scroll stopper, seeing this pig in what looks like a very, very nice hotel lobby. Click to answer the story. You're not going to find out what happened until you click. That's the best way of creating this intrigue that will get people to click the transformation Once again. Show this to you before Day one, day 100. I built a wildlife pond. Here's what happened, a clear before and after.
Speaker 1:But the intrigue is all about the in-between and then size comparison. I tried the smallest art supplies on the internet. Big versus small, it can work both ways. There's just natural visual intrigue. There's all these tiny scissors and crayons and colored pencils and a computer that are all like this really tiny Rubik's cube that you see, all on a human hand. Everything just looks extremely tiny.
Speaker 1:So the lesson takeaways Allocate more time to the idea and the click Focus on simple packaging. That stops the scroll. Focus on human intrigue, not on algorithms. Really fantastic advice. All right, we're into lesson four out of five lessons Still got a little bit of takeaways to go here. Lesson number four Data is a tool, it is not everything.
Speaker 1:He asked everybody in the room if you were looking at this graph of video retention by time, which one would you like? And everybody, you know there's a blue one that gets just better retention than a red one. So everybody would raise their hand and say you know the blue is better because where the red only gets, you know, 35% retention, the blue gets 60. But then he juxtaposed the numbers, that the blue one was only one million views, the red one was 10 million views. In other words, data is relative. It is not everything. Anyone would would rather much have 10 million views with worse retention than one million views with better retention.
Speaker 1:I believe Case in point already hinted about this earlier in this recording, but the relationship between click through rate and average view duration is pretty interesting that the higher the click through rate, the lower the average view duration in general, the lower the click through rate, the higher the average view duration. This is why YouTube, for their thumbnail testing feature, is choosing the average view duration as the key metric, not click through rate, something else to think about. He also talked about you know, sometimes when the your click through rate goes down and you're really worried. He has this graph of someone that started out with a very, very high click through rate got a lot of views. That started going down. The click through rate went from 10 to 3% and then it peaked again with another 16,000 views when the click through rate was only at 5%. And now it is getting pretty consistent views with a 5% click through rate instead of the 10%, so that high click through rate may be attracting newer people. They may not be interested in the topic, may not be interested in you. I think that's one potential explanation.
Speaker 1:But once again, we need to look at the data in not such a simplistic way. Was really the message here? Now the common forces affecting metrics click throughs, it could be impressions, traffic source, average view duration, niche with retention, it could be views, broadness or narrowness of the video, the traffic source, device, the video length, the content format. There's a lot of different things here. I don't think we need to go any deeper, but just goes to show there are a lot of reasons why the data can skew. Therefore, don't look at the data at face value. So focus on views and retention, curve behavior. Always consider the context behind a metric and compare with controls the first 30 days of this video compared to the first 30 days of that video, et cetera, et cetera. In terms of time views and format, we're in the home stretch.
Speaker 1:The final lesson you have was that YouTube is not a linear game. Our expectation is that things go up like this. The reality is that things go up and down and we have the ebbs and flows. That is just the way it is, and I've already given you examples of people you know he shows. He had a video come out in December 2019, in August 2020. He had like a million views he was doing great in March of 2021. They went up to 2.5 million views in June or May of 2022. Went up to 5 million views in September 2023. Went up to 7.5 million views. It is a roller coaster but at the end of the day, by sticking with it and being consistent and consistently creating videos and improving, mentioning, you know, putting in action everything we talked about, they were able to get a 1,100% increase on this one specific video. Think if you can do that for all the videos in your library. So embrace the unpredictability, stick the course and enjoy it.
Speaker 1:Hey, I know that this was one of the longer episodes, so if you stayed to the end, I really appreciate you. There were just so many takeaways. I had to actually cut out a lot of content from this podcast, but I wanted to make sure that you got really the takeaways that I got that I thought were really important for myself to note and for you to know as well. Well, that's it for another episode. As always, if you didn't know, these episodes are also being broadcast on YouTube. In fact, you can see interviews of people on YouTube that I livestream. That will be coming out in podcast form in the next several weeks.
Speaker 1:So if you want to get a sneak preview of what I've been talking about, or if you want to see me talk for an hour and 40 minutes, like I did on this podcast, and see those visuals I talked about, go to youtubecom slash Neil Schaefer. I'd love to see you there. If you go to the live tab, you'll find the live recording of this podcast, as well as previous podcasts. And also I want to encourage you if you haven't so far. I'm trying to get to 100 reviews on Apple podcasts by the end of the year and I am still well. I'm at 59 now.
Speaker 1:I want to thank Purple Maniac, who left the following review on Apple podcast Neil screams Soka. I've been an avid listener of Neil's your digital marketing coach podcast for quite a while. Soka is a Japanese term relating to added value. That's exactly what I get from this podcast to help me with win as an e-commerce and marketing professional. Purple Maniac, thank you very much and I encourage you. If you've gotten anything out of any of my episodes, it's real simple go over to Apple podcasts, give it a five star or whatever you think it's worthy of, leave a review and let me know. I would love to thank you personally, but at least I would love to read out what you shared with me so that I can share with others. So thank you so much. And that is it for another episode of the digital marketing coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, signing off. Signing off.
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