This episode features Interact’s CEO, Josh Haynam, Growth Manager, Jackie Aguglia, Digital Marketing Manager and Host, Jessmyn Solana, and Social Content Manager, Jesy Nelson.
In this episode we will cover:
- Why Youtube, what are the benefits? How does it actually help you grow?
- Differences between Youtube and a tool like Wistia?
- Why did Interact decide to use Youtube?
- What are the best practices for creating videos for your business? Why does video quality matter?
- What are the first steps to optimizing your channel?
- What metrics do you want to look out for when you publish?
Check out Interact’s channel on Youtube here.
Resources from this episode:
🌟Dan Bennett’s Video for Entrepreneurs Course
🌟Ready to look and sound great on camera? Take Dan’s quiz to find out the exact steps you need to get started!
Hi guys and welcome back to new Grow podcast. We were formerly Creator Stories and we are now kind of rebranding. Josh, you wanna kind of speak to why we decided to do something new? Yeah, so this year. Connor, kind of one sense of looking at it is evolving with our customers because I think really great creators are evolving past just branding themselves as creator.
Like, uh, you think about somebody like Mr. Beast, who I’ll probably talk a lot about today. , like he’s got five or six businesses now, but he started as a creator, like a YouTuber, necessarily, like his main thing. But now he’s just like growing these businesses. So the problems that he would face now, Are much more about like, how do you scale a business?
How do you hire, like he’s thinking a lot about hiring, and so part of it is growing with our customers, but then part of it is also that interact is now widening our base to have the ability to serve a lot more people beyond just creators. Because of the advent of our AI offerings, like we can actually be more useful as a quiz builder.
Tool for all sorts of businesses. So it’s not just creators. Now it’s like you have a construction company or you have a mining operation, or you sell, you know, whatever type of products and you’ve been around for 20 years. Like you might not call yourself a creator, but everybody has this common goal of growing their business.
Right. And it also is about like growing as a person, because I think is Paul Graham, who I also talk about all the time. He’s like, businesses grow as people grow. Like the, the best businesses are the ones where the person is growing. The, the founding team is growing, the whole team is growing, so then the company grows.
So that’s kind of the broad ethos of it, and I think we’ll probably expand more as, as we figure it out. We also talked a lot more about, um, sort of, you know, talking about our own growth as a company. Um, and I. , it’s gonna be a lot of fun sort of digging into, you know, okay, what are we doing? What are other people doing?
Can you replicate that in your own business? Um, but with us today on our episode, we also have Jackie, our growth manager. And for the first time ever, Jesse, our social content manager. So, Jesse, welcome. Hello. Thank you for having me for my first time ever. Big debut on our new, new podcast name. Um, but we’re really excited.
I think it will be a lot of fun sort of having these conversations and talking a little bit about what we are doing and what you could do to replicate it as well for those who are listening. Um, so for today, what we wanted to dive into is YouTube, how to use YouTube for your business. So I can’t wait to kind of hear what you guys think.
Um, and. , you know, we’re all doing different things, right in regards to YouTube. Some of us are creating the content, some of us are editing the content, publishing the content. And when you publish the content, there’s also that, you know, YouTube SEO strategy that comes along with it. So I think first and foremost, my first question, and whoever wants to jump into this, can jump in, but why YouTube?
What are the benefits and how does it actually help you grow your.
I will start by saying, um, I think at least for me, publishing to YouTube. I don’t mean to say an accident, but it kind of was because I just needed a place to store videos in order to embed them into our community. And the reason we chose YouTube to do that was because, a, it’s free storage. Um, b, you might get some views from it, which will tell you what content might be more popular than others.
Right. But then you also get the analytics. From it. So how many views do you get from within the community of people watching that? And then it just, after doing that for a little while, it just became sort of obvious of like, why aren’t we talking to people who are on the YouTube platform? And the answer to your question of why YouTube is really, because YouTube is.
One, one of the only platforms that’s actually trying to find an audience for your videos. So it’s trying to match up, right? Like of the content that you’re making, who is this intended for and let’s send it to them. So YouTube’s actually suggesting your videos to other people that you may never have thought of or knew or could reach.
Uh, so that is my answer on why YouTube. . Yeah. And I would add, I would add on to it from like a more even zoomed out level. Um, I think if you look at the existing landscape of ways to get discovered as a company, you have search and you have social and then you have video, right? Like those are kind of the big ones.
Podcasts, I guess you could consider. But I think. probably further down the funnel in general, like as a business, people aren’t necessarily discovering your brand through a podcast. Maybe they do and could add that into the mix, but in terms of alignment between the platform and the creator, I think YouTube has the best alignment.
Because like you were saying, Jackie, they actually want people to watch their videos because if people watch your videos, then people see ads and then you juxtapose that to Google. Search where they don’t want you to click on the links. They, they’re not incentivized for, uh, a searcher to click on links that are not ads.
And so I think that’s part of why it’s so broken and like, , you know, everyone’s freaking out about AI replacing search because search is just terrible. Like it’s, it’s a known entity that is terrible. And it’s not just Google, it’s also Amazon, like search for anything on Amazon. It’s like 12 ads and then one real product or Yelp or whatever service you use.
But I think in terms of alignment between the platform, who needs to get paid to run the platform and the creators who need to get paid to create the content. It’s like perfect alignment or near perfect alignment. And then I also think it’s very, uh, not susceptible to AI because video is not really good with AI right now.
Or I don’t know when it will be or if it will be. Um, but it kind of gives you a hedge against like AI taking over what a lot of people are probably doing now, which is like written content. YouTube is a silent killer. Um, and I say that. I don’t think it’s always the first choice when you’re thinking about marketing yourself and your business and I, but we always use it all the time as consumers, we’re constantly like, you know how, I mean, okay, this isn’t a more personal thing, but I’m always searching, oh, how do I put on blue eyeshadow and make it look nice and not like I’m from the eighties?
Um, and your first go-to will be, well, I wanna watch someone. If I’m learning a new tool, um, I’ll search up. I remember when I first started using Canva, I was on YouTube all the time of, okay, how can I make the most use out of this tool that I’m now paying for? Because I don’t wanna just pay for it and not use it.
And so I think that it’s, from a business perspective, it wasn’t our first one. Our first one was, well, how do we get on Facebook? How do we get on on Instagram? How do we get on Twitter and all these social platforms? But it wasn’t until I think, a couple years ago, right, Jesse, that we were like, okay, let’s get on YouTube.
Yeah, I think it was probably two years ago, and we just kind of were like, let’s see what happens. Let’s go from there. Started with super general business advice and then now we’ve gotten to a place where we’re targeting more and getting better with what content we actually wanna create and what our audience wants to hear from us.
Yeah, and I, I. I, the thing that I wanna point out about this too, because before we were using YouTube, we were using WIA a lot, which was hosting all of our videos for the website, the platform. What, what would you guys say is the differences between using a tool like WIA versus YouTube? Because you can just take the YouTube video and also embed it.
Why did we start out that? I can jump in on that, cuz I think that was, that was probably back when I was doing this. I think, um, WIA lets you keep things private, which can be, uh, an advantage, right? Like if you have, like you’re, you’re selling videos, like you don’t want them to just be on YouTube. Um, Yeah, I mean, I think, honestly, my perspective on that, and I actually have a ton of respect for wia.
I love what they’re doing. Um, I just think that like it’s gotten very expensive to host things privately, either on WIA or Vimeo. Probably has paid plans like that now too. Um, Whereas like I think, I think the fundamental shift in business and like our, this podcast we’re doing is like, an example of this is like brands are getting more transparent, which I wonder if that’s like a reaction to the loss of trust in brands.
Like I don’t know what those reports are, like Gartner, whoever runs those, but like trust in corporate brands has just plummeted in the last like 15 years. And so I wonder if that’s part of the shift is. , let’s, let’s put things out in the open a little bit more, like show who we actually are as people and then that’s, that’s part of why like things move from these like private repositories like Sia to now on YouTube.
But I think that’s also why YouTube was so successful because it gave people an opportunity to watch someone else’s. and it wasn’t on tv. You didn’t have to be an actor or you didn’t have to sign up for, you know, MTV’s real world to have, you know, your own kind of show. It was, it was a, it, like you said, like transparency.
So I think for, from a business perspective, um, a lot of businesses were able to like take that idea of, oh, like we can be creators too and sort of show the behind the scenes. We can show people how to use our tool show how. get the most out of it. So that way it builds that trust that you need with your customers and they’re gonna keep coming back.
Mm-hmm. . So in regards to creating videos for your business, Jackie, what are the best practices when you’re thinking about what content you’re gonna put out and why does something like video quality matter? I think video quality, I mean, go back to that trust factor, right? Like if it’s super fuzzy or very blurry or just not like the professional look that your brand is, can people trust you as an expert in that space as much as somebody who.
Looks and sounds amazing on camera. Even if that person just started their business yesterday, I bet you we all would click on that video simply because it looked like it was gonna be better, even, even if the information wasn’t. So I think that’s where the quality comes in. Also, I believe YouTube will prioritize videos, um, based on the quality a little bit.
I might have made that up. I don’t know. Don’t quote me. Maybe we should Google that and then put it in the show notes for later . Um, but I would say it was the other part of that question just getting started, like what content to put onto YouTube, right? . Mm-hmm. . So like I said before, in the beginning, it was just we were building a community and we needed to show people how to use our tool, how to set up certain settings, how to use Circle as a platform, which is the, the platform we use for our community.
And video was the easiest and it was the fastest, and it was the clearest way to communicate that message because in addition to me, Telling you how, how it was done, I could also show you on a screen share. And that made it so much easier for people to get it rather than having that back and forth in email or in chats or in in posts.
Right. Um, So really ju I, I would suggest for anybody thinking about using video or anybody who’s not using video right now, simply just start making videos as answers to questions that people are giving you. And those you could just store on YouTube. You don’t have to have any specific, I’m not saying like, don’t have a strategy, but you really don’t, in order to get started, need to have a very specific strategy, uh, or like specific dates on when your content comes out.
Just get it out there to get started and then you’ll start. The strategy, which is where, where we’re at right now, we can get more specific with the content that we wanna cover because we also have a lot of analytics to look at now of what videos were watched the most, how long were people watching them, and what do they want more of?
And let’s make that. So in terms of thinking of your strategy, what advice can you give to people listening who really don’t know how to be on video? You know, I think there. , and correct me if I’m wrong, if anyone disagrees, but there is sort of like a format to how people present themselves when they’re being informative or they’re showing something about their business.
And I know when I first started recording videos where I was presenting something, it would take me the entire day because I constantly over. what I was saying. I would write out a whole script and then forget, or I didn’t write a script, I just did an outline, and then I’d ramble. Right. So how do you kind of, I guess, get to that point where you either are like, okay, I’m gonna go run through this.
It’s gonna be so quick, or, and Jesse, you can answer this in terms of editing what those best practices are, when after you, after you record, before you actually publish. I mean, I will say I’m one of those people who’s not super comfortable on video, and same with you, Desmond. Like I would make a script and I would probably fumble and mess it up.
From everything I’ve heard from people, it’s practice. The more you do it, the better you get at it, the more comfortable you get. But from an editing standpoint, , I would say it’s very interesting to see everyone’s different styles. Jackie, I can see, if I look at the video note, she’s talking almost every single second.
There’s not a silent moment in her videos, , but you know, she’s actually, it’s not like she’s just mumbling or saying anything random. She’s talking and she’s good at that. Josh will have some down times during his videos, but more like intentional pauses. and it’s just very different. Jasmine, you talk more to, I would say, you know, add in more filler words, but every style I think has a purpose.
I think Jackie’s videos are like more fun and everything. Josh’s are super informative and like, but also fun. But I think probably it just depends on the type of person and the type of content and your audience. But I think all of it works. Cause I’ve watched some videos that. , like gardening videos, how to plant something.
You know, the quality’s not good. There’s no B rolls, there’s no nothing. But I got the information that I needed and it still has, you know, 500,000 views cause people are watching it. So I think it just depends. But Jackie, how do you feel? Like, what makes you. Easier to record videos. . The reason that I talk every single second is because I can’t script.
I tried it to start, cause same thing when I, the first time I started making videos, I was like, what? You want me to make videos? I’ve never done this before. And so of course I scripted it cuz I got nervous and I didn’t know what I was gonna say, but I could not. Okay, I can, I could read it, but it sounded like I was reading it on camera.
And so after doing that enough times, and for me wasting enough time of trying to read this script perfectly, cuz then you fumble your words, you have to start over and then there’s how much editing time goes into fixing all of that. I just said okay. I mean, I got comfortable enough with just getting on the camera and starting to talk and so now I think I.
Place where I need to go back to scripting and practice it a little bit more because the length of my videos can be longer than they need to be because I love to just chat away. . And so scripting will definitely help me to stay on track, but more so within a specific timeframe because we can see from our analytics people only really only watch a video for a couple of minutes, and so I wanna make sure that I’m providing content that our audience and our customers actually want to watch.
And I don’t want it to be too long or to have them have to search through that longer video. To find this, the piece of information that they’re looking for. Um, but you’re not gonna, no matter what you do scripting or just reading, like riffing off the cuff, you’re, you’re not gonna be good at either of them until you just start doing it.
So, just like making your quiz done is better than perfect. Turn your camera on. Start recording. Editing is magic. It can do so much for you. Um, so really just start and then you’ll figure out what you’re good at, what you’re not, or I guess rather like how to get better. And your videos will improve over time for.
And Josh, we’ve jumped around as like a, you know, company wide strategy between recording videos where it switches back from your face to like screen sharing. We’ve also done like a little circle or a little square of your face while screen sharing. We’ve done no screen sharing, just explaining how do you keep up to date with.
what is the best strategy right now in terms of formatting your YouTube video when you’re recording? Yeah, I mean, I, my thought like, ripping off of what Jesse was saying about style, um, two of the biggest YouTubers growing wise right now are Lex Friedman and Andrew Huberman, and they literally have like four hour podcasts about like meditation and they.
like I’m talking right now, like it’s very monotone and not any knock. I think they’re both awesome, like they do tons of research and it’s amazing. But like, I think to the point of like, you don’t have to do it a certain way, and that’s kind of, I think what sets you to a part is that it does show more of like a personality.
You can’t hide behind a keyboard and like type a certain way or you know, a lot of blog content. Honestly, people don’t even write themselves anymore. Like they’ll outsource it. and I think it’s kind of the same with formatting. Like Jackie, you could probably chime in cuz we’re playing around with new formats now too.
I think it’s, it’s partly like what works with the platforms, right? Because now what you kind of have to do is like have videos that can be cut up and turned into TOS because like TikTok is still eating up market share and you can’t afford to miss out on that. Twitter’s also moving to vertical video, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts.
So if you’re not on those platforms, you’re gonna miss out on the new audience that’s coming online. Uh, so I think that’s like the biggest thing is just like making sure that you can accommodate new platforms. But other than that, I think, I think it is kind of stylistic. Like some people just like to have a four hour conversation and just record it and upload the whole thing.
Other people, Are super good with like 60 seconds and it’s just super punchy and you learn something. Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s just like everything that you do in your business, right? What is it that your customer wants? How is this going to best help the people that you’re creating it for? So like in terms of screen sharing, if I’m demoing the tool, then I wanna make sure my face is not in the way of what I’m trying to show you.
And so maybe that means I’m not on camera at all and it’s just the screen and you can hear my voice. Or maybe that means I’m tucked away in the corner in the bottom right. So it’s really just a matter. Why are you making the video? Who is it for and how is it going to be best received by them? And then I guess I’ll just add, cuz Josh mentioned, um, like reusing, repurposing the same content for multiple platforms.
We’ve just. Sort of been playing around with different AI tools that edit clips of longer videos. And the problem that we faced with a lot of that is we were using Zoom, or I was using Zoom to record, so my face was always in the corner of of the screen share. So when these little clipping tools. Cut down to a story size video.
It was a chunk of the screen share. My or my face was super small in it and it just didn’t look good at all. And so recording your screen share and your video separately so that you can repurpose it later for different platforms is definitely what you should try to be doing, um, because you can use it for so many different things later on when you are recording.
and you’re coming up with the content and you hit record. This doesn’t have to include like the actual editing part. How long does that actually take you? As long as it takes to get your point across in the shortest way possible. . Was that a good answer, ? I do love that answer. I think a lot of, at least when people are trying something new in marketing, I think the question is always, how long is this gonna take me?
Like is it worth investing my time and money into it? And how do I make the most of it? Right? So I think it’s a great answer because, , you don’t want to not give enough information to where then people don’t feel like they can connect to your brand because they’re not getting what they need. But you also don’t want to do an hour long video with a demo because at some point people might just drop off.
And correct me if I’m wrong, you YouTube pays attention to stuff like that, like how long the video is versus when somebody drops off in the video and how many times that happens and the amount of videos that you publish. Yeah, retention is a key analytic. Yeah. Go ahead Josh. Well, I was just gonna say, um, we could probably just pull up our analytics if somebody wants to pull that up and screen share.
Um, both, both from the perspective of like , we’ve actually been having success on YouTube, so this is, uh, more legitimate. And also just to, just to kind of demo how granular. , the analytics can be, and then we can talk about it too. So for if you’re just listening on audio, it’s not just like, oh, we’re talking about this thing.
But yeah, it does give you the best analytics. And over the years, like. So we, we started out as a brand on Google, like YouTube, or not Google, Google search, right? Um, and that used to show you tons of data and now it shows you absolutely nothing. Um, and so YouTube is very refreshing cuz it does show you like, here’s exactly where people drop off.
And like Jackie was saying earlier, now you can see, you know, how, how far people watch on your videos and all that kind of stuff. So yeah. Does anybody wanna jump in and kind of walk us through what’s going on? . Yeah, I mean, I can show you right here. This is our watch time and so this, you can see sort of like how, well actually no, I lied.
We should go into a specific video. So if you click on the specific video and then watch time, you can see, uh, I think this is as long as the video was. No, I’m running our podcast . Hold on. Am I looking at, um, . I think that one that’s, that’s like views over time. And then average view, view. Mm. Here we go. So we have like a nine-ish minute long video.
And then here’s how, here’s the retention of it. So like halfway point, we’re losing what, maybe almost half, a little bit more than half of the people who started watching it. And then the gray in the background is our typical retention. So like averages between all of the videos that we. that we have on our channel.
And so this is where I can see, I mean start with just getting content out there and then see how long your audience watches it for. And so this is why I say I want my videos that I’m making to be like no longer than five minutes if they don’t have to be. There’s definitely certain topics or screen shares or things that maybe I’m, I’m demoing in our product that will take longer than five minutes cuz it’s gonna take our, cus our audience, our customers longer than five minutes to watch or.
Thing that, that I’m showing off. So if it has to be longer than five minutes, that’s totally okay. But if I’m just giving like an informational video or maybe like an opinion on something or review video, I’m really trying to keep it to five minutes because that’s what our analytics show people stick around for.
I do wonder, I’m not sure if any of you know, but I’m the type of person I skip through videos. If I click on a video and you know, there’s an intro or something, but I’m like, come on, get to the point. I skip, you know, two minutes in. Are they doing what I need to know? Not yet. I skip in. Like I wonder how it accounts for that as well, because we make a lot of like how-to, and you know, tutorial videos.
And I would assume people are also doing. If they already know that part of it, they’re like, okay, I’m gonna go to like the second half. Or maybe they only need like two minutes of this whole video because yeah, they’re coming back to it or something. But if I see started it, yeah, if you pull up one that has more views, like it might be, need to be one of the ones that has like a few thousand views, but I think it’ll actually show you, uh, highlights, like key points in the video that people watch.
So then you have that waterfall graph that shows you. Audience retention over time. So like, how many people are still watching after two minutes, three minutes, four minutes. But I think it’ll also show you spikes, um, like hotspots in the video. Um, and then if we pull up the analytics again, like we can just look at our analytics as well, because we’ve been seeing a huge growth in the last, like two or three months.
But we’ve been on, when did we start publishing YouTube videos? 2020, I think. Yeah. 20, 20. 20. Yeah, we had some before then, but they were way old. . Yeah. So when you’re looking at your analytics, what are the the key metrics that you wanna take a look at to know if your videos are actually performing well and people are liking what content you’re putting?
So retention is definitely one of them. And I also wanna preface this with, I am in a video course with Dan Bennett. It’s called Videos for Entrepreneurs. And we cover a lot of this. So a lot of the new strategy and me like deciding or knowing now, okay, I really need to start scripting some of my content is, is from that course.
Excuse me. So shout out to him. Uh, and that’s also why I’m like, where are these analytics? Because I’m also very new to looking at this. So that’s why I say, just get started because you will be okay. We’re getting really great results from our content. But to be completely honest, I didn’t know much about what I was doing when I started recording and making these videos and uploading them.
So, uh, retention is one and the other one is click through rate, if I could find it. But I don’t think that’s gonna be on a specific, is that on a specific video? . I think if you go back to the main dashboard and then you just click on the, the analytics tab, so like from the main channel and then analytics, and then I think if you go to the content tab and then it gives you just a huge chart.
Um, yeah, if you keep, oh yeah. See key moments for audience retention on this. Um, Above typical intro. So there’s just, there’s so much stuff in here. We could honestly like dig through this analytics overall. Uh, , Jesse or Jackie, like if you guys were to pick like one or two metrics, people should actually focus on, um, or maybe three.
If you wanna get fancy . What, what would be like the top two or three? Because there’s so many things you could do and I’d be like, if someone’s just getting started, this is just like a lot. It looks, it looks overwhelming when you’re first looking at it. And for those of you who are listening, we are screen sharing.
So this is actually up on our YouTube channel if you wanna see exactly what we’re looking at as we’re speaking. I would say just from my standpoint, I’m publishing these videos, the first thing that I look for is once I post it, do the views start to take off? Like is traffic going toward it? Like, I think we posted one a few days ago that Josh made about, um, chat, G p t, prompt Engineering.
and that one instantly took off a bunch of views. And I also noticed just from that video we got like nine new subscribers. So those people that saw that video subscribe and want more content like that. So I think that’s always a good indicator. Yeah. And then, Yeah, I was just gonna add to that. And then retention would be, people are sticking around to watch not just this video, but other videos on your channel.
And so that’s a big learning that I got from this course as well, is within the descriptions of your video or in the video itself, tell the person what they should go watch next. So hey, and that will help you to. Condense the amount of time that you’re putting into each video. Hey, start with this. It’s only gonna take you five minutes.
And then at the end of that video, say, now you wanna go check out this video because it’s gonna help you with the next step. And YouTube loves to see that and will reward you. They’ll, they’ll suggest you to people. Um, that will benefit from your content more often if you’re able to keep people on the platform longer.
Yeah, that’s, that’s Jimmy. Mr. Beast’s big thing. If, if you’re not familiar with him, he has 120 million subscribers on YouTube. Um, and his videos get a hundred million views every single time, which for reference is how many people watch the Super Bowl. So every time he puts up a goofy video of him and his buddies doing something, uh, they get a hundred million views.
Now they do crazy stuff, but, um, his thing is, YouTube’s algorithm is simple. They just want people to keep watching videos. So if you make videos and people keep watching them, they’re gonna show your content and I that I, I buy it. I’m like, yeah, that makes sense. You just need people to stay. So we talked a lot about video, video content, best practices.
What about your actual channel? And Jesse, I know you could speak a lot to this because you’ve been doing all of it, doing the thing. Um, what are, let’s start with, what are the first steps to optimizing your channel? Like what is something you absolutely have to. I’m actually gonna pass this off to Jackie cuz she’s just learned a bunch of new stuff about this one from Yeah.
Also shout out to a video for entrepreneur. Go join that course if you’re really trying to upgrade your channel. Um, I would say so Dan in that course gives a, he calls it his solar system methodology or his framework. And at first I didn’t really know how I was gonna implement that into. A YouTube strategy, but it’s actually pretty simple.
You have your son, which is your north star, your main point, like the thing that you do, the purpose that you exist. For us, it’s we’re trying to make it as easy and simple as possible for anybody to make a lead generation quiz. Then you have these. Planets that, or orbiting around the sun. So we could talk about why you wanna use the quiz, how to get started making a quiz using templates for a quiz.
Case studies or results about from people who are using quizzes, right? Those are all different topics that relate back to this is how to make an any D quiz before you can make a quiz. You have to know that you’re gonna want one, right? Like, why would I even use this thing? So that’s a topic that you can talk about.
Um, and so those planet. This is from Dan’s Frame, Dan’s framework. Those planets essentially could become playlists that you’re putting onto YouTube channel so that people can again, follow step by step in that specific thing that you’re talking about. Then each planet has moons that orbit around the planet.
And those are like even like further down, more subtopics that you talk about within that. So Dan explains this so much better in his course. So go check it out. We’ll, we’ll link this, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll send a link for him if you guys wanna join. But that’s what I would say when you’re thinking about your strategy is everything has to.
I mean, typically you’re gonna wanna give a call to action, right? And so that call to action doesn’t need to be, okay, go sign up for interact. But that call to action should lead them one step closer to eventually creating a quiz, which is what we’re all about. , when we first started, um, when we didn’t know anything about YouTube, we were recommended to try out the tool to buddy Jesse.
What has been your experience using that tool? As we were just kind of figuring out YouTube getting started, you know, basically, yeah, we were babies. How did , yeah, how did that whole process. TubeBuddy has been amazing. I think it’s not only do we get to use it for tags, but I can also look at competitor videos and see the types of analytics that they’re getting, the traffic they’re getting on topics.
And I would say that’s a big thing that we’ve used it for, but it also helps you optimize your titles, your descriptions, um, and so many different things. YouTube itself doesn’t provide, but with TubeBuddy we’re able to do so much more and just get way more analytics and may way more granular. Like even for thumbnails, what’s more clickable?
Like? We’ve started out with just kind of having a template for all of our videos and now we’re getting the point that, okay, that’s not working. We need to make them, you know, more exciting looking. They don’t all have to be the same. So I would definitely recommend Tube many for anyone. not sponsored, but
And it’s like an extension that you put on YouTube. Um, Josh, when you are thinking of your channel and making sure everything is cohesive, how do you figure out, you know, what videos sit at different parts of your actual marketing funnel. and do you choose certain parts? Is it always, I guess, you know, you can answer all of these however you want, but my question is really, you know, we have our bottom of funnel videos where we know people know who we are.
We’re literally teaching them how to create a quiz. But we also have top of funnel videos where we’re talking about sort of tan tangential topics, um, to get them interested in marketing, which will eventually lead them to quiz. . Yeah, that’s a, it’s a good question because I feel like my view on this has evolved over the years where I, I feel like it’s more like strata, like in the rock, you remember like the geology stuff, like layers of the rock.
Um, that was a terrible example cuz it makes way more complicated than it needs to be. We should have said an onion, . Yeah, it’s like an onion. It’s like layers. The thing that’s interesting to me is, . I don’t know that people necessarily see it, like customers don’t see it the same way that that brands do.
Like brands love talking about like these layers of the funnel or whatever. But I feel like when I talk to customers, they’re like, oh, I watched this video, which we would consider to be like super top of funnel, but like they’re already a customer for two years. And then vice versa, like someone who’s not a customer watches a video.
you know how to integrate with Convert Kit. That’s like five minutes deep diving on it because they’re curious about like how that would work. And so, I think, I think it started to get more fluid to where it’s more, and I think this is what Jackie’s doing too with the planets, like it’s more organized around like topic hubs rather than like, oh, this person is already a client, therefore they wanna see this type of content.
Um, which kind of goes back to like that term like user intent or audience intent, which is a huge thing in like the SEO world. Everyone’s trying to figure out intent. And whenever I see that I kind of bristle. Cause I’m like, how, how do you know? Like someone is searching for some term, they might be already your client for five years or they may have never heard of you.
Like, and I think trying to guess is I, I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to guess and. put people in a certain path and now it’s more just like, all right, what are the topics that our, what are the topics that our audience generally cares about? Like we’ve been doing a lot of stuff about AI and chat G B T as a marketing tool and it’s cuz people are all talking about that right now, but six months from now, everybody might be talking about something totally different.
So we need to make sure we’re covering that to be helpful to our audience. So we just stay like in the ethos. This is a very long winded way of saying, I think that it’s more fluid. than I used to think is my perspective has shift. But you said something right now that really caught my ear that I’d love to touch on is knowing who your target market is, understanding what they need, but also staying in tune with what’s happening overall in the market.
So chat, G P T, AI literally blew up. outta nowhere, in my opinion. I know it’s been there, but if you are not paying close enough attention, it literally felt like it just blew up outta nowhere. How do you figure out, okay, this type of tool is huge. How do I relate it to my target market, and how do I convince them that they need it?
I mean, I feel. People already. You want to, you almost wanna, uh, hit your wagon to something that people already are convinced that they need. I, I’m, I am convinced that you cannot convince anybody that they need anything ever. Um, you just don’t think, I don’t think it’s possible. We’ve tried so many times, like it’s the story of interact at the beginning.
Like, you know, it was extremely slow for five, six years because you just could. for the life of you convince somebody that they needed to use a quiz, early gen, like it just wasn’t a thing. Even if you did it for them and put it on their website, they’d be like, eh, I don’t know. . Um, so I don’t think you can convince anybody of anything.
I think it’s about tying what you do to what people are already convinced that they should be doing. And so like chat G B T, everyone’s like, oh, I should be using chat G B T for everything now cuz that’s what the ethos is right now, which, You know, take your own approach to that, whatever. But that’s, that’s kind of the general vibe in the, in the world right now.
Um, so then it’s just about like, okay, well how can you use chat G B T in my world, uh, in my world of my business? And what are the different use cases somebody could employ that have to do with that? And can I talk about that in a way that resonates with how my audience talks because. . You know, there’s so many different flavors of it, right?
Like you listen to anybody talk about any popular topic, there’s a million takes, but your audience probably has a particular take. And if you can connect their take to the current event, then you can always stay at the forefront. Like you can stay on the bubble of like attention. And if you can do that, I think that’s where content really, really thrive.
when you are thinking of something huge like chat, G B T and ai, how do you target the right people on YouTube if you can use it for anything? Like, I think when I first started reading about it, kids were using it to write essays. Mm-hmm. , right? And it’s like, what if I chat G B T and that’s what I get. How do I as a business owner, or from a business perspective, make sure that I’m choosing the.
Whether it’s tags in your YouTube or description or title to make sure it’s clear, like this is for business owners, this is for you if you are selling something, whether it’s a service, whether it’s a product. And this is not for people who are using it to like, I don’t know, write essays or it’s not for people who are um, you know, creating beauty videos.
I wanna target specifically people who are selling beauty product. and things like that. So my, my thought and everybody else can jump in if, or I’m, I’m gonna call out Jackie and see if she can help us, . Okay. So my thought is, I’m terrible at this because. I, I want every piece of content to do everything, and it’s actually like a big mistake that we’ve made to interact in the past because all of our content ends up looking the same and it’s like a huge problem that we’re having to undo.
Like we have so much work left to do. We’ll do an episode on our blog later cuz it’s. A dumpster fire from all the stuff that I put in there that is no longer relevant cuz it’s all the same. Um, but I think that Jackie’s planet system, which came from Dan, who is awesome and you should go take his course and we don’t get paid if you take his course.
Um, but he is great. Uh, he’s been such a good friend to interact. Um, but uh, I think that you should use the planet where the sun is. Use chat GBT to make a quiz. But then Jackie, do you wanna run us through like what would the other planets be like? What would be the planets that would get you to that video if you were like watching something about chat?
G B T? Yeah, so we have three planets, and this is what he encourages. Three planets. You shouldn’t really have more than that. And so for us, it’s the transformation, what a quiz can do for your business. It is the tactics, the strategies that go into creating a quiz, and it’s the tool which you can see how that’s like moving someone down the funnel.
Because when you’re talking about the transformation, it’s like, okay, I’m going on YouTube, or I’m searching on Google, right? How do I get more leads? How do I find people that are searching? Beauty products that I sell. Oh, what is this about? A quiz that I could create all these leads, 40% conversion, right?
That’s a whole bunch of content in itself that we can create why you would want a quiz, um, how a quiz converts, how it works, results that you can get from a quiz. But then you move down into the strategy. Okay, this sounds really great, but how do I actually build it? What does that look like? How much time is this gonna take?
Create, where do I put it? Once I create the quiz, and then once you sort of figure that out, okay, I’m ready to build a quiz, now you can move into the tool. Here’s how you actually use intract, step by step templates that we have, um, interact ai, when that’s available and how to use it. Right? That that’s you, you’ve just become product aware and you probably have purchased at that point because we’re the best quiz software out there.
Um, and you’re ready to use it because you’ve moved through this, this sequence of, um, your, I guess, stages of awareness. Okay. And then I, this is an actual question that I have, so real time, um, how do we categorize our other videos like where we’re talking about, like the one Jesse mentioned that’s getting a lot of traffic around, like prompt engineering, like how do we think about tying that in?
Because that’s like if the three planets you’re talking about are like, I don’t know the planets, but like the ones that are closest to the sun, then that one’s like Pluto. So it’s like still in the solar system, but it’s super far away. This is a problem that I’ve thought about a lot. Like how do you connect Pluto to the sun without it being like, Hey, you’re on Pluto.
You should check out the sun. And they’re like, that’s. 50 million light years away or whatever it is. Yeah. And not even a planet. I’m just kidding. , not haing. It also not a planet , but actually the answer to that question is you have these moons because the moon is orbiting the planet, right? And then you can move closer to the sun, which is like sort of this flow of gravity.
And this is all using this. Um, terminology that Dan has of this solar system framework. But yeah, so with our AI content, I mean, first of all, just get started because we sort of created just little mini dumpsters in YouTube and it was like, okay, all AI videos are gonna go in this playlist, but now it’s like, will you have AI for quizzes?
And you have AI for writing blog posts and for marketing and. For promoting your quiz, maybe specifically. And so now that we’ve created this content to fill, let’s just call them dumpsters, now we can really get strategic with how do you connect Pluto to the sun? How do you connect? Okay, here’s 13 uh, G P T prompts that you can use to multiply your, your marketing.
How do you connect that back to time to go make a quiz? Right? And. The kind of what, Josh, what you said earlier, people are already convinced that they need to create blog posts that they need to promote something that they’re doing for their business, right? So that’s where that thir, those 13 prompts come in handy.
But then once you’ve seen that and there’s a prompt in there for making a quiz, uh, once you’ve seen that, you get a little bit closer. Okay, now how do I get traffic to this blog that I just made? Well, hey, check out this video. Maybe if you put a quiz on your blog or on your website or on socials or, you know, I mean, you don’t have to use quiz, but.
Different things, right? And so slowly they’re like little breadcrumbs that lead back to here’s how, here’s why you would wanna use the quiz. So it all relates because really anything any business owner does is kind of the same in how they’re promoting and showing up online, obviously in their own style and in their own way.
Um, but you only really have one big main idea or one solid. I don’t even wanna say call to action cuz you could have hundreds of call to actions, but at different times on the, in these different stages that people are at. I think it just relates back to like remembering the core of what you do Totally.
And, and your brand and who you are as a business. You don’t wanna get on YouTube and just, you know, start. , it has to, like you said, like it has to relate to like the core of what you do, because that’s what you want at the, ultimately, you want people to buy from you. You want them to end up on your website and make a purchase, or you want them to end up on your email list and make a purchase.
So keep in mind that you want your videos to have something to do with what you do, who you serve, who your customers are, because you don’t want someone there who’s, who’s not gonna buy from you. And that’s where if you think of work backwards, think of your big main idea that sun. What are the three main topics, these planets that you’re, they’re themes rather that you’re talking about.
And then what are these moons or subtopics under these themes? And that way, no matter what you create, it’s always going to like be able to link back to that main. I think it’s so interesting that like we’re talking about these like more overarching topics as moons cuz moons are smaller. Right. But I feel like these overarching topics are so much broader.
Like that’s when we’re trying to reach type of funnel, like larger audience, you know, maybe not super targeted, but we’re working it down to the specific people with our giant planets in comparison to our moons. Yeah. We’re getting there for sure. The one thing that I wanna point out for those who are listening is we, like I said, had YouTube videos way before we really got into it in 2020.
And the quality and the content and you know how we run it has changed so much over time. So, just alluding back to Jackie saying like, just get started. Feel it out. See what you enjoy doing, but also see what your customers like to see and what they like to watch, and then sort of keep going from there.
It’s not always gonna be, you know, you send out your first video and it’s gonna get Mr. Beast style views, but over time you will get there. And also don’t be discouraged if you post something on YouTube and you don’t get a huge spike in views. Because remember, your content that lives on YouTube is around forever.
People will always be able to find it. And so maybe in a year from now you have a video that you’ve created way back when that suddenly takes off. So just keep posting because keep creating because, just because if you do something, I mean just like anywhere, right? Like even if you do so, One time it might not take off, but practice over time will help you.
And then also specifically on YouTube, that video that you made years ago could come in handy in the future. And there you go. Because wasn’t it just right before this? Who told me, Jess, um, it took Mr. Beast seven years of creating content before he hit a thousand views. Or was Jesse, you were just telling you this?
Yeah, it’s like not me, . I did not know that info , but I will pretend like I know that info wasn’t that the, it took him seven years for one video to hit a thousand views. I think that’s what I heard in one of his YouTube videos. Someone was interviewing him. He was just saying he. Like take off for a long time, but he just kept doing it, kept doing it, and then one took off and went from there.
Wow. Love it. Well, guys, we’re two years in. We have five more years to go. . Yeah, we got it. We got it. . Um, thanks for hopping on with us today to have this conversation. And for those who are listening, we will have some links for you in the show notes. Um, definitely check out our YouTube, get a feel for it.
Reach out if you have any questions, and we’ll see you next time