How Rainbow Plant Life Found Success on YouTube as a Food Blogger | The Food Blogger Pro Podcast

So with Rainbow Plant Life, you had mentioned that before. That's your brand. What were the things that you did optimize early that were the most impactful? Like you get into it now you have this time, you're used to working 12 hour days. So it's like you're willing to hustle and work hard and you say, okay, I need to make this work as a business. What were those things that were most impactful?

I would say honestly, like the first six months weren't that impactful in this, in at least in terms of the output and the results I could see. I was definitely putting in a lot of work on the input side. But I think the first six, maybe nine months were like building up towards that, getting the momentum, like figuring out how to better write a blog post, figuring out how to like produce a more thoughtful, well planned out YouTube video. I think spending a lot of time on the analytics of my YouTube channel really helped it grow as much as it happened a lot here.

I think that's really. You had said two things within that, a thoughtful well or well thought out YouTube video and then spending time within the analytics. How do you, how do you do that and what was the outcome for you doing that?

So the how you do that part is a shout out to my partner who is like very analytical minded and like loves sitting with the numbers. And I don't at all. I one, I just am not a numbers person. But I also think it kind of pulls away the creativity for me by focusing on all that. So it's a lot of him looking at that and saying like, okay, your watch time was really high in this month. And that's because we did two videos that like really brought in a bunch of new audience members and like we should iterate on that and create more videos like this or your audience retention is really low in this video. It's probably because you just blabbed on at the beginning without getting straight to the point. So like next videos, like your intro has to be super tight. It needs to be like 20 seconds or less, whatever, and then thoughtful planning out of videos. So I think when I first started YouTube a couple years ago, I literally did not watch YouTube at all. I didn't know how like why people came to YouTube, what they were looking for. And I was just like, oh, other vegan creators are making videos like three healthy salad recipes or three overnight oats recipes. I was like, maybe I will do that. And there was never content I was super interested in because I would much rather create recipes Where I'm like teaching you how to cook and I'm like showing you something a little special, a little bit extra. And so in the last year or so, give or take, I've been like, okay, like, let's be thoughtful about the content that I'm creating and making sure it's. Making sure that it's on brand, making sure that like, I'm giving value to the audience and not just doing what every other content creator is doing.

It's such a, it's such a, such a hard thing to do though, because you see other people doing something, you're like, I need to do that same thing.

Yeah. And of course, like, you might have success with it, but if someone else has already done it first and it's done it better than you, you're probably not going to see success with that. And also, just in terms of like delivering value, like, how much more value are you delivering if we're just doing an iteration of what someone else is doing? Even if it's totally different recipes, you're not copying the recipes, but like, you know, still. Yeah, not super valued.

It seems like there's kind of a cool balance that you have there, which is figuring out what, what's your brand is, what's on brand. Who am I as a content creator along with how do people respond to the content that I'm creating? And then allowing the analytics and the data to inform how you are going to change as a content creator, as opposed to just looking at what somebody else is doing and saying like, well, I'm going to try that. And an example being like tightening up and making sure that you have a short, to the point intro. And it was one of the things I noticed when I was watching some of your videos is like, hey, like jump into it really quick. And the significance of watch time as it relates to, you know, a short intro. So there's a couple things with YouTube that you mentioned. Watch time. And then there's another. I forget what the other one was, but can you talk about kind of some of the data that's available in the YouTube back end and what you'd consider to be the most important data and the most important metrics about YouTube, knowing that maybe it's not this place that you spend most of the time if you're like, grocery aisle, check aisle seven for that stuff and then people can go and learn more about it on their own. But what would you consider to be the most important metrics for YouTube?

Yeah, I would say watch time. And so that's like the, the amount of time watched of your video. So if you have a 10 minute video but only 3 minutes of your video will watch, like, maybe that's not the best time. But if like seven or eight minutes of your video or watch like, that's probably quite good. And the way to improve your watch time, again, like part of it is like hooking your viewer in the beginning without giving them all this extra fluff. Unless of course, you're already an established channel and like maybe you're known for vlogging and people like when you just kind of spew off the cuff. Yeah. So finding that hook and then like a lot of things that help are like constant cutting of different angles. Like different, like, like B roll, like keeping the audience engaged instead of just like you doing one thing on camera or just like showing it overhead, like, oh, and then I'm going to add this to the overhead shot and then this and this. You just like, you want to like provide different angles and different cuts and different jump cuts so people are staying engaged. The other things that are, I think, important, I guess I mentioned audience retention earlier. So if you within the first 30 seconds lose 50% of your audience, that's really bad. You need to think about how can I get maybe like 60% or 70%, whatever the metric that you want to work up to to get them to stay within the first 30 seconds. And part of doing that is again, not blabbing in the beginning about useless things, but also delivering on what your title and thumbnail promise. And this is something I'm still working on, so I don't want to pretend I'm an expert because I'm not. But if your title says that you're going to teach someone how to make the best lasagna, and you have this beautiful photo of lasagna in the thumbnail, but in the first 30 seconds you're talking about like how your grandmother used to make you lasagna. And it's just like this narrative part and you don't see any actual lasagna that looks like the best lasagna. People are going to click out of that. And I think overall in terms of YouTube views in general are the most important relative to subscriber count. So you can have a relatively small channel and still if you make an excellent video on a topic that people really want to watch or are searching for, like, you could get hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of views even if you have a small account. So it's a little bit more of a meritocracy that think than like Instagram or having a blog. Yeah, that was a lot.

So. No, that's great. And it's interesting when I some of the videos that I watch one because I get sucked in because they're so good for that exact same reason. But also almost as an observation of content creators on YouTube of which we're like, that's not a specialty for us. But I'm interested in just from a content platform. I think of Mr. Beast. Have you ever watched like any Mr. Beast video?

I've seen a couple, but I know he's.

It's not like you're like a Mr. It's not like you're gonna have a Mr. Beast swag that you're wearing or something. But like for anybody who is interested in YouTube, I feel like it's a great channel to check out because some of the things that you talked about, like delivering on the title of what it is and how quickly things move. It's amazing in a movie, in a TV show or on YouTube how quickly you have to cut from one thing to the next. It's like a few seconds sometimes in between. And Mr. Beast Content, the longer form stuff does a really good job of showing that. It's like three seconds here, three seconds there. And it's really significant things that they're showing. Like you could probably do a minute just in one area. Like, you know, whatever it is like digging out a car to try and find the car keys. Then you win the. You know, it's like all of these crazy weird things, but it moves so quickly. And that just being so important for YouTube. Sam.