What The Top YouTubers Taught Us About YouTube Marketing | Ep. 2611

So for today, we're going to talk about here's what the top YouTubers taught us about YouTube marketing. So I'll start off with a story. Neil, you remember George Gammon who spoke at my thing, right?

Yeah, economist.

So he talks a lot about macro. He talks about what's happening with the economy. And he has about 500,000 subs on one channel and maybe 300,000 on another. So he does pretty well. And he gets more than that. Forget about the subs for a second. 4 to 5 million views a month. That's what really matters more. And these are organic views. And he was kind enough, 'cause he listens to this podcast. I think he listened to like 100 episodes in a weekend, Neil, when he was playing golf a couple weeks ago. And he's heard us talk about how, you know, I personally don't think you and I are the best at YouTube and we're going to try to get better, right? And he's like, you know, I want to get on a call. So he offered a call with Josh from his team and they're both obsessed with YouTube, right? And they gave me a couple of thoughts on how we can grow our YouTube. 'Cause they're like, there's no reason why we shouldn't be crushing it. And Josh kind of made fun of us and he says, he's like, yeah, your guys' channel is shit, right? And so, you know, we wanted to share some of the takeaways. Neil and I were down for feedback, but we wanted to share some of the lessons here. You ready?

We love feedback, by the way. Eric and I don't think we know everything as well. And we also have a problem and I don't, it's not necessarily a bad problem. Him and I tend to focus on what drives the highest ROI for our businesses versus the spray and pray approach.

And the spectacle.

Yes.

All right. So let's jump into it. So they gave us some feedback here. And also yesterday I hung out with Ali Abdaal. He has like 5 million subs or so. So I'll start with Ali first. And so he's— the first thing we should all understand here is that your subs no longer matter. It's as long as your video is good, you're going to get views. I'll give you an example. The Marketing School channel that we have right now, we got like 10,000 views in the last 30 days. It's pitiful, right? And then I have a clips channel that got 50,000 views or so. It has like 700 subs. So the subs don't matter. If you have good videos, it's just going to do well, right? And here's what George said. This is probably the best takeaway I got here. You have to look at if you're going to be creating on YouTube, especially YouTube, right? You are an employee of YouTube. And so if you're an employee of a company, they're not just going to give you all the views and gave you all the promotions in the beginning. They want to see if you're going to be a consistent employee. If you're going to be posting consistently over time, are you going to be talking about the same thing? And is your content actually good, right? And so, we've talked about this concept of YouTube jail before a couple episodes ago. And I told George about this. I was like, hey, my friend Patrick, he's like, there's this concept of YouTube jail. He's like, it's not that. It's that Patrick, he got no play on his YouTube Shorts for probably a year or so. And then all of a sudden, one of his videos got 11 million views.

Oh, yeah.

another one got 2 million views, another one got 1 million views, right? The Shorts game started to recognize him because he was playing it consistently. What George said was this. He said back in 2019, 2018 or so, sorry, 2019, he condensed all of his audition period with YouTube into like a span of 3 months. So he was working 80-hour weeks and he was publishing these, like he spent like 8 hours per video and these were like 20 to 30-minute whiteboard videos. And he just went to town for three months, and he was only getting like two hundred views a day, whatever. And all of a sudden, the algorithm just shot him up twenty thousand views per day, forty thousand views per day, sixty thousand views per day, and then he just didn't look back, right? So I think the key thing to understand here is that if you're going to play the YouTube game, which I think is probably the best long-term social channel for the next ten years, just understand that you are an employee. And here's the other thing: I was talking to Ali yesterday. His girlfriend's also YouTuber as well, and they're like, "Man, you know, I don't want to continue on this YouTube hamster wheel." It's like. Yeah, it's a commitment.

It is a commitment. And they're spot on right about the subscribers. I have over a million subscribers. Whether you have a million or 10 million, it doesn't matter. What matters is the content. But here's the kicker. You got to A, be consistent in producing content, but B, and B is even more important, if the content you're producing isn't hits, it's hard to actually get more hits. But once you get 2 or 3 hits consistently, assuming your content's really high in quality, it's easy to maintain that momentum. But the moment you create 2 or 3 hits and then you just put out a few mediocre pieces of content, it actually screws up the whole channel. You got to make sure that you're consistently trying to produce hits. And what you'll find is more of your content will just go viral. And it's hard to do that. And what we found is when we produce hits that are more broad, like in the marketing world, like here's a hack that'll help your WordPress blog rank higher on Google. We get a lot more views, but then on the flip side, we generate a lot less qualified leads. But when we produce content that's not as much of a hit, like, should you use a subdomain versus a subdirectory for SEO? What do you do for a site that is in 50 different languages or something like that? Bad title, but you get the point, right? Should you use subdomains or subdirectories for your blog? when your website is in 50+ different languages, content like that won't get the views. But for us, it drives leads and leads from like large enterprise companies. And that's what we're seeing revenue from YouTube at least.

Dude, check this out. Here's another one. This is, I almost forgot this one. So can you see my screen over here?

It's loading.

Okay. So this is Russell Brand. I don't know if you follow him at all. I just know he's like a purple belt Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy, but he's really popular, right? Like 6.7 million subs. He had some controversy recently. But here's what George Gammon and Josh said, right? It's like, his thumbnails are the best, right? And so it's like, look at this, like the war with Iran right now, or like Israel versus Palestine, what's happening. And then it's like, you have this one with Hillary Clinton wearing like a jail jumpsuit. But key theme is that his thumbnails, like he was making fun of our thumbnails, right? Like on your channel, on my channel, on our Marketing School channel. It's like, it's not that interesting. And here's the thing. We make a lot of videos where like in the thumbnail and the headline, we kind of just give the video away. And it's just like, what's the point of watching the video, right? And so all of these things, the thumbnail, the hook, the headline, all that stuff matters. And here's another thing I'll say. So Russell Brand, definitely follow his stuff, check out his thumbnails. It's very clickable. Look at this one with the— do you see this one with the vax over here?

Oh yeah.

Yeah. So anyway, point being, it's like they spend a lot of time and money on thumbnails. That's fine. One more thing I'll say with George Gammon is that his channel, he has a separate channel called Rebel Capitalist, I believe. And he does like 3 reaction videos a day and he's basically winging it, right? He'll just open like an article and just start reacting to it. And that channel gets like, I think like 2 or 3 million views a month or so. So a lot to learn from that.

Yeah. Dude, a lot of these YouTubers do well. But the one thing I would say is YouTube marketing is great even though Eric and I think it's the big social channel that you should pay attention to that's still going to be extremely popular over the next 5, 10 years. Like, you know, Facebook is great, but the real money in Facebook is just running ads. It's not really on the organic side. YouTube, we still think you'll be able to do really well organically in the long run, but I still wouldn't recommend putting all your eggs in one basket.

Yep. Yeah. Diversify once you nail one and then scale it and then move on to the next one. So, and here's— I'll leave with this final piece over here. So, Ali yesterday, we're doing a podcast and he's like, yeah, I struggle with the focus thing because it's like, well, I have YouTube and then what if YouTube maxed out? I'm like, the marketing channels you can diversify all day, right? The worst thing is if you diversify in too many different unrelated businesses, that's a completely different story. So, it's okay to diversify marketing channels once you figure one out.

So yes, but not businesses. Businesses, you should stay laser focused and, you know, just make sure you're after going after a big TAM. TAM stands for total addressable market. It also makes your marketing easier because if you can appeal to more people or a bigger audience, or even if it's a small audience but they spend a lot of money, it's just easier to generate revenue.

Yep. All right, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.