How to be a successful Youtuber in 2021| Masterclass with Greg Jarboe | The Ask Avi Arya Show

We had a client, the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper in the Boston area. And they had a reporter named Jill Carroll who'd been taken hostage in Iraq. And she was held for 82 days. Her driver and translator were killed on the first day. And everyone thought that, you know.

Hey, guys. Arya, father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet moguls. Welcome to my channel, A Heart for Life. So, Greg, before we get started, we'd love to hear your story.

Oh, my story is long and very strange tale. And I got into YouTube sideways. It was not my plan. In fact. In fact, think of this. When I was growing up, getting into YouTube was not an option. Now I got here, I had my own agency, it's called SEOPR. And in 2006, we had a client, the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper in the Boston area. And they had a reporter named Joe Carroll who'd been taken hostage in Iraq. And she was held for 82 days. Her driver and translator were killed on the first day. And everyone thought that, you know, the worst. Basically, at the end of. End of 82 days, she was freed and came home, spent some time with her family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then went back to work and sat down and wrote an 11 part series on what it was like to be a hostage and think that any day they're going to come kill me. And I got hired to, quote, promote the story because the editor at the newspaper was thinking at the time, this is going to be published in August. Everyone's on vacation in August. No one's going to read it. I've got the. One of the best stories going. What can we do to, like, reach out to people? And so my agency got hired to promote the story and I went to all the editors of the major media. So I went to CNN and I went to ABC News and I went to the Huffington Post and I basically said, I'm here to talk about the Jill Carroll story. We can get you 150 word excerpt, an exclusive excerpt from her 11 part series so that you'll have some content ahead of time. I can get you a photo of her if you will break the story. You know, when, when we break the story, so we can drive traffic to the newspaper site. And every one of the first five editors that I talked to said, do you have any video? And I didn't.

Right.

But my son was working for me that summer. He was in college at the time. And you know how he came to Be, you know, whatever. So he was employed. He said, dad, I can put a YouTube video together this afternoon. I said, that's what you're learning in college. He said, well, no, no, no, no. I mean, you know, I'm studying history and other important subjects, but yeah, I've learned how to do that in college. So he put together a short YouTube video, we uploaded it and I went back to the editor of all these major media and said, we have a YouTube video. Will that work for you? And they all took the story. And in the first 24 hours, we got 450,000 unique visitors to the Monitor website. We got a million page views. All of that was like seven to eight times higher than their normal daily average.

Nice.

And I looked at this YouTube thing and I thought, you know, this, this is probably something I should pay more attention to. So I was not a visionary. My son made me do it.

Awesome, awesome, Lovely, lovely. And you know, everything has in our community has a how to topic. So before we let you start with your presentation, we. What is the how to topic for today?

Oh, the how to topic is how to become a YouTube expert. And less time than it took me to become a YouTube expert, which is about 15 years. And oh, by the way, I had a lot of trial and error. I made a lot of mistakes. So you can learn a lot from mistakes. And what I want to try to share with you as a way to become a YouTube expert, how to become a YouTube expert in less time than it took me.

That is fantastic. Ladies and gentlemen. How many people are excited to learn how to become a YouTube expert? Just type excited in the comment box and we go to let Greg share this his screen and share a presentation with all of us. Alrighty Greg, take it away. All yours.

All right, well again, I love to be in a situation where I can under promise and over deliver. So by the end of this presentation, you will be farther along the journey to becoming a YouTube expert than I was when I first uploaded my first YouTube video in August of 2006. Now there is an alternative way to become a YouTube expert and I just want you to know what it is in case you want to consider it. I know a lot of people are interested in getting there and the answer is all you have to do is write a book. Now it took me about a year to write the book and after I published the book, I discovered that I had written the book and there were people who were calling me a YouTube expert. But when the book was finished, I suddenly realized, oh my lord, Now I actually understand what I wish I had understood before I wrote the book. So fortunately, the first edition of the book sold well enough that my publisher asked me to write a second edition. And I was very grateful for the opportunity because I got to rewrite 75% of the content of the first book so that I could have basically a more accurate description of how YouTube worked. So if you are willing to make mistakes and have them published where everyone can read them and then figure out what you want to do and get a chance to do it again, that's an alternative way to becoming an expert. Now, my second book was published in November of 2011, so that's a long time ago. That's almost 10 years ago. And here's the problem. A month after my book was published, YouTube changed what was then called YouTube Insights, which is how they measured things and reported them back to the content creator, and they replaced it with what is now called YouTube Analytics. So a month after my book was published, a whole chapter was obsolete. Just, you know, total nonsense. In fact, so many things have changed since then that the only chapter left in that first edition of the book that you might find amusing to read is chapter one, which is a short history of YouTube, because the only thing they haven't changed is their early history. Fortunately, that is sort of settled, but the rest of the book, not so much. So here's what I want to share with you today in the 20 minutes that we have. And no, it turns out it may take you longer than 20 minutes to become a YouTube expert, but this hopefully will get you on that path a little more successfully than those of us who had to wander around for a long, long, long, long time before it sort of occurred to us. There are at least three key things that you need to do to become successful on YouTube. You need to find a way to get your videos discovered. And that's hard then, and this is going to sound redundant, but it's not. Then you have to get them watched because not everyone will watch them all the way to. To the end. And last but not least, you need to get them monetized. That's it. That's the secret formula. You can, you now know, you know, if you can do these three things and you can figure out how to do them in 20 minutes, then, wow, you're. You're off to fame and fortune. But let me warn you that none of this, it sounds simple in an outline form, none of this is easy to do. So some basics, foundations, some of the things that you have working for you, that certainly did not exist when I started 15 years ago. Is YouTube is already well established in India. In fact, YouTube is well established around the world. And with 265 million users of YouTube in India, India's become YouTube's largest market. Bigger than the United States, it's also the fastest growing market. It continues to add hundreds of thousands of new viewers every year. So you happen to have gotten to the right place at the right time. And boy, I can tell you, for a whole lot of the pioneers in this field, they are very, very, very jealous of the fact that, wow, this is an established thing. There are now kids who are growing up thinking, I want to be a YouTube star when I grow up. And again, like I said at the beginning, that was not an option 16, 17, 18 years ago. So one of the other interesting things that's worth noting is there's at least 1200, 1200 Indian content creators who now have more than a million subscribers. And that's an important sort of threshold because you can now begin to monetize your audience in a way where you can make a living, a very comfortable living. You may even have to hire extra people to work for you to keep creating that content on an ongoing basis. So that was the good news. Let me give you the bad news. The bad news is, oh, in a given minute, TikTok, TikTok, TikTok. One minute, 500 hours of new video content will be uploaded to YouTube per minute. So what that means is, oh, boy, do you have a lot of competition. And the actual hard truth that you're gonna have to wrestle with is nobody, and I mean nobody can watch every YouTube video that gets uploaded. So getting found, particularly when there is this huge rush of new content being uploaded and, oh, by the way, there's already a huge library already on YouTube, means one of the first challenges that you're going to have to face is your video needs to get discovered. Now, YouTube will offer you a couple different ways to help people discover your video, one of which is when people log into YouTube, they go to their, you know, basically their, their home page. And on their home page, there are suggestions. One of the suggestions I'm getting here is, oh, you seem to like videos from the Late show with Stephen Colbert. Would you like to see his latest one? And what I will tell you is, is that after you become established, there will be lots of people who will be watching your videos and getting recommendations on their homepage. So would you like to watch more? But that doesn't help you in the early days. Those people already, you know, had my loyalty years ago, and now you've got to elbow your way beyond them. So how do you do that? Well, it turns out in addition to being really large, YouTube is the world's second largest search engine after only Google. In other words, people will Type into the YouTube search field Questions about topics that they are interested in seeing video content about. And that's the other primary way that people will Discover your videos. YouTube search and their search and discovery system has a couple elements, but one of them is they want to help people find the videos that they're searching for. And how do they get match that up? Well, YouTube can't watch your video. It doesn't know what that content is. They're working on that technology, but it's not there yet. So what they do is they basically look at your title, your description and your tags, and some of the other metadata that you have. In other words, they're, they're looking at the words that you've added around your video and they are making decisions to say, oh, if somebody is searching for funny video, is funny video in the title? In the description of the video, does the word humorous turn up? Because that's a, that's a synonym for, for funny or, or in the tags. Does funny video exist in the tags? So a lot of video content creators think that the hard part is creating the video. And the answer is, yeah, that's hard, we'll get to that. But you also need somebody who can describe that video using optimized titles, descriptions and tags. And here's, here's the shortcut. Your title should be about 50 characters long. Include the keyword near the beginning and make the title engaging enough to get someone to click on it to watch the video. Your description can be anywhere from 50 to 150 words long. I'm actually writing descriptions in about the 300 word length. But the point is you can use your keyword 1, 2, 3 times in that without basically beating it to death. And please, please, please minimize your, your use of boilerplate. You know, don't drop that into your video every time you upload a new one. And tags, tags are really important in YouTube and you can have a lot of them. You can. I usually have 20 or 30 in the videos that I optimize. So this is the secret sauce to getting your video discovered. Now, how do you find these search terms? Well, there are a couple of different techniques, but let me share one that you can see visually. It's called Google Trends. And if you Go to Google Trends. It's free. And if you do a search, one of the things that it will show you by default is this is the search trend for Google. It's called a web search trend. Okay, but if you basically mouse over that where it says web search, and look at your options, one of the options are going to be YouTube search. And you can even do YouTube search for India. Or as you can see in this example, YouTube search trends in India between, oh, let's say two years ago and last week when I created this presentation. Why? Because I wanted to show you that there has been a spike in interest around this phrase corona virus. You may have heard of it, but guess what? Two years ago, nobody were searching for videos about coronavirus. You know, it came out of left field and suddenly had a huge spike. All right, that's fine. But this is the interesting correlation. The spike in coronavirus coincides with a spike in searches for news. I don't know if you're in the news media business, but if all of a sudden people are looking for news because something is happening that people need more information about, then, boy, I'd want to be creating a coronavirus news video. That's one of the ways that you can use this tool not only to find the. The search terms that people are looking for, but to recognize that over time they will change and there's a lot of opportunity. And using this tool, you can spot a lot of trends early. Now, in the last, oh, I don't know, eight, nine months, YouTube has rolled out something interesting called YouTube Shorts, and it's gotten a lot of publicity. And if you want, I wrote an article last September for more than two minutes and up to about 20 minutes. And they can't watch your video for 20 minutes if it's only, you know, 15 seconds long, can they? That's why they have to give an alternative way to have shorts get discovered, because the regular algorithm in YouTube is rewarding videos that get watched. This is the whole concept of watch time, which is a key part of YouTube's algorithm. Some people say it's more important than even the discovery part. But I would argue that if your video isn't discovered, it doesn't get watched. But that means, guess what? You can tell a long story that is 2 to 20 minutes long. Now, it doesn't have to be 4 minutes long or 6 minutes long or 7 minutes long or 15 minutes long. The story can be as long as it takes to tell the story. But, you know, guess what? It's counterintuitive but don't necessarily cut the short story short just because you heard somewhere that everybody is a goldfish and their attention span is eight seconds long. You're not creating videos for goldfish. Guess what? They're not watching YouTube. You're creating videos for people and they binge watch movies, they will binge watch television series, and they will watch a YouTube video for two to 20 minutes if the content is compelling. Now that then brings you to how do I make any money doing all of this? And the answer is, well, you're going to have to join what is called the YouTube Partner Program, or what YouTube will often refer to as YPP, which sounds odd. So I like to call it the partner program. But whatever you call it, the point is, is that in the early days they were picky and choosy and they contacted you and then they opened the floodgates and anybody and everybody could become a partner overnight. And then they discovered that some of those partners were little, oh, shall we say, dodgy. And so they tightened up their criteria. And these days, here's what it requires. You need to have at least 4,000 watch hours in a 12 month period. In other words, people need to be watching your content. And it helps if you also have more than 1,000 subscribers. And then, and only then will YouTube send a human being on their staff to come review your content to figure out if you know, you should become a member of the YouTube Partner Program. And if everything looks good, then you get approved. And then, and only then do you get to monetize your content. Now here's a hint. YouTube won't tell you what kind of content to create. You know, they're sort of counting on you to use your imagination, your creativity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm sure being entrepreneurs, you've got a thousand ideas and that's great. And I hope that you come up with a whole new category that none of us have ever thought about. But if you look around, there are certain people who are already making $100,000 a year or more creating YouTube content. And they tend to fall into an interesting set of categories. And the reason why they are an interesting set of categories is YouTube has packaged these categories together and they call it the Google Preferred program. And they go to advertisers and they say, I've got a whole category here around, oh, beauty and fashion or entertainment or technology or sports or whatever. And if you want, we will put your ad in front of audiences that are interested in those things. You don't even have to worry about which content creator is creating the content. We'll just put the money there. And if you happen to be creating content in one of those categories, guess what? YouTube is going to put the money there. So these are the categories. These are the categories. I have to say in the United States. They haven't announced what the categories are in India yet. So if you look at the last category, Spanish language, that's really, really, really important in the United States. Why? Because, oh, in parts like Miami or the southern part of Texas or Southern California, there's, there's a significant Spanish speaking population. So that may be unique to the U.S. but if you look at the rest of the list, comedy, entertainment, pop culture, technology, food and recipes, gaming, sports, music, science and education, beauty, fashion and lifestyle. I gotta believe that those are going to be popular categories in India as well. Now there's, there's two things missing from this list. One is automotive and I think that is a temporary thing basically due to the economic impact that a lot of the COVID 19 lockdowns created. People aren't buying cars as much. I got to believe that, you know, as the economy rebounds, automotive may get added to this list. The other one, of course, is travel and tourism. Again, it took a dive in the last year. There's some economic data around that says it's down 60%. There's others that say it's down 80%. It depends on how much of the economy in a particular area is dependent on tourism. But if you're creating travel videos, it's hard to monetize them right now because the travel industry isn't advertising. But I gotta believe that again, you know, that'll come back and get added to this list. But this is where the money is. This is what I hope that will help you shortcut your way to fame and fortune. Now that leaves a lot of people starving, doesn't it? Because not everybody's creating content in those categories. YouTube understands that. So they've come up with a variety of other ways to monetize your video content, one of which is called Brand Connect and the shorthand version of that. It is for influencers. So it's an influencer marketing program. Right now it is only available in the U.S. i suspect it will get rolled out in India at some point. An entrepreneur may want to move faster and open up a influencer marketing platform in India before YouTube does. But you know, that's up to you. But the point is, is that in a influencer marketing program, you aren't worried about advertising the Sponsor basically gives the money to the content creator to create a video in a genre or about a particular product or brand. Then there's some other options like super chat and super stickers or channel memberships. And again, if you've got a smaller passionate audience, there are ways that they can support you financially without you being dependent on getting a lot of advertiser. Or you can sell merchandise, T shirts, you know, whatever things with your logo or brand on them. And YouTube is allowing that now too. So there you have it. That's less than 15 years. See that? See, I kept my promise. No, you may not be an expert yet, but at least you're on the right path. Because YouTube's algorithm is trying to help people find the videos they want to watch. That's why you need to optimize your title, your tags, your descriptions. And then they also want to maximize long term viewer engagement and satisfaction. That's why I think watch time is a huge goal that you need to focus on. And if you do those things, then you can monetize it with advertising. If you can't do those two things, if you decide to go to way of creating, let's say YouTube shorts, then you're going to need to find some alternative way to monetize them. And I think, although they are not there quite yet today, I think those are along. We're going to see them soon in 2021. Of course, the alternative is you just wander around like I did for 15 years and who knows, maybe you'll get lucky. So Avi, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I said thank you very much, that was a fantastic story. Guys, what's the one thing that, what was your biggest takeaway in the last 25 minutes? Give us one of your biggest takeaways. Put it, drop it in the comments. If you're on Facebook, on YouTube, let us know what was your biggest takeaway.

Okay, I see one says categories, two to 20 minutes. Yep. Well, let me, let me tackle it quickly. It turns out in the early days of YouTube, there were a variety of people who tried to acquire YouTube. Google beat them out in 2006 by buying YouTube for $1.65 billion. Not that I focused on the number very long, but one of the companies who got beat out in the rush to buy YouTube was called Viacom. And having really, really desperately wanted to own YouTube and being really, really, really upset that they lost out, they did what many Americans do in a situation like that. They sued. And what they decided to do is Oh, I know. We'll sue YouTube for plagiarism, for copyright infringement. There are a lot of people who are taking content from our shows and just putting them up on YouTube. And, you know, we deserve a lot of money because, you know, this is wrong, wrong, wrong. Well, one of the ironies is when it went to court, what got discovered was, yes, some of the people who are taking content from Viacom and uploading it to YouTube were Viacom employees. So they didn't win that lawsuit, but it made YouTube really, really, really, really nervous about charges of copyright infringement. So they have created what they call a content ID system. And every time a video is uploaded, particularly if it's in the music category, but also any other kind of category, a comedy, it could be a movie, it could be whatever, it basically gets a fingerprint. And one of the things that YouTube will do for particularly big copyright owners is say, join our content ID system, and if anyone steals your content, we're going to give you three options. Option number one is you can shut them down. Option number two is you can let them continue running the video. Only any monetary activity. If, if, if there are any advertising around this video, you get that money, not the person who copied you. And the third option, which actually almost nobody ever uses, is, by the way, you can just monitor this and watch it and see. I don't know, maybe it was an experiment. Maybe you're trying to find out if there's an audience for a particular, particularly a new genre of content, whatever, that you rarely see that. But the point is, you know, if you create the content and somebody else rips you off by just copying and uploading it to their. You have a way to flag them, and you have a way to use the YouTube Content ID system to basically prevent them from making money off of your creativity.

Excellent, Excellent.

Okay, got some other stuff in here. Tubebuddy or Vidiq? Good question. I use both. Why is it either? Or. If you got a tool that helps me one way or the other, I'm gonna use it, so. And by the way, if there's enough money involved, you don't want just a hammer in your toolkit. You want a hammer, a saw, screwdriver, and a few other tools. So, yeah, if the tool works and adds value, add it to your toolkit.

I know. You know, like one of my, my friends who's also a mentor of mine, he always says, you cannot be cheap on your way to greatness. So if there's a tool out there and every tool helps you a little bit. You know, get whatever you can instead of using your mind. But how long have you been using tubebuddy?

Tubebuddy. Okay. Boy, years blur. I'm gonna say seven years. Wow. But I'm getting old, so it could be six, it could be nine. Let's put this way longer than I can go back. And I remember meeting them at a conference. So this was before COVID So they were still holding conferences.

San Diego.

Yeah, it could be. And they had an exhibit and I said, okay, give me your best shot. Show me a demo. And. And it looked good. And I said, you know, sold. So it was back in the old days when they still had face to face conferences.

I know, it's. Wow. Back in the day, huh? That is, yeah. Awesome, Greg, you know, thank you, Greg. We let you go now. Thank you very much for your time. Really appreciate it. All the best.

Have a good day. Actually, it's night time, your time. It's only a little afternoon my time, but have a good evening. Bye.