Host 0:04
Welcome to The Blogger Genius Podcast brought to you by MiloTree. Here’s your host, Jillian Leslie.
Jillian Leslie 0:11
Hello everybody. Welcome back to The Blogger Genius. Before we get started, I wanted to make an announcement. What I am doing now, Monday afternoon, 3pm eastern time, I’m going into our Facebook group to have a live discussion.
Our Facebook group is called The MiloTree Mastermind group. Please head over to Facebook. Please join the group, MiloTree Mastermind group. We’re going to have a discussion about this last week’s episode.
I think this is super valuable because we can all share what our biggest takeaways are. I want to share what I have learned from the episode, what I am taking into my business. This way, we can all grow, learn together. So please meet me over there. Mondays, three o’clock, Facebook Live. Be there.
Okay. Today’s guest is Nate Woodbury. He is founder of Be The Hero Studios. We are talking all things YouTube today. What he does is he helps business owners create YouTube channels, not to be YouTubers, but to sell their products to grow their businesses.
Remember, YouTube is the second largest search engine. So, it’s worth having a presence there. And I’m going to be building up our YouTube channel as well.
He’s got some really great strategies and tactics. I think you are going to get a tremendous–. Even if you’re not on YouTube, even if you’re completely terrified of YouTube, listen to this episode. Okay. So, without further delay, here is my episode with Nate Woodbury.
Nate, welcome to the show. I’m excited to have you.
Nate Woodbury 2:00
Thank you. Very glad to be here.
Jillian Leslie 2:02
Okay. So, I just read that you have 13 YouTube channels. Can you explain what that even means?
Nate Woodbury 2:13
Yeah. I have a built a YouTube production company. Eight of the 13 are actually daily YouTube channels. So, that’s a lot of work but I’m surrounded by a great team. I’ve got 14 full time assistants in the Philippines.
Jillian Leslie 2:28
Okay.
Nate Woodbury 2:29
They do a lot of editing. I’ve got a couple of filming assistants here in Utah. So, we definitely have a lot of work that we do.
Jillian Leslie 2:35
Wow. Okay, let’s back up. Can you share your entrepreneurial journey and how you got into YouTube, and when you got into YouTube?
Nate Woodbury 2:45
Yeah. I’ve had my company for nine and a half years.
Jillian Leslie 2:48
Okay. So you were early.
Nate Woodbury 2:51
Yeah. I really love entrepreneurship. I’m passionate about creating things, and efficiency, and finding things that work. I started actually with web design. I quickly found great success in selling a custom website design service.
All my clients were happy with my service but I wasn’t. All right? I wasn’t. I wasn’t happy because I didn’t see that my clients were really using their websites very effectively.
Jillian Leslie 3:25
What kind of clients were these?
Nate Woodbury 3:27
Any type of small business owner. I help anybody from a dentist, to a landscaper, to a restaurant owner. Just all different types. We create a beautiful websites, but they weren’t really getting a lot of traffic.
And so, then I created an SEO service, search and optimization service so they would start to get traffic and that work. But then I was discouraged again because while they were getting traffic, they weren’t really selling anything on their websites. It was just an online brochure.
I’m like, “Well, do you have a sales funnel? Do you have promo videos? What are you doing to do something with this traffic I’m sending your way?” Well, I discovered something along the way. That the SEO service that I created and that was working, we would create a YouTube video that would answer a how to question.
So we put that video on that landing page or that the SEO page. We would transcribe the video, put all the text on the page. We would then do article marketing and have that link back to the page. We create infographics and put that on Pinterest to have that link back to the page. It was a lot of work. It did get the page ranked on the front of Google.
The crazy thing that I then noticed was that the YouTube video itself was getting 50 times more views and traffic on YouTube than our SEO page that was ranked on the top of Google.
Jillian Leslie 4:58
Okay.
Nate Woodbury 4:59
I just love results. I love efficiency. So I decided, you know what, I’m going to simplify things here. I’m just going to focus on this YouTube video strategy and see what’s here. And really just started focusing on YouTube and getting traffic there and how much easier it was that you could answer people’s questions and build a following there and develop leads.
Jillian Leslie 5:24
Okay. So we’re going to get into that. So first question is, can you today, like start a YouTube channel and get to where you are? Or did you get in at a time when it was possible to do this? Is it still possible?
Nate Woodbury 5:24
I went from having a full custom website design team to now I just use things like Click Funnels to build my websites and landing pages, but now I get tons of traffic on YouTube. That discovery was around six or seven years ago. It just went from proving that in small scale with individual videos to now having very successful channels on YouTube that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.
Yeah, it’s definitely still possible. And there’s new channels that I’m launching even today. What has changed is in the beginning, you could just create videos and you could become popular. Just by creating videos. Not really having any strategy.
Nowadays, you do have to be strategic. But a lot of the strategy is really a lot of the same strategy that comes with entrepreneurship. To be successful in entrepreneurship, you’ve really got to have stick-to-itiveness, that tenacity.
And same thing on YouTube is as long as you’ve got those attributes and you’re creating quality content, putting value out there, basically, then it’s definitely a great platform to build on.
Jillian Leslie 7:03
Can we talk about your 13 channels? You said you have eight that are your own and you’re putting content out every day? Can you share what are those eight channels and what kind of content are you creating every day?
Nate Woodbury 7:18
Right. So, one of them is with a friend and partner of mine, Kris Krohn. He teaches real estate investing. And so, that channel is actually seven videos a week. I call daily five or more but this one’s seven. It’s how to invest in real estate, how to improve your credit, how to have a money mindset, and all of those type topics so that young investors can learn those ropes.
Other ones are life coaches. Paul Jenkins, he’s a positivity psychologist switched to a coach. He’s still a licensed psychologist but just teaches positivity, teaches parenting, teaches relationships. We’ve got several that are life coaches and teach a lot of different things about goal setting or just achieving goals.
We’ve got several that are talking about business, and marketing, and branding. My own channel that I am the star of is I teach a lot about YouTube. I teach how to get results on YouTube, and I like to talk a lot about entrepreneurship and influence.
Jillian Leslie 8:25
What’s your channel called?
Nate Woodbury 8:27
It goes by my name, Nate Woodbury.
Jillian Leslie 8:29
Okay. Nate Woodbury. Okay. So, you are creating then a video every day?
Nate Woodbury 8:36
Yeah. On most of the channels, it’s five or more episodes per week.
Jillian Leslie 8:39
Okay. And are you batching these? Are you spending one day just–?
Nate Woodbury 8:43
Definitely.
Jillian Leslie 8:44
Okay. Let’s start at the beginning. How do you come up with, okay, so this week, you’re going to make five videos for let’s say, your own channel? How do you come up with the content?
Nate Woodbury 8:57
Yes. So that question leads into the big secret that I love to share. And that’s one of the biggest takeaways that anyone can get if they want to have success on YouTube, is to do keyword research before filming.
Jillian Leslie 9:11
Oh. Yes. I believe doing keyword research before doing anything is the best strategy.
Nate Woodbury 9:18
Yeah. Because a lot of people will come to me and say, “Hey, Nate. I’ve got thousands of videos.” That’s crazy amount to have. They’ve got thousands of videos. “And I don’t know what to do with it.” Or, it’s already on YouTube and it’s not getting any traffic. “Can you help me SEO my channel or my videos?”
It’s really hard to do that. I’ll give you an example. So, my friend Katie, she’s an interior designer. Let’s say she would have already filmed some videos on living room design. But then we do keyword research and I’ve got some real titles in my mind from when we’ve done this. We’ve found real specific questions such as, “How to design a living room with a corner fireplace.”
So if we now know, “Oh, that’s a great question. That should be the title of our video.” We can’t just go back and take one of her living room design videos and title it how to design a living room with a corner fireplace because that’s not what she talked about in the video.
So, the goal is to really go deep and define all these specific questions and then film our videos. And so, one of the questions you asked earlier that we now have an answer for is how do you find all the ideas for for videos? You do keyword research like that.
With Katie, we found another one. “How to design a living room with large windows.” or “How to design a living room with high ceilings.” or “How to design a kitchen-living room combo.”
Jillian Leslie 10:46
Now, tell me how are you discovering that these are good keyword phrases? What are you doing?
Nate Woodbury 10:54
Yeah. There is a tool that I discovered a year ago. Prior to a year ago, I use a whole bunch of tools and it was a very painful process. Now it’s easy.
The company is called semrush.com. They’ve been around a long time. Well, they created a tool that a year ago was in beta that they showed me called the Keyword Magic Tool.
Jillian Leslie 11:17
Yeah. It’s on Sem Rush, right?
Nate Woodbury 11:20
Yes, they can find it in Sem Rush.
Jillian Leslie 11:21
And if you go, it says keyword magic tool. Okay?
Nate Woodbury 11:25
Right.
Jillian Leslie 11:25
So for people who don’t know, Sem Rush is this really powerful SEO kind of dashboard where you can see where your ranking for things ,where you can explore, put in keywords, and see how they are doing, you know how much traffic a keyword gets.
The one thing about Sem Rush is it’s expensive. It’s like 100 bucks a month. So, if you’re serious about SEO, like we pay for it, even though it’s one of our most expensive tools, but it’s so powerful, so I highly recommend it. The information on Sem Rush is kind of available in the world. But Sem Rush just puts it all together really nicely.
Nate Woodbury 12:16
Yeah, definitely. For somebody who’s really serious about even doing a daily YouTube channel, you could get away with using that tool for just one month, and then cancel your subscription. That’s actually what I tell a lot of people. They have a free trial but the free trial is… Even though they say 14 days, you can only do like 10 searches. That runs out pretty quickly.
But if you pay the hundred bucks for the month, and you just use it for several days digging and finding all these real specific phrases. The best way that I found is you go to that keyword magic tool, you type in, we’ll just use that example, living room design. The results come up, they look pretty similar to what you see on any other tool, but there’s a button that you can hit that says questions.
Jillian Leslie 13:03
I haven’t explored this.
Nate Woodbury 13:03
So when you hit that button it just makes it so simple. It filters out all the non questions. But it’s also powerful to see how many questions are in this tool. And then, here’s another tip. You don’t need a huge search volume to get results. I typically recommend starting with phrases that have between 10 and 100 searches per month.
Jillian Leslie 13:29
Oh, wow. Really? Okay.
Nate Woodbury 13:32
And here’s why. So I think the phrase “how to design a living room with a corner fireplace”, I think that phrase on the SEMrush tool gets searched 50 times per month. If I post that video, only 50 or so people are going to be searching for that and find my video but they’re going to watch the video all the way to the end because I’m talking exactly to what they searched for.
And the YouTube algorithm is going to see, “Oh, wow. This is a high performing video. People are watching it all the way through the end. Let’s find more people like these 50 that we can suggest this video to.” So YouTube will start to promote your video for you on top of that search race.
Jillian Leslie 14:18
Got it. Okay. So if you hit a sweet spot, that people really want that content, then that tells the YouTube algorithm, “Oh, this guy or this woman is providing some real value. People like it. And then we should find other people interested in interior design, let’s say, and show it to them.”
Nate Woodbury 14:38
Yep. Yeah, that’s right. So it’s actually easier if you go more specific.
Jillian Leslie 14:42
Interesting. So don’t do living room design.
Nate Woodbury 14:46
Right. In fact, with the real estate channel, we’ve never made a video about real estate investing. It’s always been how to invest in real estate with no money, or how to invest in real estate with bad credit. Just something real specific each time.
The first 700 videos we made on that channel, we’re all following that exact strategy. Now we have enough momentum there. We can make a video about anything and it will get results. But the keyword research before filming strategy, these long phrases, low search volume, it’s a perfect strategy for laying the foundation for YouTube channel.
Jillian Leslie 15:22
I love that. So it is the long tail in terms of search results. Now, will you get traction on Google as well?
Nate Woodbury 15:32
Yep. Yep, definitely.
Jillian Leslie 15:33
So people on Google searching for, you know, corner fireplace, then your video is going to show up?
Nate Woodbury 15:40
Yeah. Oftentimes, it depends on what people are searching for. But the Google algorithm often knows, “Oh, is this a tutorial type of topic or a lesson? Maybe we should suggest a video there.” And Google owning YouTube has access to all of that. So, yeah.
Jillian Leslie 15:56
Right. By the way, this is an awesome strategy if you’re a blogger looking for blog content to write.
Nate Woodbury 16:04
Oh, yeah. It will be fantastic.
Jillian Leslie 16:05
And I always say, you know, they say, of course, the riches are in the niches. But it is about, I think, finding the long tail search results. We have a site called Catch My Party. People upload photos of their birthday parties, baby showers, bridal showers, and stuff like that. We get millions of page views a month, but we get it through the long tail.
We’re not going to win on princess parties, right? You type in princess party into Google and guess what, you know, Party City is going to show up, and Target’s going to show up, and all of those places where you can buy princess stuff. However, if you do like a rainbow unicorn, Cinderella, Princess party, or princess Kinsey Mira, we will show up.
There are enough people out there in the world searching for these random things. And guess what, we end up getting traffic. And so, it’s funny because when you look at our Google A nalytics, it’s all those random searches with just like 10 hits or so.
So it’s not like you can go, “Oh, these are the top five search terms that will send traffic to our site.” It’s thousands of search terms that send traffic to our site. We are big believers in the long tail.
Nate Woodbury 17:31
Now, what’s what’s also cool is YouTube is a wonderful promotion engine. I’m not talking about you can pay YouTube to promote your own videos. But YouTube will find videos that perform well with advertisers. So they’ll find videos that will make them money and they promote them heavily. And so it becomes a huge tool.
My biggest video is over five million views and it did not go viral. We knew that it was on a topic that YouTube liked and YouTube would promote. I’ll just tell you. It was “how to invest in your 20s.” So that video we saw had 50,000 or 60,000 views.
And you can look in the YouTube Analytics, they provide so much wonderful data. We saw, “Okay. This video, the reason it’s getting more views is because YouTube has been suggesting it to others. Let’s create another one with the same title, but let’s make the video even better and make it longer.” And so we did that. And definitely, YouTube really grabbed the hold of that and starts to promote it.
Now, here’s the crazy thing. Because YouTube has this partner program which means they’ll pay me 55% of the ad revenue they get because I’m creating good videos that they can pair ads with. So not only did they take this video that we created, promote it to now over five million people, the ad revenue that’s come from that, I’ve personally received between $150,000 and $200,000 just on the ads for that one video.
But then the leads that it’s brought in for Kris for his real estate investing courses. He’s made over $2 million in sales just from that one video.
Jillian Leslie 19:26
Wow. Okay. But I would say that doesn’t feel very long tail. That seems like a pretty big keyword and yet you guys were able to rise above the noise.
Nate Woodbury 19:41
Yeah. Well, I’ll also explain that while we’ve never made a video for real estate investing, we made so many longtail phrases that now if you type in real estate investing, we do rank there now.
On my strategy, I use a tree analogy. So you’ve got a broad trunk that goes up to branches that goes up to leaves. I teach, the leaves are these really specific long tail phrases. Just make leaf after leaf after leaf. But eventually, you’ll dominate for the whole tree.
And so, if you type real estate investing, you’ll see Robert Kiyosaki, you’ll see Grant Cardone, and you’ll see Kris Krohn. He’s now ranking up there with the big boys.
Jillian Leslie 20:22
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Okay. So now, tell me this, which is how do I create good videos on YouTube that people want to watch? I’ve heard that videos need to be at least 10 minutes. They need to have a catchy beginning. They need to have a good thumbnail. What are the other ways that you are optimizing your videos?
Nate Woodbury 22:52
Yeah, so there’s a lot of different things that we could talk about. One that’s the most important is that you have something valuable to give. If you’re an expert, you have expertise to share. People all around the world are searching for your expertise, but they don’t know that you exist right now. There’s kind of a problem with that obscurity.
So that’s why I started with keyword research and suggest we go there because then you’re finding out the questions that people are asking and making it so that they can find you. That’s the biggest way. And then, don’t stress about production quality.
When I say create really good content with high value, you can pull out your phone and film a selfie video. Another direction we could go is there are three different topics that are–. Let me ask you a question. And you can guess what you think most people respond with. What what would you say is the most important, the camera, the lighting, or the audio? What do you think most people respond with?
Jillian Leslie 24:00
Lighting.
Nate Woodbury 24:02
Okay, that’s the answer that is correct. Most people actually think that the most important thing is to have a high quality camera.
Jillian Leslie 24:09
Okay. Yeah. And so, it’s all about the lighting.
Nate Woodbury 24:13
Yeah, it really is. The simplest way to do it is if you have a window, daylight outside, you just face the window so the light’s coming in on your face.
Jillian Leslie 24:25
I’m a woman. So I know this.
Nate Woodbury 24:28
There you go.
Jillian Leslie 24:29
I think all women who’ve done any video know that it’s all about the lighting. And it’s all about the window.
Nate Woodbury 24:37
Yeah, you can film a selfie video just facing a window. If you’re holding the phone camera in your hand, it’s close enough that the audio is going to be great. And so, you can make videos like that. But if you’re really delivering high quality content, you’re sharing some really helpful advice, you’re answering the question in a way that’s really unique and is centered around your expertise, that really is going to deliver the results that you want.
People are going to love it. They’re going to watch it all the way through to the end. There’s plenty of other things that we could talk about thumbnails, about retention rate. Maybe I’ll talk about both of those.
Jillian Leslie 25:16
First of all, how long does your video need to be?
Nate Woodbury 25:20
Yeah, YouTube, you said 10 minutes. That’s right. I shoot for 10 to 12 minutes on average. The longer the watch time the better. If you can keep people watching for a long time, then YouTube will promote that video more. You just don’t want your video to be too long. You don’t want to run out of things to say and just keep it going because that will not get you any benefit at all.
Let me give you another topic. How to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics. That’s a topic that we researched for a friend of mine many years ago. I’ve used that as an example. It’s a great remedy, by the way. So, if I wanted to keep people engaged for 10 minutes, here’s how I might introduce that video.
So, “Welcome back. In this video, we’re going to talk about how to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics.” And I’ll start out just really talking about why not antibiotics in the first place. And then, I’ll share with you the three different ingredients. There are three ingredients that you’ll have in your kitchen.
I’ll go over the first one. Spend some time there. And then, I’ll explain the virtues of that one and the other three. And then, I’ll explain how you make this and kind of how you need to take it. How many doses? What’s the length of time? So, you’ll have a good understanding.
That wasn’t perfect, but I let people know what the video was going to be about. And then, I kind of summarize it step by step of what I’m going to be talking about. When you do that at the beginning of your video, it lets them know, “Okay. This is valuable, and why I need to watch all the way to the end.”
Jillian Leslie 26:55
I love that. It’s kind of like when you learn essay writing when you’re in fifth grade. They say, “Okay. In the first paragraph, you have your topic sentence.” And then you say, “Here’s what I’m going to talk about.” And then you talk about it. And then at the end, you say, “And here’s what I talked about.” You know, “Here are the three things I’m going to talk about.” Then you talk about each one. And then, at the end you go, “And that’s what I did.” I talk about these three things. So it’s kind of like that.
Nate Woodbury 27:20
It’s exactly like that. The only difference I found, and this is just an interesting side note. People don’t like you to summarize what you talked about at the end.
Jillian Leslie 27:30
Okay, that’s good to know. Okay.
Nate Woodbury 27:32
That’s just on YouTube. They end up leaving. So at the end, what you do is you say, “Alright. So now that you know how to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics, I want you to watch another video that will teach you how to get rid of an ear infection. So here’s the link to that video.”
Jillian Leslie 27:45
Like a tease to something.
Nate Woodbury 27:46
Yes.
Jillian Leslie 27:47
Okay. Okay. I get that. I love this. So it’s not about being funny, or being big, or loud. It’s really just about imparting information that’s useful.
Nate Woodbury 28:04
Definitely. And letting your personality shine through is definitely going to help. You don’t want to be somebody else. That’s something that I’ve learned. I mean, Kris Krohn, who’s the star of the real estate channel, he is very dynamic. When he speaks on stage, he’s got huge movements, he is really loud.
When I started speaking on stage, at first I was really struggling because I wanted to be on stage like Kris but I’m kind of a chill guy. I’ve just learned to kind of embrace who I am. And when I’ve spoken on stages, in the last year, it’s been very well received. I’m like, “Okay, good, I can be me.” It feels a lot better that way.
Same thing when you’re kind of creating your own channel. You want the parts of your personality that your close friends see, that your family sees. You want that to come out on video because people will really be able to get to know you.
But again, you don’t you don’t need to act, pretend, or kind of put yourself in. “I’ve got to do this because I’m on camera.” Sure, increase your increase your energy a bit but you don’t have to stress about that.
Jillian Leslie 29:11
Okay. So, can we talk about monetization? Because one thing that I keep hearing is, yes, you can make money with ads. I think you need, first of all, like 1000 subscribers. There are certain metrics you need to hit in order to start monetizing. But, you’re not going to get rich with Google AdSense.
That it is a nice addition to your income but unless you are one of these gaming streamers, you’re not going to hit those 5 million subscribers. Tell me your thoughts about that. And then, can we talk about other ways you’re monetizing?
Nate Woodbury 29:55
Yeah, definitely. And I agree with that. All the clients and channels that I’ve produced, or for people who already have businesses, and so they’re not making commercials to put on YouTube but their goal is to get people to come from YouTube eventually to come to their website and to buy their their services.
And so we talked about how the advertising revenue eventually can be significant, but just accounted as icing on the cake. It took me many years to get to a point where I had five figures monthly from AdSense revenue. Five figures, that become significant. That can become a livelihood. But when you recognize you need millions of views to make thousands of dollars, it put things into perspective. If you’re only getting thousands of views, then you’re only making pennies.
Jillian Leslie 30:46
Okay. So then, what do you say? Let’s say I’m a blogger. Let’s say I’m a food blogger. Let’s say I sell a recipe book. I have a cookbook, or I promote other people’s cookbooks, or I do affiliate sales and sell my favorite baking pan, those kinds of things. How would you coach that person in terms of creating a YouTube channel and then monetizing it?
Nate Woodbury 31:15
It would be in a very similar way to how you’ve directed traffic to your blog and how you’ve monetized that there. With just some advantages that YouTube has an amazing search engine, and so you’re going to be getting a lot more search traffic.
Most people, when they refer to the partner program, they think about the ad revenue, but I think about the partner program for a bigger benefit. And that’s if I make a video that will make YouTube money, they will promote my video. So I really see that the second benefit there, as YouTube is a big promotion engine.
You have a massive platform that that will promote you and pay you for that promotion. And so, how to monetize that. If you’ve got the patience to wait three or four years, then you can expect to have the ad revenue come and be significant. But, what are you going to do in the first two or three years to get to that point?
But then, at the end of many of my videos I’m very strategic about it. But at the end of the video, there’s always a call to action. Oftentimes, that call to action will be. “Hey, if you found value in this video, I’d like to give you a copy of my book for free. Click the link below.”
That will get them into my sales funnel. They’ll be on my email list. They’ll be on my sales funnel, where I can sell a course or have their contact information and call them.
Jillian Leslie 32:52
So, you use it as lead gen.
Nate Woodbury 32:55
Totally.
Jillian Leslie 32:55
Now, here’s the thing. I’ve heard though, that YouTube gets mad when you lead people off of YouTube.
Nate Woodbury 33:03
Okay, that is correct. But, once you have that thousand subscribers and you can join the YouTube Partner Program, you can get your own website approved. Once it’s approved, they say that the penalty for them clicking a link and leaving YouTube, that penalty is dramatically reduced.
And so, it’s definitely worth it. You have to think, “Okay. If I’m going to link from YouTube to Facebook, is that worth the penalty?” If I’m going to link from YouTube to my own website and get something like an email address, it’s totally worth that penalty.
We’ve done different approaches for every single video we link to our website. We’ve still seen growth. We’ve still seen success. But then, what we’ve seen better results with is if on some of our videos, we say, “All right. Now that you’ve understand how to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics, you definitely need to check out the earache video. Watch that.”
At the end of the earache video, we then link to our website. I’m just making up an example but some of the videos will then just be to promote other YouTube videos. And it can be videos on other people’s channels. Just by keeping people on YouTube, YouTube will recognize that, “Oh, this video increases session watch time.” And so, they’ll continue to promote it.
If we find a video that leads to a lot of new leads coming in for a sales funnel, then we’ll create other videos that will give value and link back to that high performing video.
Jillian Leslie 34:44
Got it. Okay. Let’s say you make 10 videos, how many of them are going to link to your website? And how many of them are going to link to your other videos? And how many of them would you link to somebody else’s video?
Nate Woodbury 34:57
I would break it into thirds. Have a third of them going to your own website, a third that will link to your videos and others. And the third category I’ll say would be to encourage social engagement. You could have the main call to action be to leave a comment below or there’s actually a feature where you can have a poll right within your video.
So, just some type of engagement where you’re really encouraging them to like, or to comment, or to answer a question in the poll, or subscribe, definitely.
Jillian Leslie 35:29
Okay. Can you talk playlists and the importance of playlist?
Nate Woodbury 35:34
Yeah. Playlist are important according to what I’ve been taught. I personally don’t have any good playlist strategies.
Jillian Leslie 35:42
Interesting. Do you use them now? Are you creating playlists?
Nate Woodbury 35:45
I do. A couple of instances where I’ve recently started using them is when in a video when the call to action is to link to another video, I have linked to a playlist where I’ve referenced a before and an after video, just because it’s a strategy that I’m teaching. And I think that that kind of use of a playslist make sense.
Jillian Leslie 36:05
Wait. Can we go back? Can you explain that before and after? What do you mean?
Nate Woodbury 36:09
Yeah. So, I found a video that was performing well. It got 50,000 to 60,000 views. And so, I decided to create a sequel of it. And that’s the video that I mentioned earlier that now has over 5 million views.
And so, I was talking about this strategy. And so, I said, “Okay. Now, I recommend that you go and watch both of these videos. You see what worked before, and you’ll see how we can build upon it.” And I created a playlist with those two videos.
Jillian Leslie 36:35
Okay. Okay, I get it. Now, here’s the thing. The conventional wisdom is one video a week. And you are making five to seven videos a week. Do you feel like YouTube is this content monster that wants to just continually be fed? Do you think you can make one video a week? Or do you feel like no, to really optimize it, you need to be making five to seven?
Nate Woodbury 37:01
All right. So, you can succeed at a gradual pace with one video per week. That’s where I started even with the Kris Krohn real estate channel. Two years, we just did one episode a week at most. But then I learned what was happening when channels were posting five or more videos a week.
There’s something in the algorithm that they really liked consistency. They like people coming back every single day. So we decided to put it to the test and see, “Okay. Well, we’re supposed to experience a big spike of exponential growth in four months if we go daily.” So we did.
And to the day on that four month mark, we had our first spike. We are averaging, you know, I’m trying to remember the numbers the best I can but somewhere around 500 views a day channel wide. Then, we had a spike and we went up to 10,000 views in a day. The spike settled down, but it was much higher than our average before. And then, we had another spike up to like 35,000 views in a day.
And then, since that first test, I’ve seen it channel after channel after channel. And so, there’s four ingredients that will ensure that you get a spike like that after four months. The first ingredient is you’ve got to do keyword research before filming and use that strategy.
The second ingredient is the length of the videos, which we’ve talked about between 10 and 12 minutes is the average that I shoot for. The third ingredient is you’ve got to have your average view duration be about 45%.
Jillian Leslie 38:35
Wait. Your average what?
Nate Woodbury 38:37
Your average view duration.
Jillian Leslie 38:38
View duration. Okay.
Nate Woodbury 38:39
Or retention rate.
Jillian Leslie 38:40
So that people will stick through. So, if your video is 10 minutes, 40% are watching all 10 minutes.
Nate Woodbury 38:48
Yeah. Or another way of looking at it is, on average, how much of the video are people watching? Are they leaving after one minute? Or, on average, are they watching 50% of it or whatnot? The higher that stat the better. You need at least 45%.
Jillian Leslie 39:07
Okay. And then, what’s the fourth?
Nate Woodbury 39:10
The fourth one is just be patient for four months.
Jillian Leslie 39:12
That’s hard. I bet that’s hard because you’re like, “Why isn’t this working?” That is one of the hardest things, I think about entrepreneurship, is knowing when to be patient and knowing when to pull up.
Nate Woodbury 39:26
Yeah. Well, especially when you’re running that hard. Putting out five episodes a week and you’re waiting for four months thinking, “Man, I sure hope this happens.”
Jillian Leslie 39:35
Right. Okay. But in your experiments, it does work.
Nate Woodbury 39:41
Yeah, it’s worked every time. I’ll be open that there’s a couple channels where one of the ingredients was missing, and it didn’t work. The main ingredient that was missing was the retention rate or the average view duration, where we’d look in 20% or 15%. People were just not really in.
Without saying a name to embarrass anybody, one individual that I worked with, we were still getting gradual growth, we’re still getting search traffic. We stopped filming this channel last December and that channel still continue to grow. It’s up to 10,000 subscribers now without posting an additional video.
But in her case, somebody else was investing in her and paying for the production of her channel. She didn’t really know what the end goal was. And so, she didn’t really have any direction. She was just creating topics that she wasn’t even passionate about.
Yeah. And so, there are some things that we could definitely work to improve there. Probably a few lessons that we could learn – if you’re going to be making this many videos, you want it to be about something that you are excited about that you can stick for the long term.
Jillian Leslie 41:01
Definitely. And your audience can smell it.
Nate Woodbury 41:03
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like how you worded that. Exactly.
Jillian Leslie 41:06
Okay. Now, here’s a question. If you’re releasing five videos a week, I’m assuming that’s Monday through Friday?
Nate Woodbury 41:14
A lot of them are, yeah. But the interesting thing is, we find that Monday is actually a slower day. So some of our channels will do Tuesday through Saturday or some other rotation.
Jillian Leslie 41:25
And are you releasing them at the exact same time everyday?
Nate Woodbury 41:29
Yeah, YouTube has a scheduler. You can just go in there and set that date and time. We will film 20 episodes in a day. So when you asked if we batch, we definitely batch. And so, what we’ll film in bulk like that, and then we get to work on the editing.
Within YouTube we’ll get everything ready, the thumbnails, and schedule that in there so then it will just come out each morning. Typically, eight and nine in the morning, somewhere in that range. But if your audience is on another side of the planet, then you got to worry about different time zones. It can kind of be confusing. I don’t stress too much about the time.
Jillian Leslie 42:06
Do you need a thumbnail that has like a crazy image of you going, “Ah.” How important is the text on your thumbnail? And then, I’ve heard that you don’t just want to be like, “Hey, here’s me smiling.” but like, “Here’s me reacting to something.”
Nate Woodbury 42:23
Okay. Thumbnails have become more and more important. They’re super important because people have a whole menu of videos to choose from.
Jillian Leslie 42:33
Right. Why would they pick this one?
Nate Woodbury 42:35
Yeah, what’s going to make your video stand out? And so, when you mentioned, should I put a crazy picture? I mean maybe if that crazy picture really creates curiosity about the topic. If I made a video, how to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics, and it’s me just sitting there, normal, maybe that would be enough. But maybe if I’m holding up some unique ingredient, like one of the ingredients is raw honey, so I could be holding up raw honey, and kind of have my eyebrows up. Maybe that would help.
It’s hard to guess. Sometimes we make subtle changes that make a big difference that we would have never guessed. That’s all you do in the beginning. It’s just guess. Like, “Okay. What do I think will get people’s attention and create curiosity?” And then you can actually do an AB test.
There’s a software called TubeBuddy.
Jillian Leslie 43:29
Okay. Spell that.
Nate Woodbury 43:30
T-U-B-E. So like YouTube, TubeBuddy. They have an AB split test. Well, they also have SEO tools and stuff that I don’t use. I use the SEMrush side of things for SEO keyword research. But I do like their AB split test tool.
As a side note, last spring, YouTube said, “Hey, this summer, we’re going to come out with an internal AB split test tool.” Well, it’s now September, we still don’t have that.
Jillian Leslie 43:59
Okay. TubeBuddy is happy. Going, “Oh, they didn’t kill our business yet.”
Nate Woodbury 44:03
Right. Basically, you can design two different thumbnails. I recommend just changing one variable at a time from it and say, okay, if all I’m doing is changing the words but the picture, the colors, all are the same, then when you see, “Oh, there’s an improvement. Oh, cool.”
And one thing that I’ve found consistently is that you don’t need to repeat the title in your thumbnail or tell people what the video is about. The text can be things like, you’ll never guess. Just something like that that creates curiosity. If the title is how to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics, that’s already said. They’ll see that every time with the thumbnail. But in the thumbnail, it’s like,”Tthis works amazing.” You know, stuff like that.
Jillian Leslie 44:49
Yup. So that kind of text is where you want to create that question for the audience that they have to click to find the answer.
Nate Woodbury 44:58
Right.
Jillian Leslie 44:58
So you’re not just writing how to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics in the thumbnail?
Nate Woodbury 45:04
Yep. One other example is with Kris Krohn, how to invest in your 20s. The first thumbnail did perform well, it was him sitting on his pool table. Had a red felt. He didn’t want to show his car but when we did the remake of that video, I’m like, “You know what Kris, we’re going to use your car.” He has this BMW I8 with a wing door. And yeah, that thumbnail performs really well.
Jillian Leslie 45:29
And what was the text you put in that thumbnail? Do you remember?
Nate Woodbury 45:33
I retired at 26.
Jillian Leslie 45:35
Oh, good. Okay, I get it. I get it. Yeah. So, okay. I don’t want to use the word clickbait but you do want to be thinking more in that direction?
Nate Woodbury 45:47
Right. Yeah, the word clickbait can have good or bad connotations. What bait really means is you don’t want your video to be a bait and switch. So if they click on the thumbnail and expecting to see one thing, but that’s not what they get, then they’re gonna be disappointed.
Jillian Leslie 46:02
So you want to deliver?
Nate Woodbury 46:04
Yeah, you definitely want to deliver. And if you can deliver, then absolutely, use the good side of clickbait.
Jillian Leslie 46:11
Yes. Okay. So, yeah. We don’t love curiosity. We want closure. So if you say, what are the best three ingredients? There’s a part of us that goes, “I don’t know. I must find out.” What are the best haircuts for 2019? It’s like, “I don’t know. I will click to see it.”
And so, it’s like you leave that question in the audience’s mind so that they need resolution. And they’re willing to click to get it.
Nate Woodbury 46:43
Absolutely.
Jillian Leslie 46:44
Oh, well, this is terrific. I mean what I really like about what you’re saying is it’s like, do these nuts and bolts. Think about your keywords. Do your videos. Make them 10 to 12 minutes. Think about your thumbnail. Think about your call to action. It’s very strategic but it’s not rocket science.
Nate Woodbury 47:09
Right. Yeah. I mean we’re very strategic. Exactly. But it’s not that we’re doing anything too complicated.
Jillian Leslie 47:15
Right. Or that other people could never do this because you have some sort of technology or some sort, you know, your best friend works at YouTube. That you’re just kind of going, “Well, we see this. This works. We’re going to keep going. We’re going to wait four months to see if we can get some sort of boost.” You know, that you’re patient, and that you’re willing to stick in there and like everything you’re willing to do the work.
Nate Woodbury 47:42
Yeah. Well, just to be a little bit vulnerable, going back five to seven years ago, I knew in my mind and in my heart that this was a solid strategy. I started putting on three day retreats. People come and I just teach them in and out about all this stuff. I did seminars, coaching, and whatnot.
But, you know, it was really hard. I get 15 people at a retreat and I would barely break even with cost because I had to charge a little to get people there. No one was really implementing it. No one was really taking me seriously.
Once I got a track record of success, and you know making multiple six figures and have lots of clients that are making multiple six and seven figures with their channels, then people say, “Oh, man. That simple strategy that Nate taught, that actually gets this results.”
And so, once they just see it in perspective, because what I was teaching, it’s not anything that’s overwhelmingly profound. It’s just you need consistency. You need to be strategic about it and know what the end result is that you’re going after. Once they see it, “Okay. If I follow these steps, I can do that?” Yeah. It’s something that anybody can do.
Jillian Leslie 49:02
I love that. Okay. So Nate, how can people learn more about you, reach out to you if they have questions, or they want to learn about your courses?
Nate Woodbury 49:12
Yeah. I definitely recommend my own YouTube channel, Nate Woodbury. And then, I have a keyword research mini course that I like to give away for free.
Jillian Leslie 49:23
Okay. How can people get it? Is it on your website?
Nate Woodbury 49:26
It’s a long link so maybe you could link to this, but I’ll spell it out. You need the HTTPS. And you need the three W’s. And then my website is BeTheHeroStudios.com/keyword. And that will give you access to my keyword research mini course.
Jillian Leslie 49:47
Well, wonderful. Well, Nate. I feel empowered. That’s the word I would say after hearing you talk about the strategy and you breaking it down like this.
Nate Woodbury 49:57
Fantastic. That’s my goal, for sure.
Jillian Leslie 49:59
All right. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being on the show.
Nate Woodbury 50:03
You’re very welcome.
Jillian Leslie 50:04
I hope you guys liked that episode. I think that Nate’s strategy for building videos can be absolutely applied to creating blog posts. So just definitely think about that.
And please join the MiloTree Mastermind Facebook group. Come on over Monday at 3pm, Eastern time, because I would love to meet you. I’d love to talk to you. I will be back here next week.
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