How Can a "Video Flywheel" Help You Rank YouTube Videos

All right, welcome back to the show. This is Brad. And today is a special interview on the show where you are going to wish you had a notebook and pen out. So if you're driving in the car listening to this, you're going to want to listen again, because I can already tell you that we're going to have a lot of things you're going to want to write down and try to implement later. But the good news is you're not going to have to take notes because I am going to provide you a cheat sheet at the end of this interview. But that being said, if you are actively trying to get traffic and promote a product, a service and offering of any type, then you're going to want to pay close attention because I got a couple guests on the show today. We're going to talk about a very innovative and effective way that they're using YouTube for themselves and with their clients to create just really relevant, high converting and massive amounts of traffic for cheap. Now, I've been in the world of digital marketing for, I guess, 11 years now. I've had a lot of experts on YouTube marketing, and I've talked to a lot of people here on the show, and these guys are doing something that is unique and innovative and different. And I haven't heard about it. And if I haven't heard about it, there's a good chance you guys haven't heard about it. And they have agreed to pull back the curtain and reveal everything they're doing in a way that if you have any degree of proficiency in YouTube, you can probably pull this off as well. And if not, they actually do offer a service, a done for you service where they're working with people. And at the end of this episode, I'll explain not only how you may be able to work with them, but what they're going to be doing as a very special listener of bacon wrap business. So if you're ready to dive into the this innovative world of YouTube marketing, we're going to get going. I'm going to introduce you here to Tristan Goodwin and Aaron Biblow. Now, I met these two fellas, I met Aaron a couple years ago, I want to say, when I was speaking at a Mastermind and we hit it off, we kept on talking and we spent a lot of time together. And I've always been really impressed with his. With his marketing strategies and his understanding of how to go find these gaps in the marketplace and, and sees them. And he recently told me about this partnership that he's got with Tristan who is just an absolute genius in understanding the YouTube algorithm and marketing and how to make it work better than most people have been able to figure it out just by throwing videos randomly up on YouTube, which I admit is what I've done. And so we have spent the past hour offline, not recorded, going into detail about what this is, just to make sure that this is innovative as I thought. And guys, it is. So without any further ado, I want you to introduce you to Aaron and Tristan. Guys, welcome to Bacon Wrap business.

Hey guys, thanks so much for having us. I really appreciate being on the show.

That's Aaron and Tristan. You want to say hi to everybody?

Hi everybody. I don't talk too much. I'm the resident nerd. So I just kind of sit here and smile and nod.

So nice. He's my ninja nerd.

Ninjanerd.com I like that actually exists. If not, that's a pretty good URL. Alright, so before we dive into the exact strategy, give me a quick background on both of Yalls kind of general marketing and business entrepreneurial experience. Like what's. Where'd you guys come from?

Sure, I'll start first. So again, I'm Aaron. I've been in the online digital marketing world for, geez, seven years now.

Got my start working for another agency and built up a nice client list and that was going spectacularly up until the company I was working with decided not to honor the commitments I made to my clients. So I said this is never going to happen again.

Helped them all get out of their contracts and then one of them approached.

Me and said, hey, we still want to work with you. You put us first, how can we get started? And then launched my own company. And since then it's always been clients first and kind of serving them in whatever way was necessary. So mostly been doing search engine optimization and then sort of through that learned that video is the way to go and then found Tristan. And Tristan is the video ninja. And I've never met anyone that can.

I guess persuade YouTube to do what we want it to better than he can.

So.

And then Tristan, you have quite the story as well.

Yeah, so I, I guess I got my start back when I was about 15 or 16. I wanted to be a professional skateboarder. Nobody would sponsor me and so I started my own business building custom skateboards and I sponsored myself. And it's kind of been that same story repeated ever since. I really got my biggest start back in about 2009 I started a little translation agency. I needed work and nobody out where I was living was hiring translators. So started freelancing, grew that into a little business, started hiring other translators to work with me, and by the time I closed shop in 2015, then I had 600 translators on staff. We worked in about 19 and a half different languages. It depends on whether or not you count Catalan as a full language. I'm fluent in English and Spanish. Lived in Argentina for a couple years and started doing YouTube videos just to kind of help some of my colleagues with, like, their websites and help them with, you know, just some of the things that I had learned from going from being a freelancer to an agency owner. And it kind of grew. We started messing around more with YouTube, trying to figure out how to expand my reach, and we ended up shutting down the agency in the beginning of 2016. I was going to take a year off to study SEO full time and, and see what I could do with this. And the idea was just to take a year off and then go back. And I never went back. So still doing this.

Love it. Love it. Well, let's jump in to why we're here. Let's talk about YouTube marketing. And a lot of people out there have a, like, like me, have a kind of cursory understanding. You know, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world and it's place to get found. And there's a million ways to do it, and people have heard about optimizing their video, et cetera, et cetera, but that's not what we're going to talk about. You guys have a really cool, structured way that you almost treat YouTube as a, as a marketing funnel. And you do it in a way that, that really plays with the YouTube algorithm so that you don't get penalized. In fact, it's the. Quite the opposite. But let's talk about. I guess we should probably start about what are some of the misconceptions and some of the ways that typically do YouTube, why that's wrong and what YouTube is really looking for right now.

Okay, yes, that's a question for me. So I guess either one of you. Okay, so I guess one of the biggest misconceptions is, is that everybody's trying to upload these videos and they're expecting things to just kind of explode. Right? Or they'll take kind of like the same general SEO approach to it where you think, okay, I really need to focus on the tags that I'm using. I need to focus on building backlinks and embeds and things like that to get my Videos to rank. Well, that helps with Google. It doesn't really help with the internal recommendation system that we have within YouTube that we can take advantage of. So I think that's one of the first things to just really trying to use that system to get the organic traffic that's already there. And that Google, you know, who owns YouTube, that Google wants people to stay on the platform. They want people to watch more videos. And you're making that easier for them because you're giving them videos that people are going to watch. The other thing that I think a lot of people kind of goof up is that they try to send people off of every single video to a landing page. They try to send you to an email thing or to purchase something or whatever. And, well, that the problem with doing that is that Google or YouTube will actually start to penalize those videos for something called a session end. Because YouTube's goal, what they want, is people to spend as much time on YouTube as possible, to watch as many videos as possible, so they see as many ads as possible, so they make as much money as possible. And so when you have a video that's directly intending to send people off of the platform, then it kind of cuts that. That system, it cuts that flow they're trying to create, and then they'll stop promoting it as much. In fact, there's even parts within the terms of service of YouTube that say that if you create videos specifically designed to send people off of the platform, then they can actually penalize the channel. You might even have the entire channel taken down.

Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. And I've seen a lot of people get channels taken down and YouTube videos get penalized. And I think a lot of people don't really understand why it works, how it works like that, but understanding that, you know, what's in it for YouTube is they want people to stay on there. They want them to watch and view ads. So the more you direct people off, the worse that'll be. So your way around that is what let's. I mean, let's kind of, you know, before we go into the way around it, I like talking about results that people get. So you guys sent me a document here about some of the, you know, recent results you've had, some clients have had, et cetera. Let's kind of talk about what.

Doing.

The strategy that we're about to outline can get people using, you know, the process you use. So you talk about, like people who sell courses and consulting. What was your example on that? Tristan, do you want to talk or Aaron.

So sorry, I was muted. So, yeah, for a new course launch in as little as 65 days, we had no list, and from no ad spend, we ended up generating 9,000 views of the course. We got 350 email signups that to 104 course sales, 25 consultation gigs. A lot of free burritos for Tristan because he's a. He's a sucker for burritos. So if you want help, that's one way. And then that actually even led to a contract with the country of Dominica. And we can't really talk too much more about that. But yeah, just YouTube is such a powerful program or powerful. Has a powerful algorithm when you take advantage of it properly.

That's fantastic. Can you talk about like there was a brick company of brick factory that you. That you guys work with.

Tristan, I'll let you take that one.

Yes. So we have one client that literally sells bricks online, and we're kind of using the same process. We have, you know, YouTube videos promoting it. We're sending people back to, you know, to their website and everything. And we've been able to do a. Last year we did 700,000 in leads for them, and the goal for this year is a million. Right now we're sitting at 47,000 in leads since over the last two weeks.

So what do you mean? Okay, so obviously you didn't get 700,000 leads, but you said 700,000 in leads. So $700,000 worth of leads. Is that based upon how much they're used to? Like, where does that number come from?

That. So I actually had the client send me all of the. The total for the quotes that they actually send back for every one of the leads that they. That they receive. The total of that was about 700,000.

Oh, perfect. Okay, so the leads that came in, the quotes they sent out, et cetera, was. Yeah, for about $700,000 in business. That's fantastic. I love that. And a lot of what you guys are doing, you do utilize advertising, but it's not all about YouTube ads. Correct. You guys, you. And I want to dive right now into the heart of this, but I want people to understand that, yeah, you can. There's organic YouTube, there's paid YouTube, and there's a combination. And you guys are using paid YouTube ads really, to goose the effectiveness of the. Of the organic ads and put them to work in what you guys call a flywheel. And I want to kind of dive now into what makes this work. So this is for all my listeners, this is where we get into the kind of the, the meat of this. And if you want to use an example, I'll give you an example to use which I love doing this for very selfish reasons. And then mentioned, my wife is a mortgage officer, right. She helps people get home loans and do mortgages and whatnot. And she does a lot of video marketing. She'll put them on Facebook, she'll throw occasionally some stuff up on YouTube. But I just wanted to allow you to use her as an example if you want to. As you're illustrating the things that somebody should be doing to implement this flywheel strategy for sure.

So just to kind of reiterate, YouTube likes it when people stay on YouTube. So yes, we use ads, but the majority of what we use is continuing.

To get people to watch our videos. That builds this flywheel effect. And we harness what's called the recommended videos. And those show up in a couple different areas, both when you first log on to YouTube, those browse videos that show up, the videos that show up at the end of a video autoplay. And then of course the videos either further down when you scroll in mobile or off to the side when you're on desktop. So if we can optimize things and target the videos properly, we can keep putting our clients videos in front of their ideal prospects using the YouTube algorithm to figure it out. And it has a neural network that learns way more effectively than almost any other algorithm on the Internet because of course it's from Google.

And so using, for example the mortgage broker example, what we would do is we'd set up a, almost a video funnel. So there's of course the top of the funnel videos and then the middle of the funnel and then if you have your conversion at the end. But unlike a lot of other people that are using sort of video sequences on YouTube, we isolate each step from each other so that it doesn't interfere with how the algorithm treats the majority of the funnel. So in this case, so for example, we'd want to try and set up some entry videos into our funnel. And that would be trying to talk about topics like that are really related to someone's problems, someone's pain points and stuff. Like they're actively going to go and search on YouTube or Google. And being that YouTube and Google are linked, we can pull data from both and get them to show up in both areas. So for example, doing I know that she just put out a video on VA loans, that'd be a great place to start. Like different Mortgage rates. Why use a mortgage broker? Those are all common questions that someone would type into Google and type into YouTube. Right, because you go to YouTube to learn things.

Yes.

So we'll create a series of what we call those entry videos that are designed to introduce someone and show some value. From there we end up creating a series of what we call our flywheel videos. And they're meant to be bingeable content that someone can take action on and move the needle and get a result. And from there we create this momentum where YouTube sees that they're watching our clients videos and they keep recommending them because they keep staying on YouTube. So we end up generating what we call the flywheel effect from there in order to actually convert them into a paying customer. We have exit videos and those are separately isolated from the other videos because when you cause someone to leave YouTube, you get penalized, as we talked a little bit about earlier. So they're called our sacrificial exit videos and those will be hard linked at strategic points inside of the, inside of the flywheel so that it doesn't disturb the natural recommendations that happen.

Beautiful. Okay, so, and an example like you would say is like somebody might be looking for, you know, how to qualify for a mortgage loan or you know, first time home buyer mortgage, something of that nature, something broad, something that they would type in. They're watching it and instead of like most people do, I'm just reiterating what you said here, just lock it in. So instead of saying, and come to my website, penacosta.com to, to apply for a loan on that video, I'm going to say at the end of that, and if you want to know more like what are the, you know, what fees you should expect and which fees you should negotiate on in this process, here's another video that you can watch right now, right? So I'm gonna send them to the second video. So they're staying on YouTube. So YouTube will like that because I'm not kicking them off. And the more somebody stays on YouTube, you know, the more money YouTube potentially makes with ads. Now that second video, which is talking about maybe it's a little bit more specific and it's saying, okay, as a first time homebuyer, you're gonna come across a whole bunch of different mortgage fees. And here's an example of all of them, blah, blah, blah, blah. At this point, correct me if I'm wrong, I still don't necessarily want to send them off to my website.

Right.

I want to send them to that call to action video.

So even before that, ideally, you want them to watch somewhere in the realm of. It depends on the offer and the.

Size of the offer and of course, the familiarity you need to build with them. Actually, a good example that Ryan Dice talked about is that you don't ask someone to marry you after the first date, right?

So you kind of want to go on a couple dates first and then escalate things a little bit further and then escalate things a little bit further. So from that entry video, you want them to watch that first flywheel video. Then maybe you take them to the next thing, like the 10 things that you may need to make sure that you don't do when looking at your house. So stuff that could add value that's either directly related to your service or something that's complementary. And then you get them to watch three or four videos. Then at the end of that sequence, then you'll say, hey, I hope you got a lot of value out of watching the videos that you've watched so far. If you'd like to work together, jump over to this video and we'll talk a little bit more about how we can do that. And then that separate video is hard linked into the video we just watched. And they'll go there and it'll explain the offer. And then from there you direct them onto the website or the order page or some sort of lead capture.

Now on those second videos, well, first or second videos, like if. And I'll. And I'll continue to use my wife as an example here. Would you ever recommend maybe in the, in the video itself put like, you know, when you're, this is when you're editing the video. Not a YouTube feature that you might put their web, just put their website there like Kenyacosta.com or something of that nature to where they can see it and open up a new tab and click on it. I'm sorry, and type that in. Or would you even totally leave that off?

It really depends on who you're serving.

Again, if it's a high ticket offer, we'd probably just leave that completely off because you haven't built enough familiarity. If it's something where you're responding to some sort of emergency service, like for example, someone really needs a loan right now and they've just decided off the first video that they want it because there's always those people that will come along and they're like, give me, give it to me now, please. It could work. And we'll, we'll test to See if it works.

Okay, cool. So it's probably less. It's probably a less risky, less egregious thing to kind of put it up on there as opposed to like clicking off. Love that.

Definitely.

Awesome. So, and to kind of, kind of. I always like to kind of resume these up, create the broader entry point videos. Send those two content videos and those content videos. Like when you say it's a sacrificial video, it's a call to action. You're not trying to rank that one. You're just trying to get people to take action on there. I love that. The. If I'm just starting off, like, if I don't have a big YouTube channel, if I don't have a lot going on and I want to start from scratch, and let's say, let's say it's her, her channel or anybody else's channel. Are you using ads first to test and goose those videos early on just to kind of get the momentum going? And then how are you using remarketing?

So, yeah, we will occasionally use ads. They're really, really great because it gives you a chance to kind of test things. So you can test like thumbnails impressions and click through rates and things like that. So I mean, you can get thousands of impressions within the first five minutes. And that's just really great data. Sometimes you don't necessarily need them. Sometimes a video will just rank depending on the competition for the keyword and how well optimized that competition is. But yeah, typically what we'll do is we'll start off by running some ads to the video and then using that, like I said, to test, to evaluate. And then as that video starts to gain watch time, as it starts to gain engagements, then we'll start to pull back on those ads because it's going to be generating that traffic organically. We don't have to pay for it. As far as retargeting, remarketing, then what's really cool about this is we can actually then retarget somebody who's watched that video. So, for example, if we have an ad about a specific type of lawn, right? Then somebody searches for that keyword in YouTube and then we can have that person watch that video. When they watch the video, then we can then follow them across different Google properties. So if they watch our video and then they go to Google and they look for something similar for any other keyword that we want to target, we can actually show up in front of that person again. And since they've already watched our video and we can even set it so that way they only, they only see our ads, for example, if they watch 30 seconds of the video or a minute of the video or a certain percentage. So that way that lead is then going to be significantly warmer than if it was just a cold click. And so by doing that, our conversion rates are significantly higher. And since we're actually feeding the ad robots the list of people that we want to target and when we want to target them, then our ad, our cost per clicks are actually significantly lower as well. So do you typically see typically about 60%? Yeah, we've seen significantly lower than that too. So.

Wow. So I've got a, I've got a buddy of mine who is a big affiliate marketer, for instance, and the only thing he's doing or they're doing, they're doing like normal, just like Google. Their whole strategy is do like branded Google search terms for, you know, that product, and then they're taking them to a basic review page. And then if the person buys the product using their affiliate link, cool. And if not, they're just retargeting them across Google and Facebook, right? Like that's really all they're doing. But I mean, their primary entry source of traffic is just Google ppc. So in this case, what he could do is he could take the same brand name product, go create some YouTube videos like product name review and product name versus other product name, and just create a handful of videos that might get some good traffic on YouTube and number one, whatever or whoever watches those, and he could even run YouTube ads to those, right. To boost up the volume of people watching it. And if 5,000 people watch that YouTube video about that product name, then they don't take action. But then they go over to Google tomorrow and then they type that product name into Google as they would have normally, and they see his ad, the same ad that everybody else sees who does it for the first time, the ones who've already watched that video, they, he has a potential to get like 60% or more cheaper cost per click on those Google Ads.

Is that correct? Yes, sir, that's exactly it. One example, you know, talking about affiliate stuff is I sell, I do a little bit of affiliate stuff with YouTube. I sell gaming computers, right? And so you'll see a lot of like really, really expensive keywords. You know, if you wanted to go just straight PPC for that kind of product, right? But we're able to get that same 5,000 views on YouTube. Usually we can. That would cost me about $50 compared to, you know, the 15, $20 per click that you'd be spending with just the normal Google traffic. So you're able to get a lot more traffic at a lot lower price and then you know, it's just makes the entire process a lot easier and faster. So yeah, it's, it definitely works for that.

Beautiful. I love that. That is super powerful and I know some people who, myself included, who will love putting that strategy into place. Let's talk about some of the other things that really matter. So I know that the general YouTube optimization matters from what I mean, what you titled the video and the thumbnail. Would you say that those are two of the of the most critical things? Because you know, you got to get somebody to click on it. Title and thumbnail. Is that where it really all starts?

Yeah, that's definitely number one. And that's one of the reasons that we'll do some that paid traffic in the beginning because we want to see how people interact with the title with the thumbnail. And so you know, we're looking for, you know, a certain click through rate with the thumbnail. We're looking for certain engagement rates. But yeah, so like if you want to get into the really nitty gritty of it, like the actual white paper that YouTube released a couple years ago and just to give you an idea of how much fun it is to read this thing, the title of it is Deep neural networks for YouTube recommendations. It's eight pages long and no joke, it took me three days to read.