Navigating Digital Challenges: 3 Major Lessons from a YouTube Pioneer, Aleric Heck

Welcome to beyond you'd why podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys, and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

This week we're going to be talking about the why of better way to find a better way and share it. So if this is your why, then you are the ultimate innovator. You are constantly seeking better ways to do everything. You find yourselves wanting to improve virtually anything by finding a way to make it better. You also desire to share your improvement with the world. You constantly ask yourself questions like, what if we tried this differently? What if we do this another way? How can we make this better? You contribute to the world with better processes and systems while operating under the motto I'm often pleased but never satisfied. You are excellent at associating, which means that you are adept at taking ideas or systems from one industry or discipline and applying them to another, always with the ultimate goal of improving something. So today I've got a great guest for you. His name is Alaric Heck. He is a YouTube ads expert and the founder of Ad Outreach. He has been on YouTube for over 12 years, first growing a YouTube channel to over 500,000 subscribers. Over the last seven years, Alaric has taught thousands of entrepreneurs and business owners how to grow and scale their business using laser targeted YouTube ads. Collectively, Alaric has helped his clients generate over $200 million in sales from YouTube ads and scaled his own business to over eight figures. Alaric, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me on. I'm excited.

Well, this is going to be fun because I saw you speak at the Traffic and conversion and you did a phenomenal job. One of my favorite speeches and so I was looking forward to having you on here.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Thank you.

So tell everybody. Where are you now? I can see out your window there's some buildings there. What city are you in? Where do you live?

Absolutely. So I'm here in. In Austin, Texas. Moved here about three years ago, and prior to that I was in Massachusetts. So I was in the Boston to Austin. So it sounds very similar. Two totally different places, but also great places to be. So I kind of traded. I was, I was telling you earlier, I traded the really cold winters for it's, you know, 70 degrees right now here in, in Austin. It would not. It's. It's not that warm up. Up north, I'll. I'll say that. So there we go.

I was talking to somebody yesterday and I said that we were going to go to Austin to run the Austin Marathon. And they, oh, my gosh, how did you get into that? And I'm like, what do you mean? I just entered and they're like, you can just enter to get into the Boston Marathon. And I said, no, I said Austin, not Boston.

So. Yeah, exactly.

Well, let's let everybody get to know you. So where were you born, Alaric? And, and what were you like in high school?

Yeah, great question. So, so back, you know, in. In Massachusetts town called Chelmsford is kind of, you know, about 45 minutes outside of. Of Boston, the suburbs area. And, you know, really grew up, you know, with a love of, you know, kind of creativity, entrepreneurship. I had always had, you know, the different lemonade stands. I also, you know, was filming videos with my camera. And ultimately that actually led me to creating my YouTube channel. And back in 2009, created the channel and was reviewing mobile apps, tech tutorials, teaching people how to use their iPhone. And so I actually had that while I was in high school. And so I had my YouTube channel. I had was building it up. People were watching, subscribing, and I was getting sponsorships. I was making ad revenue. And I remember it was actually kind of interesting. You know, I was just explaining to a friend, you know, some of the fact that I was making money on YouTube. And I remember one of the high school teachers came over and I had said that, you know, I was making at the time about $60,000 a year on YouTube. And he came over, he said, oh, that can't be right. And I'm like, well, what do you mean? And he's like, you can't be making 60,000, like on. On YouTube. Like, that's, you know, it's got to be something different than that. So then I said, oh, no, look, let me show you the stats. And I just pulled up like, the yearly chart and you can see it was a little bit more than that. And. And he looked at it, and his jaw dropped. I can see, like, his. His face was, like, turning white. And he's. And he's like, that's more than I make. And that's when I realized, wait a second. This is something. This is something special. Because also at that time, like, I feel like also when you're younger, you don't really understand, you know, the different amounts of money or things like that that people are making. I just knew I was making Money on the YouTube channel. And at the time, I was just, you know, either reinvesting it to buy more equipment or just putting it in a savings account, you know, watching it grow. And so I wasn't really even thinking that, that, you know, that I was. That. That was substantial money at the time. So that's kind of going back to high school. And the other thing that was really big then. I was, you know, I was in Boy Scouts and. And Eagle Scout and all that stuff. And so basically, that was like, you know, the classwork. My YouTube channel, that was. That was my kind of, you know, favorite, you know, big thing I was doing. And then I also was doing, you know, camping trips and scouting stuff as well.

So a lot of time in front of the computer.

Yes, a lot of time in front of the computer. But I balanced it out by doing those, you know, doing things outside and some of that stuff, too. But, yes, a lot of time in front of the computer, for sure.

You know, if there's somebody listening to this that's, you know, over 40 and wondering now, how the heck do you even make money on YouTube? And, like, what were you doing back in 2009 that would allow you to make money? Because everybody knows, yeah, you can go to YouTube and post your video and what now? But how do you make money posting your video? So how did you do it back then?

Yeah, so there are three main ways. The first is YouTube ad revenue. So that comes from those advertisers placing ads on your channel. And a lot of people don't know this, but YouTube actually pays 55% of the ad revenue they make from advertisers to the content creators whose ad. Whose videos the ads show in front of. So they're actually paying out the majority of money. It's actually really smart how they do it. 55%, just, you know, just that slight majority. So they can say, hey, we pay the majority of the ad revenue to content creators. And so that's what a lot of people don't necessarily know is that that's actually happening. So what we were able to do when I was able to do, you know, at the time, because it was just me then, was get into the YouTube Partner Program and actually start making money for the different ads that played in front of my videos. And because I had some really popular videos at the time, especially, you know, iPhone tutorials, teaching people bodies or iPhone things like that, those videos started getting millions of views. And so that started to generate some substantial income. But then what I also got was sponsorship inquiries. So people would reach out to the channel and say, hey, I'd love to pay you some money to have you talk about our app or our, you know, product or our service or whatever it happens to be. And then they would pay a certain set amount and then I would do a shout out or do a dedicated video and feature that app, product, service inside of our YouTube channel and inside of our YouTube videos. And then the third way was kind of affiliate revenue. And I had some kind of smart ways I was doing this too, where, you know, in the iPhone beginner's guide videos or some of the videos that I would do, I would show people how to download an app and I would use a sponsored app and use my affiliate link and then I would tell people to go to that link and, and then I would be able to earn some affiliate revenue too. So those are kind of the three main ways back then that I was making, making money with, with the YouTube channel. And honestly that's, that's still, you know, how people, you know, make, make good money on YouTube is, is ad revenue, sponsorships and affiliate deals.

So how many.

Views do you need to have in order to find a ad vertizer or sponsor or an affiliate? I mean, if you have 10 people watching your, your home video, there's not many people that don't want to sponsor that.

Right?

What's kind of, is there like a magic number or some. What, what does it typically take?

So they actually have a certain amount. So it's. And they actually have changed this recently to make it a little bit easier. So this might be slightly outdated, just to clarify, because for a long time was 4,000 watch hours and getting over 4,000 watch hours, a thousand subscribers, and then there was a certain amount of views that triggered it as well. But basically in general, you just need to have at least some degree of people watching and, and going through your content. The one they care about the most is those watch hours. And it can definitely take a little bit of time. To build, build up to that point. But once you get there, then it becomes more of a snowball where it really starts, starts continuing to gain traction over time. So they just want to know that you have a channel that's of a certain size. And they do all their verification, their ID verification. But back in the past, it used to be a lot harder. Like I had to apply four different times to get it and it took a while to actually get monetized. Now it is, like you said, more of a threshold. And I actually think that they made that even easier more recently as well.

Awesome. Okay, so graduate from high school, still got your business going off to college?

Yes. So I went to College, went to UMass Amherst Eisenberg School of Management. And you know, I wanted to find a college that I could continue to work on my business while I was also there and studying and going through, you know, kind of the college like process there. I knew I wanted to do my business long term afterwards, but I also knew that the YouTube channel wasn't quite at the spot where it could just be like, all right, you know, forget all the rest of this. And so my goal through college was to get myself to the point that I could very distinctly, you know, tell my parents, hey, I'm just going to do my own business. I'm not going to go work for somebody else. And I almost saw it as like an incubator for me to. And I think this is actually really good for, you know, entrepreneurs. There's anybody listening or watching this, you know, that is either in college or going to go to college or maybe you have kids that are, you know, at this point in time, they know that they want to be entrepreneurs. Well, it's actually a really good way to think about colleges as an incubator because you have the ability to, to try things and if it doesn't work out, no big deal, you know, and so you just test different things and make it happen. And then you have four years, you know, we're up to four years or whatever happens to be to go and test that and come up with different ideas, recruit fellow, you know, students to, you know, do stuff with you and really start to build a business. And if you get it to that point where is bringing in that revenue, then you can say, hey, this is what I want to do post college and focus on that. And that's honestly what I went into knowing I wanted to do. And I also became very involved in the entrepreneurship club over there. I became the president, the entrepreneurship club and we actually Rolled out an event, you know, you launch at UMass. And we would go and basically help people launch businesses while they were in college and get some initial funds for them, have them launch a business over weekend, kind of modeled off of Startup Weekend and, and three and you know, three day startups like that. But basically we would have, we would have people launch their, their business while they were there. And I saw a lot of great people launch some pretty exciting things. One of the, one of the people got on Shark Tank and you know, different products and things like that. So it was cool. Wow.

So while you were in college, you're still building your. Was it called ad outreach at the time or was it.

So that was. The YouTube channel was app Find. So that was reviewing mobile apps, tech tutorials. I had started that, you know, a long time ago. Now there's a new kind of face and voice of the channel. I still own the channel. I just have somebody else who's like really into tech, you know, reviewing those products and going through all of that. But now. But then it was around my sophomore year of college that I started to get into the ad outreach side of things. And part of that was with my YouTube channel with app Find. In college, I hired, you know, of my fellow college students as script writers, video editors, business development people to go and reply to all the emails we were getting to sell them on sponsorships. So I created a few of these different roles and kind of created an assembly line for these different videos. We'd sell sponsorships, we write scripts, we would, you know, I would just need to be kind of the face and voice and then it would all be edited. And then I would go through and publish those, that content. And I had kind of created a whole assembly line with that. And so that gave me some time to start experimenting with other things. And so one day I had a mobile app that sponsored me as was, you know, usual. But after I put out the video, they got a bunch of downloads. They said, this is great. How can we get more people to see this video and to go and download our app? And I said, well, you know, what if we take this video and we run it as a YouTube app? And this is about eight years ago, and this was kind of before a lot of people were doing YouTube ads. They were a little bit skeptical. I said, well, hey, let's just take a small budget. We took $500, ran ads, and they ended up getting thousands of downloads for their app. So they got really excited about that. They then, you know, called me up and they said, hey, let's keep this promotion going, but let's also, you know, we've got this other app that's even bigger. We would love to have you promote that too. And so then, you know, that next app there, the budget ad budget on that was, you know, over $1,000 a day was my second campaign I was running on YouTube. And that got pretty exciting because I was able just to dive in. And I realized pretty quickly that I had a skill set for it. I'd been on YouTube for a long time. I understood how the platform worked. And then media buying and running those ads just kind of came naturally to me. I was just able to figure it out and find out how to actually run those ads. And so that started to do really well. So that company called me up and they say, hey, alright, like, we want you to drop out of college, fly out here to Silicon Valley, join our team. You can run the YouTube ads division. And they gave me, they actually gave me three different offers because I turned them down. The first couple times just got sweeter each time. But at the same time, I ended up turning it down just because I knew that I wanted to build something myself. And instead of being the night in somebody else's castle, I wanted to be, you know, kind of the king of my own castle, even if it's smaller. And I would build it up over time. So that's where, you know, I created ad outreach. Originally it was YouTube ads for mobile apps. So I was doing ads for different mobile apps. I tapped into my network, the people had sponsored me before, ran millions of app downloads for a variety of different applications. So a few dozen apps that I ended up working with kind of through that, and that showed me that I really had the ability to ramp this up. And I also started to realize that apps were not the main type of business that I wanted to work with. And that's when I found like, actually I went to HubSpot Inbound back in 2016 and that's where I saw the ClickFunnels booth there. And they had sponsored HubSpot Inbound. And I signed up for, for Click Funnels. I was, you know, really excited to, to dive in and learn that I could actually build a funnel, a marketing funnel to promote what I sold or to help other people. And that's kind of what led me to the YouTube ad side of things, is then people started asking me, hey, can you run YouTube ads for our funnel or for this funnel or for that? And that's what I started doing. And Then naturally, it evolved into teaching people how that worked and training people on how to run YouTube ads versus other platforms like Facebook.

For those of you that are listening.

If you've ever.

Seen somebody use Microsoft Word or PowerPoint or Photoshop that actually knows how to use it, and you watch them and you're like, man, I didn't know you could do that. I didn't know that worked like that. You see them whizzing around in there, and it just kind of blows you away how amazing they are, those apps. That's what it was like watching Alaric's presentation, because you started going into the back end of, okay, now let me show you how you do this. And if you want to do this, okay, you go over here. And if you want to target this, if you want to target this page, you just do this. And you just showed so many things that I can't even imagine most people know existed. And it was fascinating what's possible. And you've been doing it for so long, it's. It's, you know, it's just second nature to you. But those little nuances were fascinating. And is that. Did that just come from doing it for so long?

Yeah, and I really appreciate that. And it definitely did come from doing it so long. And also, I think the big thing is we have depth and breath, because what we were able to do is we've now worked with thousands of businesses to help train them on YouTube ads. We've been in those ads accounts. Not just myself, my team, we had a fantastic team, get about 36 people on the team now. So we have, like, a whole team that's diving in with our clients. We understand, and we work with so many different accounts at any given time, hundreds of active clients, but we've worked with thousands. And then we also have depth, right, because we actually spend a lot on our own ads. You know, we've spent. I've spent millions and millions of dollars on my own YouTube ads. And so we spent a lot of money ourselves with our own ads. And we've also helped our clients spend a lot across a lot of different clients. And then some of those clients have depth themselves, or many of them do, because many of them end up, you know, they're like, this is great. Let's spend a lot of money. You know, you've got clients that, you know, spend. Spend a lot on on YouTube ads. And so we have both the breadth of different types of clients and also the depth of spending a lot inside of specific accounts, whether that's Ours or the clients that really end up scaling pretty massively. And so that gives us is so much data, so much understanding of what's working, what's not working, what to do, how to write the best scripts, what ads are likely to convert, how to actually optimize, how to scale those campaigns. And then what we also do is we see where we're able to constantly test a little bit. Little things in different accounts across different people. You don't want to, you know, do too many tests all at once, but because we work with so many different clients, we might be able to see, okay, let's do this test over here. Let's do this test over here. Of course, you know, working with them on that, and then you'll see that breakout success. Same thing with ourselves. We're constantly spending a little bit of our budget testing different things and seeing what works. And once we have a winner, we're able to really scale that up. So I think that it's just by being in there so often, we have a really strong grasp of exactly what to do on YouTube ads. And we've also seen so many evolutions in the past. It didn't actually used to be the algorithm. It was all manual targeting, manual bidding, cpv, so cost per view. And there wasn't an algorithm. There wasn't an algorithm like there is today on YouTube. And actually, at the time, there was on Facebook. That's why people thought I was crazy. I had people laugh at me. Like, literally, I would get on calls and people would say, you're doing YouTube ads for direct response. I didn't even know you could do that. Isn't it just for branding? Like, oh, we just do Facebook ads because Facebook's got the lead, lead algorithm. And I'm like, oh, no, no, you could do it. You just have to know how to do it. And it was kind of funny. And obviously, the tides have turned. And now everybody, you know, every. Everybody knows, we helped kind of usher some of that in too. But at the same time, what we were doing at the time was going in and we would test these different videos, test these different audiences and keywords, and we would go in and manually turn off keywords that didn't work, scale up ones that did. So I was the algorithm. My team was the algorithm in the early days. And so we learned what the algorithm today is just doing automatically. And I think that that actually gave me a much deeper understanding. It's kind of like if you look at, you know, scientists and mathematicians that are solving the biggest, like, you know, quantum theory problems and all of that. Sure, they're using calculators and, you know, advanced, you know, computer programs to model these things out. But what do they spend a lot of time studying? How to actually do it by hand, how to actually do the calculations. And that gives them a deeper understanding of what the calculator or the computer program spitting out. I think it's the same thing with us. People that get trained today might not have that depth of understanding of what the ad accounts actually doing in the background. But because, you know, I and our team really started out, it was so long ago, what we were able to do is actually be that algorithm in the early days and now we understand what's going on behind the scenes. So we know how to better train or inform the algorithm of the, what we're looking to do. And that's the whole alpha AI targeting strategy is Google has shifted to an AI algorithm to get you the best results, but it's only as good as how you train it and teach it what the best results are. And that's the alpha AI strategy is training the AI to get you alpha or better results.

Give us an example of that because I'm sure there's a ton of people, I happen to watch you do it, but if I hadn't done that and I just heard you say train the AI for Google, I don't think I would have any idea what you're talking about. So maybe you could give us an example.

Yeah, that's a great question. So an example of training the AI is by going in and telling it you want to reach people who are searching for specific things on YouTube or Google or going to specific websites or have specific interests versus what a lot of people do is they'll just go in and they'll just target, oh, I want to reach people who are in the market for business services or in the market for, let's just say there's an in market audience for personality tests. I think there's something along those lines. Yeah, you know, maybe you'd go in, you just click that button and let the algorithm kind of do the work. But that's not necessarily going to get you the best results. So what we would want to do is go in and actually create a custom intent. And what this can do is you're training Google on, you're looking to reach people that are searching for these particular things. So there's called a custom search intent and that can target people based on searching for things like how to find your why, how to discover, you know, your, your, your why, you know, what's the best personality tests for business owners or best personality tests for entrepreneurs. All these different things, right? So you want to target people asking these questions on Google or on YouTube or watching specific videos that have that, you know, as the, as that, as that title that they're searching for. What we can do is go in and create this audience, this custom intent that targets people who have recently searched those things on Google and search those things on YouTube. So you're telling the algorithm, this is exactly who I want to reach and then find more people like that. Same thing with URL audiences. What you could do is there's a couple directions you can go and you can create multiple of these different audiences. Maybe there's one with a lot of different pages with people trying to explore and discover their why. Maybe you know, whether they're competitors or complementary sites. But also maybe there's all the different personality tests. Maybe another avenue for you is reaching people that are taking different personality tests. You're going to talk about why. This one's actually going to be even more powerful for them to discover what their why is. So you can actually create these URL audiences based on websites people are going on in the past. And Google has all this data because they own Google Analytics to install on 55% of all websites. They have Google Chrome, they have Google Search. They see what you're searching for, they see what you're clicking on, they see what you're subscribed to with your email, with Gmail. So they have all this data and it's just waiting for you to inform it and say, this is who I'm looking to reach. And so that's how to really train the AI to say, I want to reach people that have done these searches or have gone to these websites or have these interests. Because there's also another one called, you know, interested in market affinity audience, where you could build essentially a custom affinity and just target people interested in their why or personality tests or things like that. That's a little bit more broad. So that's kind of the most broad. Then it gets kind of more narrow as you, as you go through.

So I have again, I had the.

I was fortunate enough to watch Alaric slides as he's talking. He's showing, this is where you go, this is how you do it. Let me give you an example. And that was super valuable.

I.

That's what was so intriguing about your presentation was because, yeah, you can tell me all about it, but unless I actually see you do it. I, I don't quite get it. So I'm sure there's a lot of people right now just listening that are like, well, that sounds incredible that I could actually target somebody who put this question in or went to this web page or went to this landing. You could take it all the way down to a landing page, right? Because I think I saw you do that. Yeah, you, you, you went to somebody's ads landing page and targeted that. Is that right?

Yeah. You can go in and target landing pages, you could target subdomains. One of the ones that I love to do is target people who go to app.clickfunnels.com I know that they have their own funnel. Right. If they're going there, if they're going to app.clickfunnels.com which is like the login to the back end of clickfunnels, I know I'm reaching people that have their own clickfunnels account. And that means they have a funnel that means they're looking to market. That means they're potentially a ideal client for us. And so that's the exact type of thing that you could do is get really granular there. I will say the more you go into a landing page, depending on the amount of traffic that that page is getting, the results may vary. But at the same time, if you have something big like that, you can get more granular and target landing pages or specific subdomains.

Could I target.

TED Talk?

So, meaning Simon Cynic wrote the, you know, did the start with why TED Talk that's got 61 million views and 61 million people have seen that TED Talk, but only probably 61 people have ever figured out what their why is. So I have a way now to help them actually do that, as you know. And so is there a way that I could target that video or anyone who's ever seen that video?

Yes. So there's a few answers to that question. So there's the audience targeting style version of that. And then there's also there's a way to run a manual campaign to actually specifically target that video that you can still do. And so I'll start with how you would normally do it now. And then I'll talk about the more kind of advanced, you know, back end way that you can do it. So what you could do, there's a few different ways you could target anybody who's searching for, start with why. Searching for Simon Sinek, you know, looking up, you know, find your why, all those different Things and you could target that with a search intent. So that's somebody who's searching those things on Google or on YouTube. They're looking up Simon Sinek looking at. Start with why they're looking up. Start with like, you know, TED Talk. That's going to reach and capture a lot of people. What you can also do is do the affinity audience of people who are just interested in. Start with why Simon Sinek, you know, and things along those lines. Right. And that's going to get the ability to target the interests or the searches. You could also target URLs. So in terms of targeting a YouTube video as a URL, that's an area where, because it's YouTube as a platform, it's not necessarily targeting sub, sub targeting that one video. There's a different way to do it. So I'll get into that. So you wouldn't necessarily just put that video URL in on YouTube. You would put more of the TED Talk URL on TED Talks page or you would put in Simon Sinek themselves, you know, Simon Sinek.com you know, or, or a site along those lines. Because the other thing is there are some black box sites that kind of stop Google from crawling them. And that's included with like Amazon for instance. Like you can't put the Amazon page for Simon Sinek book because those websites specifically block Google from getting some of that data. And it's a little bit complicated. The same thing with Facebook. You can't like just put a Facebook group URL because they're, they're blocking the scraping of that data. Whereas normal sites that have like Google Analytics installed and you know, they want all of that data to be tracked like probably. Simon sick.com My guest is like 80% confident that he's going to have Google Analytics installed and even if he doesn't, they'll be able to still track the Google search traffic. What you can do is you could target that specific site or people that have been to that site. Now we can go a little bit more granular in the other direction and just target that video with a CPV or cost per view campaign. Now this is different than the ones that we want to target that are more lead generation where you're optimizing based on getting leads. This is where you're paying per view. But you can buy a specific placement and decide to pay per view and say I want to target this specific video and I want to pay a certain amount to get ads shown just in front of this video. So you would set that up as a manual, the video campaign directly in front of that video, that TED Talk that's on YouTube.

That is so fascinating. And you know, obviously you see as soon as I mentioned something, your mind goes right to all these different things that you can do where, you know, most people have to go research that and try to figure it out. You're doing that every single day and you've done it for so many people.

Now.

Why did you pick YouTube versus Facebook? Because a lot of people listening are probably why, yeah, I'm doing this on Facebook, but never heard of this on YouTube or never thought about it on YouTube. Why did you pick YouTube instead of. Because you don't do Facebook.

Right, yeah, so, so, exactly. So we don't, we don't do Facebook as a main lead generation, but we do retarget across platforms. I'm a big believer in omnipresent retargeting. So you want to retarget people everywhere, but in terms of bringing in new leads, that's where we focus on YouTube. And I'll talk about the benefits of YouTube in a second. But even when I get to the benefits, honestly, the real answer is I've just been in the world of YouTube for a long time and seeing how powerful it is. And that has led me to discover what is possible with YouTube ads. And in terms of YouTube ads versus Facebook, Facebook ads. And those types of platforms are very pat, like interruption based, right? So people are scrolling, they're scrolling. Oh, I'm interested in this, interested in that. Oh, this is interesting. You know, find your, you know, discover your why why institute. They click that. Maybe they're, maybe they're interested, maybe they go through it, maybe they don't because they're just kind of scrolling, right? You might reach the right person, but you might not reach them at the right time. Now let's say that Same Person's on YouTube and they have more intent. Now. They're watching videos. They might be watching Simon Sinek's TED Talk or they might be watching a video about how to discover their why or revealing, you know, all the different personality types and, you know, in a different test or something like that. And now you get in front of that video and you talk about, you know, instead of, you've heard that you need to start with why. But have you, have you actually discovered what your why is, you know, and whatever the ad happens to be? Well, we want to talk to you about how you could discover your why by taking this simple test, why institute? You know, then you get into it you give them a little bit of education, you give them a little bit of value, and then you invite them to click the link to take action. So now it's not as much an interruption where they're not expecting to see it on Facebook. You're actually reaching them while they're in the learner's mindset, while they're watching videos, while they're consuming and looking to learn. And then you give them an opportunity to go off to your site and actually learn more and take action. And that's one of the reasons that YouTube ads work so well. Also audio and videos on from the beginning so people can see and hear you and they can pay attention versus on Facebook. You know, the video will load, but the audio typically is off at the beginning. So it's kind of the opposite. What we want to do is you want to get in front of people and actually connect with them and walk them through why what you're doing is going to be exactly what they need.

Connect with them in the learner's mindset. I hadn't heard of that.

How do you. How do you. So now you've got a video on YouTube. How do you get more views or how do you get more people to see it? Is that by buying more ads or like, what are you seeing that's actually working out there? So there'll be a lot of coaches listening to this. There'll be a lot of entrepreneurs that have videos and they're like, you know, I'm getting like 30 views on my, you know, all my content that I put out. How do I get more views? What do you do to get. What have you seen that works to get more views on YouTube?

Great question. Because there's actually two different types of or two different major types of YouTube ads. There's the traditional YouTube ads that you see that run in front of videos that lead people off to a landing page. Those are going to be your conversion ads. These are ads that lead people off to a landing page. And those drive direct conversions. And those direct conversions can drive new leads, new sales, new customers for your business. But there's a different type of YouTube ad called in feed ads. These are ads that appear in search results as suggested videos. And then you click that ad and it brings them to your video watch page. So now it stimulates them just naturally stumbling upon your video naturally on YouTube. And now all of a sudden they're watching that video and they're on the watch page. They're watching it. They can like the video. They can subscribe. And so these in feed ads are really good at actually growing your channel and getting more people to discover your content. Because it's not an ad that plays in front of another video that leads people off the platform. It's an ad that's on the platform that actually gets people to want to watch it and start consuming your content. So these, you know, it's also known as kind of discovery ads, or they're called in feed ads today. But these ads appear in those search results alongside the suggested videos. They can click it. Now they start watching your content on YouTube and you can start getting them to go down that rabbit hole. We've all done it before. We've gone to a channel, we started watching content. Now we're watching many different videos from that channel. Well, that's what we want to simulate and create. Create with these types of in feed ads is serving them these specific videos. So now they start watching it, they start consuming that content and they forget that they even clicked on an ad. So they might see the ad in the search results or as a suggested video, but once they click it now they're just watching the video as they normally would on YouTube. So that's going to be the best way to actually grow your channel. The in stream ads can get you views, but it's not going to be views for your channel because those are going to be views, you know, in front of other videos. You usually want those videos to be a little bit shorter, whereas with infeed, that's going to be going to the watch page. And you can run even long podcasts, as in feed videos, and those perform very well.

Can you make money on YouTube anymore without buying ads?

So you absolutely can. I think that it's going to be a little bit more challenging. It's just going to take more time. Just going to take more time. So you're either going to pay with time or money in really anything. I mean, that's kind of the. And, and obviously there's some things where it's more leverage than others. But you're either going to be able to spend time building up a channel, building up a following, or you could spend money to actually build that quicker. But it is absolutely possible to build up a channel organically without spending on ads and get to a spot where you're making money, whether from ad revenue or from driving off, you know, potential clients. It's just going to take you a little bit more time. Unless, you know, you really strike gold.

Somewhere, somebody, you know that's listening to this is thinking, man, I want to do this, I want to get going. I don't know how much is what kind of budget I should put together for getting onto my YouTube channel and ads and all that set up. How do you come up with a budget for, you know, being you on YouTube?

Great question. And it is going to depend what type of ads you want to do. So let's say you want to do the in stream ads that drive direct conversions. Typically you want to have at least a minimum of a $25 per day campaign. And, and usually we'd prefer to see 50, but if you have a $25 per day campaign across four campaigns, then that's going to be $100. But you know, again, usually like do four, but minimum kind of two. So minimum two campaigns, minimum $25 a day. That's a minimum of about $50 per day. What we recommend starting on YouTube. Now why would we say two campaigns? Is that just one? Well, if you just run one campaign, you don't know if that's the best campaign ever or not the best. You always want to be beating the control. So if you have one campaign that's performing up here, another one down here could cut this one test again. That test does better. Cut that one test again. That doesn't do as well. Okay, you got another test that's better and it's kind of like a ladder and you're, you're essentially beating the control. If you just have one campaign, you don't have that opportunity to do that. We usually like to run four different campaigns. We usually like to do fifty dollar a day budgets on these campaigns. But you can do just two and you can do just $25. So what I would normally recommend is, would be $200. That would be across per day, which would be four campaigns, $50 per day. That's what is really going to get you that additional testing budget to really roll. But you can start with as little as $50 a day to $25 a day campaigns and really get things started. Now if you're just doing the in feed ads to grow your channel, you could start those for as little as $5 to $10. Those are a fraction the cost of the conversion ads. And because you're bidding per view, you can, you don't need as many actions in a day to have it be viable. It gets a little complicated. But basically if you're looking to grow your channel, you could start as little as $10 a day, a couple $5 a day campaign. If you're looking to actually drive direct leads conversions and run more of a client acquisition strategy from YouTube then I would recommend about $50 per day to $25 day campaigns.

So what I think I'm hearing you say is start with let's just use the $25 a day one, do at least two ads of $25 a day so that you can compete one against the other. And then once you find the winner, then get rid of the other one, bring a new one in and keep trying to beat it until you get to a certain level, whatever that is, and then start putting more money in. Is that about right?

Exactly. And that's when you, when you see that return, you track back that return. That's when you're going to be able to really ramp up and scale, scale up and keep, you know, putting more money in and keep building things up from there.

What is the return you're looking for that makes sense to be able to start putting more money in?

It's going to depend on the different businesses. So it really also has to do with your own business, your own metrics and also, you know, what are the back end metrics too? So on the front end, you know, people selling things on the front end you might be looking for a smaller roas, but on the back end or overall with your funnel, looking for a bigger one. Generally we've got a lot of coaching, consulting, course based clients, high ticket clients, people selling courses, things like that. Usually if we have something that's like $1,000 plus a lot of our clients are looking for between 3 to 5x plus ROAS. So you know, put a dollar in, you get 3, 4, 5 out at those higher ticket offerings. That said, if you have lower end things, you know, which could fall into, for instance this, you know, I know you have higher end offerings on the back end, especially if like, or if it's a bigger company kind of comes in, then that's obviously going to be a bigger, you know, client for you. But let's just say that you're selling individually the Y test. What you may want to target more of like 2x row as we got a lot of, you know, E commerce clients that are looking for those types of things. There are also some people that will even just break even on the front end to make money on the back end. Just going to depend on your metrics. I am not as big a fan of that. I like to, you know, you, you make money from the front end too. But it's going to depend on where Your metrics are if you're over $11,000, though, you should really be shooting for 3X Plus. And then if you're under that, it really is just going to depend on the metrics of your funnel and what's viable.

I love that. That's. That's super helpful, Alaric, because it's very confusing, you know, for somebody who doesn't spend their time in there because we're doing what we do, it doesn't. It almost seems, I don't want to say impossible, but very challenging to do it yourself versus getting someone who actually knows what the heck they're doing.

And that's. And that's the thing, that's why, you know, we were here to help people, is because it is challenging to try and figure it out yourself. And what we want to do is, is helped shortcut that process. And, you know, obviously we have the ability to go and train, and we've trained a lot of businesses in how to do this. And now we also have clients that we. We do it for them. So we have our fractional media buyer offer, where we dive in. We install one of our top YouTube ads, media buyers, you know, fractionally into a business, and then that way we can actually run those ads similar to an agency model, but a little bit different in that our clients are working directly with one of our top media buyers. Instead of having the whole, you know, the, the normal process where there's an account rep, there's kind of the mystery media buyers, all that, we threw that out the window. We want to work directly with our clients. So we also have our fractional media buyer offer. We do that on their behalf as well. It just depends on different people's business if they want to have us do it or have us train them on how to do it too. Both are really good, viable answers. And then also even people that are really keen on doing it themselves, you know, we've got a course as well that people can follow. But I really recommend having some type of help because it's been years and years and years of us, you know, and millions and millions of dollars in ad spend to uncover what the best strategies are. And that's what we've systematized into our process. And, and that's, I think the key there is, is getting that spot.

I mean, it all really just boils down to results, right? I mean, you could save a lot of money but not get any results. What did you really save? And, you know, I ran into a buddy of mine that was in this mastermind group with me and they were a massive spender on Facebook ads. And I mean millions a month. And I think his last one was like 9 million a month he spent. He was spending on Facebook ads. He had some plaque for, you know, being one of the top spenders. But, but then I, when we were talking, he said, yeah, I'm doing YouTube now instead. So he switched over to YouTube and he said, it's been much more effective. So that surprised me as well.

And that's what I, that's what I've been, I've been saying, well, my top ads, my classic ads, YouTube ads beat Facebook ads. And, you know, I think a lot of people didn't believe it for a long time until they saw the results for themselves. It's actually kind of interesting because early on a lot of our clients, now it's changed. But early on a lot of our clients, they came out of necessity. They said Facebook shut them down. And it seems like Facebook's gotten. Even though they still shut a lot of people down, it's been easier for people to get accounts back. But if you recall like three, four or five years ago, if you got shut down, you could be shut down for a quarter or two and that's really going to cause a lot of problems to your business if you can't get that back up. And so we had a lot of clients come to us out of necessity. I remember people saying, you know, alright, you know, we came because Facebook shut us down, but we're just like, all right, we just need something. But honestly, this is a blessing in disguise because now we're getting even better results on YouTube. It's like twice as good as what it was over on Facebook. So now we're just going to scale this up and Facebook's going to be our secondary channel when we do get that back. And I had, I have many. I've got like so many videos of people saying that and many examples of people saying that now over time, now more and more people are seeing YouTube as an opportunity. Before, it was like, oh, I'm running into problems on Facebook. Shut it, shut down. Or costs are getting prohibitively expensive. Let me test out YouTube now. People, people come to us wherever they're at on Facebook, whether it's not working or it is working really well. They're just like, I just want to see what's going on with YouTube and see how we can. You know, I've heard great things about it. Can we beat better? Can we beat the results we're getting right now? Get even better results. And then that's what we do is help them set that up. So it's actually really interesting how things have shifted over that period of time.

So Alaric's why is to find a better way and share it. And you can see that coming through loud and clear. Continually looking for better ways, right? How he does that is how is to challenge the status quo, think differently, push the limits, don't get stuck in a box. And ultimately what he brings is a way to contribute, add value, have an impact in other people's lives. And how did that feel to you, even just hearing that right there? How did that feel to you, Alec?

It feels exactly true. I mean, that's, that's the thing is, is. And I think it really articulated who I am and, and, and why I do what I do, you know, better than I've seen it on really any other personality test. And I think that that's the thing that is really clear here is if it articulated in a really great way of what that why is of sharing that better way. I kind of had a feeling it was something like that. I remember, I think it was, you know, the closest I got before this, but it didn't nail it. The way that this had was, I remember I was on a call with Rich Sheffrin and he told me, he's like, he's like, alright, you know, the sense I get from you, your brand positioning is you're just a nerdy guy that thinks figured it out and wants to share it with the world. I'm like, you know, that really resonates. And I actually, after taking this test, I remember that conversation because I'd kind of forgotten about that. And that was many. That was a few years ago now. And I remembered that conversation. I'm like, you know, that's what it is. I've figured out a better way. I want to challenge the status quo. I've always been, you know, obsessed with Apple too, and how they've, you know, challenged the status quo and all that, you know, their old commercials and all that stuff and like, and so it's like, all right, I've, I've established it. Got a better way. I want to challenge the status quo and I also want to do it to create an impact as well. And you know, our mission at Outreach is to empower businesses to amplify their. Empower businesses to amplify their impact and create a positive ripple effect on the world. And I think that that's exactly, you know, it's exactly aligned with Different. Different elements there.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, for those that are listening, you can just hear it coming through loud and clear in everything you do. And, and what's wonderful about your yos, Alaric, is that you have the what of contribute, because if you're what was all about you, then it would be different conversations that we'd be having. Then your what is about how can I help other people now experience this? Because when they do better, you feel.

Like you did better, right? Yeah.

That's so critical. Because it. This is why you would choose Alaric. This is why you would choose ad outreach. If you're looking to find a better way to use YouTube, if you want to do it differently than what's currently available and you want to have a bigger impact with your business, then that's why you would pick ad outreach. And so that's kind of the essence of your messaging. What's the. Just a kind of last question. What's the best piece of advice you've ever given or been given?

Oh, that's a really good one.

Honestly, I think the best I can start with the one that I have given other people. And, and I also have adopted this as well. And sometimes I have to remind myself, and then I'll see if I can think of. Of another one there. But the, the one that I really resonate with is really following the, the mantra of win or learn. Right. And I actually think it resonates really well with, with the yos here because, you know, it's really about winning or, or, or learning. And I think a lot of people, when they're going into marketing or business or really anything in life, they're concerned about winning or losing, and that actually causes them not to take action. Right. But that inaction is actually the worst piece because you're not getting information back. You're not seeing what works and what doesn't work. And so if you go into everything with an approach of win or learn, then you're always going to be growing, you're always going to be getting to something better, because everything that you do, every action you take, every ad test that you do, every business decision is either going to be a win that you can compound and do more of, or it's going to be a learning lesson that you can grow from change and adapt and do something differently. And so I really think that that's a key, is win or learn. And really, the only true failure is to either give up or the failure to learn. And as long as you're learning and you're growing and you're winning, you know, with some of the things, but you're also learning with others. Even if you have a season of a lot of learning lessons, it's going to ultimately build on itself and you're going to grow.

Overall, I love that. And kind of one of the ways that I've heard that. But not, not really win and learn. So that, that's really great. How I've talked about it is, you know, set up the game so that no matter what, you win.

Yeah.

So that no matter what you play, you're going to win. But I love how you said that and that's awesome. So, Alaric, if there's people that are listening that want to connect with you, want to connect with your company, want to hire you, want to work with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Absolutely. So I'll share that in a second. But first, I've got a gift for everybody that's, you know, watching or listening. I've got our 19 page YouTube ad strategy PDF walks through exactly how the process works. You can go to ad outreach.com/gift that's ado ut r e a c h.com/gift ad outreach.com/gift, that's my 19 page YouTube ad strategy PDF. And then if you want to book a call and see how our process works and have us map out a game plan, you can book a complimentary strategy call at ad outreach.com/apply. Just add outreach.com apply and you can, of course, follow me on all the major social media platforms, YouTube. I post every single week. It's just look up my name, Alaric Heck, and you'll be able to see my content there as well. So those are the best ways to connect.

Alaric, that was awesome. And I learned it. I got like, I don't know, seven pages of notes here. So thanks for being here today. I look forward to staying in contact. I know we are. We're in some similar groups. So thanks for being here today.

Thank you so much. It's been awesome.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez and I'll see you on the next episode.